Thingification II – Talking With Tom Cowan About “The Game”

This is a follow up to my previous piece on the Utah teapot and thingification. Last week I had the good fortune to spend an hour talking with Tom Cowan about the nature of this “game” in which we find ourselves. We’re being “thingified,” pushed into a mixed reality simulation. In order for capitalism to continue on a beautiful planet of finite resources, the plan is to shift growth to digital realms. There life, managed in a militarized cloud architecture, can continue to be squeezed in ways that profit the denizens of Davos. It is a supremely anti-life effort where beingness has come under the threat of mass virtualization.

Those in positions of power are reimagining us as captive consumers of digital items, “players” on a hexagonally tiled board of GPS coordinates governed by behavioral economics and coded nudges. They’re counting on us to either not realize we’ve been pulled in the game or to know but tacitly agree to play by their rules. Caught in the crosshairs of those plotting out the internet of bio-nano-things, I believe natural life will only remain viable if we collectively step out of the game and forge a path towards healing ourselves and the earth.

Shall We Play A Game?

The following visual postscript speaks to some of the topics covered in our conversation. I’m not going to say a lot about each image, but I hope the collection conveys a sense that this cyborg avatar capitalist future being imagined in Tokyo is not all that far off. This is a mixed-reality game we’re being pushed into. It is militarized. It is run to profit finance and technology interests. Public health is being used as cover to push medicalized therapeutics on healthy people that will lead to a cybernetic existence where non-modified life is inexorably erased from the planet. Artificial intelligence as the final settler colonizer – all humans targets for profit extraction and eventual elimination.

Source

Where Are We “Playing?” The Spatial Web

If you’re old like me and can remember the early days of the Internet, think back to when hyperlinked text was new, how fascinating it was to have access to so many layers of interconnected information. Moving forward, the plan is to use sensor networks and wearable and implantable technologies to apply layers of information to the PHYSICAL world, including people, with which we interact.

These cyber-physical “smart” environments are augmented with data, but not everyone will have permission to interact with ALL the data. Much of it will be “permissioned.” In this game each player’s interactions will be mediated through nested digital smart contracts. Depending on a player’s status and digital profile, they may experience the reality of a given geography very differently from others, even another player standing ten feet away. Everyone has a custom “game of life” board that reflects the particular quest of “self-improvement” they’ve been assigned by social impact investors. Each path – training, wellness, mental fitness, rehabilitation – aligns the players towards good “global citizenship” as determined by the game designers who work for the billionaire class.

Source

What Are The Rules? Smart Contracts

While many seem mesmerized by the clamor around crypto currency, the true power of blockchain is the underlying ledger designed to track digital assets. Those assets include you, a character, within the confines of the billionaires’ game. In the future it will be not so much about “currency,” but rather earning scrip, digital rights and privileges. Complete a task in the game and earn tokens that endow you with special powers. All of it tracked in the ledger. In the mixed reality game world, a character and how they experience “reality” will be determined by the tokens in their possession at any given time. This is nothing new, of course. The technology has simply become more advanced, and with it the panopticon more sophisticated. The control it exerts within the confines of the game can be so subtle that some players may forget they’re playing (or being played).

Source – Spatial Web Foundation

Starter Money: Globotics, The “Future of Work,” and the State of “Play”

In the game, the future of work is carried out on screens as avatars or through remote haptic robotics. Artificial intelligence assesses the applicant pool’s blockchain skill and reputation scoring to assign short term tasks via automated contracting. Work assignments supplement modest Universal Basic Income stipends. Players may also increase their income selling access to personal data, a next-gen plasma bank. In the next phase, Globalization 4.0, players in the game work in black boxes wearing haptic suits. It’s the creepy robots that get to live in the real world. Picture “Surrogates,” the Bruce Willis film.

Source – Globotics United Nations

Moving Within The Game: Geofencing

Geofencing uses GPS coordinates linked to sensor networks to create virtual borders in real time. Changing borders determine each player’s ability to move around “the game board” as they complete assigned “social impact” activities to generate success points on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals leaderboards: poverty, diet, health, education, etc. The current mobility landscape was transitioned by restricting private transportation; advancing “shared” mobility options (all monitored through apps and the Internet of Things); privatizing public transit systems through social impact investment deals; and then handing over the whole shebang to ride-sharing companies like Uber. Who has access to the system? Does your avatar have a blockchain token in their public benefit e-wallet that allows them to ride? Are they out of compliance (health status, reputation score, etc.)? If so, they may find their token or QR code has been deactivated. Then they must remain in place until they fulfill the requirements dictated before continuing gameplay. A world tiled in hexagons (hexed) ala Settlers of Catan. It is the most efficient way to predict and run the simulations.

Source – Uber

Source – Settlers of Catan

Tracking Tasks On The Quest: Wearable Technology

Each player is assigned a quest at the start of the game. This quest consists of a series of tasks that must be accomplished, some independently and some in coordination with other players. Demonstrating compliance by completing items on your task list increases your value within the game. Players are monitored in real time on leaderboards for the purposes of human capital investment – see “Betting On The Game” further down. Wearables including smart clothing, fit bits, and biofeedback devices employ xAPI technology to upload certifications of completion as blockchain tokens to online lockers.

Source – Smart Shirt

Source – Brainco

Source – xAPI

Fabricating The Game: Coding Virtual Reality

Before the game starts in earnest, the board still has to be created. The coding work for the spatial web has started, but it is far from complete. The capitalist imperative demands much of the work be done using unfree labor – prisoners, refugees, children, and the poor as a condition of welfare to work. Abigail Spanberger’s proposed federal legislation – RESET for America’s Future – would link food assistance (SNAP) to planned regional economy workforce training placement. It requires tracking future wages against the success metrics written into outcomes-based contracts (pay for success finance). My suspicion is they will use hunger as the stick to compel the masses to code the prison planet and carry out the cyborg-transhumanist agenda.

Source

Betting On The Game: Income Sharing Agreements And Securitized Debt

Income sharing agreements (ISAs) are central to the elite’s plans to finance (and profit from) the reskilling of lockdown-displaced workers into Fourth Industrial Revolution gig work. The future of work will no longer require degrees for most people. That legacy system is in the process of being replaced by a perpetual race to attain the next micro-credential. Upgraded credentials (and more debt) will be required to stay qualified to compete as a Task Rabbit on the globalists’ micro-work clearinghouse platform.

Players in the game will be expected to self-finance not only their training, but their social services, too. At the beginning of the game players seek arrangements with an investor or group of investors who contract with them to receive return payment based on future garnished wages. This contracting arrangement is logged on blockchain and monitored as the game progresses. Once logged, that debt can be securitized, packaged, and made available for trading on global markets.

That is where the real money is to be made, and the hedge funds know it. They’re the ones who backed the creation of the whole gaming enterprise. For a real-life example look to former Goldman Sachs now New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy’s Career Impact Bond initiative. This financial product was developed by Sir Ronald Cohen’s Social Finance. Planned securitization of ISAs will happen through Edly, created by Christopher Riccardi, grandfather of collateralized debt obligations. CDOs tanked the housing market in 2008. Same playbook. Why is it up to mom researchers to expose this? Isn’t this something that should be showing up in national papers of record?

Source – Edly

Source – Phil Murphy

Source – Social Finance

In closing, this is the Merrill Engineering Building housing the computer science department at the University of Utah. The state’s only nuclear reactor sits beneath it. I did a revocation of consent there, burned sage, and left the ashes on the front steps.

Artificial intelligence computing systems that use processes not visible to interested parties is “black box.” One can see inputs. One can see outputs, but one cannot know the process by which the former transitions to the latter. The Merrill Building “black box” is a center of computer graphic simulation, going back to the coding of the Utah teapot. The mixed reality game we’re being pushed into is grounded in the work carried out there.

Who really knows what’s has gone on, or is still going on, in that box?

A study in contrasts with nearby Red Butte Canyon.

What does it mean to be a scientist?

What does it mean to be a good relative?

What does it mean to be in the game?

What energetic system are we tapping into?

What signals intelligence are we generating?

And to what end?

There is still time to refuse the billionaires’ game.

Burn sage, revoke consent.