Smart Cities: Rise of the Billionaires & Fall of the Middle Class

“Smart cities are the intelligent cities of positivity and happy-energy, not the junkyards of technologies but of diversity, love, life, beauty, dignity, freedom, tolerance, and equality.” Dr Amit Ray

You can listen to me read this essay here:

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If we are to believe Amit Ray, as famous for his teachings on peace, compassion and the 141 chakras as he is for his contribution in the field of artificial intelligence, we should happily submit ourselves to the authority of AI and allow it to monitor us inside smart cities.

And this, my dear reader, is precisely why we should never blindly believe experts like Amit Ray, even if they claim to be spiritual “gurus”.

Before I get to the heart of this essay, let’s recap what’s been going on with these fires. To get a sense of the tragic destruction of Pacific Palisades, you can watch this short video showing before and after:

I don’t think there was any big conspiracy by the elites to set these fires. They don’t need to do that.

People have forgotten that last year and the year before Los Angeles had abundant rainfall. It’s been reported that “We have more water stored at this time of year than in the history of the agency.”

After two very rainy years, brush on the hillsides of Los Angeles had a chance to grow – into lots of kindling. That was coupled with there being nearly no rain – less than two-tenths of an inch since May 2024 – making it the second-driest period on record in Los Angeles over the last 150 years. Fire needs air as well as fuel – which a massive Santa Ana windstorm provided starting on Tuesday. The winds – the worst in 15 years or more – gusted up to 100 miles per hour. It made fighting the fire by plane and helicopter – to dump water and fire repellant from above – impossible.

This simple explanation makes sense to me. There’s no reason, as Mel Gibson suggested, for “someone” who “had a purpose in mind” to “pay arsonists to start the fires.”

Nobody needs to pay arsonists to start fires in Los Angeles. They’ve been starting fires in the city for years, as I pointed out in a previous essay.

Fires can start in any number of ways. Yes, some are started intentionally by arsonists. Electrical wires can fall and ignite during high winds. Teenagers partying in the Santa Monica mountains can set off fireworks, as happened this last New Year’s Eve. That fire was put out, but it might have smoldered undetected, and reignited, resulting in the burning of Pacific Palisades.

And once the fires are put out, that isn’t the end of it because then come the rains. Heavy rains cause mudslides, and more properties slide down hills and are buried under the mud.

All the billionaire club has to do is sit back and wait for disasters like this latest fire to strike. Once it does, they can unleash companies to swoop in and buy up the wreckage for cheap.

The goal after each disaster is to transform apocalyptic cities into smart megacities divided into thousands of 15-minute neighborhoods.

Citizens will be monitored by AI, through aps on smart devices that at some point in the near future will be integrated into their bodies. The age of the Internet of Things (IoT) will transition fully to the age of the Internet of Bodies (IoB).

The Los Angeles fires are the latest opportunity to convince citizens of the advantages of owning nothing, submitting to the hive mind of AI, and allowing the state to care for them. It started with Covid, when people lost homes and businesses. Since then, living in the real world has become more and more expensive and dangerous, while living in a fake world, constantly entertained, becomes more desirable.

Through 24/7 indoctrination on social media, the masses have come to believe that relying on cool billionaires is the answer to every problem. Citizens have come to expect it as their right to be taken care of by benevolent overlords. They believe this will free them, and I suppose, in a sense, it’s true. Perhaps most people really do just want to be taken care of. Perhaps they really do just want to empty their minds of difficult thoughts and fill themselves with silly memes. I don’t know.

What I do know is that while it’s become more and more difficult for people to survive on their earnings, Wall Street has been buying up single family homes at a dizzying rate.

In the United States, the median home costs between 4.5- and 5-times median household income. The average house in the United Kingdom costs more than eight-times the average earnings of an individual. Before long, only the uber rich will be able to afford to own a home.

Already, more than 63% of Los Angeles residents rent their homes. It seems like people are even losing the concept of ownership—of ownership of anything except the smart devices they hold so dearly in their hands.

Billionaires are banking on Mega Cities filled with captured citizens.

It is estimated that 60% of the world’s population will live in megacities by 2030. Here are a few examples of future megacities:

Saudi Vision 2030 includes Neom’s “The Line”, a futuristic city built in the deserts of Saudi Arabia.

The Line is literally just that—a line in the desert. With an estimated 1 million residents living in layers on top of one another, it will be 33 times the size of New York City. It will be the first city in the world with no streets and no cars.

As its website boasts, Neom will be a “living laboratory, home to the brightest minds, dedicated to the sanctity of all life on earth.”

A living laboratory? Absolutely. Capturing millions of humans inside such megastructures where they can be observed, medicated and manipulated is a dream come true for the gods who wish to rule with absolute authority.

Already, 21,000 disposable humans have died building Neom and work continues, unabated. This should tell us everything we need to know about the billionaires’ plans for the rest of us.

Trump wants to build 10 mega cities throughout the United States

Trump proposes building 10 ‘freedom cities’ the size of Washington DC on Federal land. He wants to spearhead a “great modernization and beautification campaign” that would involve knocking down “ugly buildings” and reconditioning parks and public spaces.

Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?

Elon Musk is building his own town called Starbase in Texas:

Starbase involves creating a company town where SpaceX employees and their families can live. According to reports, SpaceX workers have already moved into renovated homes and temporary trailers near the launch site.

If all goes according to plan, Starbase will become an official municipality, complete with its own mayor and city officials. Interestingly, the proposed first mayor is Gunnar Milburn, SpaceX’s security manager.

“Incorporating Starbase will streamline the processes required to build the amenities necessary to make the area a world-class place to live – for the hundreds already calling it home, as well as for prospective workers eager to help build humanity’s future in space, explained SpaceX General Manager Kathryn Lueders.

Tech Billionaires Want To Build Their Own City In California

A group of tech and finance billionaires want to build a brand-new city in northern California.

The project is called ‘California Forever’, and aims to build a city of roughly 400,000 people on 60,000 acres in Solano County, northeast of San Francisco.

The goal would be to create a city that’s pedestrian-friendly with apartments and townhomes, but no large single-family homes.

Backers of the project include LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, and Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of late Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

Mega Cities will be Smart Cities

In 2020, it was predicted that smart city business opportunities worth $2.46 trillion could be expected by 2025, with at least 26 smart cities to be established by then:

Spending on smart city technology is expected to reach $327 billion by 2025, up from $96 billion in 2019.

An uncertain post-pandemic situation, and perhaps even another pandemic, will compel cities to focus on developing collaborative, data-driven infrastructure for use in healthcare, public security services and more.

Artificial intelligence and data-driven solutions are expected to be in high demand, with growing opportunities for crowd analytics, open data dashboards and digital city services.

Investments in smart technologies are also expected to rise over the next two years. Cities have already invested in contact-tracing wearables and apps, open data platforms, autonomous drones and crowd analytics to fight COVID-19, according to the report, and smart grids, intelligent traffic management, autonomous vehicles, smart lighting and e-governance services are expected to gain traction when the pandemic passes.

All of this is certainly happening as predicted.

Los Angeles is scheduled to be a totally renovated Smart Mega City by the 2028 Olympics

The destruction of the fires will go towards making that happen. As described in the SmartLA 2028 brochure:

Los Angeles residents will experience an improved quality of life by leveraging technology to meet urban challenges. No longer the “car capital of the world”, residents will choose how they wish to get around LA, using a single, digital payment platform, with choices like renovated Metro rail and bus systems or micro transit choices, such as on-demand LANow shuttles or dockless bicycles. Neighborhoods will again welcome the pedestrian and allow easy access to green space.

Notice how they always talk about the choices we will have. But keep in mind that the smarter the city gets, the less the citizens own, and the more limited their freedoms will be.

You will not be able to just get in your car and leave or get on a plane without justifying the energy you will be using to do so. Remember that the smarter the city, the more energy AI needs to operate and the less will be allocated to us. Already, AI feeds off of us. Its appetite is insatiable and will only grow, the smarter it gets. And the more we send up satellites into space and travel to the Moon and Mars, the more energy these programs will consume, and the more humans will need to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of machines.

In theory, there’s nothing wrong with 15-minute neighborhoods.

We are told to think of them like living in a village, with green spaces and everything needed within walking distance. But that is where the similarities end. In a village, you can walk into the countryside within a matter of minutes. You own your home, your own animals and farmland. You are self-sufficient.

In a village, no one is watching you except your nosey neighbor through the curtains. And if you get tired of that nosey neighbor, you can close your own curtains and have privacy. But you will never have a moment of privacy in a smart neighborhood. AI will be in your house, listening to everything you say, watching everything you do. It will even, at some point, be inside your head, monitoring your thoughts, perhaps even controlling your thoughts. Because by that point, how will you know which thoughts are your own and which are AIs or the billionaires who control AI. Perhaps at some point, AI will control the billionaires. Perhaps it already does. How would we even know? We wouldn’t.

As far as I’m concerned, a 15-minute neighborhood surrounded by thousands of other 15-minute neighborhoods, inside a megacity, is a nightmare I never want to experience. Big cities, just as they are now, are bad enough.

During the 1994 earthquake, I was married, pregnant and living in a condo in Century City, an affluent part of Los Angeles, just next to Beverly Hills. After the earthquake, everyone was ordered to stay where they were. We had no choice anyway since all the security measures that ordinarily kept us safe, now kept us prisoners. We couldn’t drive anywhere since the security gates wouldn’t open. The elevators were too dangerous to use. I had to walk up and down many flights of stairs.

Every aftershock sent my heart thumping in a panic. The vulnerability that I felt, especially being pregnant, was something I never wanted to feel again.

Within a couple of days, the gates were opened manually which was some relief. But orders were given not to drive anywhere. Fires had broken out across the city. Stores were being looted. Bridges had collapsed and concrete on the freeways had buckled and broken.

We were safe but I was living a nightmare. My 10-year-old daughter wasn’t with us, the phone lines were down, and we couldn’t reach her. As luck would have it, she had spent the night at her best friend’s house in Northridge, the epicenter of the earthquake. We were hearing all kinds of terrifying stories on the radio about the devastation in Northridge. At last, I couldn’t stand it any longer. Once the gates opened, I insisted to my husband that we get in the car with our 18-month-old son and go find her.

I will never forget coming over the hill on the 405 freeway and looking down on the apocalyptic scene of the San Fernando Valley. Smoke and fires rose up to a bloodred sky, helicopters and sirens sounding, the roads completely empty of anyone but us.

When we reached my daughter, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The neighborhood was having a block party. Everyone was camped outside, and they were barbecuing and listening to music. My daughter was having a wonderful time. I cannot describe the relief that flooded my heart. I thanked God a million times as I jumped out of the car and gathered her into my arms.

She didn’t want to leave, but all I could think of was getting out of the city. We drove north to Madonna Inn, a historic California coastal hotel, and stayed there for the night. I didn’t want to ever go back again. Of course, we had no choice but to return.

From then onwards, I vowed I would never live, surrounded by millions of people again. Within a week of my second son’s birth, we had moved to Calabasas. After my divorce, I have always lived on the edge of the city or in a village. A real village, in the countryside, with animals and farmland. Not a fake 15-minute-village, surrounded by thousands of other 15-minute-neighborhoods where everyone is a prisoner inside a megacity from which there is no escape.

Smart cities and data collection.

You can be sure these new cities will be surveilled by drones, cameras and tracking devices on phones that will progress to devices implanted inside our bodies. Residents will not be able to breathe without AI analyzing and reporting it. In fact, if a person takes too many breaths, they will be flagged, perhaps as needing some sort of medication for a heart condition, or as behaving in a potentially suspicious manner, perhaps with criminal intent.

I’ve said over and over in my essays that it’s all about data. Whoever has the most data rules the world. Everything about each citizen will be recorded and analyzed by the Vast Machine.

This short video describes how data collection is going to “make your life easier.” Pay attention to the part where someone is walking down the street and sensors are picking up everything they do and say, with “microphones everywhere”:

Data Collection:

AI requires massive amounts of energy to collect all that data. For that reason alone, humans must be herded like cattle into smaller spaces where they use less energy, perhaps even become an energy source for their own devices.

Humans are the source of data being fed to machines. Our thoughts, our feelings, our actions, our illnesses, our creativity, literally everything about us as humans is already being fed to machines so that they can grow and become more like us as we become more like robots.

Without data collection, AI dies. I believe that if humans don’t wake up and start refusing to feed the machines, we will eventually die.

Just to get an idea of how massive data collection already is, China Telecom is the largest data collection site in the world, occupying, 10,763,910 square feet. It has an extensive global network of over 400 data centers located in prime regions in Mainland China and overseas markets.

The rapid growth of data centers to drive AI is a major source of demand for electricity and thus a major contributor to air pollution, the researchers say. Just one data center consumes 10 to 50 times the energy per floor space of a typical commercial office building.

AI data centers exceed the entire California on-road emissions. No wonder citizens can’t drive cars anymore. All that energy must go to collecting and analyzing human data in data centers so that AI can get smarter and reach “consciousness”.

Researchers found that training a model the size of the Llama 3.1, launched this summer by Facebook parent company Meta, could produce the same amount of pollution as 10,000 cars driving round-trip between Los Angeles and New York.

But that hasn’t stopped the powers that be from forging ahead with bigger and bigger data centers.

• Just today, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to provide federal support to address massive energy needs for fast-growing advanced artificial intelligence data centers. The order calls for leasing federal sites owned by Defense and Energy departments to host gigawatt-scale AI data centers.

• President-elect Donald Trump has announced that Hussain Sajwani, an Emirati billionaire businessman, will invest $20 billion in new data centers across the United States.

• Microsoft, which recently said it was on track to spend $80 billion on AI data centers, said in a recent blog post that the company’s success depends on “new partnerships founded on large-scale infrastructure investments.”

Just keep telling yourself: we are the data. And we aren’t even getting paid for it.

In fact, we are being shamed for taking up too much energy and told we must cut back. All of this while we are literally being “mined” for our data, the very life sucked out of us to feed machines.

One of the ways we will be increasingly monitored is with “predictive data”.

AI analyzes our data in order to predict our every move and our every thought.

Predictive Healthcare Analytics is one example:

Big Data can revolutionize urban healthcare by predicting disease outbreaks, tracking the spread of illnesses, and optimizing healthcare delivery. For instance:

• Analyzing social media trends and healthcare records can identify early signs of flu outbreaks.

• Wearable devices collect real-time health data, allowing for personalized care.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, South Korea used Big Data to track infections and manage quarantine measures effectively. By analyzing data from credit card transactions, smartphone GPS, and CCTV, the country curbed the virus’s spread efficiently, or so they say. What they really did was prove how easily they could control the masses.

Artificial intelligence will monitor smart cities and use predictive data.

Predictive data translates into predictive analytics, a branch of advanced analytics that makes predictions about future events, behaviors, and outcomes.

In the cities of the future, no one will even dare to throw a dirty wrapper on the ground as their actions will immediately be known. In fact, data analytics will predict which citizens have a propensity toward littering—or any other deviant behavior.

Eric Siegel, a former Columbia University professor, tells us in his book, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die:

“Data embodies a priceless collection of experience from which to learn. Every medical procedure, credit application, Facebook post, movie recommendations, spammy e-mail, and purchase of any kind — each positive or negative outcome, each successful or failed event or transaction — is encoded as data and warehoused. As data piles up, we have ourselves a genuine gold rush. But data isn’t the gold — data in its raw form is boring crude. The gold is what’s discovered therein. With the new knowledge gained, prediction is possible.”

Imagine living in a city where everything about you is known to the powers who rule over you, before you even know it yourself. Those powers are mining your every thought to be fed to the machines that police you.

While you lose every bit of freedom over your body and your mind as your data is fed to AI, the billionaire club grows richer and more powerful because of it.

If you doubt any of this, just look back to what happened during Covid, because that’s when it all started.

Covid has been called “the poor person’s virus.” While the masses suffered under lockdowns and mask mandates, their small businesses closing as they became dependent on government aid, the rich became richer than their wildest dreams could have imagined.

It was during Covid that the billionaires really started living in a parallel universe to the rest of us.

Here are a few examples of the total disdain they showed to the commoners beneath them:

• Kim Kardashian celebrated her 40th birthday on a private island with her friends and family, sharing on social media:

  40 and feeling so humbled and blessed. There is not a single day that I take for granted, especially during these times when we are all reminded of the things that truly matter.

  As one person responded:

  Yep, the things that "truly matter" are a private island, a jet full of friends and lots of photos of it all to show the rest of the world what they cannot do while they struggle to survive a pandemic.

• Beyonce and her family flew to Croatia for her 39th birthday, when most travel to Europe was barred.

• Travis Kalanick, founder of Uber, threw multiple outdoor parties at his $43 million Los Angeles estate.

• Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson cruised Greece in another yacht after receiving “honorary” citizenship.

• Facebook overlord Mark Zuckerberg trolled the waters off Hawaii on a $12,000 surfboard.

• Jeff Bezos and his lady friend started house-hunting, buying up millions of dollars in property in Los Angeles to build a compound while traveling via private jet to several cities around the country

• Former Mayor Bloomberg splashed out $45 million on a Colorado compound (joining a host of other billionaires buying in that state as well as Montana and Wyoming).

• Peter Thiel and others spent millions to buy citizenship in “safe” countries like New Zealand.

• Dave Chappelle, Joe Rogan, Elon Musk and then girlfriend Grimes were all partying maskless in Texas.

And you know what’s funny? While billionaires were having fun disobeying every Covid rule, millions if not billions of ordinary citizens were learning how to police and punish each other for noncompliance. To this day, there are folks who won’t meet or talk to unvaccinated family members or friends. Can you imagine?

And you know what else is funny? People love the billionaires who stole from them and continue to do so. They are the new celebrities, and the masses follow their lives with the same fascination that they used to show movie stars.

Meanwhile, the excess continues amongst the elites while the masses who worship them suffer.

We see it with this latest disaster. Some of Pacific Palisades’ wealthiest residents have hired private fire fighters to protect their homes as the A-listers find refuge in expensive hotels. Jamie Lee Curtis as well as power couple John Legend and Chrissy Teigen are among dozens of stars forced elsewhere. Curtis was seen on the news crying about the losses—understandable—but then taking heat for comparing the devastation to Gaza.

Actors Dennis Quaid and Sarah Michelle Gellar are among those seen arriving at the Hotel Bel-Air, built in 1922 and which charges up to $15,000 per night for a room. Also pictured there were Mötley Crüe rock drummer Tommy Lee, 62, and his 38-year-old wife Brittany Furlan. Scores of other famous individuals are said to be frantically trying to book rooms at the iconic Beverly Hills Hotel.

This is a world apart from the thousands of people who no longer have fire insurance, will be unable to rebuild and forced to sell their destroyed homes for a song and a dance to the ruling class.

It’s a tragedy for anyone to lose their home, I’m not saying it isn’t. And most of these celebrities, just like government officials, are also pawns in the game, controlled by those who have clawed their way to the top of the ladder of success. I don’t think Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates, for example, lost anything.

These fires represent one more bridge broken over the widening chasm separating ordinary citizens from the billionaire club. One more nail in the coffin of the disappearing middle class.