Twisted Magic: A New Context for What’s Next

A lot of the roots of the technology discussed in this book trace back to 2015 when this book was started, and even before that, when several of its chapters began their life as posts on montrealtechwriter.com.

Now in 2023, the world has exploded with exascale computers, the metaverse which threatens to swallow reality whole in a lot of ways comparable to The Matrix, all combined with powerful generative AI, rampant facial recognition used by the so-called authorities, worldwide grid systems employed not only by Google and the super-pumped at Uber and their big tech equivalents in China and Russia and other places, but by the US department of defense, and again its Chinese equivalent social credit system (in that their civilian system copycats the American military’s), which all is crystalized for me in a furthering of Michel Foucault’s panopticon concept to the much more nascent but apt omniopticon metaphor⁠—with all watching all⁠—except perhaps for the so-called Davos Man who can escape to some kind of privacy there in Davos, or Lake Tahoe, or Hawaii or Fiji, or some such other gated community or island or nation or city-state like New Zealand or Singapore.

As any new technology is indistinguishable from magic as the saying goes, this new iteration of extreme tech, beyond both major game engines, the Unreal Engine, and Unity, and even past Mark Zuckerberg’s own AI Research SuperCluster which, as Jaron Lanier predicted, may soon be the biggest siren server of them all, whether Israeli spy tech from the NSO group, or Clearview AI sucking up all pictures of you wherever they might be, the question becomes in another furthering of the Nazi tattoos in Auschwitz and at the rest of the camps, partially made useful by IBM technology, morph into Zuckerberg’s algorithms in his new AI machine, right down to the molecular level operationalized by vaccine passports or their equivalents in the near future?

Of course it makes me think of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon much in lieu of whatever thoughts Peter Thiel is hawking these days.