“Rebuilding trust” was the theme of this year’s World Economic Forum gathering in Davos. It is as compelling as “Put lipstick on this pig” or “Be slick enough to fool the public” or “Make subjugation look like freedom.”
You can’t build trust in an institution that doesn’t deserve it. In recent years, the WEF has given copious reasons to make the public wary. The organization co-founded by Klaus Schwab in 1970 can no longer advance its agenda without revealing its true colours.
Ten years ago, the WEF hosted a “hackathon” event as the ironic means to propose “FridgeFlix” and the “Appliance Alliance.” The idea was that people could lease all of their household appliances from a provider who would service and update them. Former Danish environment minister Ida Auken wrote about this for The Guardian, and two years later, penned the famous words, “Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.”
Soon the WEF had the slogan published on video: “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.” In response to criticism, Auken said this future was not an intention, but a possibility to ponder as we consider what the future should be.
Then again, the WEF, and the rich, smart, and powerful people in its circle, would rather decide our future for us.
Hebrew University of Jerusalem History professor Yuval Noah Harari, an advisor to the WEF, spoke at the Davos meeting six years ago and asked, “Will the future be human?” In his speech, he literally asked an important question: “Now how exactly will the future masters of the planet look like?”
Schwab would like a digital ID system that would grant access to goods and services and monitor people’s online behavior, purchases, and biometrics. The threat of climate change has become the pretense for regulations and control that would otherwise be dismissed outright, but are now deemed good and necessary.
“Is Klaus Schwab the most dangerous man in the world?” comedian J. P. Sears asked on YouTube last year. The adage “Many a truth is said in jest,” could well apply.
In the video, since seen more than two million times, Schwab states, “One of the features of this fourth industrial revolution is that it…changes you, if you take genetic editing, just as an example.”
Sounds right. Sears also quotes him as saying, “[A]cute crises contribute to boosting the power of the state … There is no reason it should be different with the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Such is the Great Reset, as Schwab likes to call it. As Harari explained (as Sears included in his video), the elites are pondering a transhuman, post-freedom future.
“Humans are now hackable animals. The whole idea that humans have this, you know, this soul or this spirit or they have free will and ‘nobody knows what’s happening inside me,’ so whatever I choose, whether in the election, or whether in the supermarket, this is my free will–that’s over.”
Oh? Thanks for the heads up.
“By hacking organisms, elites may gain the power to re-engineer the future of life itself. … In the past, many tyrants and governments wanted to do it.… Neither the Gestapo nor the KGB could do it. But soon, at least, some corporations and governments will be able to systematically hack all the people,” Harari explained.
“Science is replacing evolution by natural selection with evolution by intelligent design. Not the intelligent design of some god above the clouds but our intelligent design, and the intelligent design of our clouds, the IBM Cloud, the Microsoft Cloud.”
Could IBM, which developed technologies for the Nazis to count and categorize the prisoners in concentration camps, have a role in some future heavy-handed rule?
We can’t say we weren’t warned. It’s no wonder Sears says of Harari, “Didn’t anyone bother telling this guy not to say any of this out loud on camera? It’s just a lot of evidence!”
Yes, the toothpaste is out of the tube. It cannot be put back and it tastes terrible.
Categorizing people and items, controlling their emissions, tracking their movements, it’s all part of the plan for the internet of things. The WEF has active plans to ensure eveyrone has a birth certificate so as not to escape government notice, and that every item of clothing has one too. The New York startup Eon has paved the way for the future through its Connected Products platform.
“The platform gives each new fashion item a digital birth certificate which includes information about where and when it was made and what it’s made from. That’s linked to a ‘digital twin’, a virtual replica of the real product, and a digital passport that tracks the product through its life,” the WEF explains in a 2021 web post.
All this is done in the name of sustainability, but is really about power and control. Perhaps Sears said it best: “We are in the process of either the Great Reset or the Great Awakening, and the choice isn’t Klaus Schwab’s — the choice is yours.”
Lee Harding is Research Fellow for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
