Previously published in GRAPH Website
By 2030, there will be technological revolution leading to civilizational transformation which would have no parallel in human history. Unfolding of events will take place at awe-inspiring speed and unprecedented scale. The exponential growth of automation technology, robotics, nanotechnology and synthetic biology will increase manifold the wealth of those handful few who would possess either physical or intellectual capital while the rest of the humanity will be condemned to low wage drudgery. The middle section will decline as never before since its emergence in the pre-capitalist era. A miniscule minority will grab high end jobs while the vast majority people will have no choice but to do menial jobs and live in a veritable living hell.
So believes Mr. Klaus Schwab, the founder and CEO of World Economic Forum. He also believes that the future of human society can not only be presumed, it can be charted out in the line of precision technology. If the myth of ‘fourth industrial revolution’ expounded by him finds embodiment in such an epic proportion, there will remain the possibility that the modern day Prometheus will be born to steal fire from the virtual world to be brought to the people of physical world. Here is why I was led to invoke such a mythical phenomenon.
Fire was the first revolutionary discovery of mankind. It was proved to be a quintessential weapon of struggle for the survival of the most dominating creature of this planet. Technological advancement over last half a century has created a new tool called data which is the equivalent of fire of primitive society in terms of its utility and universality of application. A technocratic vision of future human society is that the economic, social and political predicament of us will be decided by who owns and controls this tool. In the name of insane digitization and mindless automation coupled with artificial intelligence, every human interaction and activity are being recast into bundles of infinite number of data.
The emperor of the virtual world or the billionaire elites adorning his royal court known as ‘world economic forum’, will remain as the monopoly custodians of hundreds of ‘exabytes’ of data being produced every day. He has to ensure his bloodless conquest across the globe and make the entire world the captive market of colossal data that he owns or claims to own by way of patenting. So, he needs to make the physical economy beyond his data empire disappear without a war and instruct the governments to have accretion of power without public unrest. In order to achieve this, it became necessary for him and his cohorts to perpetuate a pervasive fear in the peoples’ mind and tell them to remain confined to their home.
Another unique feature of the data driven totalitarian regime is that the data-empire considers it to be a natural right to seek rent from every form of human needs and activities. Mr. Klaus Schwab made it crystal clear that “the line of demarcation between physical, digital and biological sphere will be blurred” and “every commodity or service needs to be added with digital value chain.” The colossal technological advancement and extreme concentration of power has endowed them with a twin set of weapons, namely the disruptive strategy and disruptive technology. The first one was effectively put into effect in the wake of Covid-19 and the second one is now being invoked purportedly to counter the cyber pandemic.
The mock staging of cyber pandemic has been named polygon 2021. It has started on 9th July, this year, exactly in the same way the emperor held Event 201 in October, 2019, just three months before the outbreak of Covid-19.
If it is not yet clear who the emperor is and what he has to do with the mock staging of various pandemics, let’s listen to what Mr. Klaus Schwab has said, “Indeed! For years, international organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO), institutions like the World Economic Forum and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), and individuals like Bill Gates have been warning us about the next pandemic risk”. The ‘individual’ has been neither a microbiologist nor an epidemiologist but he has penchant for prophecy and insatiable desire to expand his vaccine empire across the world. He wanted 7 billion people to be vaccinated with Covid vaccines. Mr. Schwab articulated and advocated his fancies in a different way - “a full return to the normal cannot be envisaged before a vaccine is available”.
The monumental destruction of economy, effacement of millions of jobs and businesses were wrongly attributed to the virus, though every informed person of the earth knows that no virus can ever be so selective in causing mayhem to the physical economy of people at large and hugely increasing the wealth of billionaires representing the big pharma, tech-giants, big financial corporations and digital trade. Destructive strategy was implemented through a human intervention called lockdown and it was falsely linked to the virulence of virus whose infection fatality was just 0.23 % which is comparable with that of other respiratory viruses.
Vaccine was developed and marketed at break-neck speed defying the normal time line and by-passing mandatory phases of trials. Mr. Schwab saw nothing unscrupulous or unscientific in it, he reiterated, “So the reason is production, not science.” Even before the production was underway the major vaccine makers bagged a total of about $10 billion US dollar public money under the cover of operation warp speed. Vaccine roll-out was followed by rising opposition all over the world against suppression of facts on serious side effects including deaths and the push for mandatory vaccination. Many opted for vaccine hoping that normalcy would return and the fear of pandemic will be overcome. For the most optimistic and credulous people, Mr. Klaus Schwab was deceptively stoic in his prediction, “When things will return to normal? The short response is ‘Never’.”
He emphasized on two aspects of Covid-19. It dealt a devastating blow to the existing physical economy beyond the ambit of digital control while it “accelerated the changes” that were already taking place in the direction of ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’. He also suggested that Covid-19 will be followed by many more disruptions to lead his fancied technological revolution to its pinnacle.
One document published by WEF on 1 June, 2021, has cautioned us that if we think the right medicine (read vaccine) and science will tame the virus, we will be awfully wrong. There will be reincarnation of virus in another sphere. It gave us apocalyptic warning, “we should prepare for a COVID-like global cyber pandemic that will spread faster and further than a biological virus, with an equal or greater economic impact.”
Not surprisingly, a parallel has been drawn between the pathogenesis, fatality and transmission dynamics of Covid-19 with the speed of spread and destructive trail of the proposed cyber pandemics. The analogy between a so-called novel virus and a computer virus or malware is not only the product of naiveté and ignorance, it reflects the desperation of digital thugs to fool the people with the same set of algorithm.
“The reproductive rate – or R0 – of COVID-19 is somewhere between two and three without any social distancing” and “by contrast, estimates of R0 of cyber-attacks are 27 and above”, reads the document. It reminds us that the fastest computer worm called sapphire worm infected 75000 devices in 10 minutes and 10.8 million devices in 24 hours and crippled 2 million computers in 150 countries. The digital pirates are suggesting that it is going to be a re-enactment of Covid-19, therefore we have to brace up for social distancing, isolation and dislocation in digital space too. So, their ominous prediction goes, “If the vector were a popular social networking application with, say, 2 billion users, a virus with a reproductive rate of 20 may take five days to infect over 1 billion devices.” This cyber virus resembles its biological ancestor so closely in predictable disruption (which should be considered outlandish and bizarre in normal time) that “If cyber-COVID mirrored the pathology of the novel coronavirus, 30% of infected systems would be asymptomatic and spread the virus while half would be malfunctioning, the digital equivalent of being in bed for a week, 15 % would be wiped with total data loss and 5% would be inoperable.”
By now, you might have guessed what is going to be their prescribed treatment protocol in conjunction with Covid appropriate digital behavior and what would authoritarianism be like in the so called digital democracy. They went on saying, “The end result: millions of devices would be taken off line in a matter of days. The only way to stop the exponential propagation of cyber-COVID would be to fully disconnect all vulnerable devices from one another and the internet to avoid infection. The whole world could experience cyber lockdown until a digital vaccine was developed. All business communication and data transfers would be blocked. Social contact would be reduced to people contactable by in-person visits, copper landline, snail-mail or short-wave radio. A 21- day global cyber lockdown could cost over $ 1 trillion.”
But the question remains who is going to benefit from this orchestrated mayhem? “Replacing 5% of the world’s connected devices would require around 71 million new devices. It would be impossible for manufacturers to rapidly scale up production to meet demand”. Taking cue from Covid-19, you have already had enough understanding on how a life time opportunity could be created for the market of experimental, re-purposed medicines, ventilators and the predatory hospital industry. The manipulation and diktat of market applies to every season and every sphere regardless of whether the incarnation of virus is biological or digital. The big corporations who stood to gain from Covid-19 were largely represented by their CEOs in the event 201.
Who are the corporate bosses of largest financial and tech companies now running the polygon 2021 show to herald the impending cyber COVID? Under the aegis of world economic forum, the centre for cyber security was formed in partnership with Sberbank, IBM. Among the protagonists of the polygon 21 were Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder; Jürgen Stock, Secretary-General of Interpol; Roger Halbheer, Chief Security Advisor, Microsoft; Peter Maurer, President, International Committee of the Red Cross; Mark Barnett, President of Mastercard Europe; Mathew Dill, Global Head of Strategic Partnerships and Ventures, Senior Vice President, Visa.
In the beginning of COVID-19, we saw the director general of WHO sermonising the world that “we are in an uncharted territory.” Similarly, the cyber Covid has got a sagacious headman who is Craig Jones, Cybercrime Director at INTERPOL who said that in its current form, international regulation isn't enough to stop global ransomware attacks. Nobody was there to ask him the moot question, why have you been there at international cyber police headquarters and what are you doing here cosying up with the heads of big corporations brainstorming on what form of digital money will be the legal tender, how the mid-sized banks will fall in line with the diktat of big banks. Nobody asked, how the power grid corporations will be forced to adopt prescribed cyber security measures, how the businesses and enterprises refusing to come under the command of digital dictatorship will perish and how the entire schooling system will be revamped on cyber secure digital platforms.
However, the worst has not yet come in the sense that we have to see the cyber police chief giving emergency authorization of cyber vaccine. But it is very likely that media will soon join the bandwagon to advise the people and organizations to invest in cyber security measures which will be the equivalent of cyber vaccine. It is not at all reassuring news that Nike Gowing, news editor of BBC took part in the brain storming session.
Klaus Schwab opened Cyber Polygon 2021 by saying: "A lack of cyber security has become a clear and immediate danger to our society worldwide. We have seen in the past few months, for example, ransomware attacks targeting hospitals, critical infrastructure, school systems, the power grid, and many other essential services". It explains why the digital dictators are telling the people that the impact of cyber lockdown in the aftermath of cyber COVID will be far wider and more devastating. Still then, if someone has an element of skepticism that the emperor of virtual world is toying with his fancies or fuelling the conspiratory theory to perturb the most sensible minds, he or she should again be reminded of the standpoint of WEF that “COVID-19 was a known and anticipated risk.” And, “So, too, is the digital equivalent.”
Under the looming digital authoritarianism, there will be very thin difference between the known and unknown, peace and war and violence or nonviolence; so does the ideologue of ‘fourth industrial revolution’ believe. He also believes that the future human society will be robbed of compassion and empathy and devoid of heart and soul. It is up to the rest of humanity to decide whether our outdated belief systems, political thoughts and systems will be shaken to its foundation to stand the biggest ever existential threat to human civilization. It is up to us whether our legacy of struggle, determination and resilience will be dissolved in the context of pandemics in sync with what Mr. Klaus Schwab has predicted.
Unlike him, we do not know anything for certain. We do not know either, whether the mythical Prometheus will be recalled to bring back the fire that lit up the torch of civilization.
