You'll own nothing and you won't be happy
But don't worry, that's a good thing!
Technocratic utopia or your worst nightmare? …how about both!
You might have seen this article doing the rounds on the socials this week.
SOURCE
The headline is of interest because it echoes the highly controversial article Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better, penned by Danish politician Ida Auken for the WEF (2016). The article has since been removed from the WEF website. I have linked to the Wayback Machine archive version. Auken insists that the article was merely a conversation starter, though a WEF poster campaign from 2020 suggests otherwise.
This campaign video accompanying the poster series was also hastily deleted by the WEF due to indignant backlash - the general feeling being, “what you mean is a handful of unbelievably rich people will own everything and they will be even happier.”
The video may have been deleted, but the article titled 8 predictions for the world in 2030 on which this campaign was based remains on the WEF website.
FACT CHECK!
Fact checker sites such as Reuters insist that the WEF does not have a stated goal to have people own nothing by 2030. This is fact check by pedantry. No the WEF does not use the word “goal”. The WEF uses the word “prediction.” The prediction can be found nested under the Agenda section of the website. For the thousandth time, let us note that fact checkers more often than not obfuscate what is true by using tricksy technicalities to deceive. Disappointing from a purported news site, no less one that claims the lofty title of Fact Checker.
Let us briefly review the 8 predictions for the world in 2030 (by Ceri Parker, Commissioning Editor, Agenda, World Economic Forum).
All products will have become services. “I don't own anything. I don't own a car. I don't own a house. I don't own any appliances or any clothes.” Charming. This point links to Auken’s now removed article (page not found) in which she muses, “Once in awhile (sic) I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. No where I can go (sic) and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.” Yeah, just hope.
There is a global price on carbon. In progress.
US dominance is over. We have a handful of global powers. In progress.
Goodbye hospital, hello home-spital. One has to wonder if the utter ineptitude of the bureaucrats managing our healthcare systems plays into this by undermining public trust in hospitals. Unsurprisingly, this utopion vision is entirely technocratic. There is no mention whatsoever of holistic or traditional medicine in the accompanying article. It’s all printing organs and algorithm-generated pharma prescriptions.
We are eating much less meat. Bill Gates has been telling the world for years that we should eat 100% synthetic meat and has invested in a tidy portfolio of fake meat start ups. The industry is shifting that way, with WEF young leader Jacinda Ardern proposing to tax cow farts. Michael Pollan’s concept of ‘nutritionism’ comes to mind. Pollan outlines nutritionism as a paradigm in which we assume that it is the scientifically identifiable nutrients in foods which give them their value. He points out that we have no idea what we do not know. We only know what we can currently identify and measure. Therefore, he says, synthetic foods should in fact be called “edible foodlike substances”, because they are not and cannot be the same thing. You can read more about nutritionism in Pollan’s book In Defense of Food.
Today’s Syrian refugees, 2030’s CEOs. I am not well placed to comment on this.
The values that built the West will have been tested to breaking point. Yes but not in the way that the accompanying article describes. Undermining of trust in government, media, public health and all manner of institutions, particularly during the pandemic, has left many Westerners with a deep distrust of our leaders and institutions. At the same time, culture wars are tearing the West apart from the inside out. See: The War on the West by Douglas Murray.
By the 2030s, we'll be ready to move humans toward the Red Planet. I’m not well placed to comment on this one either, but if the billions being spent on the space race are anything to go by, then I guess this one’s in progress too.
For predictions that are definitely not goals, it looks like the WEF is making good progress.
YOU’LL OWN NOTHING
YOU’LL HAVE NO PRIVACY
YOU’LL BE HAPPY
It seems like WEF is now going with something a little more like this:
Returning to the article, titled Psychologists say a good life doesn’t have to be happy, or even meaningful. Just noting that this one also sits under the Agenda section of the WEF website, but don’t let Reuters think you mean it’s a stated goal, they won’t have it.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with what’s being reported on here. The study was covered by a swathe of news outlets and essentially identifies the difference between meaning (deeper, contentment) and happiness (shallower, more fleeting), offering a third orientation called psychological enrichment (complexity, novelty). A minor issue is that while some outlets framed the story as saying that meaning, happiness and psychological enrichment are interconnected roads to a good life, the WEF framed the story as saying that happiness and meaning are not necessary, hinting that our current post-lockdown world may not be conducive to happiness (and that’s all good).
But the bigger issue is not the idea itself - ‘happiness is not the be all and end all’ - but rather the ideological framework within which the WEF consistently absorbs ideas, transmutes them and then promulgates them.
That’s technocracy, baby.
A government or social system controlled by technicians, especially scientists and technical experts, technocracy is government by ruling class. Unlike democracy, which is rule by the people, for the people, technocracy in this age is better conceptualised as a kind of digital feudalism.
It’s no light matter that the most elite contributors in the WEF are unelected billionaires, tech experts and scientists. These are the people shaping our world, our future. And bear in mind that the WEF in strategic partnership with the UN (under which the WHO operates) now holds sway over almost every aspect of life on earth, globally.
In an open letter to Mr António Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations, the Transnational Institute (TNI) called on the UN to sever their strategic partnership with the WEF. The TNI summarises the risks of such a private-public partnership:
”This public-private partnership will permanently associate the UN with transnational corporations, some of whose core essential activities have caused or worsened the social and environmental crises that the planet faces. This is a form of corporate capture. We know that agribusiness destroys biodiversity and sustainable and just food systems, oil and gas corporations endanger the world’s climate, Big Pharma weakens access to essential medications, extractive corporations leave lasting damage to countries’ ecologies and peoples, and arms manufacturers profit from local and regional wars as well as repression of social movements. All these sectors are significant actors within the World Economic Forum.”
(emphasis mine) SOURCE
Fascist global governance by technocrats! is the warning cry here. Remember, Mussolini defined fascism as the merging of the state and corporations. If you have the time and interest, I strongly encourage you to read the letter in full.
The WEF is actually stunningly open about this public-private arrangement.
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Aldous Huxley imagined a dystopia of technocratic engineered happiness in Brave New World, but he didn’t foresee that the technocrats of the new millennium might do away with happiness altogether.
The trick is to condition the people to like their technocratic serfdom. To gratefully accept it. How many times in the past few years have you read or heard the phrase, “your safety is our number one priority” from corporations whose number one priority is plainly your money? Or, “stay safe!” in place of “tooroo!”? Safetyism is very attractive to fragile populations.
YOU’LL OWN NOTHING
YOU’LL HAVE NO PRIVACY
YOU’LL BE HAPPY SAFE
Legendary scientist and science communicator Carl Sagan warned against technocratic engineering in his last interview.
Sagan worried that a handful of elites running formidable technologies will end up running us:
”If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes along.”
And this is why the Fact Checkers who obfuscate truth are a problem. This is why big tech censorship of dissent is insidious. And this is why public-private partnerships allowing the WEF to engineer every aspect of our global future is downright terrifying.
Question everything, especially when they tell you it’s for your own good. Especially when their good ideas are being imposed on you. Especially when you don’t get a say in it.
BONUS CONTENT
You’ll have no privacy - even in your own mind. Reporting by the Wall Street Journal.