Monday, October 30, 2023

The Great Reset Part 1

The Great Reset Part 1



The technologies at the heart of the Fourth Industrial Revolution are connected in many ways — in the way they extend digital capabilities; in the way they scale, emerge and embed themselves in our lives; in their combinatorial power; and in their potential to concentrate privilege and challenge existing governance systems.’
Klaus Schwab, Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, 2018

The Great Reset Initiative is an economic recovery plan drawn up by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The project was launched in June 2020, with a video featuring the then Prince of Wales Charles released to mark its launch. The initiative’s stated aim is to facilitate rebuilding from the global COVID-19 crisis in a way that prioritizes sustainable development.
Strange as it may seem, however, this grudging concession of the existence of a global economic plan, its origins in a corporate think-tank and its support by the now Head of State of the UK is an age away from the vociferous denials and mocking denunciations of being a ‘conspiracy theorist’ that were hurled at anyone who dared even to refer to the ‘Great Reset’ in the first year of lockdown. These only gradually diminished when someone pointed out that the term was openly used on the website of the World Economic Forum and had provided the title of the book published by its founder and Executive Chairman, Klaus Schwab, in July 2020, barely 4 months since the ‘pandemic’ was declared by the World Health Organization.
And while the accusation of conspiracy theory is still used to silence anyone who attributes anything other than purely beneficent motives to the 1,200 banks, asset managers, information technology conglomerates, media corporations, energy utilities, industrial manufacturers and other companies that, on the same day the ‘pandemic’ was declared, formed themselves into a ‘COVID-19 Action Platform’, the term itself is now more or less openly used by politicians, civil servants, corporate CEOs, marketing executives, digital engineers, journalists, activists and other promoters of what the World Economic Forum calls ‘stakeholder capitalism’.

But what I want to focus on in this book is the incorporation of the judicial institution, which this legislation is clearing the legal barriers to, into what Foucault called the regulatory apparatuses of biopower. These — my Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — are:

Most citizens of the UK — if we can still call ourselves that — will have heard of some or all of these. It’s safe to say that, after two years of lockdown and the threat of what were called ‘vaccine passports’, everyone in the UK will know something about Digital Identity. But few, perhaps, will be aware of the programme of eco-austerity imposed by the UN’s Agenda 2030 and 2050, even though all will be familiar with the claims of the environmental activists that receive promotion in our media that only the world’s richest individuals and institutions can buy.


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