Programming the Global Citizen: Cybernetic Childhood, ESG and Corporate Maoism

Our next speaker is Garry Robson from England, but he's living now in Poland. He is Professor of Sociology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, and the main organizer of the conference ”The Rise of the Digital Technocracy”, which will be held at the end of September, on the 28th and 29th. His most recent book is ”Virtually Lost: Young Americans in the Digital Technocracy”. His speech is entitled ”Programming the Global Citizen: Cybernetic Childhood, ESG and Corporate Maoism”.

Thank you. So following on, I want to pick up on a couple of things: one thing from each of the two talks we've started with. The first concerns cybernetics, and I would like us to have in mind as an image for my talk that of a small child, adolescent, teenager, locked into a one-to-one cybernetic relationship with their device (smartphone), in a kind of closed loop system designed to automate all of the elements in the interaction.

So I want to talk about automation; the attempt to automate the understandings, responses and behaviours of young people as a precursor to the installation of a technocracy. If I were one of the people working on trying to get a technocracy put in place in five or ten or fifteen years' time, I would be focusing very tightly on young people now, which I think is what is happening. So I'm going to try to connect two things. One is this attempt to cybernetically automate the behaviors of people, people still in the process of formation, (and the other is) what we call the woke ideology, I think too lightly… I want to begin by talking about that, because now in the last three or four years, we've all started to talk about ‘woke’ as if it were simply some kind of more troublesome version of the old political correctness.

But I would argue that it is a much deeper, more extensive and important thing to try to get to grips with. So I want to offer just five or six definitions or ways of thinking about ‘woke’ that I've thought of. They wouldn't be a complete list. But I want to talk about those things because they will provide the kind of content and the kind of strategies through which an attempt to automate and kind of cognitively cyberneticize children and young people which is now taking place.

So I'll put those two things together and then I will talk about the social physics, which is a set of practices aimed at creating a hive mind and hive behaviors for a centralized Borg-type technocratic entity.

So I will begin with just a few thoughts about how we might think about ‘woke’ in a multi-dimensional way. The first thing, it seems to me, is this… if you want a ‘Great Reset’, which is a revolutionary statement, and you want a reset based on ‘year zero’ principles, as in the origins of the French Revolution or Pol Pot in Cambodia, you're going to want to wipe the slate clean of everything that pre-exists it.

So we can think of what is called ‘woke’ as a destructive, revolutionary, pre-‘Great Reset’ attack on all customary cultures and modes of understanding. This has obvious real world consequences like divide and conquer, create a race war in the United States, divide men and women, break up any conventional traditional idea of what a family is, so that it (the ‘Great Reset’) embeds itself in the society, with children absorbing this material through their education, through their cultural consumption, on a kind of continuous basis.

Second, I think we can consider it to be a proposition for a system of thought control via the enforcement of widespread convergence across populations on a kind of skeletal, pseudo-ethical system based on the ceaseless, ritualistic repetition of incantations. Black Lives Matter, Transphobia, and all the rest of it, which appear in everyday life, might be embodying things in people's minds as part of just a performative reality of everyday life in a practical way on the basis of these rudimentary incantations, (this is) very old kind of system for forming young people.

The religious or pseudo-religious character of this these strategies needs thinking about, of course. Douglas Murray calls ‘woke’ a new metaphysic for where we are now, a religion without a deity, which addresses the crisis of meaning which is endemic in the world, partly because of the attempt of our friends, the technocrats, to deprive life of meaning or to muddy the waters. So we can think of it as a new metaphysic, which means... that the people who really adhere to it …are more like committed believers in a belief system. It is of course a theological justification for the globalist rule. And I can't help but notice that in the United States, for example, perhaps most interestingly, actual real Christian congregations have been the site of a lot of this activity to exploit ideas about mercy, compassion, to kind of warp Christianity into a ‘woke’ direction on the basis, again of true belief, not a fashionable set of ideas.

At its most extreme, I think we can think of, and some of us were talking about this yesterday, a metaphysical rebellion, a really serious metaphysical rebellion against God, obviously, but all forms of social and material boundary or limitation. One example is the book published by Martine Rothblatt in 2011, which explicitly as a manifesto makes the link between transsexualism and transhumanism as a gradual journey towards the complete abandonment of the human being. So in the book, he, a billionaire influencer in the tech side, strangely enough, talks about how he could no longer live in the male-female binary. It was just too restrictive for him, so he became a woman.

But he found, once he became a woman, that his problems were not solved because now he wants to be post-human because even becoming a woman is too restrictive. So he wants to leave the human condition, the embodied human condition, in favor of turning himself into a series of disembodied thought processes in a box. He doesn't understand that that's not going to happen. Or it's just an idea that he is promoting as a marketing ploy perhaps. This could be a...metaphysical rebellion or just a form of nihilism, a complete rejection of all that we have understood up until now as human and characteristic of humanity.

And it is now legally embedded. An interesting thing about woke is I think it's been building for decades. And if you look, for example, at the American but also some European legal systems in managerial states, it is deeply embedded in law, already very deeply embedded…and therefore the sports person that says the wrong thing or is canceled is not, is both kind of normatively at the popular level, but also legally, transgressing the codes of all of this. And of course, to finish with, it (‘woke’) is a multi-billion dollar industry, at various levels, enforced from the top down through the ESG, (Environmental and Social Governance) an outgrowth of the plutocrats’ takeover of the United Nations.

So many people are under the illusion that what we call ‘woke’ is some kind of organic, spontaneous political movement, but I think we should see it much more as a top-down, imposed system through law and through a corporate credit rating system for corporations and businesses and other institutions, which the ESG program is there to enforce. So I think it's very far from being a just a kind of spontaneous thing that began to happen and is carrying on. And I think this is a part of a bigger story which we can't go into now of monopoly capitalism of high-level Big Money gradually morphing into something much more like communism… with Larry Fink at BlackRock starting to look very much like someone setting five-year plans for the economy, command economy type stuff, which needs to be investigated. 

And I think it's worth thinking about this resurgence (of communistic thinking) as part of ‘woke’ Maoist strategies for the enforcement of the ideology. We are back again in the world of struggle sessions, humiliation rituals; see the policemen on their knees at Black Lives Matter protests. And, importantly, the creation through education of child activists who are starting to look very much like the Maoist Red Guard, turned against their parents, (in an) activist rejection of the older culture,  through the Social Emotional Learning programme. So, in the United States and in Britain, which are the countries I'm most familiar with, in the last couple of years you find that the old therapeutic approach, the culture which was 30 years older, morphed into (something) much more radical. It didn't morph, it was placed into a much more radical direction in order to create, from the perspective of Maoist or Marxist social activism, activist citizens. This is now an explicit goal of educationalists in some places. And so we get the Red Guard child activist thing institutionalized through the education system in some of the Western countries.

I come now to ‘social physics’. Now, since we are thinking about this image (the child holding a smartphone), its precursor, as well-established by a number of authors including Shoshana Zuboff in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism, was the Facebook strategies for maintaining the attention of users based on old-fashioned…Las Vegas one-armed bandit gambling technology. What that technology does is place the user into a trance. It's called ‘The Zone’, where the conscious reflexive mind is switched off and you think about nothing and are pleasurably immersed. You keep putting your money in, and you don't care until it runs out. This zone leaves people very wide open to suggestion. The question here is to produce a state of suggestibility. And my suggestion is that in this highly suggestible state, all kinds of messages can be sent to the receiver at the emotional level -  at the level of, not of rhetoric, but of maybe blocks of words, pieces of music, stuff like that. This is a form of super-nudge, or neuro-nudge, and there's a guy called Alex Pentland at MIT who is turning this into a science and a lucrative business because he claims that he can now produce and move people around very much like swarms on the basis, as Zuboff says, automating their behaviors.

So something comes on your phone, you get some kind of trigger and you respond to the thing without thinking. In this way, and on the basis of endless amounts of data-mining of school children and the new educational technologies, it is hoped that what Pentland calls bringing people together on the basis of what he calls ‘social universals’ is to be achieved.

One of the things that makes all of this work so well is the disembodiment and the  (weakened) agency, of children…we need to get children out of the matrix, into their bodies, doing the things that humans always did in their bodies together before all this stuff started 20 years ago. So I will finish there -  in terms of solutions and forming communities, a very important step, a basic step in this, would I think be to re-embody children and young people and assist their formation in that way.