Whether it's Twitter or Threads or whatever else, the Vast Machine is now the Ghost in Your Head.

"What you think, what you feel—it’s all just data—data that in large patterns can be decoded using artificial intelligence.” ~ Nita Farahany, Duke University futurist and legal ethicist

One-time or recurring donations can be made at Ko-Fi

You can listen to me read this essay here:

I’m sure there was a moment in your life when you realized that you didn’t believe what the adults were saying. Perhaps they were big and you were small, but suddenly you knew that they were wrong and you were right.

There’s nothing unusual in this moment when we step back and separate our own wishes from those in control. To create our authentic self, each child has to make decisions about accepting—or rejecting—the right of others to control our lives. It is through these small acts of rebellion that we gradually become adults. ~Jonahan Twelve Hawks, Against Authority

I would encourage everyone to go to Twelve Hawks’ website and download for free his book, Against Authority. Twelve Hawks wrote about the Vast Machine, a term for AI that I like very much. Twelve Hawks is a pseudonym. His identity is unknown, and he lives off the grid. A clever marketing ploy or holding true to his beliefs? Who knows.

I like to use this term, the Vast Machine, in my writing because it’s a bit old-fashioned. It wakes us up; takes us away from Artificial Intelligence (AI), the term we’ve been conditioned to use, reminding us that it was once just a machine, like so many other machines, but now the machine is everywhere.

I also like the term the Ghost in the Shell, taken from an anime about humans who possess cyberbrains, technology that allows them to interface their biological brain with various networks. The Vast Machine has become the Ghost in our Minds. And we are becoming Empty Shells.

Ghost in the Shell

This is where we are now. It isn’t a dream. It isn’t a science fiction movie. It’s real.

As you read further into this essay, keep Twelve Hawks’ words in mind. We are not children. But we are being treated as if we are. We are being assured that the state will take care of us because we are incapable of taking care of ourselves. We need constant amusements as well as constant surveillance to make sure we don’t get ourselves into trouble by making independent choices. We need to be told what to think and what to say. We need to be analyzed and regulated every moment of every day.

In order to succeed in this goal, we are being herded into social media sites where we gladly “verify” our existence in order to “belong” in a space where we feel “safe” and “informed”, where we can hang out with other like-minded people, and where all our needs and wants are taken care of. It’s so “convenient”.

Threads, the new social-media service from Meta, reached more than 100 million signups over its opening weekend, making it the fastest-growing app in history, outpacing both ChatGPT and TikTok.

Mark Zukerberg’s Meta already can draw on Instagram with over 1.35 BILLION active users and Facebook with over 2 BILLION active users worldwide.

To put that in perspective, Twitter currently has a total of 353.90 million users worldwide.

Twitter doesn’t even make it in the top 4 most downloaded apps of 2023 (or even in the top 15).

1. TikTok

2. Instagram

3. Facebook

4. WhatsApp

Notice that Mark Zukerberg’s Meta has 3 of the top apps on that list. So why is Twitter so important?

Because what Musk is doing is priming people to accept even more of their data being controlled by machines. He made it clear for the past year that he wants to turn Twitter into his “everything” app called “X”. He now complains that Zuckerberg stole his “everything app” idea. However, Musk stole his “X” app model from China’s WeChat, which acts as an all-encompassing service that “includes messaging and video chatting, video games, photo sharing, ride services, food delivery, banking, and shopping”. 

At first, people on the right were shocked by Musk’s love affair with WeChat. But now, they’ve heard it so many times that it doesn’t mean anything anymore. Everybody wants an “everything” app.

The rivalry between Musk and Zuckerberg is being played up by both of them with the prospect of a cage fight, which of course will never happen. But it certainly is a perfect metaphor for their battle over winning the data war. Perhaps too perfect not to have been planned out by both of them. Rivals? Or simply two parts of the Vast Machine. Front men like Musk and Zuckerberg are there to ensure that everyone gets captured, if not in one virtual prison than in another.

All social media apps gather information, or data, on you.

Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram collect 86% of your data, which is then used to sell you more of their own products and show you relevant advertising. Twitter, LinkedIn, and eBay are not quite as bad, but they collect about 50% of your data for these purposes.

Not just Meta and Twitter, but Google and Microsoft are all battling for your data, too. All the while that we chatter on Twitter or post photos on Instagram or watch our favorite influencer on YouTube or search for disease symptoms on Google, complain about our children, politics, sports, laugh, cry, moan, hours upon hours of nonsense and cat videos and porn and online chat rooms and therapy sessions and video games, it is all being turned into data and fed to the Vast Machine.

How much data are we talking about? Humans create 3.5 quintillion bytes of data every 24 hours. I don’t even know what that means. But it is estimated to be 40x bigger than all observable stars combined in the universe, and that’s mind-boggling. 

What are they doing with all of this data? They are persuading you to think and act in certain ways. They are invading the most secret parts of your brain in order to do so.

At Stanford, there is a Persuasive Technology Lab that teaches engineering students how you apply the principles of persuasion to technology. The goal was always to hack human feelings, attitudes, beliefs, behaviors to keep people engaged with products. To make you buy stuff. But it is much more than that. Persuade is so behind the times. Buy stuff is so last century.

No longer are they satisfied to collect simple data like your name, birthday, what kind of car your drive, what kind of products you like to use. Now, they want to get inside your mind and collect your thoughts. Not just to influence you to buy products. But to influence you to become the product. They are feeding off of you like a piece of meat. In fact, in The Bloodsuckers, I point out how executives call the real world the MEATverse, as opposed to the Metaverse.

Back in October of 2021, people laughed when Zuckerberg rolled out his Meta vision. I didn’t find it funny at all. I wrote in The Bloodsuckers:

Mark Zuckerberg has just unveiled the new name of Facebook—Meta—and his Metaverse. It looks quite hokey and I read a lot of comments from people making fun of it. But remember that Zuckerberg is only just beginning. Facebook’s goal is to own a monopoly on the Metaverse and I wouldn’t put it past them. And anyway, if Facebook doesn’t succeed someone else will.

In June 2018, Oculus executive Jason Rubin sent an email to Facebook board member Marc Andreessen with the subject line “The Metaverse.” It contained a 50-page document laying out the foundation for the futuristic ambitions of Meta.

The document “now looks like the first draft of history. It imagined users floating through a digital universe of virtual ads, filled with virtual goods that people buy. There would be virtual people that they marry, while spending as little time as possible in the so-called “meatverse” — referring to the real world because humans are flesh and blood.  Rubin used the phrase ‘shock and awe’ 12 times to describe the desired experience”.

Who could have ever imagined just a few years ago that we would graduate from buying useless products in the real world to buying even more useless products in a fake world.

I’ve said this for the past two years in multiple essays but it’s a hard concept to grasp. I can say “data is the new gold” but gold is something you can hold in your hands. You can dig a hole in the backyard and hide it. Data is not half as exciting. It floats in the ether. It’s nebulous.

This is being called the age of “Dataism”. “In its extreme form, proponents of the Dataist worldview perceive the entire universe as a flow of data, see organisms as little more than biochemical algorithms and believe that humanity’s cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing data-processing system — and then merge into it.”

At the World Economic Forum’s Davos 2023 gathering, Nita Farahany, Duke University futurist and legal ethicist, gave a talk titled Are You Ready for Brain Transparency.

Farahany’s talk starts with an animation of a person at work whose every thought is anticipated by the AI her brain is connected to. If she is experiencing undo stress, it triggers calming music that starts playing in her head. She can mentally move the cursor on her screen monitor to assess her brainwaves and notice spikes in stress during her sleep. What’s that about? Mentally, she writes and sends an email to her doctor: Could you take a quick look at my brain data. Anything to worry about?

The video then describes the woman fantasizing about the new guy in the office who is super handsome, except there’s a policy against dating colleagues and her screen reminds her of this, which sets her worrying about her boss knowing about her wayward thoughts.

Connecting yourself to an “everything” app is just the beginning of the end of your freedom—although it will promise you more freedom and more control over the decisions you make. What will really happen is that you will think you are in control of decisions because of how much information you are receiving when you ask for it. But are you really deciding what information to receive or are you being influenced to do so. And while you are being fed this information it is reenforcing the ways your controllers want you to think and act. You are no longer a free individual. You are an extension of the Vast Machine.

Job performance, scholastic performance, every bit of data about what you do, how you feel, where you go, who you interact with, the composition of your stools when you go to the bathroom, the beat of your heart, will be monitored by AI. Citizens will get monthly reports on their brain data which will either earn them bonus points or demerits.

The coming future—like tomorrow—is that these devices will be the primary way we interact with all the rest of our technology. “Rather than a mouse or a keyboard, you can simply swipe with your mind,” says Farahany. Very cool! Truly, it’s like something out of a fairytale. Magic!

Your waking hours will revolve around a constant conversation with the machine inside your head. Even simple things like picking up a cup of coffee, together you and AI will agree to do it, firing the neurons sending the command down your arm to your hand. You will be assured that you are the one in control of the movement, just like you were before the machine became a part of the equation. But really, is that true? If you think about the machine, who created it? Who connected you to the machine? Who is behind the machine? There are hundreds upon hundreds of people involved in the process of creating the Vast Machine. Thousands upon thousands over time. But who is behind all of them? Is the machine an extension of a Higher Mind? Were we actually manipulated to create it?

If we already know that increasingly our decisions are being influenced by algorithms (machines) who are learning everything they can about us so that they can anticipate what we will do even before we do it, what makes us so sure we will be in control of the movement of our arm when we pick up that coffee cup, or we will be the ones initiating those thoughts inside our heads that told us to do so?

Once you are hooked up to the Vast Machine, at any time, it can choose to investigate your brain activity if it suspects you are an insurgent, a spreader of disinformation, a vaccine refusenik, a terrorist, a white supremacist, transphobic, racist, anything that is determined to be against the good of the state.

Artificial intelligence has already advanced to the point where it can decode brain activity in exactly the ways described in Farahany’s WEF talk. EEG decodes the thousands of neurons that fire in your brain when you think thoughts like, I’m hungry, I’m tired, I’m angry. A simple device put on your head can record these brain waves. They are described as “fitbits for your brain”. Simple devices that people are already used to wearing like headbands, earbuds, hats. I cringe when I see people wearing earbuds. I want to tell them to take them off, but it would require a long explanation (like this essay) and people don’t have the time for that.

The controllers can pick up and decode emotions and even faces that you see in your mind. Shapes. Numbers. Your pin number to your bank, for example. As I already mentioned, they can even pick up the brain signals you send down your arm to your hand, telling you to move or type.

It is decoded through something called electromyography. Like just about everything that is now enslaving our bodies and our minds, electromyography started as a positive diagnostic procedure used to assess the health of muscles and the nerves that control them, enabling a physician to diagnose conditions that can cause numbness, tingling or weakness. Something as simple as a watch can pick up this activity.

Meta acquired CTRL-Labs in 2019. The startup joined Facebook Reality Labs, a division of the social media company that is working to develop augmented-reality smart glasses. The size of the deal was between $500 million and $1 billion.

“Here’s how it’ll work: You have neurons in your spinal cord that send electrical signals to your hand muscles telling them to move in specific ways such as to click a mouse or press a button,” wrote Facebook Vice President of AR/VR Andrew “Boz” Bosworth. “The wristband will decode those signals and translate them into a digital signal your device can understand, empowering you with control over your digital life.”

Facebook Reality Labs wants us to know that they have our best interests at heart.

We are relentlessly innovating to enable technological breakthroughs, testing the limits of artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural control interface, life-like haptic interaction, audio enhancement and full body tracking. This cutting-edge research enables us to build a future that puts people first, expanding the possibilities of human connection and collaboration.

But imagine the implications. You might be allowed to control innocuous things like the little world you build in the Metaverse, where you are encouraged to spend your bonus points for thinking pure thoughts on things like a mink coat or a Ferrari, things you could never possess in the meatverse. But in the meatverse, if you move a muscle in the wrong direction, AI can stop you. If you think one wayward thought like, why doesn’t someone just kill the president, or if you don’t respond in a positive way to a political speech fed to you on your “everything” app (whichever one it is), or if you try to switch off the device pumping medication into your veins, or if you think negatively about the advice your therapist is giving you, there will be so many ways to punish you. Everything from denying you those extra tokens for that real piece of steak you were hoping to eat this month, to electric shock waves in your brain, to immobilizing your limbs, to locking you inside your apartment, to locking you out of your bank account (if you still have one), to refusing you travel on public transportation (because don’t imagine you will have a car by then), to taking you in for questioning, to rewiring your brain, to imprisoning you.

There's something called Eulerian Video magnification where you point a computer camera at a person's face.

If a supercomputer is put behind the camera, the controller can run a mathematical equation, and find the micro pulses of blood to a person’s face that humans can’t see but that the computer can see, so it can pick up your heart rate.

Watch this creepy video showing how they do it.

What does this type of data collection allow the controller to do? Farahany explains:

I can pick up your stress level because heart rate variability gives them your stress level. I can point—there's a woman named Poppy Crum who gave a TED talk this year about the end of the poker face, that we had this idea that there can be a poker face, we can actually hide our emotions from other people. But this talk is about the erosion of that, that we can point a camera at your eyes and see when your eyes dilate, which actually detects cognitive strains—when you're having a hard time understanding something or an easy time understanding something. We can continually adjust this based on your heart rate, your eye dilation….

So again, the end of the poker face, the end of the hidden parts of your personality. We're going to be able to point AIs at human animals and figure out more and more signals from them including their micro expressions, when you smirk and all these things, we've got face ID cameras on all of these phones. So now if you have a tight loop where I can adjust the political messages in real time to your heart rate and to your eye dilation and to your political personality. That's not a world that you want to live in. It's a kind of dystopia.

There’s a fascinating interview in Wired magazine where historian Yuval Noah Harari and ethicist Tristan Harris discuss the future of artificial intelligence with WIRED editor in chief Nicholas Thompson.

TH: If you want to know what Facebook is, imagine a priest in a confession booth, and they listened to 2 billion people's confessions. But they also watch you around your whole day, what you click on, which ads of Coca-Cola or Pepsi, or the shirtless man and the shirtless women, and all your conversations that you have with everybody else in your life—because they have Facebook Messenger, they have that data too—but imagine that this priest in a confession booth, their entire business model, is to sell access to the confession booth to another party. So someone else can manipulate you. Because that's the only way that this priest makes money in this case. So they don't make money any other way.

YH: I mean, once you reach beyond a certain point, it doesn't matter how you call it. This is the entity that actually rules, whoever has this kind of data. I mean, even if in a setting where you still have a formal government, and this data is in the hands of some corporation, then the corporation can decide who wins the next elections. So, it's not really that much of a choice…. It's over. Humankind is in the dustbin of history.

It’s incredible to think that people are rushing headlong into giving ever more intimate data to the Vast Machine.

It is only a matter of time before that device you hold in your hand will be a thing of the past. Your mind will be the device. And the machine will be the ghost inside of it. At what point will individual minds cease to exist. At what point will it be the Vast Machine manipulating your thoughts, your actions. And how would you even know?

But here we go, headlong into new ways to submit and people are so excited about it.

Amazon has initiated Amazon One, in Whole Foods stories in Phoenix. It is described as “One way to unlock the world, powered by your palm”.

They emphasis “your palm, your choice”.

Each time you use Amazon One, you'll need to intentionally scan your palm for it to work – you get to decide exactly when and where to be recognized.

No two palms are alike.

Your palm is a unique part of you. It doesn't go anywhere you don't and can't be used by anyone but you (except if the criminals get bolder and chop it off or just kidnap you).

Truly contactless interaction

Our service means that after signing up, you won't have to touch anything to use it.

Imagine how healthy that will be. You don’t have to touch anything.

They say that “Your palm is a personal part of you and you alone decide when to hover it, and when to keep it private”.

Except that it isn’t private and after everything we’ve discussed here, how long will it be before you won’t be sure who is controlling your palm, you or the Vast Machine. You are assured that you are in control. It’s your palm, after all. Except that your palm is controlled by your brain. And once you let them into your brain how will you get them out? They will never leave.

Amazon’s walk in, walk out, “Go” stores allow you to leave without paying.

You know how stores are being robbed and no one is doing anything about it?

We hear story after story like:

A group of 14 individuals barged into a Louis Vuitton store in Oakbrook, Illinois, while customers were inside and audaciously drove away with a $100,000 worth of merchandise. The entire incident was caught on the store’s surveillance video.

An enormous Whole Foods in downtown San Francisco that opened just last year recently closed due to concerns about worker safety. I write about this in The Chinafication of the Western World, how they have made the real world so dangerous that we will want to live in a fake world, believing it is so much safer.

Well, “Go” stores will solve that problem. Customers can walk into the store, choose their items, and leave without paying. There’s just one catch. You must scan your device—or will that soon be your palm—when you enter the store, or else you cannot get in. Once inside the store there are hundreds of cameras monitoring your every move. They record what you take and shortly after you leave the store, your account is charged for the amount of the items you take with you.

People not connected to the Vast Machine will not be able to enter these stores. They will not be able to buy necessities.

Also, it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name. Revelation 13

You don’t have to be religious; you don’t have to be a Christian to recognize that what the Bible describes here is uncannily like what is happening now. We ignore this blatant warning at our peril.

It was Covid that enabled these companies to turn into the monsters that they now are and justified the unleashing of the Vast Machine upon us all.

Locked inside our homes with our devices, buying stuff online so we didn’t have to touch anything or anyone in the real world, interacting with family and friends on Facebook’s video chat, having wine parties or office meetings on Zoom. We have been turned back into children monitored by the adults, so we don’t get into trouble.

Returning to Twelve Hawks, in his book Against Authority, he talks about some rather horrible experiments with electroencephalogram EEG signals being conducted on him as a child and then about American physiologist Benjamin Libet who in the 1970s conducted a series of famous EEG experiments that focused on the unconscious electrical activity of the brain. Participants could push a button and what Libet discovered was that “the brain activity that caused the participant to push the button happened, on average, three hundred milliseconds before they were aware of the decision to act.” Libet called this change the readiness potential.

“Our unconscious brain initiates decisions approximately a half second before our conscious mind realizes what’s going on.”

Twelve Hawks: A busload of computer scientist and philosophers have used Libet’s experiments to attack the idea that humans have free will. Benjamin Libet rejected this conclusion, pointing out that the brain always has a brief interval to reject each action.

This gives us great hope because as Libet concluded quite beautifully:

The conscious function could still control the outcome; it can veto the act.

Twelve Hawks makes the point of how one of the most important words a small child learns first—if not the most important—isn’t yes, but NO!

While consciousness doesn’t instigate our physical activity, the brain provides us with a short interval to suppress certain acts. Considering Libet’s findings, the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran wrote, “This suggests that our conscious minds may not have free will, but rather free won’t!”

Yes, the Vast Machine can now predict with great accuracy what every individual will do, and it can therefore influence everyone’s behavior. But what of that one person who does the unexpected. What of that one person, or maybe two or three, who, when everyone else is walking off the cliff, turns around and goes the other way, calling out for others to follow them?

But here’s my closing thought:

What happens if the machine gets into our heads and learns how to switch off that half second where we are able to say NO. We mustn’t let that happen. We must warn everyone.

I’m not signing up for Threads. Rather, I am thinking of going off social media entirely. I got banned from Twitter because of my essays. Elon Musk reinstated me, but I am now censored worse than before. It’s just more subtle. The way my essays reach people is mostly on the Substack network, by being republished in other news outlets, and by my subscribers sharing them.

One person at a time.

So please reach out to your friends and family, not just with this essay, don’t be afraid to talk about the topic and most importantly, show them an alternative by the way you live your life.