Before reading this piece we recommend reading Part 1: A Dystopian Vision Of The Future
As the World Economic Forum announces the need for a “Great Narrative” to unite the people around their Technocratic ideals, the public is learning of the WEF and their partners’ plans to build a dystopian virtual world known as The Metaverse.
In mid-November, Klaus Schwab, Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, sat with Mohammad Abdullah Al Gergawi, Minister of Cabinet Affairs of the United Arab Emirates, to announce the launch of The Great Narrative. This announcement represents the next phase in the WEF’s “Great Reset” agenda.
“We are here to develop the Great Narrative, a story for the future,” Schwab stated during a panel titled Narrating the Future. “We meet today to develop a great narrative; a story for the future. I quote His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, when H.H. said ‘The future belongs to those who can imagine it, design it, and execute it.’ We are here now to imagine the future, design the future, and then execute.”
One of the hot topics discussed at The Great Narrative launch was the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR).
The 4IR is a pet project of Klaus Schwab which was first announced in December 2015. The 4IR is the digital panopticon of the future, where digital surveillance is omnipresent and humanity uses digital technology to alter our lives. Often associated with terms like the “Internet of Things,” the “Internet of Bodies,” the “Internet of Humans,” and the “Internet of Senses,” this world will have 5G and 6G technology powering smart cities where jobs and duties typically performed by humans are managed by artificial intelligence and robots. In this vision, humanity is also tagged with wearable technology which interacts with the AI and smart cities.
Of course, for Schwab and other globalists, the 4IR also lends itself towards more central planning and top-down control. The goal is a track and trace society where all transactions are logged, every person has a digital ID that can be tracked, and social malcontents are locked out of society via social credit scores.
Another topic mentioned at The Great Narrative was the Metaverse. The concepts of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Metaverse are inextricably linked. This article is a brief exploration of the concept and the companies attempting to bring the virtual universe to life.
Understanding the Metaverse
The vast majority of the public has only recently become aware of the term due to the recent announcement that Facebook would be changing their name to Meta, an ode to Mark Zuckerberg’s desire to move humanity into the virtual world known as the Metaverse.
In July, Zuckerberg explained his plans for the metaverse in an interview with The Verge, stating that he imagines a future where people are wearing eye glasses or contacts which show a virtual reality where they can interact with friends and the environment.
“I think if we can help build the next set of computing platforms and experiences across that in a way that’s more natural and lets us feel more present with people, I think that’ll be a very positive thing,” Zuckerberg told The Verge. He also explained that for him, “the metaverse isn’t just virtual reality”, but rather a “persistent, synchronous environment where we can be together” using virtual reality, augmented reality, PC, mobile devices, and gaming consoles. Zuckerberg hopes the Metaverse will not only be “some kind of a hybrid between the social platforms that we see today, but an environment where you’re embodied in it.”
Around the same time Zuckerberg made his statements, Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg told the New York Times their hope is that one day, “people will host religious services in virtual reality spaces” and “use augmented reality as an educational tool to teach their children the story of their faith.”
While much is being said about the name change and the potential of what the Metaverse might be, the origin of the name comes from popular science fiction novel Snow Crash. In Snow Crash the main character, Hiro Protagonist, exists in a futuristic landscape where people hop in and out of the alternative universe made up of augmented reality and virtual reality.
While Snow Crash isn’t the first or the only novel to imagine an alternative reality where humans use technology to interact with a virtual world and the physical world augmented with heads up displays, Snow Crash was the first one to use the term Metaverse. From Snow Crash:
“So Hiro’s not actually here at all. He’s in a computer-generated universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones. In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse.”
Despite the utopian promises from Meta executives, there have been numerous critics of Zuckerberg’s plans to shift the public from actual reality to a simulated virtual reality. Tom Valovic at CounterPunch described the Metaverse plans in the following way:
“I want to be careful not to mince words in describing what this technology coup is really all about: nothing less than an attempt to fabricate an alternate “reality” other than the physical one we now inhabit. This new reality can be accessed, of course, only by paying customers and those in a position to afford and understand it. It is a technology designed by elites and for elites and implicitly leaves behind much of humanity in its wake.”
“The metaverse appears to be part of a larger effort to implement technocratic governance and dovetails nicely with the agenda of the World Economic Forum (WEF). This organization is the official mouthpiece of the billionaire class.
The first wave of transhumanism’s new invasiveness will come with so called wearable devices i.e., headbands, virtual reality glasses, body attachments, skin implants, and others. The next phase will be an attempt to physically wire our bodies into an electronic alternate reality where privacy and individual autonomy will be nonexistent.”
Valovic is correct in his estimation of the WEF vision. For the billionaire class and their puppet organizations, such as the WEF and the United Nations, the Metaverse offers up the potential to commandeer all life into digital prisons where the people can be charged for services and products in the digital realm. Also, the public will likely be fed the narrative that being in the Metaverse is better for the planet, or that there are no viruses to fear in the Metaverse. Of course, the potential for a digital virus to infect the hardware and software of the Metaverse — as well as the minds jacked in — is more than a little terrifying.
With the understanding of the true plans and intentions of those driving humanity towards the Metaverse, it’s not hard to imagine a world which reflects something akin to the 2009 Hollywood film, Surrogates. In the film, Bruce Willis plays an FBI agent investigating a death involving a surrogate, humanoid avatars that people choose to live in rather than their own bodies. While in Surrogates the avatar is an alternative physical being, in the Metaverse the avatar is a digital being. Regardless, the end result is that most people choose to live in their Surrogates rather than in their real human bodies. Is this what we will see with the Metaverse? Time will tell.
If the Technocrats have their way, we will have a physical world made up of smart cities where you will own nothing and be happy, with privacy and individuality a thing of the past. The smart cities could potentially lock people in their homes and shutdown essential services during Climate Lockdowns or flare-ups of the latest COVID variant. Meanwhile, in your smart home you could ignore the problems of the physical world by wearing goggles, contact lenses, or, eventually, an implant that plugs you directly into the Metaverse.
With the people of the world safely tucked into their digital beds, the Technocrats could complete their total takeover of natural resources, the economy, and humanity itself.
Bringing the Metaverse to Life
Although Meta is seen as the driving force in the creation of The Metaverse, they are not the only company working on the vision. As CBS recently noted, there are “5 companies building our virtual reality future“. In addition to Meta, we also have Google, Microsoft, Apple, Valve, and Magic Leap contributing to this potentially dystopian nightmare.
While most of these names are well known to the average person, Magic Leap is a company with which we ought to become more familiar. It is highly likely that Magic Leap will play an outsized role in bringing the Metaverse to the corporate world, and then, they hope, to mass consumer adoption. While the company is less known to consumers, it has enough clout to pull in advisors like Neal Stephenson, the author of Snow Crash. In fact, Stephenson is the “Chief Futurist” of Magic Leap where he can now work with the tech sector to bring his Metaverse concept to life.
Magic Leap was founded in 2010 with the goal of bringing augmented reality and virtual reality to the masses. In 2017, Magic Leap launched their “mixed reality goggles” with the hopes of finally launching humanity into the Metaverse. However, as with most previous attempts — Facebook’s Occulus Rift, Google Glass, and Microsoft HoloLens — the concept has not been successful.
Magic Leap has failed to live up to expectations in the last decade and it has been reported that between late 2019 and June 2020, the company’s valuation dropped from $6.4 billion to $450 million, a loss of 93 percent. By most accounts Magic Leap was a failure.
Then, in October 2021, Magic Leap raised $500 million from an unidentified source. Magic Leap states that the investment will help the company focus on delivering “best-in-class augmented reality (AR) solutions”, including the Magic Leap 2 by 2022. Magic Leap CEO Peggy Johnson said the investment is “an important step in advancing Magic Leap’s mission to transform the way we work.”
Peggy Johnson herself is also part of the rebranding of Magic Leap. She joined the company as current CEO in August 2020 with the focus of “accelerating the company’s shift to the enterprise market” after the failure to gain consumer acceptance. Johnson has said that Magic Leap will now focus on “building a robust business across sectors ranging from healthcare and manufacturing to defense and the public sector.”
Johnson’s previous employers provide a bit of background on her experience and connections. Before joining Magic Leap she was the Executive Vice President of Business Development at Microsoft from September 2014 to August 2020. In her role at Microsoft she appears to have been one of the main people involved in Microsoft’s partnership with the ID2020 project, including being quoted on the front page of the ID2020 website.
The ID2020 project is an attempt to create digital identification for every single person on the planet. The partners of the ID2020 project include Microsoft, GAVI (funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), and the Rockefeller Foundation. It was during Johnson’s tenure with Microsoft that a formal partnership with the ID2020 project was announced at the World Economic Forum in 2018. While making the announcement Johnson also noted, “It was last summer that Microsoft took a first step, collaborating with Accenture and Avanade on a blockchain-based identity prototype on Microsoft Azure.”
Having a legal proof of identity is an essential tool, which nearly 1 in 6 people live without. @Microsoft + @ID2020 announce new commitment to tackling identity exclusion around the world #wef2018 https://t.co/zqd80ldSK9
— Peggy Johnson (@PeggyJ) January 22, 2018
Interestingly, Peggy Johnson currently sits on the Board of Directors of BlackRock, a position she has held since March 2018. BlackRock has come under fire in the last year for real estate investments, but also for their stock in Moderna, Inc.
The fact that Johnson has experience working with the likes of Microsoft, BlackRock, the WEF, ID2020, and other major players of The Great Reset agenda is likely one of the reasons she has been chosen to help usher in The Metaverse.
Johnson’s statements in recent interviews provide a window into her own thinking around the virtual-augmented reality concept. On her LinkedIn page she recently discussed her first year as CEO of Magic Leap. “One year ago, in the midst of a global pandemic, I joined Magic Leap as CEO, inspired by the company’s vision to amplify human potential through the power of augmented reality (AR),” Johnson wrote.
Johnson goes to explain how Magic Leap plans to conquer the corporate workspace environment first, before moving onto consumer grade technology. She outlines a few of the companies Magic Leap has partnered with:
“We partnered with Ericsson to improve work floor processes on factory floors, increasing efficiency and collaboration. Ophthalmologists at Heru used our technology to develop an AR solution for eye exams, replacing a costly and cumbersome diagnostic machine with a more affordable vision diagnostic tool. And Farmers Insurance recently used Magic Leap to remotely train newly hired claim adjusters during the pandemic eliminating the need for environmentally taxing travel.”
In a February 2021 interview Johnson also payed lip service to “stakeholder capitalism“, a key component of the WEF’s Great Reset agenda. “Just cause we are a little company doesn’t mean that we can’t abide by the principles around stakeholder capitalism,” told the Leadership Next podcast.
Just days before the publishing of this article Peggy Johnson spoke at the Web Summit and revealed some more details of Magic Leap’s plans. Johnson told the audience we are already in the early stages of the Metaverse. According to Johnson, as the physical and digital worlds merge into one, people might fly less and participate in physical reality less, in general.
“‘Remember when doctors didn’t use AR to operate on you?’”, Johnson claimed someone might ask. “You’re not going to want that old experience, you’re only going to want that new experience because it’s going to be so accurate and precise.”
At the Web Summit Johnson stated that, for her, the goal was to “free ourselves” from looking down at our screens, and instead have users looking up at the world around them. However, despite many supporters of the Metaverse pushing for complete immersion in the virtual and augmented reality, Johnson claimed this is not her goal. “I don’t want to live in a fully occluded world where I enter another world for hours at a time,” she stated. “I want to live in my physical world and have that world augmented for me. That’s where I think we’re going and that’s the real promise of the Metaverse.”
While Johnson herself may not intend for The Metaverse to become an all encompassing reality that supersedes physical reality, for the Zuckerbergs, Microsofts, and WEFs of the world, that is exactly what they intend for The Metaverse.
The web of Technocrats working to build this reality should be cause for alarm to any thinking mind. Meta, Microsoft, Google, Apple, the World Economic Forum, Amazon, and others are absolutely intending to bridge the gap between virtual and physical reality. The Metaverse serves their ultimate vision of dominating humanity via digital technology and erasing privacy and individuality.
The only thing standing in the way of this technocratic dystopia are the free hearts and minds of the world. We must reject this effort and instead strive to reconnect to the physical world around us. While the technocrats have attempted to use COVID-19 as a method to sever human connection so that we might crave something akin to The Metaverse, we ought to push past this propaganda and reconnect to our fellow humans and the abundant natural world. Now is the time to fight for our humanity before the Predator Class completely abolishes our physical connection to each other and the planet.
Source: The Last American Vagabond
Derrick Broze, a staff writer for The Last American Vagabond, is a journalist, author, public speaker, and activist. He is the co-host of Free Thinker Radio on 90.1 Houston, as well as the founder of The Conscious Resistance Network & The Houston Free Thinkers.
https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/category/derrick-broze/
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