Pre-Crime Prediction for “Better” Humans – Synthetic Pretenders Part 11

This is the eleventh installment in the Synthetic Pretenders series examining the proposed CaliforniaTrust Framework within the context of synthetic biology, eugenics, and the Spanish mission system. 

Part One: Scientific Management, Robo-Bees, and Digital Babies

Part Two: Apocalypse, Mind Files, and Interplanetary Promises

Part Three: The “Magic” of Radio-Eugenics and Holographic Twins

Part Four: Ritual Gaming and Berggruen’s Transformation of Humanity

Part Five: Elite Views on Automated Law and Vending Machine Democracy

Part Six: Reject Scientific Management, Celebrate “Weeds”

Part Seven: Computation Life and Industrial Design Erode the Boundaries of our Beingness

Part Eight: Market Alchemy and Illuminated “Well-being”

Part Nine: Photonic Workhouses and Behavioral Scrip

Part Ten: Magenta Dusk and the Royal Beacon of Decarbonization

In this post, I’ll be talking about several individuals associated with the Human Betterment Foundation’s eugenics / institutionalized sterilization program who were based in the Bay Area where the Berggruen’s Transformations of the Human office is located. From these figures I’ll draw connections to current policy implementations in California that appear benevolent, but are really about social efficiency and scientific management of children.

Source: Human Sterilization Today, 1938

Three board members were associated with Berkeley:

Herbert Evans, chair of the university’s school of anatomy with a research focus in endocrinology and reproduction

Samuel Holmes, a UC Berkeley zoologist with strong anti-immigrant sentiments

Rabbi Rudolf Coffee who led Berkeley’s Temple Sinai from 1921-34 and then led the San Francisco Conference of Christians and Jews

There were also representatives of Stanford, a school that is at the forefront of developing social policy; financial innovation, including social entrepreneurship; and biomedical research. Transformation of the human is definitely in their wheelhouse. David Starr Jordan, a founding member of the board of the Human Betterment Foundation and mentor to its director Paul Popenhoe, was the first president of Stanford University. After a review in the summer of 2020, university officials decided to remove Jordan’s name from numerous buildings and a street on campus and make plans to better educate the community about his legacy through historical exhibits and programming. Jordan, a naturalist and ichthyologist, held racist views about dysgenic degeneration, unfit populations, and that the “efficacy of education was limited by genetic potential.” You can read more about him in this request to rename Jordan Hall, prepared in 2019 by the Stanford Eugenics Project.

Source: David Starr Jordan with Brigham Young University President George Brimhall at the Provo, UT train station in 1912. Jordan was there to deliver a lecture.

Lewis Terman was another prominent member of the Human Betterment Foundation. He was a renowned psychologist at Stanford who developed the Stanford Binet IQ test and carried out extensive studies of genius seeking to determine the genetic basis of intelligence. In 1928, Terman wrote ” It is more important for man to acquire control over his biological evolution than to capture the energy of the atom.” With today’s nanoelectromechanical systems, some imagine they are close to harnessing evolution towards renewable energy harvest within living tissues.

Terman’s son Fred was a protege of Vannevar Bush who returned to Stanford after working at the radio research lab at Harvard during WWII. Fred became dean of the engineering school at Stanford and helped launch the Stanford Research Park in the early 1950s. This became the anchor for today’s Silicon Valley juggernaut. Fred Terman was also involved in setting up the Korea Advanced Science Institute in 1970 under Pak Chung Hee (fast forward to Samsung’s Metaverse). He mentored William Hewlett and David Packard and got them set up in business. An interesting, but probably related side note, is that HP’s first big break was selling processors to Disney for the animation of the film Fantasia – picture playlists of gamified edu-tainment with trademarked animated characters. In 2015, HP split off its enterprise unit from its personal computing division, creating HPE. HPE’s focus includes high performance supercomputers, IoT edge computing, digital medicine infrastructure, data storage and analytics, and cyber-security.

Source: The Vexing Legacy of Lewis Terman, Stanford Magazine 2000

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has played a leading role in remaking the non-profit sector to be data-driven and evidence-based for the coming era of social-impact finance. It’s also almost single-handedly funded the development of OER. These are Open Education Resources tagged with meta-data that will be used to program humans as lifelong learners chasing skills badges in haptic suits. The stuff Knewton was working on. I’ve written about them here and here.

Source: xAPI “We Can Track It”

In 2018, funds from the David and Lucille Packard Foundation were awarded to Franklin McKinley and Alum Rock schools in San Jose to participate in the Datazone pilot affiliated with the Silicon Valley Regional Data Trust. Datazone’s initial funding came from the National Science Foundation in 2013 and was expanded with support from Chan Zuckerberg. The intent was to aggregate a broad range of data including early childhood education, foster care, and juvenile justice data in addition to academic data. It is notable that Priscilla Chan was the keynote speaker at the 2017 launch for SVRDT.

David Haussler, the bio-molecular engineer who assembled the first draft of the human genome in 2000, was a panelist that day. So where does genomics fit into the data interoperability agenda? That would be those synthetic-biology upgrades and value profiling of human resources. Let’s just not call it eugenics. Precision education and nutrition sound much better don’t you think?

They are after the children – to convert the next generation to Metaverse life. The plan is to govern them as data commodities that will generate social impact profits and, strange as it may seem to say at this point, possibly as a source of alternative energy through entangled digital twins and quantum thermodynamics? Picture pre-k classrooms remade as bio-generators. So much un-harnessed piezo-electric energy going to waste. If only we had more “smart” playgrounds.

A lab for experimenting with a “concierge” model of integrated health and personalized learning grounded in family re-education was Priscilla Chan’s Primary School franchise, established in 2015 with a $5 million pass-through grant from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. There are now two schools, one in East Palo Alto and one in East Bay. So, pull out your “Fitter Families” lens  as you scroll through these images and consider what they portend for Fourth Industrial Revolution bio-digital convergence.

Source: Littlesis.org deleted three hundred+ maps I made over five years on their open-source platform. Unfortunately, an interactive version of this map was not archived before the purge. Littlesis,org has also made it impossible to search their database for many entries I created. However, you can still find a lot of the records via Google  if you include Littlesis in your query along with the term. Once you locate one of the records they are still interactive, so you can explore and uncover additional information.

Source: Universal Access to Early Childhood Care, Education, and Health Services

Source: Priscilla Chan’s 2017 Facebook post about financial support of Datazone for personalized learning.

Source: Priscilla Chan, note Breakthrough Energy Coalition membership

Source: Oculus Working on More Affordable VR, BBC News 2016

Source: The Primary School, note involvement of Playworks whose primary funder is Bechtel (S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation) – alternative energy research

Source: Priscilla Chan’s The Primary School Combines Healthcare with Academics

Source: Silicon Valley Regional Dat Trust: Investing in the Future of Children, Families, and Communities, 2017

Source: UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute, Haussler-Salama Lab – What does this mean for eugenics? Who decides what optimum “health” is?

Source: Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan Pledge $3 Billion To Fighting Disease, NY Times 2016 – What if the “disease” is simply to be a natural human?

Source: Conversations on Los Angeles School District Daily Pass Program, QR-Code-Enabled Tele-medicine in Schools

Source: Investing for Impact: Equity, Diversity, Inclusion Partnership. Santa Clara Count Office of Education Slideshare for Datazone, 2018.

The content of this presentation is about creating digital twins of pre-school children needed to underpin futures trading in human capital.

Source: Human Capital Performance Bonds, Steve Rothschild, Invest in Outcomes 2011.

Looking back over the fine print of the grant, coordinated by of the University of California Santa Cruz, I noticed that the IJIS (Integrated Justice Information Systems) has been tapped to provide input on the development of secure information sharing for the project. IJIS is based in Ashburn, VA on George Washington’s Science and Technology campus. Its mission statement is to unite “private and public sectors to improve critical information sharing for those who provide public safety and administer justice in our communities.”

The social-impact finance model is built on the premise of pre-crime, where “crime” is re-framed as being an economic burden on society. How much did the system put into raising you? What is the return on that investment relative to your anticipated economic productivity? In 2020, IJIS prepared an extensive white paper outlining the use of technology in transitioning to an open-air prison model for low-level offenses. I believe such a structure will eventually be applied to children and “lifelong learners” for risk assessment and reputation scoring embedded in pay-for-success finance deals. Prison and rehabilitation are significant cost-offsets used in the equations meant to finance this disruptive debt product boondoggle.

SVRDT’s data interoperability provides the predictive analytics needed to scale impact investing in pre-k, juvenile justice, and foster care. Picture the “anytime-anywhere” “learning ecosystem” model as a QR-coded carceral state intended to groom children, through digital identity management, for a post-human existence. E-carceration has been embedded into education infrastructure over the past decade: school security screenings with student ID scans led to QR codes linked to school bus ridership. The system takes advantage of parental concerns around safety to impose more and more surveillance on and off campus. Sadly, the characterization of schools as prisons is not so far off the mark for many children today.

Source: NSF Grant #1338411″Developing A Comprehensive Regional Approach to Data Set Integration to Support Data-Intensive Research in Education

Source: IJIS Corrections Tech 2020: Technological Trends in Custodial and Community Corrections.

Silicon Valley Regional Data Trust is the model Stewards of Change and the National Interoperability Collaborative (NIC) hope to use to create robust networks of health and human service data nationwide with California, Connecticut, and Virginia being pilot states. Beyond concerns relating to the involvement of IJIS, NIC maintains partnerships with both the National Council on Crime and Delinquency and the National Fusion Center Association. Stanford Center for Population Health Sciences (David Starr Jordan and Lewis Terman) is also in the mix. While the NIC’s website and logo are clunky, the inclusion of the icosahedron feels significant. It’s a Platonic solid that represents water. A figure of an icosahedron is featured in the Nobel Prize-winning Dan Schectman’s video on quasi-crystals. It’s a prominent theme in The Institute for the Future’s 2016 “Learning is Earning” video about blockchain identity, unbundled education, debt logs, and human value calculated based on “edu-blocks” attained. Could the repeated use of this shape be an indirect reference to biomedical sensing technologies, photonic computing, and fourth phase / structured water, and the possibility of holographic DNA?

Source: National Interoperability Collaborative

Source: Dan Schectman, Nobel Prize Winner, Quasi-Crystals

Source: Learning is Earning 2026, A Partnership Between The ACT Foundation and The Institute For The Future

Marcy Lauck of the Santa Clara County Office of Education was data administrator for Datazone and served on the board of the National Laboratory of Education Transformation (NLET). NLET was a subcontractor to Resilient Network Systems, Inc. on a NIST-sponsored digital identity project, Zero-Knowledge Identity and Privacy Protection Service for Education and Children, in 2012. Again, we see where the impetus for the California Trust Framework comes from. Robert Hertzberg didn’t just come up with this idea on his own. There is a deep backstory around the development of digital identity in the state. Look at all the parties involved. This is not just about a convenient way for students to share their high school transcript during college applications. It’s a plan to engineer the lives of all the people of the Earth by luring them onto cybernetic pathways where their autonomy will be stolen.

 

Source: National Laboratory for Education Transformation

Quality Rating and Improvement System block grants were awarded starting in 2011 as part of Obama’s Race to the Top initiative. Just as K12 and higher education were standardized for global gig labor, the same structure needed to be applied to pre-k. All levels of training for future digital citizens would be integrated into cradle to career, lifelong learning pipelines. Santa Clara County, CA, the epicenter of pay-for-success human capital pilots, was among the first counties in the state to participate. See this 2018 post on Strong Start and Big Lift as well as this post on Hatch We Play Smart tables used in Educare headstart classrooms in Tulsa to collect behavioral data on toddlers for impact finance deals. Educare launched in Chicago with the backing of former first lady of Illinois Diana Rauner and expanded to Santa Clara with backing from deep-pocketed ECE and tech interests. Rauner, executive director of Ounce of Prevention Fund, was closely allied with Jim Heckman and a trustee at Stanford Business School where she earned her MBA.

The pre-k “quality” effort in California has been led by the First 5 Association, coordinating fifty-eight county participants since 1998 when it was established with proceeds from the Proposition 10 tobacco tax. That’s an interesting detail, since the tobacco mosaic virus has been identified as a key material for use in biomolecular engineering to create nano-bio technology systems by US Department of Energy, NSF, and US Army researchers.

Mark Crandall of Early Quality Systems helped devise iPinwheel, the pre-k data architecture in 2012. The criminal justice aspect enters the picture once again, since before starting his business, Crandall had been an Agile consultant with BAE, a UK Aerospace defense contractor, developing FBI case management software. The integrated software system has since been renamed Hubbe and aggregates the following data: attendance, health, assessment tools with evidence documentation, meal management, payments, and parent engagement. Among the 100+ Student Information System fields is a reference to PayPal payment integration, the only company referenced. Under the document management section there are fields for family case notes, family documents, parent case notes, parent documents, and child case notes and child documents. When you sign up for universal pre-k, your entire family becomes part of a dossier that will very likely be used to profit human capital finance impact investors.

Source: Education Changemakers San Diego – Nobel Laurete James Heckman and Venture Capitalist J.B. Pritzker on Value of. Early Childhood Education to the Economy

Kris Perry led the First Five Years Fund in California between 2005 and 2018, supporting the Obama administration’s efforts to raise the profile of public-private partnerships early childhood education as James Heckman and J.B. Pritzker went up and down the coast pitching a 7-13% rate of return on improved human capital through “character training.”

Perry did a brief stint at Save the Children, a global NGO working in data-driven maternal and childcare, in 2018. In 2019, she was appointed senior advisor to Governor Newsom on Health and Human Services. Remember, California is a partner with Stewards of Change, and one of three pilot states in addition to Connecticut and Virginia to build interoperable systems of Health and Human Service Data linked with the Fusion Centers and the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.

In May of 2022 she became executive director of Screens and Kids on Long Island, an international group working tapped to make the case for evidence-based child digital media. There’s a full court press on to groom preschoolers to grow up to be good, compliant digital citizens of the Metaverse. “Helping children lead healthy lives in a digital world.” Not quite an icosahedron in that logo, but it has a crystalline quality to it. Screens and Kids, Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory (DNA and Eugenics Record Office), and Stewards of Change area within a 13-mile drive of one another on Long Island.

Source: Logo Children and Screens

Source: Map of Long Island, Children and Screens, Cold Springs Harbor, Stewards of Change

Over the past five years, we’ve seen a nationwide surge in media coverage and third sector advocacy around early childhood education, building brains neuroscience, and device-based parenting “solutions” labelled “evidence-based.” Low-income children, particularly Black and Brown children and immigrant and refugee children, are being groomed as human capital assets against whose futures profitable gambles will be made. In 2018, the CalWORKs Home Visiting Initiative was launched in California targeting expectant parents or families with children under age two in the home. The program saw a significant expansion in 2020 with financial support from Governor Newsom, which aligns with his expansion of pre-k services to include funding in the 2021 budget for transitional kindergarten for all four year olds in the state. Trauma screenings have also been prioritized, because ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) scores generate pay-for-success cost-offsets that can be leveraged to finance the digital interventions being sold to us as quick fixes for broken children to minimize their future burden on society.

Among those lobbying for program expansion was the Alliance for Early Success with a deep stable of “investors” in human capital including Ballmer Group, the Buffett Early Childhood Fund, the Gates Foundation, Heising Simons Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Pritzker Family Foundation, Davide and Lucille Packard Foundation, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. William Keith Kellogg was the brother and business partner of John Harvey Kellogg, 7th Day Adventist entrepreneur in wellness and cereal. John was also a benefactor of the Eugenics Records Office at Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory on Long Island and a founder of the Race Betterment Foundation.

Source: Kellogg Family and Eugenics Record Office

Management of children’s behaviors, soft skills and character training, is a keen interest of researchers. Why? Because social impact investment equations have been designed to use that data by Clive Belfield and James Heckman. Social-Emotional Learning data lakes will also help “humanize” AI. A presentation about PBS Kids apps and social-emotional learning data harvest was hosted by the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity at the University of Chicago in 2018. The eleven minutes of content in the clip was drawn from a two-hour presentation. The target audience for interventions are low-income families, children in Head Start and their mothers. It’s a warmed-over story where the well-off set expectations for uplift of the poor to increase their value to society.

The following issues are touched upon:

1. How to get children who cannot yet read to be motivated create accounts on the pre-k apps.
2. Use of facial recognition and behavioral biometrics to determine who is using the app.
3. Programmed digital nudges by NPCs in game that encourage pro-social behaviors like sharing.
4. Incentivizing children by using gamification, leaderboards, and digital sticker books.
5. Interest in getting access to data about the parents and the child’s environment in the home.
6. Interest in advancing techniques for parental behavior change.
7. Where to advertise to parents to get them to download the apps.
8. Correlating in-game behaviors with OCEAN 5 personality traits.
9. Importance of child engagement above all else, and the amount of competition among games.
10. Using many different pots of data with “high-value tidbits” to find patterns and make predictions.

Shockingly, James Heckman, a professor of economics and Nobel prize winner, floats the idea during the presentation that parents be incentivized to get their children to regularly log in to PBS kids’ educational apps by using gamification and pornography for the adults.

What kind of social norms are being advanced in this oak-paneled room full of elite researchers? Who are they to be making decisions about appropriate outcomes for vulnerable children in this automated dystopia? Acknowledging that management of children on digital leaderboards as human capital assets is a direct extension of the eugenics practices of the twentieth century will perhaps get service providers and families to adopt a frame that prioritizes caution in the face policies that on the surface appear benevolent, but upon deeper investigation are found to serve other interests than those of families.

Thus far pre-k and home visits are optional, but for how long?

Home-visit programs may set up pregnant women and mothers of preschoolers for intrusive social prescriptions and collection of personally identifiable information on families. We see in the image below taken from the report “Big Ideas: Little Learners: Early Childhood Trends Report 2019” that a 13% return on investment is anticipated for investments managing children as impact commodities. The children must first be blockchained to create the interoperability needed to fulfill the requirements of the impact finance deals. This is another possible use case for Robert Hertzberg’s proposed California Trust Framework.

 

Source: “Big Ideas, Little Learners,” Omidyar Network, 2019

The report was prepared by Omidyar Network, a philanthropy of eBay/PayPal billionaire Pierre Omidyar, with offices in Redwood City, CA; Washington, DC; London, Nairobi, Mumbai, and Bangalore. Pierre’s wife Pam operates Hopelab, a health data compliance research center that was involved in the deployment of the GoalMama app in conjunction with Nurse Family Partnership and a pay for success pilot in maternal care in South Carolina. Inclusion of health data boosts Heckman Equation returns from 7-11% to 13%. I wrote about that here.

Source: What’s your goal, mama? Hopelab 2018

Pierre Omidyar and associates Matthew Bannick and Sal Giambanco, a former Jesuit priest in the Bay Area, have been active supporters of the Vatican’s efforts to advance global impact investing through conferences in Rome in 2014, 2016, and 2018. Omidyar Network also happens to be a backer of RadicalXChange, a nonprofit now promoting SBTs (Soulbound tokens), which I believe will be used as meta-data “tags” to track populations receiving social impact financed services and obtain impact measurement at a future date.

California is the most populous state in the nation with a quarter of child residents under the age of five living in poverty. As we reflect on the techno-solutions being offered to engineer the lives of those in great need, we need to realize humanity hasn’t evolved much beyond the days of Evans, Holmes, Coffee, Terman, and Jordan. In the name of “human betterment” will we profile the next generation into a mixed reality panopticon and pretend we were doing them a good turn? Managing people in an age of automation will be about managing behaviors and mental states under conditions of unimaginable social stress. It should come as no surprise that creative debt finance innovators have come up with a system that will allow them to profit from this dehumanizing transition.