Have you ever noticed that any popular book, movie, or TV show, that is set in the future, always portrays society as living under a tyrannical dystopia?

This is due, I believe, to the fact that it would be almost impossible for an intuitive person to conceptualize a future that is not frighteningly bleak, based on our current trajectory. If one were to try, it would likely come off as silly – and unbelievable – and become a flop.

What this indicates to me is that, though many may not like to think about it, we all know what is coming, on some level.

The primary cause of this creeping fate is the rapid and exponential development of technology, which, by its very nature, walks us directly into tyranny, one step at a time.

Privacy, already, has become a thing of the past. There are cameras being installed all over the place. Data about our personal lives and individual habits has become a commodity. It is accumulated, bought, and sold – without our permission – on a grand scale.

Companies mainly use this data to increase the conversion rate of their targeted ads.

While that is unfortunate, it is at least understandable, on a practical business level.

The bigger issue is, what if this data falls into the wrong hands?

A recent article in Wired by investigative reporter Dell Cameron (who, interestingly, has been perma-banned from Twitter), called “The US Is Openly Stockpiling Dirt on All Its Citizens,” details a shocking report that shows how our government is buying up massive amounts of this data.

What the government wants with all of this information, is what I would like to know. I think we can all agree that whatever their motivation is, it can’t be good.

When confronted over this alarming practice by privacy watchdog groups, the government and intelligence agencies loophole response is basically: “It is already bought and sold on the open market anyway, so why not us?”

Cameron writes:

The ODNI’s own panel of advisers makes clear that the government’s static interpretations of what constitutes “publicly available information” poses a significant threat to the public. The advisers decry existing policies that automatically conflate being able to buy information with it being considered “public.” The information being commercially sold about Americans today is “more revealing, available on more people (in bulk), less possible to avoid, and less well understood” than that which is traditionally thought of as being “publicly available.”

Perhaps most controversially, the report states that the government believes it can “persistently” track the phones of “millions of Americans” without a warrant, so long as it pays for the information. Were the government to simply demand access to a device’s location instead, it would be considered a Fourth Amendment “search” and would require a judge’s sign-off. But because companies are willing to sell the information—not only to the US government but to other companies as well—the government considers it “publicly available” and therefore asserts that it “can purchase it.”

This is just one of the countless examples that I can give to show that I am not being paranoid, nor hyperbolic, with the subject of this article.

The development that I am most concerned with, however, is the acceleration of automation technology, which is moving ahead at a breakneck pace.

According to studies, by 2030, automation is projected to eliminate 20 million jobs in the US at the very minimum, with the potential to displace as many as 73 million (46% of the entire workforce!), or more.

That tells me all that I need to know about where we are headed. It feels like watching helplessly as a train barrels toward us at a thousand miles an hour.

I have searched high and low for a well-thought out response to this frightening predicament, and have come up rather empty-handed. The most common counter-argument I have found, ominously, is “we will figure it out.” I want to see scientific arguments, not wishful thinking. By what logic is this a situation that we are going to be able to “figure out”?

The only other argument I have seen is that automation is going to generate so much wealth that it will be heavily taxed, and all of the people out of work will be given free money. If that is the case, why not just leave them in the jobs? Anyone with any sense knows that is not an actual solution, and is in fact a nightmare scenario.

What happens when the oligarchs and tech giants get control of the legal system, and buy off all of our politicians to prevent these laws, or get them rewritten to the benefit of their companies?

We can be absolutely certain that they will be working as hard as they can to pay as close to zero dollars in taxes as possible, as always. It is not in the interest of their shareholders to give large sums of free money to tens of millions of people. These are predatory corporations – not charity organizations.

For everyone who complains about the wealth gap, which has indeed been increasing dramatically in recent years, just wait until all of this automation kicks in and a large chunk of the population is kicked out onto the street with little to no hope of finding another job. I am not a statistician, but I assume the wealth gap is going to rather wide when the figure on the lower end of it is zero.

Unfortunately, not much can really be done about the progression of technology. Even if, hypothetically, our government understood the implications of its development and wanted to take a responsible path, their hands would be tied. There is no way they could willingly opt out, because then we would be guaranteed to fall under the enslavement of those who won’t, such as China.

Yuval Harari, a system lackey and hack who enriches himself by writing inaccurate and superficial pop-science books, has this to say about the coming automation crisis, in his now infamous TED article, “The Rise of the Useless Class”:

The most important question in 21st-century economics may well be: What should we do with all the superfluous people, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better than humans?

. . . we might witness the creation of a massive new unworking class: people devoid of any economic, political or even artistic value, who contribute nothing to the prosperity, power and glory of society. This “useless class” will not merely be unemployed — it will be unemployable.

He continues:

The coming technological bonanza will probably make it feasible to feed and support people even without any effort from their side. But what will keep them occupied and content? One answer might be drugs and computer games. Unnecessary people might spend increasing amounts of time within 3D virtual-reality worlds that would provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the drab reality outside. Yet such a development would deal a mortal blow to the liberal belief in the sacredness of human life and of human experiences. What’s so sacred about useless bums who pass their days devouring artificial experiences?

That is not how human nature works. Men have to have a purpose in life, or they will go mad. They cannot just sit around all day and collect free money and be content. Even at an awful job, at least one can feel like they are taking responsibility to feed their family, putting in an honest day’s work. If you just toss millions of people food like they are a pack of squirrels, we are going to end up with massive civil unrest.

Also, that is going to generate insane levels of entitlement. The masses will be ready to riot at the drop of a hat at all times, if you just hand out free money to them constantly. They will want more, or they will become indignant if a situation comes up where they are going to receive less, or if prices begin to rise but their free money checks are remaining stagnant.

People are going to be pissed about this wealth gap and pissed because they have no jobs and no purpose in life, and eventually they are going to be out for blood.

The elite class is then going to have to wall themselves off and take increasingly drastic repressive measures, in order to prevent being torn to shreds by angry mobs.

That, in my estimation, is how the totalitarian dystopia will come to fruition. It will be a matter of self-preservation by the people in power, and they are going to have an insane amount of scary technology to help them achieve this objective.

There will not be any guilty feelings over these repressive measures either (that is, if these people even have a conscience in the first place), because from their perspective, they will simply be preventing crime.

Cyberpunk and dystopian writers – and unabombers – have foreseen this, and have been trying to warn us for decades.

Continuing to turn a blind eye is not going to do us any good.

Maybe the situation is just too dark for most to want to face. Personally, I have no other option. I search for truth wherever it takes me.

I walk through life, half of the time, with the same sickening nauseous feeling that one would have walking through corpses on a battlefield, anyway, and I have looked into the eyes of evil on way too many occasions.

There is a sadistic element among us at all times, without a doubt. It is hard to gauge the percentage of the population who have sadistic tendencies with precise accurateness, but the current best estimate seems to be about 6-8%. They are the ones who are the plantation owners and the GULAG commandants, when the opportunity arises.

The most vicious and sadistic predators are always the ones who step into power when a nation falls under tyranny. They become the agents of the state.

A tyrannical system loves them, because they are its most loyal defenders. They in turn love the tyrannical system, because it gives them the power to carry out their psychotic fantasies with impunity.

Read about Lavrentiy Beria, the second most powerful person in the Soviet Union upon Stalin’s death, if you don’t believe me. Take a look at what was unearthed from his estate, decades after his well-deserved execution (if you have the stomach for it).

I doubt we are ever going to rid humanity of power-hungry maniacs. They are most likely intrinsic to who and what we are, as a whole. The best we can do is try and keep them in check. If they are able to get the power that they crave, the rest of us are going to be shit out of luck.

Force and intimidation is – and will increasingly become – their primary weapon. They will wield it consciously, and with malicious intent.

If one of those types are allowed to get their hands on me, I will be tortured and murdered, for sure. They have made that perfectly clear with their demonic eyes, time and time again. Me and them are archetypal counterparts. Mortal enemies.

That is why I am assembling roller gangs.* Some people think I am joking about that, but of course I am not joking. It would be suicidal to be outspoken in a cyberpunk dystopia without having multiple roller gangs at your beck and call. I am not suicidal, nor am I stupid. I am having the tanto blade hockey sticks pressed as we speak. These things are not cheap, either. You should send me money.

*Contact my secretary if you would like to join one, and we will start the application process.

The worst possible outcome is I could be captured and tortured, but I am ok with that. I would have to die eventually, and then it would all be over, and I will have become a martyr.

Besides, I keep a cyanide capsule between my teeth at all times – just in case.

I am not sure that I want to grow old, anyway. If I do, I will no doubt eventually be tortured to death by cancer, or some other terrible illness. It would be much more preferable to be assassinated in some kind of spectacular way, long before that, or else to die suddenly from a “spontaneous cerebral hemorrhage,” like my spiritual and literary mentor, Arthur Desmond.

Ultimately, I don’t really care about survival as much as I care about freedom. We are going to go extinct eventually anyway. In fact, the entire human experience is nothing but a flash, in the grand scheme of things. Millions of year are not even the blink of an eye, when you are dealing with an infinite timeline.

In the meantime, while I am still here, I do not want to see my species humiliated and crushed under an oppressive yoke of Mark Zuckerbergs

Where Harari sees “useless bums” and “unnecessary people,” I see fellow humans, many of them kindred spirits. Men who are as bloodthirsty and as bored as I am, and who are, potentially, a walking powder keg.

Whether “drugs and computer games,” as Harari speculates (and porn, I might add), will be enough to keep them docile and accepting of their privacy being incessantly invaded, their purpose being stripped away, and their soul being crushed on a daily basis, only time will tell.

I can’t predict the future exactly, of course. Maybe humanity will instead end up united in a war against machine overlords, Terminator-style (a war against machines that we ourselves created, even though we knew they would most likely attempt to exterminate us.)

Life on earth doesn’t seem so bad currently, but that doesn’t mean it will stay that way. I consider this a lull in history. To believe that things are going to continue the way they are, or somehow progressively get better, is in my opinion, dangerously naive.

The only thing I know for sure, is that we are going to see a lot of crazy things happen in the coming decades. My life expectancy, according to authoritative statistics, is until 2056, and I will probably live even longer than that (if not killed prematurely).

I believe tyranny should be resisted, out of principle, if at all possible, but I don’t really see any way to escape it entirely. It is unlikely that even the brightest minds could save humanity from its fate at this point. If that is true, and technological dystopia is our future and cannot be stopped, some of us should at least learn to navigate it.

So, all jokes aside, I will be sharing some tips and tricks on what I learn, or have already learned, about surviving and thriving in our current hellscape.

Although there may not be much hope for the majority, I believe those of us who possess the requisite bravery and love for freedom and autonomy should band together, and attempt to make it through this with our dignity and sanity intact.

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