My friends, let me introduce you to Yuval Noah Harari, a man chock-full of big ideas. He explained during the COVID crisis:
“COVID is critical because this is what convinces people to accept, to legitimize, total biometric surveillance. If we want to stop this epidemic, we need not just to monitor people, we need to monitor what’s happening under their skin.”
In a 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper, Harari repeated this idea: “What we have seen so far is corporations and governments collecting data about where we go, who we meet, what movies we watch.
The next phase is the surveillance going under our skin … He likewise told India Today, when commenting on changes accepted by the population during COVID-19:
“We now see mass surveillance systems established even in democratic countries which previously rejected them, and we also see a change in the nature of surveillance. Previously, surveillance was mainly above the skin; now we want it under the skin.
“Governments want to know not just where we go or who we meet. They want to know what’s happening under our skin: what is our body temperature; what is our blood pressure; what is our medical condition?”
Harari is clearly a man who wants to … get under your skin. He just might succeed.
Another recent interview finds him waxing philosophical:
“Now humans are developing even bigger powers than ever before. We are really acquiring divine powers of creation and destruction. We are really upgrading humans into gods. We are acquiring, for instance, the power to re-engineer human life.”
As Kierkegaard once said of Hegel when he talks about the Absolute, when Harari talks about the future, he sounds like he’s going up in a balloon.
Forgive me, but a few last nuggets from professor Harari will round out the picture of his philosophy, and his lofty hopes and dreams:
“Humans are now hackable animals. You know, the whole idea that humans have this soul or spirit, and they have free will and nobody knows what’s happening inside me, so, whatever I choose, whether in the election or in the supermarket, that’s my free will — that’s over.”
Harari explains that to hack human being, you need a lot of computing power and a lot of biometric data, which was not possible until recently with the advent of AI.
In a hundred years, he argues, people will look back and identify the COVID crisis as the moment “when a new regime of surveillance took over, especially surveillance under the skin — which I think is the most important development of the 21st Century, which is this ability to hack human beings.”
People rightly worry that their iPhone or Alexa have become surveillance “listening devices,” and indeed, the microphone can be turned on even when the device is turned off. But imagine a wearable or implantable device that, moment-to-moment, tracks your heart rate, blood pressure, and skin conductance, uploading that biometric information to the cloud.
Anyone with access to that data could know your exact emotional response to every statement made while you watch a presidential debate. They could gauge your thoughts and feelings about each candidate, about each issue discussed, even if you never spoke a word.
I could go on with more quotes from professor Harari about hacking the human body, but you get the picture. At this point, you may be tempted to dismiss Harari as nothing more than an overheated, sci-fi-obsessed village atheist.
After years binging on science fiction novels, the balloon of his imagination now perpetually floats up somewhere above the ether. Why should we pay any heed to this man’s prognostications and prophesies?
It turns out that Harari is a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His bestselling books have sold over 20 million copies worldwide, which is no small shake.
More importantly, he is one of the darlings of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and a key architect of their agenda. In 2018, his lecture at the WEF, “Will the Future Be Human?” was sandwiched between addresses from German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron. So he’s playing in the sandbox with the big dogs.
In his WEF lecture, Harari explained that in the coming generations, we will “learn how to engineer bodies and brains and minds,” such that these will become “the main products of the 21st Century economy: not textiles and vehicles and weapons, but bodies and brains and minds.”
The few masters of the economy, he explains, will be the people who own and control data: “Today, data is the most important asset in the world,” in contrast to ancient times when land was the most important asset, or the industrial age when machines were paramount.
WEF kingpin Klaus Schwab echoed Harari’s ideas when he explained: “One of the features of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is that it doesn’t change what we are doing; it changes us,” through gene editing and other biotechnological tools that operate under our skin.
Even the dreamy-eyed Harari admits there are some potential dangers with these developments: “If too much data is concentrated in too few hands, humanity will split not into classes but into two different species.”
The WEF made waves a few years back by posting on their website the slogan, “You will own nothing. And you will be happy.”
Although the page was later deleted, the indelible impression remained: it provided a clear and simple description of the future envisioned by Davos Man. As the WEF savants predict, at the last stage of this development, we will find ourselves in a rent-only/subscription-only economy, where nothing really belongs to us. Picture the Uberization of everything.
The prophetic Aldous Huxley foresaw this “Brave New World” in his 1932 novel. These changes will challenge not only our political, economic, and medical institutions and structures; they will challenge our notions of what it means to be human. This is precisely what its advocates celebrate, as we will see in a moment.
Corporatist arrangements of public-private partnerships, which merge state and corporate power, are well suited for carrying out the necessary convergence of existing and emerging fields.
This biological-digital convergence envisioned by the WEF and its members will blend big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, genetics, nanotechnology and robotics.
Schwab refers to this as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which will follow and build upon the first three — mechanical, electrical and digital. The transhumanists — who we will meet in a moment — have been dreaming of just such a merging of the physical, digital and biological worlds for at least a few decades. Now, however, their visions are poised to become our reality.
Mechanisms of control
The next steps in hacking human beings will involve attempted rollouts — which we should vigorously resist — of digital IDs, tied to fingerprints and other biometric data like iris scans or face IDs, demographic information, medical records, data on education, travel, financial transactions and bank accounts.
These will be combined with central bank digital currencies, giving governments surveillance power and control over every one of your financial transactions, with the ability to lock you out of the market if you do not comply with government directives.
Using biometrics for everyday transactions routinizes these technologies. We are conditioning children to accept biometric verification as a matter of course. For example, face IDs are now used in multiple school districts to expedite the movement of students through school lunch lines.
Until recently, biometrics such as fingerprints were used only for high-security purposes — when charging someone with a crime, for example, or when notarizing an important document.
Today, routine biometric verification for repetitive activities from mobile phones to lunch lines gets young people used to the idea that their bodies are tools used in transactions. We are instrumentalizing the body in unconscious and subtle, but nonetheless powerful, ways.
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