MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS

Many people do not know that back when I was just a baby futurist and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke was making some pretty accurate predictions about the City of Tomorrow.

He appeared on the BBC’s television program “Horizon” and predicted the future 50 years hence, which at that time would have been 2014. As a science fiction author, he was pretty good at predicting technology; though he said right up front that, “Trying to predict the future is a discouraging, hazardous occupation.”

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That didn’t stop him from listing a number of things that he saw happening and while there were doomsayers in his day, Clarke seemed optimistic. Missing from his speech were talks about nuclear annihilation and end times eschaton babble.

He stated that the City of the Future may not be all brick and mortar and that “It will be possible, in the future, perhaps only 50 years from now, for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti or Bali just as well as he could from London.”

Clarke of course was thinking about the computer and its ability to connect the world and make it smaller – or in his words, makes it easy for men and women to do tasks from their homes or wherever they may be.

He says when that time comes, the Earth will shrink to a point and the traditional role of the city as a meeting place for man, would cease to make any sense.

He predicted that we would no longer need to commute, but it will be important for us to communicate.

He worried thought that if man was to go into hiding with his technology, the city would become one big technological suburb instead of a hub for pleasure and passing time.

He goes on to speak of bioengineering – literally creating servants using genetics and technologies available for a group of automatons willing to work for us. He trails off talking about remote controlled chimpanzees or some other creature that can be electronically domesticated.

Well, Clarke sort of hit the mark – the internet has now shrunk the Earth to a point, we can do business anywhere in the world without even going there physically, and we are capable of creating servants that work under remote control. It is argued that sub dermal chips or nano particles attached to neurons can change brain chemistry in order to create the perfectly programmed human.

It can also be said, that it isn’t always necessary to attach technology to the brain to keep someone under control. Programming can become simple and sophisticated with just a tweaking of what are called algorithms.

Several months ago, one of the early pioneers of Facebook and its first President Sean Parker, voiced his regret regarding helping create social media in the form we know it today, saying:

“I don’t know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying, because of the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people and it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other,”…

”God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

Parker says that Facebook exploits human psychological vulnerabilities through a validation feedback loop that gets people to constantly post to get even more likes and comments.

“It’s exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting vulnerability in human psychology,” he said.

“The inventors, creators — it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”

Chamath Palihapitiya, former vice president of user growth at Facebook stated at a recent public discussion at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”

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”The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” Palihapitiya said.

“No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem – this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”

Palihapitiya then expressed the feeling of guilt, “I feel tremendous guilt. I think we all knew in the back of our minds , even though we feigned this whole line of, like, there probably aren’t any bad unintended consequences. I think in the back, deep, deep recesses of, we kind of knew something bad could happen. But I think the way we defined it was not like this.”

“So we are in a really bad state of affairs right now, in my opinion. It is eroding the core foundation of how people behave by and between each other. And I don’t have a good solution. My solution is I just don’t use these tools anymore. I haven’t for years.”

Concerning the issue of social media as a whole, Palihapitiya stated that he doesn’t use it anymore since he “innately didn’t want to get programmed.” He also prohibits his kids from using it.

Then he goes on to express some really strong sentiments:

“Bad actors can now manipulate large swaths of people to do anything you want. It’s a bad, bad state of affairs. And we compound the problem. We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection, because we get rewarded in these short term signals: Hearts, likes, thumbs up. And we conflate that with value and we conflate it with truth, and instead what it really is fake, brittle popularity that’s short term and that leaves you even more, and admit it, vacant and empty before you did it. Because it forces you into this vicious cycle about what’s the next thing I need to do, because I need it back. And think about that compounded by two billion people.”

“Everybody else has to soul-search a little bit more about what you’re willing to do,” he said.

“Because your behaviors, you don’t realize it, but you are being programmed. It was unintentional, but now you gotta decide how much you’re willing to give up, how much of your intellectual independence.”

He finishes this up by warning the audience not to think they’re too smart to fall for the implications of social media, and stated that those who are best-and-brightest are the most likely to fall for it, “because you are fucking check-boxing your whole Goddamn life.”

It is a bit like Dr. Frankenstein warning people that his creation has become a monster and that it can be dangerous.

This simple programming apparatus and recorder of your thoughts and feelings is deeply meshed with what can be seen as your soul and when allowed the monster can program your soul for whatever it sees as fit for you to consume or absorb, even if it is misinformation or even information from others who wish to impugn your character.

Once again, we know a little about biology, we jeer of breakthroughs in neuroscience, computing, robotics, and materials to hack the human body. We keep hearing that technocrats want to reshape the body and make it more of a machine in our own image.

It is now advantageous for technocrats to map the human mind in order to be able to program it and either implant memories, or remove them.

Mind control has taken on a physical and scientific dimension that threatens to become a permanent state. The interest is in the idea that a city of the future can be controlled and that human resource can be programmed like human SIMS to not question the motives of the controller. Those who resist their programming will then become combatants in their own communities and can and will be sent to camps where they can be programmed on a more intense manner.

There has always been a coordinated script in place for a very long time with the goal to turn the human race into non-thinking automatons.

There has always been a struggle for world domination and that domination includes mass murder, genocide, and the oppression and enslavement of a group of people at the expense of the powerful and privileged.

The New World Order is already seen as the system of a latter day Babylon that will be implemented with a select elite living in luxury while a dehumanized mass work and live in a highly-monitored hell.

The plan is already underway and while the programming systems like social media have us hooked the next phase is the creation of the Smart City.

Technology has always been a critical force deeply intertwined with the evolution of cities. From the first human settlements millennia ago to the industrial revolution to today, technological breakthroughs have impacted the buildings we use, the way we get around, and how we live, work, and play in the urban space.

Now, as we are on the cusp of further rapid shifts in cities precipitated by technology, it is worth imagining what the connected smart city of the future will look like – and the associated impact it will have on our everyday lives.

Take a typical day in the life of a community member in this hypothetical future that wakes up in their connected house with Artificial Intelligence automating everything from temperature preference to light levels to health monitoring and more – and scale it to the city at large. Cities are beginning to, and will continue to, integrate technological dynamism into municipal operations, from transportation to infrastructure repair and more.

The back ends of these systems are not always apparent to the end user, but as the integration of smart cities technologies becomes more visible in our everyday lives, we could begin to see large scale changes in our cities. Autonomous Vehicles on our roadways and the data that they provide could create environments where traffic lights become obsolete, traffic itself becomes a thing of the past, and cities can once again be for people rather than cars, as different modes of transportation work in tandem and communicate with each another. Wi-Fi hotspots at scale like we are already starting to see in New York with LinkNYC could help transform the way we access information and help alleviate the digital divide.

A recent article in the Erie-Times revealed that ‘Secure Smart City’ (SSC) projects are really police cam-share programs in disguise. The article boasts that the city of Erie will soon get fast, public Wi-Fi as well as a video surveillance system that can alert law enforcement of potential threats.

It starts to get interesting when Mayor Joe Schember admits that the SSC surveillance system “could relay real-time information to city officials”.

Spying on citizens in real-time is only the beginning of this privacy nightmare.

The Erie Downtown Partnership will give businesses $25,000 in grant money to purchase surveillance systems, however, “any business that receives such a grant must agree to voluntarily turn footage over to law enforcement if it can help solve a crime.”

Police cam-share programs start by law enforcement ‘asking’ businesses and homeowners to install surveillance cameras and turning over any footage to them. They market these programs as a way to improve the community by making cities and towns desirable to companies and visitors looking for safe streets. But often obscure the fact that their primary goal is surveilling citizens.

Who is behind police cam-share programs?

The Department of Homeland Security and other agencies that want to make the “Smart City” a virtual gulag with a built in panopticon in order to spy on the citizens.

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Police cam-share programs like Project Green Light use Motorola’s ‘CommandCentral Aware’ application that allows police to surveil citizens in real-time, 24 hours a day, in stores, gas stations, restaurants, and other businesses. Motorola Solutions even has a State Homeland Security Program that allows police departments to access CCTV surveillance camera systems and much more.

And in Boston, BPD Captain Tim Connolly admitted they want the Boston Regional Intelligence Center to run their cam-share program. Is it a coincidence that shortly thereafter, he was re-assigned to BPD’s Homeland Security Unit?

With so many connections to Homeland Security one has to ask, are ‘SSC’s and police cam-share programs an unofficial national surveillance program?

It appears that the Smart City idea is nothing more than a cover for more mass surveillance while providing luxuries through innovation.

The problem is that Smart Cities will have to utilize the new 5G technologies in order to be efficient.

This will increase the risks of electro-smog in the Smart City environment.

Electrical Pollution, also known as “Electrosmog” or “E-Smog” is pollution from sources of Electromagnetic Fields (EMF) and Electromagnetic Radiation (EMR).

Electromagnetic Radiation includes cell phone and wireless WiFi radiation which operates via Microwave Radiation. This is also sometimes referred to as Microwave Frequency (MW), RadioFrequency (RF) and RadioFrequncey Radiation (RF).

Infrastructure installed by Telecom and utility companies also produces harmful Electrosmog. Personal electronic and WiFi operating devices contribute to Electrosmog as well.

In 2007, the Bioinitiative Working Group, an international collaboration of prestigious scientists and public health policy experts from the United States, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, and China, released a 650-page report citing more than 2,000 studies (many very recent) that detail the toxic effects of EMFs from all sources.

Chronic exposure to even low-level radiation (like that from cell phones), the scientists concluded, can cause a variety of cancers, impair immunity, and contribute to Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, heart disease, and many other ailments.

Also according to the article, Electrical Hypersensitivity (EHS) is becoming more widespread.

Experts say up to 3% of all people are clinically hypersensitive (to sources of Electrosmog), as many as 1/3 of us to a lesser degree.

Electrical pollution is increasing dramatically.

The article also includes historical events which led to research confirming that sources of Electrosmog had caused harm.

“The Race for 5G,” “The Internet of Things (IoT).” “Smart Cities,” “Automated Vehicles,” and “Artificial Intelligence (AI) may sound really cool; HOWEVER, they involve the installation of more wireless infrastructure including small 4G and 5G small cell towers everywhere including in front of homes. Some of this has already been installed.

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There is research already that proves harm from 5G and of course everything leading up to it. In 2014, The Wall Street Journal reported that 1 in 10 cell tower sites violated federal safety standards.

More towers mean more Electrosmog.

In addition, since 2009, tens of millions of digital and wireless utility “Smart” Meters have been installed. They also contribute to Electrosmog. A documentary about this was produced in 2013, Take Back Your Power. All over the world, organizations have popped up because people don’t want these meters on their homes or in their communities due to documented health, safety, and privacy issues.

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“Smart” Meters have been a colossal failure. Millions have already been replaced for various reasons including early depreciation, fires, explosions, malfunctioning, measurement errors, and short life spans.

You would think that “Smart” Meters would have every single environmentalist on the planet completely up in arms.

No, not at all.

The more pressing issues are now climate change – not because it is a real issue – but because it is heavily-funded by political interests who are more interested in profiting off of well programmed dupes who have been conned by technocratic malfeasance.

Many environmentalists seem to think that eventually Smart Meters, Autonomous Vehicles, and Smart Cities are the answer to fossil fuels that are allegedly changing our climate.

There needs to be a shift to more precautionary policies creates opportunities and challenges for scientists to think differently about the ways they conduct studies and communicate results.

There is a complicated feedback relation between the discoveries of science and the setting of policy. While maintaining their objectivity and focus on understanding the world, environmental scientists should be aware of the policy uses of their work and of their social responsibility to do science that protects human health and the environment.

As cities continue booming, their challenges need to be carefully thought through so that population growth, economic development and social progress walk on the same path.

Written by Ron Patton