Joaquin Flores
Genesis 1:26 - And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
Humanity is on the precipice of a new dark age, a long dark winter. It is one in which the technologies once developed to liberate humanity from toil, have developed further into a seemingly insurmountable techno-industrial leviathan. This is one based upon misanthropy, slavery, and human eradication. Called the Great Reset, it is being put forth by the same as those speaking of this 4th Industrial Revolution.
But there is another 4th Industrial Revolution which is on the horizon, one which places mankind at the helm of liberatory technologies like the internet of things (IoT) and 3D printing.
Hence, what is being termed the 4IR is in fact about subverting the actual 4IR towards the interests of the financialists whose old method of control (finance) is dwindling.
In this piece, we will attempt to shed light on two very altering visions of a 4th Industrial Revolution. One of prosperity and individual human freedom as well as social liberty, versus one of repression and a new technocratic police state.
"The real 4th Industrial Revolution is about micro-production and each household, in its garage, owning its own means of production. That is the real promise of the internet of things and 3D printing. It is not about furthering globalization or the mass societies of scale towards an ever-larger pyramidically shaped control paradigm."
Whose 4th Industrial Revolution - Ours or Theirs?
There are two competing visions of the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR), and in that sense, two competing visions of a Great Reset. This is why we have posed the question in our essay Whose Great Reset? The Fight for Our Future - Technocracy vs. the Republic. Consequently, a lot of confusion has arisen about the 4th Industrial Revolution; whether it is primarily an anthropic or misanthropic agenda.
This is chiefly because Klaus Schwab's books 'Covid-19 - The Great Reset'and 'The Fourth Industrial Revolution'appropriates the language of the coming 4th Industrial Revolution, but puts forward another practically unrelated agenda entirely. The World Economic Forum, the 'Davos People', is a financialist network which looks upon the coming new epoch not with optimism, but with horror.
Just as the financialist system was about externalizing costs, now we find an entire social-psychological regime of externalizing horror. The horror and uncertainty of this time is in most ways a reflection of their own. The dominating ideas of any society are the ideas of its dominating class.
The moves of Schwab (and backed by the Rothschilds and their friends in big tech, and the Deep State writ large), are all moves to contain, control, and push-back the 4th industrial revolution into a different kind of system. This is because the technologies which the actual 4th Industrial Revolution really involve are to the detriment of the present ruling plutocracy.
To be clear, their Great Reset will not bring about the 4th Industrial Revolution they speak of, nor as it was originally understood. The 4th Industrial Revolution was originally thought to be new inventions that bring great freedom, and individual initiative that automation would allow for. These would break the fetters of the old economic model and unlock the potential of the new. It would not destroy society and imprison people, but magnify the plurality of a free society and liberate people from the planned obsolescence industrial model.
The real 4th Industrial Revolution is the economic component of the Great Awakening and the 4th Turning.
The old society was based in mass-scale industrial production, planned obsolescence, and the societies of mass-scale requiring bureaucracies. Those old bureaucracies and societies of scale mirror, in its social relations of production, the form lent to it by the means of production.
In other words, the society of mass industry and planned obsolescence at the economic level was the foundation for a society of mass bureaucracy and meaningless work at the social level. The bureaucratic revolution of the 1920's and 30's which was the New Deal and the Military Industrial Complex, was seen in other parts of the world as Marxism-Leninism and Fascism.
Consequently, as we have explained in ' Coronavirus Shutdown: The End of Globalization and Planned Obsolescence - Enter Multipolarity', that system relied upon planned obsolescence. The goal was not to produce access to the goods produced by industry, but to continue on the cycle of production and distribution as an over-arching control paradigm. This was to have people going to work every-day.
Therefore the focus of innovation has not been to increase the durability of goods, but to focus on adding features which, in terms of cost vs. benefit, were significantly higher in cost than realized benefit. And so marketing so heavily focused on the conspicuous consumption aspect of commodity ownership, for its conspiculous aspects, as explained by Thorstein Veblen in his seminal work The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), and operationalized in the revolution in advertising which is generally attributed to Edward Bernays'1923 classic Crystallizing Public Opinion. Moreover, the entire 'philanthropic'parade from Rockefeller down to Gates can only be fully understood through the lens of Bernays.
Origins of the 4th Industrial Revolution
The phrase 'Fourth Industrial Revolution'we are erroneously informed by Wikipedia, is said to have been introduced by Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum. Yet this is credited based on a 2015 article published in the Atlanticist magazine, Foreign Affairs "Mastering the Fourth Industrial Revolution". This would go on to become theme of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos.
So what exactly is the 4th Industrial Revolution if not yet another ploy by the elites to use new technologies to further enslave humanity?
Wikipedia's revisionism entirely ignores its use in futurist circles among thinkers, techies, and independent investors going back nearly two decades. These were in turn inspired by the New Wave Science Fiction movement of thee 60's and 70's, and a related genre, Cyberpunk. Even in the Wiki article which begins by falsely attributing 4IR to Klaus Schwab, they later admit that the term dates back to at least the Hannover Faire in Germany in 2011. But the term (or similar) dates back another decade before it. The concept itself dates back to the 19th century, seeing what increased automation would mean. This is a function of the organic composition of capital, the ratio of constant to variable capital.
Dragon investor knows that investing in a new product which lasts forever is a non-starter. And yet technology has long existed which could tremendously extend the lifespan of any given product. The replacement of plastic parts with the actually cheaper to produce tin, for example, has been documented for nearly 70 years as a product-life extending material.
This would have eradicated global poverty within a generation. But instead the control-paradigm which required the constant upwards redistribution of wealth towards the aim of control, and the requirement that people keep themselves busy with work (idle hands do the devil's work), was the more 'logical'model, provided that the aim is conserving power and not liberalizing human freedom and dignity.
And so why we are seeing this great coup against republican democracies right now, the Covid-19 'Great Reset', is not because the time is opportune nor because the financial elites are in a position of strength. It is not because they have done the sufficient ground work to smoothly transition into a post financial control matrix. But rather because time is running out and their position of strength is weakening by the day.
This is all because of the declining rate of profit which the 4th Industrial Revolution is the solution for. Those technologies have been developing swiftly since the 1950's. Now to repeat, there are various possible iterations of 'a'4th Industrial Revolution - some are emancipatory and liberatory in nature. And yet others (the one being pursued by the financial elites and as spelled out by the World Economic Forum) are based in misanthropy, population reduction, thought-control and policing, and the 'long dark winter'.
Why would we want those who so disastrously brought about the 'Great Reset'to then go on to manage for us the '4th Industrial Revolution'?
The roots of forecasting the 4th Industrial revolution were based in post-capitalist economic theory, and looked at sub-dividing capitalism into further historical mini-stages. This was so that the development of capitalism away from variable capital (human labor) and towards constant capital (machines) could be more accurately described and projected. It was a descriptive and predictive model. Secondarily, it has always been a fact of life that many of the same technologies that can liberate humanity can also enslave them.
A better 4th Industrial Revolution is about micro-production and each household, in a personal garage, having their own means of production. That is the real promise of the internet of things (IoT) and 3D printing. It is not about furthering globalization or the mass societies of scale towards an ever-larger pyramidically shaped control paradigm.
With that comes 'self-employment', and a tremendously reduced (and self-created) work schedule of working in one's own garage. Now, there are various transitional models which involve more local community efforts, and the requisite specializations and down-stream repair micro-economies at the local level that would flow from this.
AI and 'cybernetics'are also fields that are developing, but strictly speaking are irrelevant to the 4IR if the liberatory potential of post-scarcity economics is understood.
Cybernetics isn't necessarily involved in the decentralized and localized outcomes of the IoT.
Applied cybernetics (as envisioned by the World Economic Form) and, with it, ID2020 and beyond, are the opposite of any 4th Industrial Revolution if we understand the liberatory potential of 4IR.
Their vision attempts to 'Uberize'the entire economy. The idea here is to eliminate all permanent work, but in its place have non-contracted temporary work, which changes on a nearly daily basis. This is similar to the disastrous ' Labor Ready'model already seen in the U.S.
The dystopic idea here is that everyone has a 'chip'implanted in them, and this has all their biometric data as well as serving as their bank card. People will earn credits when they receive work assignments at a random new location on a given day, and successfully complete that work.
Unfortunately, the liberatory potential of the 4IR is not understood by those who quite rightly reject the financialist institutional version of it. How these work towards a liberatory agenda of personal freedom, localism, and the foundation for intentional communities based on shared values, is being obscured by the official proponents of the false 4th Industrial Revolution from the World Economic Forum.
In the same way that the financial elites have somewhat erroneously called their corporate-statist monopoly system 'capitalism'(if capitalism is understood as competition between players with equal legal rights), they are calling the next system they have in mind the '4th industrial revolution', when in fact it works against the actual 4IR that can be.
And while the phrases and incessant quacking about 'decentralization'and 'internet of things', along with '3D printing'are also used in the false version of 4IR, likewise we have seen for the past hundred years the corporate monopoly system nevertheless use the language of 'markets', 'private property'and 'freedom'when in fact those components of the corporate system have not really been its most prominent features.
This, practically alone, informs us on the fraudulence which is the World Economic Forum's 4IR. Just as 'capitalism'has not truly relied on free competition, the 4IR being proposed will not truly be based on a decentralized model of 3D printing.
Rather, they will sit on 3D printing and the internet of things until other, really unrelated technologies like pre-crime detectors and other surveillance state techniques, can be implemented. Then they will try to centralize 3D printing when by its very nature, it is best suited to decentralization - thus eliminating various downstream and distribution middle-men. Bear in mind, that the coercive techniques implemented first will be part of a global population reduction scheme with the aim of reducing the population by as much as 90% its present number.
But the aim for the plutocrats in transition to a new kind of oligarchy, they are trying to maintain what Karl Wittfogel described as a ' Hydraulic Civilization'in his seminal book Oriental Despotism (1957). Here we understand that the difference with the free-farmers and peasants typical of Northern Europe were made possible because of the relatively high level of annual rain-fail. In many ways, liberal ideas of personal freedom that developed out of the middle-ages and into modernity in Northern Europe are a vestige of this economic, agricultural, reality.
In contrast, the Chaldean and Egyptian hydraulic civilizations of which Rome took its model, were based upon a militarized control over relatively centralized waterways (the Tigris, Euphrates, and the Nile). Access required paying of taxes, fines, fees, military service, and a whole array of other control mechanisms. In a post-economic order that we see on the horizon, one component of this is the transformation of a whole and larger section of society into 'contact tracers', a new security apparatus of 'block captains', of snitches, of informants against the rest of society. A reference here is the 1977 science fiction work ' A Scanner Darkly', by Philip K. Dick
Today the oligarchs are trying to make a Hydraulic Society out of 3D printing, but first need to establish a new coercive model of control over these new productive modes. Even to the extent of manufacturing pandemics, forced lockdowns, and a 'cyber-pandemic'of intentional, rolling black-outs.
But the more obvious implementation of 3D printing is more akin to rainfall. That is the primary contradiction at present.
The cornerstone of any 4IR that is workable for humanity, in line with the rights of man and based upon the dignity of the human spirit, is by definition based on a new form of cottage industry which the internet of things and 3D printing make possible.
Humanity was made in the image of its creator, and is worthy of a society reflective of his magnificence. It's time to blow up the dam and stand under the rain-fall.
Reach the author at FindMeFlores@gmail.com. Please consider supporting my work at SubscribeStar