Empire of Illusion
"We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”." ~ Solzhenitsyn
I am starting with Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, and I will end with him. In between I will talk about some terrible people and what they are doing. But always keep this image in mind.
You can listen to me read this essay here:
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Forbes has just put out its 38th Annual World’s Billionaires List, and okay, you might say, why do you keep talking about these guys? Why should I care?
Because they are the ones controlling the media. They are the ones stealing your data. They are the ones feeding your words and ideas to AI. They are the ones programing you to accept it all. And yes, there could be others who are pulling the strings from the shadows, but I don’t know who they are. I do know evil when I see it. I take evil very seriously. So, let’s face this evil that makes no attempt to hide itself, and deal with it.
First of all, let’s look at some rather startling facts about billionaires and the companies they own.
According to Forbes, the planet has a record 2,781 billionaires who are worth a record $14.2 trillion.
…141 more than in 2023 and 26 more than the previous record, set in 2021.
As with the economy in general, the money is concentrated at the very top. There are now a record 14 people who are members of the $100 Billion Club… These lucky few are worth $2 trillion in all, meaning just 0.5% of the world’s 2,781 billionaires hold 14% of all billionaire wealth.
No one has gained more, in sheer dollar terms, than Mark Zuckerberg, who has benefited—to the tune of a $116.2 billion jump in a single year—thanks to…big bets on AI and the metaverse.
Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH, is the richest person in the world with a net worth of $231 billion. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk vie for second place with $200 billion, their competition played out in the media with great gusto.
It’s interesting to note that over the past couple of years, Elon Musk has lost more money than anyone in history, to the tune of $200 billion.
Of course, since the wealthy lie about money—especially their own—we can figure they have more than this, we just don’t know about it.
If money is power, then the fact that 8 OF THE TOP 10 BILLIONAIRES MADE THEIR MONEY IN THE TECH INDUSTRY tells us who rules.
At $3 trillion, APPLE IS THE MOST POWERFUL COMPANY IN THE WORLD. You can read more about it in my essay How COVID turned APPLE into the Most Powerful Company in the World.
None of us can really grasp what $3 trillion looks like.
Put it like this: $1 trillion in $100 dollar bills is 40,000,000 inches high, which is 631 miles.
But that still doesn’t tell us what it means in practical terms. So, let’s compare the wealth of the tech industry to the wealth of the weapons industry. The results might surprise you.
TOP 5 WEAPONS COMPANIES:
Raytheon Technologies $127 billion
Boeing $116 billion
Lockheed Martin Corp. $108.89 billion
General Dynamics Corp. $77 billion
Northrop Grumman Corp. $72 billion
TOP 5 TECH COMPANIES:
Apple Inc. $3 trillion
Microsoft Corp. $3 trillion
Nvidia Corp. $2.2 trillion
Alphabet (Google) $1 trillion
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. $700 billion
The weapons industry is booming more than ever. Yet, it still cannot compare to the wealth and power of tech. When we see these terrible wars and hear about them constantly in the news, it’s easy to forget that there is another war going on behind the scenes and it is every bit as important.
Since the unveiling of ChatGPT about a year ago, the most powerful tech companies have been locked in “what has been dubbed the ‘AI arms race’ in an attempt to develop and roll out artificially intelligent tech before any one firm dominates the market.”
As the most powerful company of the bunch, Apple is also the most secretive, spending millions of dollars a day training its most advanced AI model, called Ajax.
Elon Musk has his “Grok 2” coming out soon which he claims will “exceed current AI on all metrics."
There are others and in the Wild West of technology, anything can happen from one day to the next. But of one thing we can be sure. These top companies have solidified their positions and when they see smaller companies rising beneath them, either they gobble them up or ensure that they fail.
The masses already exist on a level of value beneath the machines, we just don’t know it yet. It is thanks to our insatiable appetite for “things” that these tech companies have grown so powerful. We bought the stuff they convinced us we just had to have. In exchange, they took our data and fed it to their machines so they could understand us better—so we would then buy more stuff and on and on.
But that wasn’t enough exploitation for the billionaires. They’ve flipped the script. No longer is it about humans as consumers so much as it’s about machines consuming us. Yes, we still buy stuff, lots of stuff. But we give away our souls on social media. The more we give away, the deeper AI burrows inside of us.
Take X, which used to be called Twitter. Elon Musk isn’t interested in free speech, much as he wants us to believe he is. He is interested in the billions of conversations people are having—real people, not bots. Hate speech and love speech. Politics and health. Travel, adventure. Religion, philosophy. Everything. The short snappy limited content of Twitter wasn’t enough. AI needed more. Billions upon billions of words to feed its insatiable appetite.
In Suffer the Little Children, I wrote about how the data of babies and toddlers is now being fed to AI, so that machines will learn to develop intuitively, just like children do. I wrote about how researchers in China developed the first AI child called Tong Tong, which literally means Little Girl. And how researchers at New York University strapped a headset with a camera onto a baby named Sam and collected data consisting of the sights and sounds he experienced while learning to talk.
These companies need massive amounts of data to train powerful, accurate and high-quality AI algorithms. For instance, ChatGPT was trained on 570 gigabytes of text data, or about 300 billion words. The problem is, the more information they stuff into AI, the more information it needs. They anticipate running out of data by the year 2026. Synthetic data doesn’t work. Feeding AI-generated data back into AI causes a kind of “inbreeding”.
After just 5 training cycles on synthetic data, AI models like ChatGPT tend to go "MAD" (Model Autophagy Disorder) and start acting strangely. Weird stuff happens, like below:
Or worse, AI that is fed lots of religious text, for example, can start talking in “God’s voice.” How long before it thinks it is God?
AI constantly needs fresh data from real people, or it loses touch with reality. Kind of creepy, since we are being encouraged more and more to live inside fake realities. If fakery makes machines MAD, what is it doing to us?
Still, people don’t seem to think it’s any big deal. First, we were conditioned to buy stuff in the real world that we didn’t need, assured it would make us happy. That conditioning made it easier to convince us we could be even happier if we buy stuff in the fake world.
The metaverse is predicted to become a $800 billion market opportunity. In the metaverse, we can build any kind of mansion we want. We can drive any kind of car we want. We can buy a Lamborghini, if we have enough credit. We can drive it to a movie premiere with our avatar wearing the latest designer clothes, just like we saw celebrities do on TV. Hey, we can be the celebrities in our own empire. We can be the King. God. Why not?
Here’s the world’s first ultra-luxury metaverse mansion. You sure can get in a lot of credit card debt buying this house. But it will be worth it if you live in a depressing pillbox of an apartment in real life. You might be tempted to sell your very soul to live here:
What better way for the powerful to pacify and control the populace? All the while, AI can continue feeding off our minds and growing more human while we fade into the ether.
The masses have always been indoctrinated and controlled by the powerful. The most notorious examples that come to mind from recent history are Stalin, Hitler and Mao Zedong.
It is said that Mao killed the most people in history. At least 45 million people between 1958 and 1962 died due to his policies.
As one example of the cruelty of those times, historian Frank Dikötter wrote for History Today, “When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, local boss Xiong Dechang forced his father to bury him alive. The father died of grief a few days later.”
We in the West have no concept of such cruelty. Scroll through social media, and all people do is complain about their miserable lives. Everyone has been conditioned to demand their right to be “happy” ((whatever that means) and if they aren’t, it is someone else’s fault never their own. If I tell people to be thankful for our freedoms in the United States, many get offended. No, we aren’t free, they say.
I will tell you the day I know freedom is gone: The day I am locked in prison or thrown from a balcony for saying what I am saying right now. I know of people in Egypt who experience this kind of terror. I know people who experienced it under communism. We certainly aren’t there yet.
Anyway, our leaders don’t have to do to us what Mao or Stalin or Hitler did to their citizens. They don’t have to imprison or torture us. We do that to ourselves. The reason we do it is because of the indoctrination we have been subjected to over the years. And that is thanks to the internet. We are fed propaganda 24/7 and even those of us who study it and are sensitive towards it, if we are honest, don’t realize the effect it has on us.
Here is an example of what I’m talking about when I say we do it to ourselves.
In the past, Chinese women were forced to have their feet bound for the sake of beauty. There was enormous pressure from society to do this. Without it, women were not accepted.
In the West, women slice open their breasts and balloons are inserted so they look more “beautiful”. This isn’t forced on women. They do it to themselves—and they pay a lot of their hard-earned money to do it.
Women suffering from “low self-esteem” because of their small breasts are convinced this will make them feel better about themselves. Over a 24-year period, from 1997-2021, 7.2-million women in the U.S. received breast implants. Of course, we now know this isn’t healthy. But then, anyone with common sense should have always known that. But we often do things that are self-destructive when we have been brainwashed into thinking they will help us.
Oddly enough, men now put on prosthetic boobs, too, like this poor soul, insisting that they are women.
Men who want to be more “manly” put balloons in their muscles.
Women and men slice up their faces and inject their lips to the point of absurdity. But it should all be respected, as we are all free to do and be whatever makes us “happy”.
What makes it even more insane is that people PAY to suffer this abuse. It isn’t done to them against their will. It isn’t like a twelve-year-old girl in Egypt being held down and having her clitoris cut off without her consent. No. In the West, we’ve been indoctrinated that if you are “born into the wrong body”, you can cut off your sex and magically turn into what you are not. You will pay for the privilege and then brag on social media about it, perpetuating the lies and influencing younger and younger children that they need to do this to be happy, too.
Publicly celebrating self-mutilation as some kind of victory is extreme, yes. But this is the dream we are all being fed, especially our children. That anything is possible. That there really is no line between reality and fantasy. Once you accept this as true, the idea of being anything you want inside the metaverse seems reasonable compared to the extreme of mutilating your body. I mean, it can’t be bad to create a new you inside a machine. That’s not extreme. It’s just “fun”.
AI programs like OpenAI’s Sora are pushing these lies further into our consciousness.
Just as God said, “Let there be light,” you can take a dark void in the metaverse and turn it into a sparkling paradise, the wild steppes of Mongolia, or a gritty downtown street.
The ads for Sora tell you that while you play inside its worlds, it is “teaching AI to understand and simulate the physical world in motion, with the goal of training models that help people solve problems that require real-world interaction”.
The last thing AI is doing is solving your problems. It is solving its own problems. It is feeding off of you and learning how to be just like you.
As I watched the Sora video below, I felt as if it was sending me into a bit of a trance and I found myself resisting. I have never done drugs. I am not one to give myself over to outside forces. I always instinctively knew that doing drugs was a way for my mind to be invaded by some outside force. I believe programs like Sora are the same.
Watch it for yourself, just so you understand it, because I think that’s important. And then don’t watch it again. That is my best advice. I am sure some people will say I'm being ridiculous. I don’t care. I have never been more serious about anything in my life.
All of these dazzling new technological feats promise to change our lives, help us to solve our problems and turn us into the gods of our own universes. Most people don’t want to mutilate their bodies, but they want to be supportive of the people who do. At the same time, they don’t realize they are mutilating their minds. They are not just slicing off a body part, they are opening their consciousness, their souls, whatever you want to call it, to an outside force that is invading it and slicing away, little by little.
Just like prisoners in the Gulag whose bodies were worked to the bone for the glory of the state, your mind and your body will be eaten away for the glory of AI. The difference will be that whereas Gulag prisoners were sent there against their will, you will have built your prison and locked yourself inside of your own free will.
The world inside these prisons will look so real. Right now, it is so new, we are in awe about it. It looks realer than reality. But what happens when we start to forget about reality. We don’t even think about the differences anymore. We no longer wonder if it’s a “fake”. It just won’t matter.
Perhaps we should have listened more to Native Americans who warned that photos stole their souls. They saw photos as magic that could trap a person inside the image.
They were right.
To be trapped inside a world of our own making where all our dreams can come true. But which dreams? Not all of our dreams are rosy. Nor are they always the best parts of ourselves. We are unloading everything of ourselves into the machines that are learning from it. Not only what we love, but what we hate. Not only what we hope for but what we fear most. Not only our purest thoughts but our most devious and perverted ones. We have not learned how to control our own bodies, let alone our own minds. What makes us think we will do any better when we empty ourselves into AI?
In my essay, Empire of Deceit, I quote from C. S. Lewis’s book, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. It applies here as well. These are some of my favorite books. I still love reading them.
The heroes of the story are sailing to the ends of the earth on a grand adventure. Along the way, they come upon the Island where Dreams Come True.
Everyone on the ship is excited. This, surely, is a wondrous place that they must explore! They all start imagining what wonderful dreams they’ve had that might come true. As they look out into the fog surrounding the island, making it impossible to see but a few feet ahead, they realize a man is flailing about in the water. They rescue the man and when the sailors eagerly ask him about the island, he responds thus:
“Fly! Fly! About with your ship and fly! Row, row, row for your lives away from this accursed shore. This is the Island where Dreams come true.”
“That’s the island I’ve been looking for this long time,” said one of the sailors. “I reckon I’d find I was married to Nancy if we landed here.”
“And I’d find Tom alive again,” said another.
“Fools!” said the man, stamping his foot with rage. “That is the sort of talk that brought me here, and I’d better have been drowned or never born. Do you hear what I say? This is where dreams–dreams, do you understand–come to life, come real. Not daydreams—dreams.”
There was about half a minute’s silence and then, with a great clatter of armor, the whole crew were tumbling down the main hatch as quick as they could and flinging themselves on the oars to row as they had never rowed before; and Drinian was swinging round the tiller, and the boatswain was giving out the quickest stroke that had ever been heard at sea. For it had taken everyone just that half-minute to remember certain dreams they had had; dreams that make you afraid of going to sleep again.
Don’t believe the lies of the tech gods, that you can be the god of your own utopia and all your dreams will come true and you will be happy at last. Already, each new “thing” that we acquire only makes us want more and never fills the void. So, why would we think we can replace the material possessions of the real world with fake ones in the metaverse and it will somehow make us happier.
The real world might grow much harsher, it might test us in every kind of way, but that is what it’s supposed to do. Don’t be tempted to escape it. Take a lesson from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who asks, what if…
“…during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!
If...if...
We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
The cursed machine is grinding away and if we ignore the truth of our situation, just think, oh, it’s really not that bad, or what’s the harm in making my own reality. It’s just a game. We will only have ourselves to blame when we can no longer tell the difference between reality and fantasy and our nightmares come true.
For those who continue to resist the Vast Machine, we might come to know suffering and prison. Such people will become a thorn in the flesh of those in power. Outcasts. Made fun of. That is why I write this. As I said in the beginning. So, it is out there somewhere, to perhaps be discovered one day.
I would rather spend my life in a real prison and know it and feel it, than live in a fake reality, deluded into thinking I am free but where even my thoughts are no longer my own. I stand with Solzhenitsyn when he says:
“Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”
Thank you for reading and for listening. Please don’t forget to hit the heart button, share, comment and subscribe. God Bless!
Wonderful essay.
Deeply thought provoking.
Thank you Karen
IMO AI will be the end of civilization. God has given us enough rope, now he will be coming back soon.