I think they wanted us to imagine it would be the machines that rise up and ruin humanity, with the view of ‘how could they have known?’ and ‘they had the best intentions’. But as speculated in Is It Really the Machines We Should Fear? It would appear that it is very much other humans we should be fearing, and this is not a new revelation to me, but seems to be to others.

The propaganda and fad machine rolled out thick and heavy for the instilled vision of machines gone bad with such films as Terminator, iRobot, A Space Odyssey, Robocop, Transformers and all sorts of other sci-fi and fantasy films, as well Star Trek putting forward a weird hybrid version to bridge that gap of human and machine, giving us The Borg.

And we had another idea give to us many years ago now, where we were told to think a future of being held down and controlled in a way we could merely imagine at that time, looking at other countries and history to apparently avoid that. In fact, the opposite seems to have occurred, with the regime of control seeming more familiar than a healthy, prosperous future of people, ideas and a positive energy spreading through humanity.

I will share a quote from a film here, and is one I have shared before, but it is even more apt for this piece. From the film Tomorrowland, and Hugh Laurie delivers this piece rather well –

“Let’s imagine… if you glimpsed the future, you were frightened by what you saw, what would you do with that information? You would go to… the politicians, captains of industry? And how would you convince them? Data? Facts? Good luck! The only facts they won’t challenge are the ones that keep the wheels greased and the dollars rolling in. But what if… what if there was a way of skipping the middle man and putting the critical news directly into everyone’s head? The probability of wide-spread annihilation kept going up. The only way to stop it was to show it. To scare people straight. Because, what reasonable human being wouldn’t be galvanized by the potential destruction of everything they’ve ever known or loved? To save civilization, I would show its collapse. But, how do you think this vision was received? How do you think people responded to the prospect of imminent doom? They gobbled it up like a chocolate eclair! They didn’t fear their demise, they re-packaged it. It could be enjoyed as video-games, as TV shows, books, movies, the entire world wholeheartedly embraced the apocalypse and sprinted towards it with gleeful abandon. Meanwhile, your Earth was crumbling all around you. You’ve got simultaneous epidemics of obesity and starvation. Explain that one! Bees and butterflies start to disappear, the glaciers melt, algae blooms. All around you the coal mine canaries are dropping dead and you won’t take the hint! In every moment there’s the possibility of a better future, but you people won’t believe it. And because you won’t believe it you won’t do what is necessary to make it a reality. So, you dwell on this terrible future. You resign yourselves to it for one reason, because *that* future does not ask anything of you today. So yes, we saw the iceberg and warned the Titanic. But you all just steered for it anyway, full steam ahead. Why? Because you want to sink! You gave up! That’s not the monitor’s fault. That’s yours.”

And from these things, I take it that they know what people are like, with all the decades they’ve had, and the billions they have spent on working people out through various means, and then manipulating them thereafter highlighted in Consumerism, The First Fad and Nudge Nudge. But what happens next is where the films and speculations come in, because some of them are based on presumptions and results of animal experiments, discussed in The Beautiful Mice. And I believe they have run human experiments too that we don’t know about, in places in don’t have access to, on people who don’t know that is their purpose. As we could be too, one of my out there thoughts is to consider that we are the ones who have had our entire lives fabricated, like a buckled cross between The Truman Show and Dark City. But I have a feeling that is for another article. It’s the now we are part of that will pave the way for what comes, so is an important stage and step in the whole process, so make sure you know when now is…

(c) K Wicks