Manifest Destiny’s Blueprint for Post Humanism – Synthetic Pretenders Part 16

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

Part Eleven: Pre-Crime Prediction for “Better” Humans

Part Twelve: Rocket Science and Zoology – Catalysts for Explosive Evolution

Part Thirteen: Bitter Lemons: Southern California’s Avatar End Game

Part Fourteen: Disgruntled Neighbors Oppose Berggruen’s Mountaintop Monastery

Part Fifteen A: Charter Cities, Refugee Labor, and The Learning Economy

Part Fifteen B: Mondragon Focolare and Inclusive Capitalism

Part Fifteen C: Tokenized Co-Ops and “Moral” Markets

Part Fifteen D: Wellness Metrics and Teaching Machines to “Live” (With Us)

Nicholas Berggruen courted Robert Hertzberg in 2010 to join his campaign to begin to “fix” California’s governance problems while staking out a leadership role for the state in shaping the public imaginary as the Metaverse becomes manifest. It was the perfect task for a land of wine, citrus, and silicon built on mythic stories.

In California, material excess and entertainment have proven capable of deftly cloaking high-tech military R&D and psychological operations, though after two years of draconian measures it’s getting decidedly harder to maintain the fiction. According to a 2017 feature by Joe Matthews in Pacific Standard,  the two men bonded on a plane flight from Panama to California geeking out over a shared love of policy. Nicholas launched the Berggruen Institute in 2010 as a home for the Think Long Committee for California.

Source: Beggruen and Herzberg at Book Party for “Renovating Democracy,” Donato Sardella

Hertzberg was one of sixteen tapped by billionaire financier / aspirational philosopher king Nicholas Berggruen in 2011 to develop a “A Blueprint to Renew California.” The document prominently features plans for workforce-aligned education and management of human capital for “future skills.” Though not listed as an official participant, the report states Gavin Newsom, then Lt. Governor, served on the jobs task force. Newsom’s mentor, former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, was among those who facilitated preparation of the document. It was a bipartisan effort that included conservatives like Condoleezza Rice and George Schulz; democrats like Gray Davis, Maria Elena Durazo, and Antonia Hernandez; as well as individuals like Eli Broad, Eric Schmidt, and Gerry Parsky who know their way around technology, education, data, and financial markets. It is this document that underlies the Berggruen Institute’s intentions to remake capitalism, democracy, and what it means to be human in a world dominated by artificial intelligence.

Source: Relationship Map, Blueprint to Renew California

Source: Blueprint to Renew California, Think Long Committee 2011

Such seismic changes hinge on widespread adoption of digital identity, which is what Robert Herzberg’s California Trust Framework legislation will usher in. Mixed reality cannot function unless everything, humans, other animate beings, and inanimate objects can be properly embedded and monitored in the digital landscape. Precision virtual twinning is ready to come off the battlefield and into your kitchen to mitigate climate change – life in the CIA’s real time video game of impact data analytics. I discuss this during a site visit Jason Bosch and I paid to Maxar Geospatial Services in Westminster, CO in April.

Source: Maxar Homepage

Source: Site Visit to Maxar Corporate Headquarters

Self-sovereign identity is meant to replace relational trust cultivated among humans in real community with high-speed automated “trust” dispensed through sensor networks. It will usher in new forms of globalized, electrical existence. We will be expected to learn to navigate encoded ephemeral worlds built on military systems where nothing can be taken for granted and anything could be a deception.

It truly is a harrowing prospect, and yet many appear ready to rush headlong into such a future without giving careful consideration as to how the choices we make today, through our actions or inactions, could irreversibly harm future generations and the sibling beings with whom we share the blessings of this earth.

The Trust Framework is your government on a smart phone, vending machine government.

It’s your children assessed as stackable credentials and scored as human capital assets.

It’s conditional cash transfers (UBI) tied to pay for success finance schemes.

It’s electronic health records building out our digital twins for the world simulation.

It’s managed mobility solutions based on identity.

It’s knowledge management tied to reputation scores.

It launches Richard Baldwin’s Globalization 4.0, globotics, where AI reviews skill tokens in learning lockers to decide who can put their mind in a robot for gig work at the lowest wage.

Source: Why will future globalization be so different? Richard Baldwin

Those at the top are working overtime to incorporate perpetual-pandemic threat into the “New Normal,” to justify ongoing bio-surveillance measures meant to track and trace us into a cybernetic reality where individuals will be managed as “agents” in a contrived game of “life” to generate impact profits and data to train the blockchain global brain.

I recently finished a read-aloud of San Diego State emeritus math professor and conceptualizer of the Singularity Vernor Vinge’s sci-fi novel “Rainbows End,” set in a near future dystopia of mixed reality where everyone “wears,” their own view of the world even as the actual world falls apart. Vinge finished his Hugo Award-winning book in 2006. At a Comicon festival he admitted that since he writes slowly, it was challenging to keep up with his colleagues in San Diego who were building it all out.

Source: The Kollin Brothers Interview Vernor Vinge, 2010

The ongoing nightmare of Manifest Destiny has moved on from Leland Stanford’s railroads to Mark Andreessen’s crypto dystopia where those who seek to advocate for rights to access and preserve the actual material world will be branded as hopelessly naive and “reality privileged,” since Silicon Valley adamantly asserts that racial justice can only be attained in Web 3.0. In a world of 1s and 0s equity data will be accurately collected, used to demonstrate “impact” and siphon profits over to the Impact Management Project partners’ ESG portfolios.

Therefore, it’s not surprising that digital identity in California would surface now. For us to inhabit Vinge’s new imperial realm and interact with augmented reality, we must remain visible and identifiable. In Vinge’s book, the people who were not used to “wearing” had to practice a lot to make their digitally projected avatars appear real. The hardest part was making sure digital feet remained in contact with the ground. But it’s more than just appearances, a person’s past transactions and access credentials must travel with them through smart environments. That is the reason we must be assigned unique digital identifiers.

Once scaled, the California Trust Network will comprise an open-air decentralized carceral state of radical democracy run on conditional tokens. In this brave new world, public services will all be evidence-based, data rich, and linked to global financial schemes. This will be a SMART world where harmonized citizens are monitored for their conformity to the dictates of the Fourth Industrial Revolution overseen from the Presidio, the US headquarters of the World Economic Forum and the first Spanish colonial outpost on the West Coast.

Source: Presidio Sketch, 1816

Source: World Economic Forum San Francisco Center Opens, Aims to Spread Tech Benefits, 2017