Category Archives: Transhumanism

With the publication in the United States of his best-selling Sapiens in 2015, the Israeli historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari arrived at the top rank of public intellectuals, a position he consolidated with Homo Deus (2017) and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018). Hararis key theme is the idea that human society has largely been driven by our speciess capacity to believe in what he calls fictions: those things whose power is derived from their existence in our collective imaginations, whether they be gods or nations; our belief in them allows us to cooperate on a societal scale. The broad sweep of Hararis writing, which encompasses the prehistoric past and a dark far-off future, has turned him into a bit of a walking inkblot test. The general misunderstandings of me, says Harari, 45, co-author of the recently published Sapiens: A Graphic History, Volume 2 (the latest in a series of graphic-novel adaptations of his work), are that Im the prophet of doom and then theres this opposite view that I think everything is wonderful. Both, of course, might be true. Once the books are out, the ideas are out of your hands, he says.

Some of the big ideas about humanity that youve helped popularize that fictions or social constructs have political power or that Homo sapiens might be moving toward technologically driven obsolescence have been around in various forms since way before you wrote about them. So what do you think it is about how you convey them thats been so compelling? One hypothesis is that Im coming from the discipline of history, and many of the recent attempts to create this kind of big synthesis were from biology and evolution or from economics and social sciences. In recent decades the humanities kind of gave up, and it became almost taboo to try to create grand narratives. But the humanities perspective is essential. Many of the philosophical questions that have bothered humanity for thousands of years are now becoming practical. Previously philosophy was a kind of luxury: You can indulge in it or not. Now you really need to answer crucial philosophical questions about what humanity is or the nature of the good in order to decide what to do with, for example, new biotechnologies. So maybe Ive reached people because Ive come from the perspective of history and philosophy and not biology or economics. Also, my most central idea is simple. Its the primacy of fictions, that to understand the world you need to take stories seriously. The story in which you believe shapes the society that you create.

When youre working in a mode that involves making broad conclusions about humanity, is it hard to determine whether those conclusions are banal? Well, I discovered this: The more banal they are, the more impressed people are.

Thats the trick? All these things about the fictional stories, this was one of the most basic things I learned in my first year doing a bachelors degree in history. I thought this was the most banal thing that everybody knows. It turned out that for lots of people, it was a big discovery: that you had these social constructs and intersubjective reality. I thought it was the most banal thing in the world.

Yuval Noah Harari at a lecture on artificial intelligence in Beijing in 2017. Visual China Group, via Getty Images

Does it make you cynical if what youd thought was the most banal thing in the world ends up being wildly popular? No. It just means that there is miscommunication between large parts of the scientific community and large parts of the public. The things that have been known and accepted by science or by scholars for many years, theyre still big news for the public. Its just the way things are.

One area where the scientific community has communicated clearly is the scale of the climate crisis, and the story that they and so many other people are telling about it is incredibly urgent. Why then do you think were still lacking in the global political will to address the problem in a way thats equal to the coming catastrophes? Its important to have human enemies in order to have a catchy story. With climate change, you dont. Our minds didnt evolve for this kind of story. When we evolved as hunter-gatherers, it was never the case that we could somehow change the climate in ways which were bad for us, so its not the kind of story that we were interested in. We were interested in the story that some people in the tribe are conspiring to kill me. So we have a narrative problem with climate change. But the good news is that its not too late or too difficult to overcome. According to the best reports Ive read, if we now start investing 2 percent of global annual G.D.P. in developing eco-friendly technologies and eco-friendly infrastructure, that should be enough to prevent catastrophic climate change. The beautiful thing about 2 percent is that even though its a lot of money, its completely feasible. If it was 20 percent then I would tell you forget about it, its too late. But 2 percent? The job of the average politician is to shift 2 percent of the budget from here to there. We know how to do it. We need to stay away from the apocalyptic thinking that its too late and the world is ending and move toward a more practical thing: 2 percent of the budget. Thats it.

Is shifting 2 percent of global G.D.P. a sufficiently compelling story? The thing about 2 percent of G.D.P., its not very impressive, but thats the whole point. Its hopeful. Its not like we have to completely change the entire economy and go live in caves. We just need to shift 2 percent. Thats all. So I think its a powerful message. And there are other stories: If you look at movements like Greta Thunbergs and the whole youth movement, what the young people are telling the world is that you are sacrificing us on the altar of your greed and irresponsibility. Its no longer something hazy like CO2 in the atmosphere. Its a human drama of the old sacrificing the young. Thats powerful.

Harari being interviewed by Mark Zuckerberg in 2019. From Meta

I know you get asked a version of this question a lot, but what do you make of the fact that your work is so popular in Silicon Valley? As youve pointed out, these are people whose work has very dangerous implications. Your popularity in that circle cant be just a coincidence. There are many things to say. One reason I think that its popular in these circles is that even though I criticize some of their practices and present some of these practices as a major danger to humanity, I also point out that maybe this is the most important thing that now happens on the planet. So even if you criticize them but also emphasize the importance of what they do, it is still flattering to them to think that the future of humanity is to some extent in their hands. To be somewhat generous to these figures, I definitely dont think that they are evil. Some of what they did was good. I met my husband online on one of the first gay dating apps in Israel, and Im grateful for this because as a gay man in a small, provincial Israeli town, how do you meet guys? What I would say about Silicon Valley is that they dont understand the enormous impact that they are having. They set out hoping to change the world with a deep understanding of technology and not as deep an understanding of history and human society and psychology. But, finally, I know as a historian that texts can gain a life of their own. The people who wrote the New Testament, if they could see what the Inquisition and the crusaders did with the idea of turning the other cheek and the meek will inherit the earth, I think they would be rolling in their graves. But thats history. What can you do?

Is there an idea that youre still sort of germinating that you think is maybe too radical for your audience? Ill give two examples, a big one and a small one. When I wrote Homo Deus, my main interest was in what comes after humanism and after liberalism. I thought that liberalism and humanism were the best stories that humanity has ever managed to come up with. We now have to go beyond that because of the technological revolutions of the 21st century, which call into question the most basic ideas and assumptions of humanism and liberalism. But over the last five years, Ive retreated from that frontier because of the political developments in much of the world. Ive instead found myself starting to fight these rear-guard actions to convince people about humanism and liberalism when what I really want to do is to see what comes after.

What comes after? Im not sure. I havent managed to go much beyond what was in Homo Deus. I explored the way in which the information revolution disintegrates the human individual, which is the foundation of humanism and liberalism. As far as I could see, the new foundation becomes the flow of data information in the world to the degree that even the understanding of what is an organism, what is a human being its no longer that a human being is this magical self, which is autonomous and has free will and makes decisions about the world. No, a human being like all other organisms is just an information-processing system that is in continuous flow. It has no fixed assets. What are the implications in political terms? In social terms? Im not sure. This is what I would be keen to explore.

What was the small example? The small frontier: Im reading this book about new theories about transgender and nonbinary people and so forth. The previous book Id read was about early Christianity. It struck me how similar these things are. So much of the debate about gender now, in a weird way its like these early Christians debating the nature of Christ and the trinity. Basically they were asking, was Christ a nonbinary person? Is Christ divine or human or both divine-human or neither divine and human? It resonates with many of the debates that we have now about the nature of humans and the person. Can we be both? Can we be only one? And if you dont think like me, then youre a heretic. I mean, the champions of the early Christians were the martyrs and the ascetic monks you have this guy Simon standing on a pillar for years. They were exploring the limits of the human body with what was available to them. Now you have, with the gender issue, more questions of what can we do with the body; we can change it like this and like that. There are huge differences between these things but neurons in my brain started having this conversation about early Christianity and current gender debates.

Good thing history shows us that all debates within Christianity were settled amicably. The thing is, at the time these tiny Christian sects having these debates were insignificant! But afterward it turned out that these doctrinal debates and who won and who lost had an enormous impact on the development of human history. And this is a more serious thought: I think that the reason that there is so much political heat around debates about transgender people and nonbinary people and so forth is because people maybe subconsciously feel that debates of the future will be about what we can do with the human body and the human brain. How can we re-engineer them? How can we change them? The first practical place that we come across these questions is gender. You can say people are bigots and are always sensitive when you talk about sex or gender, but I think that subconsciously people realize this is the first debate about transhumanism. Its about what we can do with technology to change the human body and brain and mind. This is why we see these heated debates.

What might it say about you and the stories you find most appealing that debates about gender, which could easily be interpreted as being about one group of humans wanting to be treated as equal to any another in the here and now, are ones that you interpret as being fundamentally about anxiety over future transhumanism? Thats the point! Transhumanism is about what it is to be human. I mean, there are different types of transhumanism, but one interpretation is that transhumanism is fulfilling the true potential of the human. Which depends of course on what you understand a human to be. This is the question that we want to pursue, and its not a question with easy answers.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity from two conversations.

Opening illustration: Source photograph by Emily Berl for The New York Times

David Marchese is a staff writer for the magazine and the columnist for Talk. Recently he interviewed Alice Waters about being uncompromising and Neil deGrasse Tyson about how science might once again reign supreme.

Read the original here:

Yuval Noah Harari Believes This Simple Story Can Save the Planet - The New York Times

Life and society worldwide have been transformed by digital technology, including the fabrics of emotional relationships. Many believed the internet would be the largest ungoverned space in the world with unlimited emancipatory potential, and trusted Big Tech to make the world a better place. Yet power and capitalism filled that space with surveillance systems, the production of private capital, the monetization of data, and the control of human lives. Social media now shape daily life and many have lost faith in the possibility of a shared consensus reality. We are living in a scenario similar to one imagined by Black Mirror: our belief in digital communication and social media creates narcissistic personalities, selves dissociated and dislocated from their reflections online. Digital communication offers an opaque mirror that delivers egos without bodies, eliding alterity.

The collapse of reality, however, is not an unintended consequence of advancements in, for instance, artificial intelligence: it was the long-term objective of many technologists, who sought to create machines capable of transforming human consciousness (like drugs do). Communication has become a site for the extraction of surplus value, and images operate as both commodities and dispositives for this extraction. Moreover, data mediates our cognition, that is to say, the way in which we exist and perceive the world and others. The imageand the unlimited communication promised by constant imageryhave ceased to have emancipatory potential. Images place a veil over a world in which the isolated living dead, thirsty for stimulation and dopamine, give and collect likes on social media. Platform users exist according to the Silicon Valley utopian ideal of lifes complete virtualization.

The internet, moreover, has radically changed the political communications game and must be considered a complex propaganda apparatus. Although a single Tweet can destroy someones career, and fake news can start a real news cycle, meaning is subordinate to the circulation of vacuous content. The capitalist capture of data for profit does not rely on policing content; the production of capital only relies on the constant exchange and circulation of information. We dont yet know the full extent of the manipulation of companies such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon in the last two elections in the US or in other elections around the world. But it is undeniable that digital platforms are actively censoring content in the interests of particular political actors. For instance: in October 2020, Zoom canceled a meeting hosting Palestinian human rights activist Leila Khaled; a month before, Facebook and Twitter censored information detrimental to Joseph Bidens presidential campaign. The same two companies intervened and shut down pro-Trump accounts in 2020, even Donald Trumps own Facebook and Twitter accounts.

After the attempted coup at the US capitol on January 6, 2020, Facebooks recently instituted oversight board ruled that Trump had created an environment where a serious risk of violence was possible. In this light, it seems likely that he will continue to be banned from the platform. According to journalist Shoshana Zuboff, however, this is insufficient, given that the oversight boards decision (whose work is supported by a $130 million endowment from Facebook) follows years of inaction by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who indulged and appeased Trump while entrenching what Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism. A liberal might think that shutting up Trump and helping Biden is not bad, as they are actions that seemingly advance the interests of the Democratic Party. What is at stake here, however, is not whether the platforms take a good or bad stance on a particular issue; the problem is that they have immense unchecked power and can act as they please. Platforms are allowed to secretly extract behavioral data from users, whether or not users are aware, transforming the information into targeted ads, destroying privacy, changing human experience into data, altering elections, and reshaping human civilization. This structure can be termed the cybernetic episteme, and the new form of control, which goes beyond the previous regime of biopower, can be termed neuropower.

According to its Greek etymology, an episteme is a system of understanding. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault uses the term pistem to mean the nontemporal or a priori knowledge that grounds what is taken as truth in a given moment. Several epistemes coexist at a given time, as they constitute parts of various systems of power and knowledge. The cybernetic episteme, as defined by the collective Tiqqun some twenty years ago, describes our relationship to technology and machines (which are inseparable from the workings of capitalism). The cybernetic episteme is based on the modern tenet of progress and human-led transcendence achieved through science and technology.

Under neuropower, the sensible gives way to cognitive pathologies. These pathologies depend on the consumption of content rather than the sharing of meaning. As Thomas Metzinger explains, the internet has become an integral part of how we model ourselves, as we use it for external memory storage, as a cognitive prosthesis, and for emotional self-regulation. This has radically changed the structure of conscious experience, creating a new form of waking consciousness that resembles a mixture of dreaming, dementia, intoxication, and infantilization. Other effects of neuropower are humans growing invisibility to each other and a paroxysmal racism that infiltrates power, technology, culture, language, and work. For Franco Bifo Berardi, racism has become a virus that exacerbates fearabove all, the fear of extinction, which seems to have become one of the motors behind white supremacy in the world. Dissociated from our environment, alienated from each other, we are oblivious to the challenges that are being posed to humanity by the Capitalocene.

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Under lockdown, internet-based technology became embedded in everyday life more than ever before. Zoom and other platforms became the matrix of a production model that exacerbates the power of technology over society. A new lockdown economy has emerged in this disembodied communication space, where knowledge is subsumed under the rules of capital accumulation. The pandemic has led to extreme alienation, to the point that privilege is defined as depending on invisible laborers to sustain forms of life. This means that a new virtual working class has emerged that can take basics like food, water, and electricity for granted, knowing that they do not have to risk their bodies to have these comforts.

Until 2016, digital technology promised access to all human knowledge, unlimited exchange, self-expression, democratization, participation, opportunities to make money, the acceleration of bureaucratic processes, and the means for grassroots and popular power to challenge governments and corporations. The peak of this alluring cyber-utopia came around 201011, when social media played a crucial role in the Occupy and Arab Spring movements. But in 2016, when Cambridge Analytica was revealed to have intervened in the US elections that brought Donald Trump to power, the publics belief in such technologies to change power structures began to shift. We witnessed the worldwide rise of right-wing governments and populist movements supported by wealth. Maurizzio Ferraris has called this the era of post-truth, when the deconstruction of a stable truth became an important political tool. In online public space, discourse has been shattered, truth has become indiscernible, and relativism has become the norm. The public spherethe bastion of established and emerging democracies, bolstered by mass mediabegan to shatter.

Leaders such as Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump, Andrs Manuel Lpez Obrador, Jair Bolsonaro, and Narendra Modi have used digital communications to construct charismatic identities and disseminate populist messages, causing deep social and political polarization. Politics has profoundly mutated: while minorities and people at the margins have found ways to validate their speech by expressing their perspectives, individualized propaganda has become the order of the day. Algorithms feed users the information they search for, resulting in personalized information bubbles designed to engage preexisting biases. Much of the news media now functions by monetizing user engagement through this type of targeting, which has led to new forms of intensified racism and other types of prejudice. Author Andrey Mir has termed this postjournalism. He explains that, since mass media outlets have lost publicity revenue, they need to monetize engagement on the internet and do so by generating anger and hatred, usually directed at some specific group of people. For many, the news is the way to access the world, and rage has become currency: platforms drive and monetize anger as a mode of engagement.

A complex form of authoritarianism is emerging, linked to digital platforms owned by the powerful CEOs who make up the notorious Silicon Six. Under the new authoritarianism, populations are no longer commanded: they are asked to participate, and in this simulation of involvement, the ideology of connection replaces the idea of social relations, neutralizing democratic demands from users to have control over their own lives, rights, and data. In this way, people are made passive. Cdric Durand explains the difference between the original conception of the World Wide Web and the subsequent development of closed platforms. The WWW began as a decentralized architecture in which a generic transaction protocol (http) and a uniform identification format (URI/URL) generated a space of flat content. In this space, human and nonhuman agents could have access to information without any third-party mediation. In contrast, closed platforms use application programming interfaces, or APIs, to mediate interaction, giving way to data loops in which interactions are more dense. The technical object that sustains this hierarchical architecture is the API, each of which is owned by a platform. On the one hand, big platforms, by way of APIs, offer apps that incorporate basic and indispensable data for users. On the other, platforms have access to the additional information generated by the API, such as user activity and buying habits. As the ecosystem grows in complexity, the platform is able to accumulate more and more data. We become more densely connected with each other and with the platforms every day, as our lives get more and more tied to the cloud. Our dependency on platforms provides the ground for technofeudalism. Historically, feudalism was characterized by a fundamental inequality that enabled the direct exploitation of peasants by lords. The lord was both the manager and master not only of the process of production, but of the entire process of social life. In todays technofeudalism, platform owners are the digital lords and users are the serfs. Rather than commodity production, these platforms are geared towards accumulation through rent, debt, and the privatization of the basic infrastructure that sustains our lives. What is at stake is no longer true or fake information but the cybernetic episteme upon which our lives and subjectivities have been built.

The cybernetic episteme is premised upon modernitys enclosure of experience. In modern epistemology, which is the precondition of the cybernetic episteme, the self is externalized and experienced at a remove from the body. Perception is centered on the brain and eyes instead of the whole body, separating sensation from reason. The selfs relationship with the world is mediated through mirrors, camera lenses, the canvas, the microscope, and mathematical models. The cybernetic episteme, moreover, is inextricable from colonialism, which entails dispossession, dislocation, dissociation, and appropriation. Ariella Azoulay has called the logic underpinning these processes the shutter; this logic is materialized in photographic technology that separates humans from objects, self from the world, and people from their lands. The shutter is the principle of imperialism by which campaigns of plunder have left people both worldless and objectless. For Azoulay, the logic of the shutter was invented centuries before photography gave it a technological apparatus, and it enabled the dispossession of non-Western peoples in tandem with the accumulation of visual and material wealth in archives and museums in the West.

The cybernetic episteme is likewise conceptually constituted by this shutter, since it relies on capturing, naming, moving, and archiving subjectsas does imperialism. In this regard, the cybernetic episteme naturalizes the mediation of the self; it creates not only the condition of detachment from the world, but allows the appropriation of the cultures of others, as well as the dissolution of collective being. The shutter is akin to Heideggers Gestell or representation, which goes hand in hand with Eurocentrism and Anthropocentrism. The Gestell and the shutter both imply that the world and experience have become representation, through an aesthetic order in which what is produced as artifice becomes the reality of experience.

In a 2017 Facebook promo video for a new virtual reality technology, Mark Zuckerberg and his colleague Rachel Frank tele-transported themselves to Puerto Rico after a devastating flood. They intended to showcase the potential of the new technology, but instead revealed its inherent violence. The ability to transport oneself to faraway places as if ones body were present gives the illusion that one we can make a difference in the world through technology. In a similar initiative, the Pergamon Museum in Berlin allowed users to virtually roam around the Ishtar Gate, which has been on display in the museum since 1930. In a section of Ariella Azoulays video Undocumented: Unlearning Imperial Plunder (2020), she films actual visitors to the Pergamon while noting that dislocation is the essence of (imperial) modernity. The VR museum visitor is at the center of a world, but they are not really there (an effect similar to the dispositive of perspective in painting). For globalized Western culture, the ground for vision, enlightenment, culture, and even social change is the dislocation and disappearance of bodies.

Disembodiment and dislocation are also fundamental epistemological premises of transhumanist Silicon Valley ideology. In this ideology, the teleology of secular modern individualism culminates in the uploading of a persons mind to a new biological, artificial, or biological-artificial body. The utopian goal of expanding and preserving human consciousness is physically and spiritually achieved. Transhumanism is the dream of enhancing the human body through technology, and ultimately escaping human suffering by transcending the errors of death and aging.

Posthumanism takes things a step further: its goal is to immortalize consciousness by uploading it to a robotic or synthetic body. Posthumanism does away with the biological dimension of the self, fundamentally altering what it means to be human. In both trans- and posthumanism, technology promises to give us the divine attributes of omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience, making humans into pure consciousness, achieving a kind of individual and secular transcendence. In the first episode of the British TV series Years and Years (2019), Bethany, an adolescent whose face is hidden behind a 3D emoji mask, announces to her parents that she is transhuman. She declares: I dont want to be flesh. I want to escape this thing and become digital, I want to live forever as information. Eventually Bethany becomes a hero with transhuman superpowers: her mechanized eyes and brain, which are connected to all the data in the world, allow her to make visible the horrors that the British government have perpetrated in a refugee camp. This techno-utopian narrative implies a democratic ideology, insofar as one political goal of democracy is to make visible the ordeals of oppressed minoritiesin this case through virtual disembodiment.

In contrast to this techno-utopian narrative, science fictionespecially cyberpunk literature generally portrays transhumanism as a nightmarish apocalyptic scenario of social control and individual subjection. Several episodes of Black Mirror do this, for example. But what Black Mirror and Years and Years have in common is that technological advances and the increasing symbiosis between humans and machines are associated with political, economic, and social instability. In reality, mind uploading has attracted millions of dollars of investment from the billionaires of Silicon Valley and beyond. In a mixture of engineering and enlightenment, consciousness is now being hacked through biofeedback techniques, meditation practices, and microdosing drugs. Many critics have observed that the utopian ideology of transhumanism underpins the Valleys culture of move fast, break things, and make as much money as possible. Technologies aiming to expand human consciousness are rooted in purely extractivist, capitalist values. In this sense, cybernetics is a political project on a planetary scale. As described by Tiqqun, cybernetics is a gigantic abstract machine made up of binary machines deployed by empire, and a form of political sovereignty that has merged with the capitalist extractivist project.

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In the pre-cybernetic erathat is to say, before the 1940smachines were intended to emulate humans; their actions resembled human behavior, but ostensibly without intent or emotions. This is why Donna Haraway describes pre-cybernetic machines as haunted. They seemed animated by ghosts, reminiscent of Walter Benjamins automaton that was inhabited by a hunchbacked dwarf. Machines were not self-moving, self-designing, or autonomous. They could not achieve human dreams, only mock them. In turn, humans related to machines by using or acting upon them: switching them on or off, using them as tools to achieve an end. Today, the relationship between human and machine is based on internal, mutual communication in a feedback loop. Early machines were led; today, machines lead us. This does not mean that machines have simply become humanized through the proliferation of androids. Rather, humans have surrendered consciousness to AI, becoming obedient and predictable. In the twenty-first century, machines have blurred the distinction between the artificial and human mind, not only because machines can imitate human functions, but because humans have become increasingly passive, since we are now subject to neuropower.

Within the cybernetic episteme, it is no longer enough to talk about a control society; we must talk instead about a composite of interlinked forms of oppression (exploitation, alienation, and domination), in tandem with extreme securitarianism. Another way to see the cybernetic episteme is as the reconceptualization of social worlds into information-processing systems. Practices of computation are used to produce new organizational and infrastructural apparatuses, which in turn create value and profit by exploiting and disposing of human life. Social worlds are subsumed into technologies through techniques such as statistical forecasting and data modeling.

The cybernetic episteme stems from a world brought into being by Europeans; this world began with the discovery of the new world and the creation of empires and colonies (which coincided with the scientific revolution). In this sense, the cybernetic episteme is inseparable from the Western civilizing project for the whole world, which connected disparate places through technologies like the telegraph and steam shipping, often powered by the extraction of fossil fuels like coal. This project has culminated in globalization as the deregulation and financialization of world economies.

The Western civilization project, based on Enlightenment values including equality, peaceful public life, access to modern science, the rule of law, democracy, and technological progress, involved the creation of infrastructure to unify nations and the world. We can call this infrastructure the technosphere. The technosphere comprises not only digital technology but all machines, factories, computers, cars, buildings, railways, and mobility infrastructure, as well as systems of food production, resource extraction, and energy distribution. Today, the infrastructure of the worldthe technosphereis shaped by information, which means that the world we inhabit is designed by data.

The technosphere is a supplement humans have created to help overcome the limits of human nature insofar as humans cannot live independently from structures geared towards sustaining life. The technosphere has promised to enable us to increase production and reproduction with less human effort. Moreover, the technosphere is also regarded as the main tool humans have to fight decay, entropy, and death, since it comprises all the structures humans have built to keep themselves alive on the planet. The total mass of the technosphere amounts to fifty kilos for every square meter of earths surfacea total of thirty trillion tons, which coexists with the diminishing hydrosphere (water, the frozen polar regions) and the biosphere (all of earths living organisms). The ultimate price of the technosphere is global warming and environmental devastation. Like humans, the technosphere needs external energy input, which is not sustainable as long as it comes from fossil fuels that will eventually be depleted.

From this standpoint, the cybernetic episteme represents the gradual merging of human activity into the activity of what we have built and surrounded ourselves with. Much of this built environment is invisible. Infrastructure and data are partially occult because we are alienated from them, even as we are produced and managed by them. The invisible infrastructure that sustains our lives is what matters politically right now. And insofar as the technosphere is cybernetic, it is inextricable from capitalism and politics.

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Human communication is at the center of the cybernetic global order. The neural system of globalized networked society is digital communication. In a 1975 film called Comment a va?, Anne-Marie Miville and Jean-Luc Godard discuss the illness of information. They begin with an image of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, published in the leftist newspaper Libration. At the time, photojournalistic images had begun to proliferate as a form of information, and Godard and Miville critique Libration (the most left-wing newspaper in Europe in those days) for failing to include the reader in the creation and dissemination of information. They ask: How is it that things enter and exit the machine? (Comment a va de lentre la sortie de la machine?). This question is about how ideas, words, discourses, human interaction, and images become information and then reach readers and viewers.

In Comment a va?, mass media represents an illness that has killed communication and language. Last year, Godard updated his critique of the media in an interview posted to Instagram. He stated: Platos cave has been fixed on paper/screen. For Godard, the consequence of the becoming-information of communication and language is the loss of ambiguity in communication. Digital technology has infiltrated every aspect of existence, and the margin of error between the transmission and the reception of a message has been eliminated by mediatization and digitization. For Godard, digital communication denies the force of the image or the word because it eliminates redundancy, misunderstanding, the possibility of reading between the lines, and the possibility of alterity.

In a more recent film of hisAdieu au language from 2014Godard suggests that digital media have destroyed face-to-face communication. He asks: What kind of self could emerge in a time when objects and bodies are disfigurable and refigurable through virtual manipulation? Godard posits that the origins of todays totalitarianism can be traced to the interruption of interior experience by the spectacle. In the film, Godard features a lengthy quote from Philippe Sollers explaining that the spectacle cuts off the subject from its interior lifea process that is, paradoxically, highly seductive. Furthermore, for Godard digital communication creates a new form of isolated solitude where people lack ties to others. In this light, technology has not become an extension of man, as Marshall McLuhan predicted, but has instead attained autonomy from man, since digital media can communicate amongst themselves without human mediation. For Godard, this means that the face-to-face encountera basic form of human relation that is the foundation of ethicsis no longer possible.

Sherry Turkle, a clinical psychologist and sociologist, comes to similar conclusions: daily conversations no longer involve eye contact, and face-to-face discussion has been replaced by words on a screen. According to Turkle, texts, tweets, Facebook posts, Instagram messages, and Snapchats split our attention and diminish our capacity for empathy. They have created new codes of etiquette; no longer do we feel restrained from reaching for our phones in the presence of other people. This new etiquette entrenches a culture of individualism and isolation from each other. This isolation cultivates the perfect ground for fascism.

The digitization of communication not only has political and communal consequences. It also affects the neuroplastic potential of the living brain. The cybernetic episteme reshapes our working memory by rearranging its contents. As Warren Neidich writes, the new focus of power is not only the false reproduction of the past (the manipulation of the archive), but the manipulation of our working memorythe type of memory that influences our decision-making. Authoritarian neuropower wants nothing less than to shape our future memory, argues Neidich.

If the nervous system of cybernetics is digital communication, at the center of digital communication is desire. Mark Fisher devoted his last lectures at Goldsmiths in 2017 to this subject. During one lecture, he played for his students a famous Apple TV commercial from 1984, directed by Ridley Scott and originally broadcast during the Superbowl. In an overt reference to George Orwells novel 1984, the commercial depicts a dreary, repressive control society. This society is seemingly liberated when a buxom blonde woman tosses a sledgehammer at a large screen broadcasting the image of an authoritarian figure, causing the screen to explode. The commercial ends with these lines crawling across the screen: On January 24, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And youll see why 1984 wont be like 1984. Fisher observes that the video counterposes top-down bureaucratic control to upstart entrepreneurialism. The dreary control society depicted in the commercial is an allusion to not only the Soviet Union, but also IBM, the dominant computer maker at the time. Apple posits itself as the dynamic, colorful new company that will liberate society from dreary IBM, ushering in a new, more vibrant world order. This new world order will fulfill our (capitalist) desires in a way that the communist world cannot. As Fisher suggests, we now live in that world of libidinal capitalism.

Elsewhere Fisher writes that what drives the circulation of information is the users desire to make one more connection, to leave one more reply, to keep on clicking. Capitalism persists because cyberspace is already under our skin, writes Fisher; to retreat from it would be like trying to retreat into some nonexistent precapitalist imaginary. In his view, we believe we have as much a chance of escaping capitalism as we do of crawling back inside our mothers womb.

5.

By means of the cybernetic episteme, Silicon Valley has shaped the world we all live in. As we are poisoned equally by microplastics and fake news, losing our grasp of a shared reality, the Silicon Sixas Sacha Baron Cohen called the titans of Silicon Valley in a 2019 speechpropagate algorithm-fueled fear, propaganda, lies, and hate in the name of profit. As Baron Cohen pointed out, the major online platforms largely avoid the kind of regulation and accountability that other media companies are subject to. This is ideological imperialism, he said. Six unelected individuals in Silicon Valley impos[e] their vision on the rest of the world, unaccountable to any government, and acting as if they are above the law. He called digital platforms the greatest propaganda machine in history.

Democratic institutions have failed to reign in the information chaos and the destruction of the public sphere. As Shoshana Zuboff argues, we inhabit a communications sphere that is no longer a public sphere. She describes this situation as an epistemic coup that has taken place in four stages: First, by way of companies gathering personal data about us and then claiming it as their own private property. Second, through data inequality, which means that companies know more than we do. Third, through the epistemic chaos created by algorithms. And fourth, through the institutionalization of this new episteme and the erosion of democratic governance.

Baron Cohen observes that people can take a stand against platforms by recognizing our power to boycott them. (One example is the mass defection from WhatsApp to Telegram when the former announced that would share its user data with Facebook.) But we also need to defend the existence of facts and a shared reality, understanding the world not as something we see but as something we inhabittreating life not as something we have, but as something we live. Anti-platform strategies might be accused of Luddism, but they are not necessarily opposed to technologyonly to certain uses of technology.

It is also crucial that we regard the cybernetic episteme as inextricable from a broader malaise: humanitys relationship to life and the planet is a toxic one. The very technologies that supposedly enable us to read, think, flourish, and desire are destroying the world we inhabit.

People continue to yearn for commonality, mutuality, and something to share. But the culture we currently share is largely mediated by repressive, profit-driven digital platforms. This is why we need to flee from the invasion of images, to distinguish between image and reality, and to affirm the opacity of the world and the ambiguity of language. We need to resist platform monopoly through presence, embodiment, immediacy, and human memory. We need to find ways to create life as opposed to turning it into data, combine emotional and intellectual knowledge, and regard visceral gut feelings as a form of human consciousness. We need to learn to exist in symbiosis with others and with the environment, not dislocated, uprooted, and detached.

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Authoritarianism and the Cybernetic Episteme, or the Progressive Disappearance of Everything on Earth - Journal #122 November 2021 - E-Flux

In Moscow at the end of the 19th century a librarian of poor origins started reflecting on how future human beings, raising themselves from a condition of conflict and divisiveness, would eventually be able to defeat evil and death through a technological and cultural revolution. His name was Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov. In the long run, the philosophers beliefs permeated Russian culture, inspiring scientists, mystics and artists who shared a peculiar, spiritual-philosophic doctrine later known as cosmism.

In the museum library named after Fedorov, cosmists prepare to mark the anniversary of the death, in 2014, of Svetlana Semenova, a leading researcher into Fedorovs works, whose DNA has been preserved. The library, seen as the heart of the Russian cosmist movement, is engaged in promoting and developing Fedorovs ideas and thought.

Left, cosmists during the annual meeting on the anniversary of Semenovas death. Right, Misha Ivanov and Elena Milova, two delegates at a conference on anti-ageing.

Semenovas daughter, Anastasia Gracheva, a Russian cosmist activist, studies objects in the museum. Her mothers body is preserved by the cryopreservation society KrioRus with the aim of bringing her back to life some time in the future.

Fedorovs ideas have been spread by Russian cosmists, whose thoughts have merged into a wider international philosophic movement known as transhumanism.

Two transhumanist activists, Alexey Samykin and Igor Trapeznikov, pictured at the KrioRus headquarters during the making of a documentary by the German channel Galileo.

Transhumanism is a cultural movement that encourages scientific and technological discoveries to enhance human physical and cognitive capacities. It believes that a future most people dismiss as science fiction is just around the corner. Transhumanists say that by 2045, humanity will experience singularity, a theory predicting human and artificial intelligence can be fused.

Filippo Polistena, founder of the KrioRus subsidiary Polistena Human Cryopreservation company, and colleagues, prepare the body of a client in Bologna, Italy, to be sent to Russia. KrioRus is making numerous deals outside Russia to promote hybernation.

A KrioRus technician prepares to enter a cooling chamber, where bodies are covered with dry ice in order to drop their temperature to an initial -78C. The mask is necessary to guard against asphyxiation by the carbon dioxide vapours in the chamber.

Ivan Stepin, deputy director of KrioRus and member of the transhumanist moment, waiting for twice-a-week storage maintenance to be completed.

Russian transhumanists established KrioRus, the first cryopreservation society in Eurasia, in 2003. Today it conserves 81 human bodies, from Russia, the US, the Netherlands, Japan, Israel, Italy, Switzerland and Australia, as well as animals. It is based in Sergiev Posad, a residential neighbourhood more than two hours north of Moscow.

Signing a contract to be cryopreserved is an act of faith in scientific research, whose progress in the fields of life extension and medicine make some people believe that humanity is inexorably heading towards immortality. While awaiting technological their hoped for resurrection, the bodies of KrioRuss clients float in storage units at a temperature of -196C.

With death many peoples greatest fear, cosmists and transhumanists can offer a seductive myth of immortality.

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Faith in -196C: pioneers of resurrection a photo essay - The Guardian

WISekeys Founder and CEO Carlos Moreira was Interviewed by Steve Bannon on Warroom.org About The transHuman Code Bestseller Book and the Need to Humanize Technology

Video Interview at https://rumble.com/vodsq7-the-fourth-industrial-revolution-and-your-place-in-it.htmlBook available at https://www.amazon.com/transHuman-Code-Program-Your-Future/dp/1626346291

GENEVA / New York October 29, 2021: WISeKey International Holding Ltd. (WISeKey) (SIX: WIHN, NASDAQ: WKEY), a leading global cybersecurity, AI, Blockchain, and IoT company, today announced its Founder and CEO Carlos Moreira had the opportunity of discussing, in this interview with Steve Banon, the content on The transHuman Code bestseller book that was debated at the Vatican Collegio Teutonico meeting on October 23, 2021.

In stark contrast to the transhumanism movement whose desire is to create the ultimate superhuman by modifying the person with innovative technology, The transHuman Code was written to initiate the most important conversation of our lives how to keep people at the center of gravity in their relationship with technology and ensure that humans have the final decision and control of the switch.

The risks are so great, but the opportunities are even greater, if the two can exist in harmony. The pandemic has reinforced the importance of collaboration in the development, financing, and use of technology for our future. Organizing the wisdom and initiatives of technology innovators is essential so that everyone understands and stays at the forefront of The transHuman Codes mandate.

Mr. Moreira, noted, The book was published before the technology threat awareness movement, which is now underway, the importance of the conversation has only been accelerated and amplified. Our assembly at the Vatican last week, brought together business, financial and spiritual leaders to discuss how we can program our future for good using the principles of The transHuman Code, provided clear evidence of this.

One critical subplot to the global pandemic is that the very thing we hoped would save us technological innovation has fallen short. But our inability to slow or stop COVID-19 any sooner has not been a technological failure. The real failure is that our global wherewithal is more clearly fractured than it has ever been. Humanity has the tools we seek to solve the issues we currently face, and many others. We just havent figured out how to work as one. But there is still a straightforward way to solve both current and future challenges.

Story continues

Mr. Moreira added, In our bestselling 2019 book, The transHuman Code, we offered the world a carefully curated take on the essential conversations that will determine whether our relationship with technology will upgrade or undermine our humanity. It ignited a global dialogue. Now its time for the next step: taking tangible action to ensure that the highest human values are coded into the technologies that are defining how we will live in what is now commonly called the metaverse the digital world in which we will increasingly work, communicate, relate, and reside as global, digital citizens.

This go round, we are not merely curating conversation. We aim to identify and ignite the technological tools and solutions required right now. The transHuman Code 2.0 will establish, clearly and compellingly, the steps the world must take, and the specific areas in which we must take them, to ensure that the metaverse presented to us is designed for the greatest common good and monitor its evolution so it is human-centric and under Human control.

As humans HomoSapiens we can view this in three ways, concurrently:

First, through the lens of a citizen of the physical universe, who desires that humanity flourish through the upholding of our highest values, and the triumph over our greatest struggles.

Second, through the lens of a beneficiary of the digital metaverse, one who enjoys its many benefits but also understands that technology can do great harm if not stewarded well.

Third, through the lens of a fellow innovator whose ideas, convictions, and actions will help usher in the brightest future for our physical and digital world.

Technology is a visible force and an invisible one. We must be aware of both, to ensure human values remain at the helm. A powerful cautionary tale of what happens when human values arent at the helm of technological advancement comes from the late nineteenth century.

To avoid catastrophic consequences, humanity must have more than a few hundred thousand savvy tech entrepreneurs making decisions on the metaverse. We are all protagonists in this global drama. We dont need to look any further than the pandemic were still fighting to know that these digital decisions affect us all.

Mr. Moreira concluded, So the big question is how can we elevate life as we know it, in both the physical and digital realms in which we exist? It starts with an acknowledgment that innovation is both good and bad and reaches us as an internal and an external process. In other words, it comes from someplace inside our hearts, minds, and souls that we cant fully explain. Who really comprehends the birth of an idea? No one. We just know it comes from somewhere inside of us. But innovation also originates from the outside, through the external context in which we find ourselves: members of a large, equally incomprehensible universe. The nature of innovation has never changed. Ideas come from everywhere. How we approach them, proactively as human co-creators with technology not reactively as mere consumers, will determine our future. In the end, what we the world collectively seek is to co-create a future that is both immediately fulfilling and filled with the prospect of greater fulfillment to come. Humanity has always suffered challenges. How we solve them today, in our dual reality of the universe and metaverse, will frame the lives we lead for centuries to come.

About WISeKeyWISeKey (NASDAQ: WKEY; SIX Swiss Exchange: WIHN) is a leading global cybersecurity company currently deploying large-scale digital identity ecosystems for people and objects using Blockchain, AI, and IoT respecting the Human as the Fulcrum of the Internet. WISeKey microprocessors secure the pervasive computing shaping todays Internet of Everything. WISeKey IoT has an installed base of over 1.6 billion microchips in virtually all IoT sectors (connected cars, smart cities, drones, agricultural sensors, anti-counterfeiting, smart lighting, servers, computers, mobile phones, crypto tokens, etc.). WISeKey is uniquely positioned to be at the leading edge of IoT as our semiconductors produce a huge amount of Big Data that, when analyzed with Artificial Intelligence (AI), can help industrial applications predict the failure of their equipment before it happens.

Our technology is Trusted by the OISTE/WISeKeys Swiss-based cryptographic Root of Trust (RoT) provides secure authentication and identification, in both physical and virtual environments, for the Internet of Things, Blockchain, and Artificial Intelligence. The WISeKey RoT serves as a common trust anchor to ensure the integrity of online transactions among objects and between objects and people. For more information, visit http://www.wisekey.com.

Press and investor contacts:WISeKey International Holding LtdCompany Contact: Carlos MoreiraChairman & CEOTel: +41 22 594 3000info@wisekey.comWISeKey Investor Relations (US)Contact: Lena CatiThe Equity Group Inc.Tel: +1 212 836-9611lcati@equityny.com

Disclaimer:This communication expressly or implicitly contains certain forward-looking statements concerning WISeKey International Holding Ltd and its business. Such statements involve certain known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, which could cause the actual results, financial condition, performance, or achievements of WISeKey International Holding Ltd to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. WISeKey International Holding Ltd is providing this communication as of this date and does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements contained herein as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

This press release does not constitute an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any securities, and it does not constitute an offering prospectus within the meaning of article 652a or article 1156 of the Swiss Code of Obligations or a listing prospectus within the meaning of the listing rules of the SIX Swiss Exchange. Investors must rely on their own evaluation of WISeKey and its securities, including the merits and risks involved. Nothing contained herein is, or shall be relied on as, a promise or representation as to the future performance of WISeKey

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WISekeys Founder and CEO Carlos Moreira was Interviewed by Steve Bannon on Warroom.org About The transHuman Code Bestseller Book and the Need to...

Engaging new reads for the holiday season

12 Bytes by Jeanette Winterson

The author of Frankissstein (2020) has an abiding interest in the relationship between humans and their technology. In the dozen provocative and often funny essays found here, Winterson discusses everything from the future of love and sex (Hot for a Bot) to her enthusiasm for transhumanism. We need to control our evolution via such enhancements as neural implants, she writes, or AI will rule us instead.

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Indigenous author and bookstore owner has a lot to say about a momentous year in her Minneapolis hometown, from the pandemic lockdown to the aftermath of George Floyds murder. She delivers it powerfully in a quirky, beguiling novel about bookstores, racial reckoning and ghosts of all sorts, under a title as resonant of prison time as of literary building blocks.

The Singing Forest.

Toronto refugee lawyer Leah Jarvis is, for once, working on the feds side as Ottawa attempts to deport a nonagenarian war criminal. The novels twin storylinesJarvis explores pre-war Stalinist atrocities and her own family secretsare beautifully written, and reach a profound and unsettling moral clarity as McCormack weighs what happens when, in her protagonists words, fragments of leftover history spill into the present.

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

Readers can dispute whether the newest work from the brilliant Irish short story writer is trulyat 114 pagesa novel. But there is no arguing the beauty of Keegans story of a crisis in the life of coal merchant Billy Furlong. Every small thing in Small Thingsa nuns gesture, a husbands look, a wifes veiled referenceis a polished gem.

On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times by Michael Ignatieff

While his political career may have ended in disaster, Ignatieff has always been a remarkably accomplished and versatile writer of fiction and non-fiction. In his compelling new work, he explores how major figures in the Western tradition, from St. Paul to Primo Levi, sought solace in times of tragedy, and how that primarily religious tradition fares in our modern winter of disbelief and discontent.

These Precious Days: Essays by Ann Patchett

The acclaimed American novelist is also a superb essayist. Her new collection23 fluid, intricate and utterly absorbing piecesruns a gamut from Three Fathers, rooted in a rare joint appearance of her father, her stepfather and her mothers third husband, to the title essay, the luminous story of an unexpected friendship.

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Six books to read this winter - Maclean's

Our natural behavior is to eat and reproduce above all and to fight and defend over food, resources, and mates. The problem is that our bodies are designed to eat the most high calorie foods and store energy as fat which leads to chronic diseases and early death. We also become easily controlled by our emotions which often leads to self-destructive behaviors and violence (physical and mental) and murder. Our brains are also maladapted to modern society and mental illness is super common now because many of us cannot cognitively handle reality as it is. Our genes make it where almost everything that gives us pleasure is harmful to us (eating meat, drinking alcohol, risky exciting behavior like sports/irresponsible sex) even at times with moderation - but thats what drives most of our actions. Our body is designed to live just long enough to propagate our genes and protect them through raising children and then dying.

I just think its ridiculous that people value being human and willingly accept the self-destructive drives we have as being normal and use it to justify being unhealthy.

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Transhumanism - reddit

Quick update with recent news. Ill probably write a better article at some point, but this will do for now. I still havent thought of a new name for an optics-friendly blog, otherwise Id put this stuff on there.

Also adding new Great Reset category to the site.

CONTENTS

As Im sure many of you are already aware, globalist elites are using their COVID19 psyop to push through The Great Reset, which is simply a rebranding of the United Nations Agenda 21 (also known as Agenda 2030 and Sustainable Development Goals).

The Great Reset was known as Agenda 21 while globalists were using Global Warming as the primary psyop excuse for creating a one-world government, The Great Reset is merely the virus psyop rebrand.

When Globalists say things like:No poverty!Good health!Zero hunger!

Theyre telling you that they plan to take totalitarian control over that aspect of humanity, and will micromanage it like the neurotic freaks that they are. They obviously dont care about poverty, hunger, etc., they just want power. Same deal when they talk about World Peace. Any conflict that they havent personally engineered causes instability and factionalism that threatens their global dominance. They dont actually want World Peace, they want a monopoly and violence, and to transform you into a pacifist cuck who kisses their boots while they stomp on your neck.

What the Great Reset is bringing us is what the globalist (or United Nations) agenda has always been: Global Communism. Dont forget that the four pillars of Communism, as laid out in Marx Communist Manifesto, are:

Anyway,themajor aspect of The Great Reset is the digitization of humanity. In other words, they aim to force transhumanism onto the entire human population or the populace of the West, at least. In the words of the sinister Great Reset faceman, Klaus Schwab, they aim to [fuse] our physical, digital and biological identity.

The transhumanist agenda dates back to the early 1900s, and globalists such as UNs Julian Huxley, who coined the term.

Unfortunately, the history of transhumanism is too long and complex to get into here, but the fusion of man with machine has always been on the globalist cards. However, their aim is not to use technology to make the masses of humanity into superhuman cyborgs, but to use technology to transform the masses of humanity into easily controlled slave gimps.

As explained by Julian Huxleys brother, Aldous (who authored Brave New World, a dystopian fiction novel), the globalists aim is to transform the world into a painless concentration camp in which pharmacological methods will make people love their servitude.

We effectively already have this with anti-depressants and so on, which are designed to stop you from feeling shitty about having such a wretched, soulless society, and kick your ass back into the meatgrinder so you can wagecuck like a good little debt slave. Around 20% of Americans are on psychiatric pharmaceuticals. Normies think that this is becausewe simply have a better understanding of mental health now,and not because society is disgusting and everyone fucking hates it.

The final step is to technologically regulate human behavior via transhumanism. Simply put, theyre going to put microchips in your brain and frazzle your thoughts. They already have the technology. (I know it sounds wacky, but you can look all if this up yourself. Its real).

So, how do globalists plan to achieve this?

Well, if youve seen the Great Reset primer image that was handily created for us by the World Economic Forum, youll have noticed that it includes things like:

The World Economic Forum, which is part of the United Nations network, very recently announced the release of a digital identity app, you can read the details in the second image below, which is higher res. The digital identity agenda will likely be the wedge issue that globalists use to force transhumanism upon the masses.

This is where the virus psyop comes in.

Globalists claim that the functionally useless lockdowns are an absolute necessity to combat the 99%-survival-rate virus. In reality, they are being used to break the will of the public and irreparably destroy the final few freedoms people have left. The middle class has been devastated, while global elites are more powerful than ever.

There are massive protests all across the West in response to the lockdowns, though these will soon be met with violent oppression from the globalist-puppeteered governments.

It is likely that people will be banned from travel, shopping, socializing, etc., unless theyre vaccinated. Some sort of digital chip may be implanted alongside the vaccine, which will be used to prove the individuals vaccinated status (tagged and bagged with a slave stamp).

This may be the beginning of the individuals digital identity, with the excuse that they must be loaded into a virus-free database.

The technology to do this has already been patented by none other than the Bill Gates Foundation.

As with the lockdowns, many people will resist the digitization of humanity and the transhumanist project as a whole. However, many more will embrace it with open arms.

For the digitization of humanity to be successful, elites will have to create a significant distinction between the digitized and non-digitized. Perhaps the virus will play a role, those who are not vaccinated may be treated as inhuman and socially ostracized, though it is more likely that non-vaccinated people will simply be refused access to basic services within society, as outlined above. This will create a pariah caste, who are completely unable to function in the newly digitized world.

Eventually, the masses will be so distraught and demoralized by lockdown life that they will beg to be vaccinated.

Get the vaccine, Leftoid. You dont want to be one of those racist, bigots, do you?

The success of the transhumanist project is also reliant upon the creation of a one-world digital currency, that will undoubtedly be linked to these digital identities. The creation of a one-world currency is something that elites have talked about for decades.

An article from the Rothschild-owned Economist paper:

Many elites, such as Bill Gates, have invested in and endorsed digital currency:

We may see the implementation of UBI, linked to some sort of Communist China-style social credit system. ThisForbes articlestates that the Federal Reserve has plans to create a digital dollar and a digital dollar wallet via the U.S Treasury, which was suggested to provide economic stimulus benefits and possibly universal basic income to Americans.

Facebooks Tel Aviv team are working on a digital wallet:

The Jerusalem Post stated that a global collapse would be a way to wipe the slate clean of nation-based currencies, especially the US dollar, and establish an international one: like bitcoin.

Klaus Schwab has ominously warned (threatened?) that there may be a Cyber Pandemic (what does this even mean?) that will be worse than COVID. How will this convince the masses that a digital identity and one-world digital currency is a good idea? I dont know.

Wolfish (who makes good YouTube videos, check him out) guesses that the Cyber Pandemic may be used to create a one-world digital currency, which would require the United Nations digital identity to use.

The final and most disturbing thing that Ive learned of recently is this patent, which seems to be for some sort of device that would essentially transform an individual into a human bitcoin mining device. I havent looked into it fully, but it seems to be style biological energy harvesting a la The Matrix. So, yeah, were heading towards some really fucked up shit here.

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COVID19, The Great Reset, and Transhumanism Thuletide

Dr Carrie Madej joins journalist, Alex Newman to discuss the transhumanist agenda behind the COVID vaccines. She speaks in a very approachable and straightforward way, that anybody can understand, in what is a deeper xpos than she previously gave on the Alex Jones show of the transhumanist technologies that are being rolled out upon and within us without our informed consent.

As for SARS-CoV-2 she says, Theres not been any Freedom of Information Act around the world that has ever produced an actual, bonafide specimen of the virus. It literally does not exist. We only have the code and thats important to know.

Nobody has the actual virus. Why is that? Theyve never answered that. So they cant make the normal vaccine. Its a recombinant code with a gene synthesis. That means theyre pushing together different types of genetic material, pushing them together like a Frankenstein puzzle and then, to fill in the missing blanks, they have an Artificial Intelligence computing program do that for them.

What she says is that the shot contains various proteins, some found in the human placenta and sperm that can trigger an autoimmune response in the tissues that have those proteins.

So far, 18 subunits of HIV1 have been in the virus genetic code, causing the body to purposely produce the HIV1 virus. Could this give you HIV or AIDS? Nobody has the answer to that. Only time will tell; years from now, well know. But just know that people who have been tested for HIV after getting these vaccinesin Australia, they have been tested positive. So that is something to be very concerned about.

Also, SARS-CoV-2 (the mathematical model) contains a replica of human chromosome 8, which means that the WHOs PCR test kits should find a positive result in all humans tested. More worryingly, chromosome 8 has to do with human intelligence and fertility. This means it could trigger an autoimmune response against a chromosome that codes for two of our most precious attributes as humans.

Pfizer and Moderna have also inserted an artificial nucleoside in the vaccines RNA called Pseudouridylyl or Psi for short, which is completely not from this world. Dr Madej says, Nobody knows the ramifications of thisIt can act as a computer hacker program. It can act as a one-way in, always to hack into the bodythey say theyre suppressing our immune checkpoints so they can sneak in the code and our body wont destroy it.

Suppressing our immune checkpoints? Well, for how long? We need our immune system! Our immune system protects us from cancers and infections and toxins and all sorts of things

Dr Madej gets into a fascinating discussion of DARPA hydrogels, which contain nanobots and how these have the ability alter human genetics and create transhuman cyborgs. The military has been testing this technology for decades. It allows controllers to see through the soldiers eyes; they can communicate and program the brain, as well as know and hear the thoughts of the soldier.

The COVID nasal swabs have been studied as a delivery mechanism to deliver nano sized drugs directly into the brain. Speaking of which, here are some spectacular photos from a recent study of nasal swabs in Slovakia, which were found to deploy hydrogel-releasing hollow nylon fibers. After the DARPA hydrogel contacts organic fluids (eg saliva), the photos reveal that they quickly began to form rectangular crystal structures (apparent nano antennae). These structures were dissolved by COVID antibodies in one test and by Ivermectin in another.

The intended uses for these hydrogel nanobots include monitoring body movement, to mine a cryptocurrency based on human labor. During business owners meetings that Dr Madej attended in Atlanta, they stated plainly their intention to secretly implement this technology that can monitor and control the behavior of the populace, in conjunction with a Pavlovian social credit system and Predictive Policing.

Based on the meetings she attended and the scientific papers she read, the true agenda behind the vaccines is to bring about the first phase of transhumanism or what she calls Human 2.0, which is already being tested in West Africa, as we speak.

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Dr. Carrie Madej Covid Shots, DNA and Transhumanism ...

Russian philosopher and life extensionist

Nikolai Fyodorov

Main interests

Notable ideas

Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov (Russian: ; surname also Anglicized as "Fedorov", June 9, 1829 December 28, 1903) was a Russian Orthodox Christian philosopher, who was part of the Russian cosmism movement and a precursor of transhumanism. Fyodorov advocated radical life extension, physical immortality and even resurrection of the dead, using scientific methods.

Fyodorov's parents were the (noble) Pavel Ivanovich Gagarin and Elisaveta Ivanova, a woman of lower-class nobility.

He studied at the Richelieu Lyceum in Odessa. From 1854 to 1868, he served as a teacher in various small Russian towns. In 1878, he joined the Rumyantsev Museum staff as a librarian. Fyodorov opposed the idea of property of books and ideas and never published anything during his lifetime. His selected articles were printed posthumously with the title Philosophy of the Common Task (also known as Philosophy of Physical Resurrection).

Fyodorov was a futurist, who theorized about the eventual perfection of the human race and society (i.e., utopia), including radical ideas like immortality, revival of the dead, space and ocean colonization.His writings greatly influenced mystic Peter Uspensky. He also had direct contact with early rocket theorist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who visited the library where he worked over a 3-year period. He was also known to Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Leo Tolstoy had the highest opinion of Fyodorov. They were quite friendly, and shared many ideas in the 1880s and early 90s. But Fyodorov refused to see Tolstoy again after 1892, because of their ideological differences. That was the time of some food shortages in Russia because of poor harvest. Tolstoy published in the London Daily Telegraph an article accusing the Russian government of not doing enough for the peasants, which displeased many Russian conservatives.

While Fyodorov shared with Tolstoy many religious ideas, he was also a church-going Christian who cared very much for the Orthodox ritual observance. This was also a big stumbling block between them.

Fyodorov argued that evolutionary process was directed towards increased intelligence and its role in the development of life. Humanity is the culmination of evolution, as well as its creator and director. Humans must therefore direct evolution where their reason and morality dictate. Fyodorov also argued that mortality is the most obvious indicator of the still imperfect, contradictory nature of humanity and the underlying reason for most evil and nihilism of humankind. Fyodorov stated that the struggle against death can become the most natural cause uniting all people of Earth, regardless of their nationality, race, citizenship or wealth (he called this the Common Cause).

Fyodorov thought that death and afterdeath existence should become the subject of comprehensive scientific inquiry, that achieving immortality and revival is the greatest goal of science, and that this knowledge must leave the laboratories and become the common property of all: "Everyone must be learning and everything be the subject of knowledge and action".

Human life, emphasized Fyodorov, dies for two reasons. First is internal: due to the material organization of a human, his or her functionality is incapable of infinite self-renewal. To overcome this, psychophysiological regulation of human organisms is needed. The second reason is the unpredictable nature of the external environment; its destructive character must be overcome with the regulation of nature. Regulation of nature, "introducing will and reason into nature" includes, according to Fyodorov, prevention of natural disasters, control of Earth's climate, fight against viruses and epidemics, mastery of solar power, space exploration and unlimited creative work there.

Achieving immortality and resurrection of all people who ever lived are two inseparable goals, according to Fyodorov. Immortality is impossible, both ethically and physically, without resurrection. We cannot allow our ancestors, who gave us life and culture, to remain buried, or our relatives and friends to die. Achieving immortality for individuals alive today and future generations is only a partial victory over death only the first stage. The complete victory will be achieved only when everyone is resurrected and transformed to enjoy immortal life.

Fyodorov tried to plan specific actions for scientific research of the possibility of restoring life and making it infinite.His first project involved collecting and synthesizing decayed remains of dead based on "knowledge and control over all atoms and molecules of the world". This idea of Fyodorov is related to the modern practice of cloning.The second method described by Fyodorov is genetic-hereditary.The revival could be done successively in the ancestral line: sons and daughters restore their fathers and mothers, they in turn restore their parents and so on. This means restoring the ancestors using the hereditary information that they passed on to their children. Using this genetic method it is only possible to create a genetic twin of the dead person (the problem of identity in cloning). It is necessary to give back the revived person his old mind, his personality. Fyodorov speculates about the idea of "radial images" that may contain the personalities of the people and survive after death. Nevertheless, Fyodorov noted that even if a soul is destroyed after death, humanity will learn to restore it whole by mastering the forces of decay and fragmentation.

The revival of people who lived during the past is not a recreation of their past physical form it was imperfect, parasitic, centered on mortal existence. Fyodorov's idea was to transform it into self-creating, mind-controlled form, capable of infinite renewal, which is immortal. Those who havent died will go through the same transformation. Humans will have to become creators and organizers of their organisms ("our body will be our business"). In the past the development of civilization happened by increasing human power using external tools and machines the human body remained imperfect.

Fyodorov stated that people needed to reconcile the difference between the power of technology and weakness of the human physical form. The transition is overdue from purely technical development, a "prosthetic" civilization, to organic progress, when not just external tools, artificial implements, but the organisms themselves are improved, so that, for example, a person can fly, see far and deep, travel through space, live in any environment. People must become capable of "organodevelopment" that so far only nature was capable of. Fyodorov discussed supremacy of mind, "giving, developing organs for itself" and anticipated V. Vernadskys idea of autotrophic humans. He argues that a person must become an autotrophic, self-feeding creature, acquire a new mode of energy exchange with the environment that will not end.

Fyodorov repeatedly said that only general scientific studies of aging, death and postmortem studies can deliver the means to overcome death and promote indefinite healthy lifespan.

The 2011 BBC documentary Knocking on Heaven's Door, about the Space Race in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, suggests that, in many people's eyes, Nikolai Fyodorov was the true father of the Soviet space project that put the first man in space.

Fyodorov's thought is extensively though indirectly discussed and alluded to in the well-regarded 2010 science fiction novel The Quantum Thief; it is implied that the founders of the post-human collective of uploaded minds called the Sobornost were inspired by Fyodorov and other thinkers associated with cosmism.

The 2013 novel Strange Bodies by Marcel Theroux imagines Fyodorov's ideas of the Common Task being developed by Soviet and post-Soviet research to implant a mind into another body using an encoded lexicon from the original mind and an unspecified, but painful, procedure.

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Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov - Wikipedia

This week, I wanted to cover something important that we havent covered before here at SBM. So I asked myself: What topic related to COVID-19 have we at SBM not covered yet that we really should have covered by now? Given that Steve has already covered the first two COVID-19 vaccines going to the FDA for approval and possible emergency use authorization (EUA), the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, it didnt make sense for me to discuss COVID-19 vaccines again. Then it occurred to me. These two new vaccines that will likely soon be available, at least to essential personnel such as medical personnel treating COVID-19 patients anyway, share one thing in common. They are RNA vaccines. What also occurred to me is that there has been a persistent myth about RNA vaccines being promoted by the antivaccine movement. Perhaps youve seen it? Yes? No?

Perhaps youve seen memes like this:

Or this one:

Or this one:

Or this one:

You get the idea. One major theme of antivaccine disinformation related to potential RNA vaccines against COVID-19 is that the RNA used in the vaccine will somehow permanently reprogram your DNA in nefarious ways. Its a claim that goes back at least to May, if not sooner, and arose as soon as antivaxxers became aware that one of the leading candidate vaccines against COVID-19 was Modernas RNA vaccine. After that, it soon became a standard talking point in the antivaccine movements pre-emptive disinformation war against COVID-19 vaccines. Why would anyone want to do this? Conspiracy theorists always havereasonsof course. Some say that its to mark people. Some people say its to develop a technology that allows you to inject DNA directly into cells and reprogram them (Would that this were true! Such technologies would make gene therapy so much less difficult!) Often, antivaxxers conflate RNA with DNA and vice-versa, not realizing that, although both molecules contain genetic information needed for a cell to make protein, they are nonetheless very different in characteristics and behavior.

Of course, to experts the claim that RNA vaccines will somehow reprogram your DNA claims are utterly risible in the ignorance of basic biology and biochemistry necessary to make such unscientific claims. But to nonexperts, most of whom probably long ago forgot their basic biology (if they ever learned it at all), the concept of a vaccine that turns your own cells into little factories making part of a key protein from COVID-19 that provokes a protective immune response (more on the specifics later) can seem quite plausibleand scary. Of course, fear is exactly the intended purpose of the antivaccine disinformation claiming that RNA vaccines will somehow reprogram your DNA and permanently alter you genetically. (We do hope for one permanent alteration in our biology as a result of a COVID-19, though, namely immunity to SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Unfortunately, its not yet clear how long such immunity will last.) So lets examine the claims being made and why you dont have to fear RNA vaccines for COVID-19.

Before we do that, lets look at what mRNA vaccines are, how they work, and what their advantages and disadvantages are compared to traditional vaccines.

mRNA vaccines rely on something Ive discussed before, namely the central dogma of molecular biology. I must admit, Ive always hated the use of the word dogma associated with science, but no less a luminary than Francis Crick first stated it in 1958, and it has been restated over the years in various ways. Perhaps my favorite version of the central dogma was succinctly stated by Marshall Nirenberg in 1958 and has since been commonly paraphrased to say, DNA makes RNA makes protein, which about summed up all of molecular biology in five words. (Why I used the past tense in a moment.) In any event, for purposes of understanding RNA viruses, this is the main sequence that you need to understand:

Basically, DNA replicates from a DNA template and results in a double-stranded molecule that is very stable, as it has complementary sequences that tightly bind to each other in a sequence-specific fashion. This DNA template is unwound by enzymes that use the template to make RNA strands, which are single-stranded, which is then used by a ribosome to make protein out of amino acids. Again, to put it simply, each nucleotide equals one letter of the code; each three-nucleotide sequence (codon) equals one word that translates to an amino acid. Given that there are four nucleotides, there are 64 possible codons. Since there are only 20 amino acids, that means that most amino acids are encoded by more than one combination of nucleotides or more than one codon; i.e., the genetic code is redundant. Of course, its more complicated than that, as this diagram shows:

Heres a little video thats useful too:

For instance, messenger RNA (mRNA) doesnt always start out fully formed. Often its made as a longer precursor molecule that is spliced to the final mRNA sequence before being transported out of the nucleus into the cytoplasm to be used to make protein.

In fact, its even more complicated than that. Remember how I used the past tense when I said that the central dogma summed up all of molecular biology? It did, but then we started finding exceptions to the central dogma, such as retroviruses and microRNAs that can regulate gene expression, for instance. You dont really need to know the gory details of many of these, although I will mention a couple of relevant ones and refer you to a post that does go into the gory details, for anyone whos really interested.

Exceptions aside, RNA vaccines consist mainly of, well, RNA. One problem with RNA vaccines is that RNA is an inherently unstable molecule. It is, after all, a messenger. It doesnt need to persist any longer than the message needs to be made. In aqueous solution, RNA molecules rapidly degrade. Indeed, the instability of RNA is why public health experts have been concerned about distributing RNA vaccines. Both companies adopted a similar strategy in designing their mRNA to encode the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein with stabilizing mutations added to lock this surface protein into a form easily recognizable to the immune system and therefore make it a better antigen. Pfizer and Moderna also used modified nucleosides (the RNA equivalent to DNA nucleotides) that are more stable to make their RNAs, and placed their RNA within a lipid nanoparticle (LNP) delivery system in which LNPs fuse with the cell membrane to deliver the RNA to the cytoplasm. Nonetheless, there are huge differences in the temperatures at which these vaccines need to be stored to remain stable and active.

Heres what I mean. The Pfizer vaccine (developed in partnership with a company called BioNTech) reportedly needs to be stored at -80C. While I have a -80C freezer in my laboratory (to store RNA samples, among other things), most physicians offices and clinics do not, because such freezers are large and very expensive compared to the more common refrigerators (which generally maintain a temperature of around 4C) and standard freezers (which maintain a temperature of around -20C). Even many hospitals do not have enough -80C freezers to store large quantities of vaccine. Similarly, because of the temperature necessary to keep the vaccine stable and active, transporting the Pfizer vaccine presents logistical challenges, because the vaccine must be kept at -80C or colder during the entire chain of transport. It can be done, using dry ice, of course, but its difficult, and one could easily imagine an impending dry ice shortage once such vaccines roll out. To this end, both companies have apparently used modified nucleotides to try to make their mRNA molecules more stable The Moderna vaccine, in contrast, can reportedly be stored at -20C for up to six months, which is much more doable, as most standard freezers can reach this temperature. Even better, the Moderna vaccine will remain stable at standard refrigerator temperatures of 2 to 8C (36 to 46F) for up to 30 days and remains stable at room temperature for up to 12 hours. Why the difference? Its hard to know for sure, as both companies are tight-lipped about the exact differences in their vaccines. A Moderna spokesperson explained to NPR:

Moderna spokesperson Colleen Hussey explained to NPR in an email that its vaccine doesnt need to be kept so cold because of its particular lipid nanoparticle properties and structure, and because the company has learned from experience its developed ten mRNA vaccine candidates already. Now we dont need [ultra-cold conditions] as the quality of product has improved and [it] doesnt need to be highly frozen to avoid mRNA degradation, Hussey explained.

In terms of safety and the reported immune response provoked by the two competing vaccines:

On the safety side, while both BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273 were generally well tolerated by participants of phase 3 trials, with most side effects short-lived, the Moderna vaccine was linked to a greater incidence of severe adverse events such as a fatigue and muscle pain after the second shot. Experts speculate that the different dosages (30 micrograms for BNT162b2 versus 100 micrograms for mRNA-1273) could account for the different tolerability profiles.

The Pfizer/BioNtech vaccine might also have a slight edge when it comes to the immune response. In phase 1 trials, with both vaccines, humoral immunity was strong, with virus-neutralizing antibody titers generally surpassing those found in individuals who had recovered from natural infection. As for cellular immunity, both also induced CD4+ T-cell responses skewed toward T-helper type 1 cells. Yet, as reported, only the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine seemed to bring about any sort of cytotoxic CD8+ T cell response. Direct comparisons are difficult, however, as the two vaccine developers used different assays for profiling immune cells.

So basically the two vaccines are very similar in design and differ mainly in their required storage conditions.

Before I move on to explain why antivaxxers claims about mRNA vaccines are nothing but fear mongering, its useful to answer the question: Given all the challenges described above, why use mRNA vaccines at all? Why not make a more traditional vaccine, in which a protein (or proteins or fragments of key proteins) are made and used as antigens to provoke an immune response? Why go to the trouble of using mRNA vaccines to get the bodys own cells to make antigen? The answer is rather simple. RNA is easier and quicker to produce on a mass scale than more traditional protein-based vaccines. Moreover, compared to DNA vaccines (which could achieve the same thing, getting the body to produce the necessary protein antigen), RNA vaccines have a definite safety advantage over DNA vaccines:

Particularly compared with DNA as a therapeutic or more specifically as a vaccine, mRNA offers strong safety advantages.5 As the minimal genetic construct, it harbors only the elements directly required for expression of the encoded protein. Moreover, while recombination between single-stranded RNA molecules may occur in rare cases,6,7 mRNA does not interact with the genome. Thus, potentially detrimental genomic integration is excluded. Finally, this lack of genomic integration in combination with mRNA being non-replicative as well as metabolically decaying within a few days8 makes mRNA a merely transient carrier of information.

Remember that paragraph as I now move on to deconstruct an antivaccine claim regarding COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. The bottom line is that the mRNA used in RNA vaccines cant integrate with your DNA, much less reprogram it.

Although Ive seen a lot of antivaxxers and COVID-19 deniers/minimizers out there sharing a lot of ridiculous memes falsely claiming that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines will somehow reprogram your DNA, one of the grand masters of this claim is a physician named Dr. Carrie Madej. I first encountered her in October and have been meaning to use her to illustrate how unscientific the claims about mRNA vaccines are, given how viral her videos and articles have gone. In particular, her website is Stop World Control, where you can find her video that went viral.

Heres what Stop World Control says about Dr. Madej:

Dr Carrie Madej directed two large medical clinics in the state of Georgia, USA. Since her twenties she has been fascinated by vaccines and studied them ever since. Her in depth research led her to discover what the proposed technologies are for the new COVID-19 vaccines. What she is revealing is alarming.

This video is an in depth documentary that shows how these new vaccines can alter our DNA, turning us into hybrids. The plans are to connect humans to artificial intelligence and global control networks. This is the start of transhumanism, turning us into HUMANS 2.0.

Study. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Seriously, I bet that Dr. Madej studies vaccines in the same way that Mike Adams does, her being a physician notwithstanding.

I found out a bit more. Dr. Madej is an internist in McDonough, Georgia. Shes Medical Director of Phoenix Medical Group of Georgia, where she has a full time practice in Internal Medicine. Her Twitter feed is a wretched hive of scum, quackery, and conspiracy theories. Unsurprisingly, she is an antimasker, seems to buy into every major conspiracy theory about COVID-19 out there, and has appeared on The Alex Jones Show, antivaxxer Sherri Tenpennys show, and on Mike Adams show. She also gave a virtual speech to the gathering of antimaskers and COVID-19 lockdown protesters at Trafalgar Square in September. When I first encountered her last month, I thought it odd that I hadnt heard of her before.

So what is transhumanism? However I describe it, Im sure someone will object, but here goes anyway. Basically, it is a social, scientific, and philosophical movement devoted to the idea that humans can be enhanced by technology, be it biological, computer-based, or physical. The idea is that such technologies would augment or increase human perception, physical abilities, intelligence, and cognition, and also radically improve human health and extend human life spans. Unsurprisingly, the movements adherents tend to be employed in technology, biotech, and academia, and there is a strong link between libertarianism and transhumanism. The ultimate outcome is thought to be the singularity, a time when computers become so advanced that artificial intelligence transcends human intelligence, potentially erasing the boundary between humanity and computers, even leading to the merging of humans and computers. Personally, Ive always looked a bit askance at transhumanism, because there is certainly a lot of woo in the movement. Moreover, transhumanists do tend to assume that the coming singularity will necessarily be a good thing. Science fiction, however, provides many potential counterexamples, SkyNet in the Terminator movies and the Borg in Star Trek being two of the most famous of them.

Science fiction dystopian views of transhumanism aside, I am not opposed on general principle to human-enhancing technologies. After all, what is medicine but an effort over many millennia to overcome the inherent biological weaknesses and defects in humans in order to extend lifespans and enhance the quality of life during those lifespans by preventing premature infirmity and death due to aging and external disease? True, there is a philosophical argument to be had over how much modification might be too much, but thats not what a crank like Dr. Madej is about. Rather, just as antivaxxers have used the COVID-19 pandemic and President Trumps Operation Warp Speed program to stoke fear that any new COVID-19 vaccine will be unsafe, having been rushed to approval too quickly with inadequate safety testing, and thereby to cast doubt on all vaccines, here antivaxxers are painting COVID-19 mRNA vaccines as incipient transhumanism in order toyou guessed it!spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about all vaccines.

Unsurprisingly, ber-quack Dr. Joe Mercola is all on board with this tactic, and it was his article Will New COVID Vaccine Make You Transhuman? that first brought my attention to Dr. Madej. Indeed, if you Google Will COVID-19 vaccine make you transhuman? you will rapidly find a lot of links reposting all or part of Mercolas article, plus articles making the same sort of claim. Im half tempted to respond to the question in the headlines of such articles with Betteridges Law of Headlines and just answer with a resounding No! but unfortunately more is required. In any case, lets see Mercolas take on Madejs article:

Many of the COVID-19 vaccines currently being fast-tracked are not conventional vaccines. Their design is aimed at manipulating your very biology, and therefore have the potential to alter the biology of the entire human race.

Conventional vaccines train your body to recognize and respond to the proteins of a particular virus by injecting a small amount of the actual viral protein into your body, thereby triggering an immune response and the development of antibodies.

This is not what happens with an mRNA vaccine. The theory behind these vaccines is that when you inject the mRNA into your cells, it will stimulate your cells to manufacture their own viral protein. The mRNA COVID-19 vaccine will be the first of its kind. No mRNA vaccine has ever been licensed before. And, to add insult to injury, theyre forgoing all animal safety testing.

Alter the biology of the entire human race? Surely Dr. Mercola must know the central dogma of molecular biology? (Maybe he doesnt.) Again, remember that paragraph I quoted before this section. mRNA like that found in the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines simply cant alter your DNA. As for reprogramming human biology, one could argue that all vaccines do that. Some, such as the ones that can produce lifelong immunity to a vaccine-preventable disease, can do it permanently, by permanently altering the immune system to be able to recognize the relevant antigens when it encounters them again. This whole take is silly. Obviously, what Mercola and Madej are trying to scare readers with is the idea that somehow mRNA vaccines permanently alter your DNA, but, again, they cant do that. They just cant.

Madej also claims (and Mercola repeats):

The problem with all of this, Madej notes, is that theyre using a process called transfection a process used to create genetically modified organisms. She points out that research has confirmed GMO foods are not as healthy as conventional unmodified foods. The question is, might we also become less healthy? Vaccine manufacturers have stated that this will not alter our DNA, our genome, Madej says.I say that is not true. Because if we use this process to make a genetically modified organism, why would it not do the same thing to a human? I dont know why theyre saying that.

If you look at the definition of transfection, it will tell you that it can be a temporary change in the cell. And I think that is what the vaccine manufacturers are banking on.

Or, its a possibility for it to become stable, to be taken up into the genome, and to be so stable that it will start replicating when the genome replicates. Meaning it is now a permanent part of your genome. Thats a chance that were taking. It could be temporary, or it could be permanent.

Dr. Madej says this is not true. Well whoop-de-doo and la-dee-da! No, seriously. This is not a DNA vaccine. One more time, it is not possible for the RNA to become stable and be taken up into the genome. (Indeed, RNA viruses that can integrate into the genome rely on first being reverse transcribed into DNA, which can then be integrated into the genome.) Again, this is Molecular Biology 101. As for transfection, all that is, is a technique to introduce RNA or DNA into cells. Thats it! Most commonly its used to introduce plasmids (circular lengths of DNA containing genes of interest) into cells. Methods range from really old school ones that I used in graduate school 30 years ago, such as calcium phosphate precipitation (which is horrendously inefficient and usually only introduces the plasmid into single digit percentages of the cells) to various liposome-based methods, which are much more efficient and get the desired DNA into a larger percentage of the target cells. (These liposomes were similar to the ones being used by Moderna and Pfizer.) While it is true that the introduction of mRNA into a cell will produce a temporary change, namely that the cells ribosomes will start using the mRNA to make the desired protein, that temporary change is just thattemporary. It has nothing to do with altering the cell permanently, and as soon as the mRNA degrades naturally the cell will go back to normal. Seriously, Dr. Madej, molecular biologists are laughing at you.

Theres so much more in the video that I could unpack but wont, in order to keep my focus on mRNA vaccines. I did let a little slip in regarding Dr. Madejs claim that microneedles and a Hydrogel base will be used to inject the new vaccines; so I might as well briefly explain that shes almost certainly referring to quantum dot tags, which are copper-based quantum dots embedded in biocompatible, micron-scale capsules. Theyre tagged with a near-infrared dye thats invisible, but the pattern they set can be read and interpreted by a customized smartphone. Contrary to Madejs and Mercolas claims, these are not permanent, as the currently estimated time during which they can be read is five years. Moreover, these quantum dot tags are not nearly as nefarious as Madej and Mercola make them sound. For one thing, knowing whos already received a specific vaccine can protect that person from unnecessarily being advised to receive that vaccine again if there is uncertainty over whether they have ever had it. Also, this technology is a long way from being ready for prime time. It is, however, unsurprising that Madej and Mercola would weave a conspiracy theory about it; this is also likely the origin of the conspiracy theory about COVID-19 vaccines claiming that they will implant a chip, and some of the conspiracy theories about it go right into tinfoil hat territory, with one crank claiming, This vaccine will not only mark you like a cattle, you will be injected with nano particules that will make a you a Perfect antenna for the 5G frequencies wich they will use to track you, make you feel and think anything they want and Madej saying:

Were gonna be branded. Each person will have their own ID. This reminds me of World War II. You know, its something to think about, being branded like a product in the storeSo well be branded. What can that be used for. There are lots of technologies out there, and thats something we need to be concerned about.

Gee, that reference to World War II and branding wouldnt be a reference to the Nazis tattooing prisoner identification numbers on the inmates in their concentration camps, would it? More importantly, neither the Moderna nor the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines use microneedles or quantum dot tags.

But back to Madej and Mercolas other claims about RNA vaccines:

Getting back to the mRNA vaccines, time will tell just how hazardous they end up being. Clearly, if the changes end up being permanent, the chance of long-term side effects is much greater than if they end up being temporary.

In a worst-case scenario, whatever changes occur could even be generational. The problem is these issues wont be readily apparent any time soon. In my view, this vaccine could easily turn into a global catastrophe the likes of which weve never experienced before.

We really should not be quick to dismiss the idea that these vaccines may cause permanent genetic changes, because we now have proof that even conventional vaccines have the ability to do that, and they dont involve the insertion of synthetic RNA.

I love that first paragraph. Its the very epitome of just asking questions (a.k.a. JAQing off), in which a crank claims just to be asking questions, never mind that the questions are based on pseudoscience, bad science, and claims that science doesnt support. Moreover, this not-so-dynamic duo seem utterly oblivious to the difference between somatic cells and germ line cells. Alteration of the DNA in somatic cells (every cell in the body except for cells that make eggs in females and sperm in males) are not propagated to the next generation. Alterations of DNA in germline cells can be passed on to the next generation, but theres no evidence that the mRNA in vaccines like the Moderna or Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines can permanently alter germline DNA because these vaccines cant alter any DNA in cells permanently in the way that Madej and Mercola claim.

But what are we to make of Mercolas claim that even conventional vaccines can alter DNA? Its nonsense, of course. Lets look at Mercolas example:

After the H1N1 swine flu of 2009, the ASO3-adjuvanted swine flu vaccine Pandemrix (a fast-tracked vaccine used in Europe but not in the U.S. during 2009-2010) was causally linked9 to childhood narcolepsy, which abruptly skyrocketed in several countries.

Children and teens in Finland, the U.K. and Sweden were among the hardest hit. Further analyses discerned a rise in narcolepsy among adults who received the vaccine as well, although the link wasnt as obvious as that in children and adolescents.

A 2019 study16 reported finding a novel association between Pandemrix-associated narcolepsy and the non-coding RNA gene GDNF-AS1a gene thought to regulate the production of glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor or GDNF, a protein that plays an important role in neuronal survival.

They also confirmed a strong association between vaccine-induced narcolepsy and a certain haplotype, suggesting variation in genes related to immunity and neuronal survival may interact to increase the susceptibility to Pandemrix-induced narcolepsy in certain individuals.

Steve Novella has discussed the issue of whether Pandemrix caused a spike in the incidence of narcolepsy in these countries. Its important to note that this is a strange case. The association was only observed in specific countries and not in others (including the US) in which the vaccine does not appear to be a consistent or unique risk factor for narcolepsy in these populations. Overall, it was a confusing set of data to derive any clear picture of whether the H1N1 vaccine was a true risk factor. On the other hand, there are data suggesting that Pandemrix might trigger the production of antibodies that can also bind to a receptor in brain cells that help regulate sleepiness in genetically susceptible people. Basically, the whole situation is confusing, and its not clear if any of the H1N1 vaccines truly caused narcolepsy.

Also, the study cited by Mercola does not show that the H1N1 vaccine caused permanent genetic changes. The investigators did a genome-wide association study (GWAS), a type of study that frequently finds associations that do not hold up to scrutiny but can nonetheless be useful for hypothesis generation. What this study shows is an association between the haplotype and vaccine-induced narcolepsy, not that the H1N1 vaccine produced permanent genetic changes. Mercola is either grossly ignorant of basic molecular biology, or hes lying, knowing that his audience doesnt know the difference. Take your pick. (I know which option I pick.)

The bottom line is that the fear mongering by Drs. Madej and Mercola is nothing new. The lie that vaccines somehow permanently alter your DNA is not a new one; the rise of mRNA-based vaccines simply makes it easier for antivaxxers to spin a convincing yarn making such false claims. Indeed, I saw the very same claim, namely that vaccines are transhumanism, eight years ago, when Sayer Ji wrote a hilariously silly piece claiming that vaccines are transhumanism in the service of subverting evolution because they interfere with how we have co-evolved with pathogens. (I certainly hope they interfere with our co-evolution with pathogens! Thats rather the point, Id say!) A few years later, antivaxxer Sherri Tenpenny was making the same sort of nonsensical argument, but by then antivaxxers had started pointing to DNA vaccines as a hopelessly unnatural corruption of our genes. Throughout it all, antivaxxers were also making ridiculous claims about how trace amounts of contaminating DNA from the cell lines used to grow viral antigens for some vaccines can somehow get into the brain, express non-self proteins, and trigger an autoimmune response causing autism. Truly, to antivaxxers, DNA and RNA are magic!

When you come right down to it, this new spin on an old antivaccine trope is nothing more than an appeal to nature as being somehow always superior to anything humans can do. Indeed, Dr. Madejs video is nothing new. Months before, a natural healing consultant named Dr. Andrew Kaufmann was featured in a video in which he made very similar claims, including that a future COVID-19 vaccine would provide a vessel to inject genes into humans, first by a procedure known as electroporation, in which an electric current create[s] little holes in our cells that allow the DNA to go into our own cells and then through the insertion of foreign proteins that supposedly generate immunity. Kaufman even concluded that such an mRNA vaccine, like the results of biotechnology in agriculture, will turn humans into genetically modified organisms.

Of course, as I mentioned before, biology is more complex than the central dogma, which was based on an understanding of molecular biology that is now 60 years old. Thats why I, as I enter the conclusion of this post, I will link to an article by Edward Nirenberg, which gets into the weeds of the exceptions to the central dogma as he refutes the nonsensical idea that mRNA vaccines permanently alter your DNA and concludes, quite reasonably:

There is no feasible means by which an mRNA vaccine could end up in the nucleus of a cell, nor prime a reverse transcription reaction, nor give you a mitochondrial disease.

There is no reasonable possibility based on the totality of our knowledge of cell biology, reverse transcriptases, human genetics, and the immune system that mRNA vaccines can affect your DNA.

We should await the detailed safety data, but, a priori, a segment of RNA encoding the spike protein RBD of SARS-CoV-2 with no replicative potential, and no ability to form whole virus, nor even whole ability to form an ENTIRE spike protein, should be expected to be a safe vaccine that isnt going to cause these insane pie-in-the-sky science fiction scenarios.

If you are worried about the mRNA vaccines, then dont get them. The data suggest that there will soon be other kinds of vaccines with good efficacy as well. I, however, am content to roll up my sleeves for one of them.

As I likely will be, once they are available.

On a final note, let me just conclude with a thought about the ridiculous claim that mRNA vaccines permanently alter your DNA or somehow make you transhuman. You have to remember that antivaxxers view vaccines as somehow unnatural to the point of altering what human beings are. Theyve been making that clear ever since I started paying attention to antivaccine pseudoscience two decades ago, and were doing so long before that. Of course, just because something is natural does not make it good, benign, or even just neutral. Nature is harsh, and the battle for survival brutal, and its completely natural for all manner of animals to be eaten by bigger, faster, and hungrier animals, and its just as natural for humans do die horrible deaths from infectious diseases. Indeed, just look at how horrible the deaths suffered by over 260K of my fellow Americans have been, and COVID-19 is entirely natural. Yet the mindset behind so much of alternative medicine and antivaccine views is that natural is always good and that anything synthetic should be viewed with extreme suspicion. (Come to think of it, thats why COVID-19 denialists go to such enormous lengths to falsely portray SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the disease, as somehow unnatural and bioengineered in a laboratory, with the pandemic being a plandemic initiated by global elites to control and subjugate the population.) Its silly, because even natural nutrients and medicines are just as much chemicals as any synthetic nutrient or chemical. We have to judge whether such chemicals are harmful based on science and where the evidence leads us, not based on whether the chemical is natural or not. When considering claims about a novel disease such as COVID-19 and vaccines against it, we must also consider the totality of what we know about biology, especially molecular biology, and how a potential vaccine works in assessing the plausibility of alarmist claims about vaccines like those developed by Moderna and Pfizer. Claims that mRNA vaccines like these can permanently alter your DNA (or make you transhuman) fail miserably on that score.

Think of the claims about mRNA vaccines this way. They are very much of a piece with how quacks glom on to any new finding in molecular biology, particularly the way quacks have hijacked the new science of epigenetics to claim that you can use mind-body interventions to reprogram your own DNA. In quackworld, RNA and DNA are magic, and the disinformation about mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 reflects that belief in magic.

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No, the Moderna and Pfizer RNA vaccines for COVID-19 will ...