This morning I received a response to my latest blog post, a piece I’d written about grief and family separation and controlled consciousness along with a description of site visits I did in Durham, NC related to military gaming simulations, neuroscience, and psychical research. It was sent by someone I know from my education activism days, an individual who’s done important work exposing the toxic discipline and financial schemes behind a particular no-excuses charter school franchise. I won’t quote from the email because the comments weren’t shared publicly. I do, however, want to unpack the content in broad strokes.
I’ll admit to being triggered by that email landing in my inbox. Blaring out from the page, at least that’s how it felt to me, was the sentiment – you are a talented person Alison, but you are not humble, and that’s a problem. I quickly started drafting a response. If I’m being perfectly honest, my reply was defensive and would probably only have served to reinforce the writer’s mental picture of me as a combative, hard-headed know-it-all. Upon reflection, I sensed the sender of the email, also a blogger, likely found my post equally triggering since it critiqued academia, the prevailing climate narrative, and political polarity. All three are topics about which the author holds strong opinions. So, I paused and made a hearty breakfast of poached eggs and crispy kale with a side of thick bacon slices, and then after finishing off a Moka pot, I decided to write my reply here instead.
The email sent to me opened with the lyrics from Grace Slick and The Great Society’s song “Someone to Love,” which was later re-recorded at “Somebody to Love.” According to Wikipedia, the group originally performed the song at The Matrix nightclub in San Francisco in 1965-66. For me this has synergy with my ongoing interest in Madeline L’Engle’s “Wrinkle In Time” novel, which centers love as the only thing that can overcome IT, the mechanical ruler of the dead world of Camazotz. The song lyrics speak of truth turning into lies, joy and garden flowers dying, and a mind full of red. The answer is to find “somebody to love,” which given the nature of the personal rejection I’m navigating by the people I love is rather cutting.
As I interpreted the intent of the email, which is in itself a fraught enterprise, the implication seems to be that I had turned into an angry and joyless person. People who read my work or listen to my talks know that is not the case. Sure, the past few weeks have been terrible, not just because my father died – I had mostly come to terms with that. The worst part was dealing with the finality of being cast out by my living family and the deep woundedness I felt at that cold, clinical distancing.
This week I was able to mostly push my anger aside, because I continue to hope that the answer is love – that love will win in the end. The message being implanted in the minds of many today is that dissidents are dark, bitter people – people who can neither be trusted nor understood with minds full of “red” thoughts. In that way we can be dehumanized, marginalized. You don’t have to pay attention to bitter people. It gives you a pass.
Below is what I wrote in my unsent, draft response.
“I want to make it clear that I am not enraged. That is what the media juggernaut would have you believe. The masses are inhabiting narratives that have been strategically fed to them for years, decades even, by sophisticated digital content management systems. These systems have been set up to reinforce social segmentation, divisiveness, and teaming. Consumption of programmed information threatens to turn us into the human equivalent of social insects. Complexity and emergence leverage automated reactivity and pre-programmed social cues. The system is using playlists of content to manage entire populations, to trigger specific biochemical reactions. I sense we’re in a simulation that is being remotely guided by hormone manipulation and biochemical signaling. See this four-minute clip about neuro-economics and use of oxytocin to induce (or remove) social trust by Elizabeth Phelps of Harvard and Paul Glimcher, a neuro-economist from UPenn.
By making your critique about some aspect of my personality, you get to sidestep the content I’ve meticulously gathered on the ethical implications of guided consciousness, biosensors, game mechanics, and group mind. Please know, I’ve mostly made peace with my situation. I plan to find a little house in the forests and lakes of the Ozarks, put up a deer fence, make a garden, get a kayak, and reconnect with nature. I’ll quilt and maybe learn how to fish. I hear the White River offers amazing trout habitat. At the top of my list for now is the little town of Mountain View, Arkansas a center for the preservation of folk music, craft, and heirloom plants. I sense we all are instruments of the divine, energetic beings, members of life’s symphony. The byline of a Twitter handle of an online friend, a musician, is “I am a string.” A string yes, and who or what are we allowing to play us? As I see it now, the military-finance-big pharma psychiatric machine is working overtime to shove God off the conductor’s podium and install the Web3 layer of mathematical logic. I’m not going to stop my work, but I am going to change the context in which I pursue it.
As far as “The Great Society,” I understand it differently now. If you haven’t seen my site visit to the LBJ Presidential Library and School of Public Policy in Austin, it might be of interest.
I recognize that Elizabeth Hinton’s book, “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime,” even in its critique, was setting up social impact finance and ultimately cybernetic signaling. She’s an agent of Harvard after all. Still, the history she lays out was super helpful to me as I started making sense of the ways socio-technical systems intersect with Skinnerian behavior modification and optimization metrics.”
I looked up the definition of humility to revisit what “humble” traits are: recognizing your own limitations, not thinking you are better than others, showing gratitude for team members, learning from those around you, and understanding your imperfections. Now, I would assert that I do have gratitude for those around me. We learn from one another even though our community is small in number. Many of the leads I pursue are shared with me by others. I may not always acknowledge that as loudly as I probably should, so let me do that now. Thank you all. I see you and appreciate you even if I don’t always say it.
I sense that by putting myself out publicly and framing my research through a lens of personal experience, some might imagine me to have a big ego. Egocentrism is the inability to recognize the needs of others or act with empathy. Egocentric people place their personal needs above those of others. What I’m struggling with is my feeling that I have been called to carry out a particular task at a particular time. Does this make me egocentric?
Should I set aside this calling and instead listen to people who are living out a totally different storyline that incorporates none of the cataclysmic changes now underway? Am I supposed to empathize with the wife of the guy managing multibillion-dollar investment portfolios that will run on ubiquitous sensing and derivatives markets in human behavior change? I can try and relate to her situation, but don’t expect me to bite my tongue and pretend I don’t have a problem with how all of this greenwashing is unfolding.
Maybe my single-minded enthusiasm for the topics I research is seen by others as boorish, impolite, and aggravating. Most people do not wish to have their ideas about civilization questioned. I get it. I have some degree of sympathy for their plight, but it doesn’t mean the things we talk about aren’t happening, aren’t relevant. Why can’t I just go along quietly and stop making the people around me so uncomfortable – especially since I don’t have a handy solution ready to pull out of my back pocket. Civil society including educational institutions, religious groups, and political parties, have been set up instruct us on how to be “good” within the confines of the game board that we call “civilized” life today. There are informal rubrics of socially-acceptable behaviors to which they imagine I must be oblivious. Is disciplined silence the key to being a “good” person in this stupid game? It feels like bullshit to me.
The pronouncement that I was not humble (or that I was proud / overbearing) felt like someone patting me on the head like a good little girl and sending me off to bed while the grown-ups took care of business. Who am I to presume I might be able to help shift the course of social evolution away from the cybernetic gangplank? I’m just a mom after all. Be humble Ally; stay in the background; think whatever you like; but don’t rock the boat in public. It’s unseemly. My husband recently told me, you don’t understand your effect on people. I should have asked, which people? People are not a homogenous monolith, at least not yet.
My family feels burdened by me. I think they imagine I have an over-inflated sense of self-worth. Though if they loved me unconditionally, they’d probably give me a big hug and be proud to be connected to a strong, grounded woman who is confident in her abilities and has a solid moral compass. I think I have a unique mind. I certainly don’t consider myself “better,” just “different.” I’m okay with being different. Each of us has God-given gifts, and I’m trying to use mine to advance right relationships. Since no one gave me an operating manual, and I only have a rough idea of what the end goal might look like, I’m learning and stumbling and recalibrating as I go along. I’ve chosen to do it out in the open to show that we can be fragile, creative, messy, and perhaps imperfectly perfect.
It is my strongly held feeling that we all have an obligation to talk about, grapple with, and come to terms with aspects of technological “progress” that are coming online right now before our eyes. While personally I believe many of these developments are unnatural and profane; I will not insist others agree with me. I will, however, continue to press for public conversations and informed consent. God has put this on my heart and given me resources to fulfill that responsibility. Who am I to turn my back on such an assignment?
It requires a healthy ego and sense of self-worth to pour out one’s personal pain onto the page for all to see. Quite a few comments on my recent posts, indicate to me that unpacking my present anguish is helping others navigate their way through the dark night of the soul. I know my audience is a niche one. I left social media and realized what drove me was a quest for internal clarity about the nature of the world and how history has informed the digitally-mediated social communications (or more likely mis-communications) of today.
I’ve chosen to conduct my research by sharing it on the internet, in the digital commons, a place I’ve come to understand is treacherous and full of landmines. I pulled back on my participation in these algorithmically-engineered spaces a few years ago when I began to have negative, dramatic interactions with people online. The weaponized nature of these platforms sank into my bones with deep finality. While I still share observations on my blog and video channel, I’m not actively looking to convert people to my way of thinking. I don’t do interviews with people I don’t know anymore. I’m not aiming to lead anyone anywhere. I just want to stay over in my corner, thinking my own thoughts and playing with ideas rather than wading out into the storm to be buffeted by digital tempests. That’s such a time suck, and I have other things I’d rather be doing.
This person’s email expressed the view that I sought to educate through intimidation and disparaged those who couldn’t understand my perspective. I recognize from the work of Cliff Gomes, that such sentiments have less to do with who I am, than the story the author of the email was listening to. It is easier to imagine me as a mean-spirited critic than consider they might not really want to know what I’ve been up to, because then they would be faced with the challenge of fitting it into a worldview where it just doesn’t fit. Jason has had similar things said to him. I suppose that confronting people with information that might undermine the vision of the world they hold at the core of their being could be seen as intimidating. Maybe that’s why people keep running away.
Our intention isn’t to be threatening. The tools of my trade, beyond relationship maps and hyperlinks to primary source documents, are flowers and rocks and even Bible passages. Is a sunflower laid down at an office park intimidating? I feel called to be a witness to the changes underway – to ask, insistently sometimes, for us to act responsibly lest we fall victim to a terrible Faustian bargain. I’m trying to be voice of the firm parent to a child in a tantrum. Children find parents intimidating, but it doesn’t mean they don’t learn from them.
The email also implied I wanted to be everything and know everything, which is odd, because in the post I specifically mention I’ve come to realize no one can ever hold the entire “truth.” All we get are the slices of “reality” we curate from the information we bump into as we live our lives. What did resonate with me though was a line about the importance of boundaries in systems and that making distinctions is a vital cognitive act, which is an idea I’ve been exploring related to complexity and emergence.
The body works to distinguish good from bad, encapsulating and removing the latter to preserve life. Computational fitness landscapes and genetic algorithms are based on this process. If the goal of “civilization” is to merge natural life with engineered nano-machines and birth a global, distributed, noetic, biohybrid supercomputing system, it’s logical that polite society would shun anyone seeking to slow progress towards that goal.
As I’ve tried to explain to my husband numerous times, we seem to be occupying different slices of reality. It doesn’t mean one of us is wrong and one of us is right. We could both be right and still different. Each person curates the world they inhabit. Our conceptual immune systems are set up to minimize cognitive discomfort. Boundaries contain us. Boundaries organize our identities. Boundaries tell us who is in and who is out. In the slow boil that is the Web3 digital identity and social steering, there are few incentives to think deeply and work to tear down manufactured boundaries that may be obscuring deeper understandings of the world we inhabit. I get it. I can empathize. That’s frightening to most people; boundaries make us feel safe.
There are no easy answers. The game mechanics have been structured so that we remain distracted as we get leveled up or cancelled on social leaderboards. For now, I’m choosing to view my cancellation as a back-handed blessing. Jason and I have a camping trip planned for October to explore Arkansas and see what there is to be seen – quartz, oaks, pine, bass, lakes, and streams. Maybe I’ll find a place where flowers will grow, joy is the norm, and the people I love will come find me there. For everyone I wish that you, too, can find a place to plant yourself, a place that brings you the personal satisfaction you desire and lets you develop into the person you were meant to be. For me, it’s time for reinvention, fingers crossed. Take the good parts, leave those which are no longer serving me, and uncover new dimensions in the human constellation that is Ally.
What a beautiful response. I support you in all you do Alison! And I have never seen you as a show-off or unhappy or whatever label you have been given. Carry on. Head high. We each get to be ourselves. God bless you.
I have followed your work since around mid-2020. Your “summer of healing and reconciliation” using dandelions as a symbolic offering inspired me to gather some friends to do a “revocation of consent” at the Minneapolis Fed, since I had read that one of its staff members (I’ve since forgotten his name) was and continues to be a leading figure in “human capital investment” especially in regard to children and their development. We made tea from dandelions and poured it on the steps of the Fed, as well as splashing it on the seal emblazoned on the wall. That was June 2021.
The group that did that ritual, together with a growing number of other refugees from the pressure to get the shot and “follow the science,” met regularly through 2021 and 2022 because we all needed a place to speak freely and grieve the losses of contact with family members, of friendships, of jobs and so much more. We named ourselves the Dandelions. We still meet twice a month. Your role in our existence has not been forgotten.
To me, Allison, what you are is a prophet. I see you as being like the Biblical prophets, who were called by God to give stern and urgent messages to the people and the rulers–stop what you are doing, it is harmful and against God’s will, and will end badly. And the lot of a prophet is, it seems, usually not a happy one. Your experiences with your family bear out the familiar adage that a prophet is not honored in their hometown. I am deeply sorry for the losses you have sustained in doing the work you feel called to do. And deeply grateful for your commitment and continuity in doing that work to which you have been called by God.
What I appreciate so much about you is your deep love for Earth and its creatures, and the rituals of connection and reconnection that you unfailingly offer. Your humanity, and your love for humanness, shines through so clearly in the way you write about your father and about your other family members, and in your care for the birds, the inchworm, the sunflower, the natural places where you leave wreath and hearts, and even leaving wreaths and hearts on the cold concrete steps of the institutions where the digital prison is being planned and created.
Thank you for being you and not giving up.
Beautiful response Betsy xo
You said everything that needed to be said (of others) in writing: “…confronting people with information that might undermine the vision of the world they hold at the core of their being could be seen as intimidating”. I will emphatically state, “that’s why people keep running away”.
It will offer you no consolation, but you are not alone in this twisted and surreal fate that the NWO has wrought!
Godspeed ms alison as you head for the Ozarks. May your line always sing with a big trout on the end. RiP to your Dad
Neurodiversity is grand. I learned that from my son. Where in lies freedom to express oneself truly and genuinely and well the others can just kick rocks or finally look outside oneself and listen, really listen to others. I hope you continue to do you. The night sky is beautiful tonight. Well at least where I am at.
I’ve been having questions about the whole neurodiversity movement and now they’re hawking neuro inclusion as well.
I’m wondering if us, ‘higher functioning people’ with mental health issues will be tagged and catalogued as used as diversity data on soul bound tokens.
Alison mentioned that the AI likes all Dara types…
https://www.diversitydashboard.com/
http://www.ecai2016.org/content/uploads/2016/08/W13-diversity-2016.pdf
http://www.ecai2016.org/sponsoring/sponsors/index.html
https://www.ed.ac.uk/profile/Dave-Robertson
— Dave Robertson, professor of applied logic at the University of Edinburgh and chief scientific advisor in the UK to Huawei,
Also whether transmagnetic cranial stimulation or ultrasound + MRI is the new frontier linked to the Human Brain Project. Or if some of the data would be used with WaveNeuro.
The egregore, just to be fair likes to glamorise autism spectrum as an umbrella diversity term, since the neuro rights pseudo movement of the 1990s to 2010s.
Often the transhuman (see the popularised transgender movement) that’s been brewing since 2008 (now popularised in 2023) has been borrowing our communities terms like “masking” and “meltdown”.
As a person with a mental health condition of various aspects. I’ve been following Alison’s work since 2017 and I’ve been watching other people in the alt media try to profile the various stories coming out of this leviathan/egregore.
Also I’ve been puzzled about this autism health start up called
https://www.spectrumai.com/
They seem to be using Electronic Health Records and Applied Behavioural Analysis to train (possibly digitally condition like Pavlov’s Dog) rewarded behaviour.
Other centres in the world in the past like the Judge Rottenberg centre (happened in 2011)have been known to use electroshock therapy on supposed violent individuals who could probably be better serviced with CBT, play therapy, vitamin or different diets.
Some of mental health issues have been known for a long time to be treatable with different schools of thought.
See the work of Donna Williams from Australia.
You are spiritual and brilliant. I appreciate your willingness to be vulnerable. Sometimes rejection puts us on the right track.
You are an awesome, almost singular voice. Keep speaking! There will always be those, however many or few, who ARE listening. Let the haters hate. There will always be those whose only real purpose is to try to discourage. Ignore them, turn your eyes upward and move on.
Oh Alison… I have been so busy that I haven’t had time to respond to your last few videos and blog entries, but I feel for you so strongly that your words bring me to tears. I hear you sister, loud and clear. Thank you for sharing your journey, from the deep diving dot connecting, to the painful personal traumas, and back again. You are such a treasure, and yes, a prophet (I know that word has loaded and controversial implications) but I stand by it. You are leading by example and translating what you see approaching, which is, in my opinion the highest form of human potential manifest. Beautiful Alison, you are not only the quirky linen skirt wearing, scavenger art creating middle woman between the dirt and the digital that we love so much, you are a frontline warrior, and your sacrifices are not taken lightly nor are they in vain. You are so loved, and I feel truly sorry for those who aren’t able to recognize your extraordinary gifts. Sending you so much love, and I know you will rise to the top, no matter how crazy this shit show gets. xoxoxo
Dear Alison, thank you for being you and for the insight you bring to so many. I consider myself lucky to have come across you in an interview on Greenmedinfo – another star.
Your voice is far from a silent cry in the night that your senses would have you believe and more like part of a beautiful choir that we had tuned out, distracted as we are, keeping up with the Jones’ and absorbing the ever new programs to render us mindless as people and thereby useful fodder for the elites.
I can’t express as well as what is written above, especially by Sonia, but I wholeheartedly agree with it all. Thank you Allison. Can I move with you? 😘
Alison, I really appreciate your unique approach and wide-ranging scope. You are a talented researcher doing good work, thank you so much!
Thanks for being you, it isn’t easy being “different “ but we all are.
Alison is a treasure. She is the embodiment of a thousand sunflowers laid down on the transhumanist dystopia. Alison’s work serves as a homeopathic bulwark against the enclosure of consciousness, and the synthesis of the detritus into a simulacrum of moribund imagination.
All I can say, thank you Alison. I am always interested in what you say, what you found, what you think…. and I appreciate that you are making them available for us to see and listen.
Profound 💛🌻⭐️
For inspiration perhaps https://www.facebook.com/mihi.wilson.7/videos/1058328458388021/?
Has it occurred to you that all of this has happened so you can truly be free, with God?
In my own life, this has occurred to me.
What if we have been trained to call egotistical behavior humility and hummm bell behavior egotiscal?
TT I feel this too, that God is taking care of our beloved Alison.
Dear Alison, you show me what it means to follow the truth of one’s own heart when it it at peace and like a compass pointing the way. Regardless of the external circumstances. A bit like the pioneering courage it took to make America?
The thoughts you articulated here in response to that person who emailed you may never reach her in a place where she can understand. It is a testament to your humility and generosity that you even tried to help this person understand. Whether you ever sent it or not, this, like all your work and thought, is a beacon of integrity and following the path you were led to walk, to those of us searching for as much truth as we can find in a world full of illusion and lies. You give me faith in humanity, when that faith was mostly lost. They will come after you, people will turn away, even abandon you, but others are here who understand, and more will come. Your heart and spirit are strong. May you walk in the protection and peace that accompany those who take the path of love and integrity.
You are an amazing, strong woman and I have long admired you & followed your work for years now. I wish we had more people like you in the world. Thank you for being the person you are and keep doing God’s work. Kate (from Australia)
Hi. I hope this reply finds you “wherever you are”.
Thanks a million trillion for the work you do. I have followed the effort for a few years.
There really aren’t any words to describe my gratitude and respect—-a fine mind and a dear heart. AND great courage.
But that is not all. Under the matrices of “named” realities, is an edenic design. Food is abundant and free. We’ve been engineered to ignore that abundance.
I have a plumb. In hanging in my study to remind me to know and be in the Eden layer. I’m a sculptor who knows sublime design when I see it. I expect no less.
Let us all find it, expecting no less. Flourishing.
This is William Irwin Thompson’s quote from his book “Coming into Being”:
«All members of humanity are involved in this evolutionary crisis, no matter at what historical cultural level of development they are, no matter to which mentality they are committed. Humanity is in the grip of a huge obsession — fundamentalists would call it a possession by the Devil —so as we move out of the old cultural ecology of transoceanic capitalism and our once-sustaining biosphere of the physical plane, we find ourselves within a subtle body, a bardo condition, an angelic body politic that is a remorseless description of who we are and who we wish to be. Or think of it this way.
Matter and physical reality are a kind of thick insulation, one that protects us from the immediate consequences of our thoughts—that makes us Dumuzi on Earth rather than Inanna in the underworld. When we die and go into bardo, we no longer have that protection, that delayed reaction of the consequences of our thoughts, of our state of consciousness. We become immediately what we are; we are what we think. It is not God’s wrath or human justice; it is just is-ness: we are what we are. Now imagine several billion people going into bardo all at once, say, in some gigantic historical catastrophe such as the reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field and the wobbling of the poles. Suddenly billions of people are in bardo all at once;
they are in the astral plane sharing a common mind, a common noetic polity.
Like the quivering spirochetes in Lynn Margulis’s films, this pattern of consciousness can become formed enough to allow an emergent state to pattern it sufficiently so that this noetic polity becomes a form of incarnation.
“It ain’t the meat, it’s the motion.” So the extended mind of the billions in bardo becomes the incarnational field of other forms of consciousness in the universe. In dynamical theory, you could say that the accumulation of noise draws the system from one attractor to another. The mythological or para- noid forms of narrative for this would be to call it “possession by the devil,” for the demonically inclined, or salvation in the mystical body of Christ, for the angelically inclined. The work of art that expresses this catastrophe bifurcation is Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Last Judgement, for it shows heaven breaking in on top and all hell breaking loose below.
Now, in chaos dynamical theory, the catastrophe bifurcation brings forth is an acceleration of time, an evolutionary quantum leap. Because the bardo or the astral plane is more pliable to consciousness than matter is, a vividly shared imagination is not simply a shared consensual delusion, but a collective form of incarnation; it is more like a civilization than a fantasy. When a billion people move into this instantaneous civilization in bardo to participate in the galactic consciousness of an archangel, then an enormous leap forward in cosmic evolution becomes possible. The galactic archangel is like an electrical trans- former that takes in direct current and steps it down to alternating current so that one can run the domestic appliances without burning up. Only in this case, the domestic appliances are the chakras. If all of this sounds pretty far-out and sci-fi, it is precisely because science fiction was the smuggling past customs of this new mentality. Think of Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End as an intuition of this, or the ending of the film he worked on with Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey. From this cosmic point of view, the catastrophe in which billions die and enter bardo all at once may not actually be a catastrophe at all, but a galactic opportunity for accelerated evolution. If humanity simply goes on as usual, we may simply slide down into a Bosnia that lasts for an aeon. For those who require an optimistic outlook on life to get out of bed in the morning, consider the fate of the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs died in the last great collective death of the Cretaceous extinction, but they came back as the birds that we see all around us.»
I think this “Galactic Archangel” is the same entity called “Global Brain”, “Cybiont” and “Metaman” by the Scientist Establishment and the Hive Mind called N’aton by occult author Nema Andahadna.
I’m a bit unsettled to find that there was a Lindisfarne influenced planned “sustainable” community set up in Arkansas with support of Winthrop Rockefeller and the Arkansas Department of Energy. Hmm…. https://www.motherearthnews.com/sustainable-living/nature-and-environment/sustainability-model-zmaz82mazglo/
Dear Alison:
I am nearly speechless at the beauty, (yes) truth, and power of this post. And I am one who finds your unpacking of your present anguish to be helpful as I navigate. Thank you.
I took notes. There are so many deep statements here.
I’m just stopping in to say how much I care, and how grateful I am for who you are, and for the work you do. “You make the world a better place just by being in it.” An applicable quote from a Natural Life bag I received recently. I ordered some sweaters for my new location in Kentucky. The bag contained a cardigan with a daisy on it. This is symbolic as I “seek a place to plant myself, a place that lets me develop into the person I was meant to be.”
I’ve said some of this before, but I think it bears repeating, over and over, if necessary.
With love,
Stephanie
💛
(I hope this doesn’t double-post. This is a second attempt at my reply. The first one gave me an “authentication failed” error message.)
P.S. I meant to also say I’m stopping in to send love. I recreated as best I could from memory.