When I hear the words “predictive programming,“ I assume I’m going to be given an advertisement for the future that I will either want or have a hard time avoiding.
Jaron Lanier. who is an older VR pioneer from the 80s, and long a skeptic of technology, gave this interview in 2018 - and and it’s very good. So good in fact that I would call it “predictive prophesizing.”
Lanier describes the central conflict of our tech era as being one between DIGITAL LIBERTARIANISM on one hand; doing whatever you want to do and embracing the future that you want to create, and on the other hand DIGITAL MAOISM, or a type of Socialism where every next level of technology is just forced on you and you don’t have any damn choice. Sound familiar?
So these two currents seem to be very much active within the tech industry (and beyond it) and the case could certainly be made that they were in place from the very beginning… and are still just as active today. Certainly seems that way to me.
He makes an interesting observation that Silicon Valley at one point in time, were of necessity, a bunch of under-funded underdogs fighting against entrenched giants like IBM… which meant that they were always struggling. But like he says, even though that struggle is long over, Silicon Valley is still fighting for every inch of new ground and that kind of ambition, greed and singular focus has largely defined the resultant technology and the economic and societal purposes to which it is put.
For example, instead of pursuing other alternative directions for Facebook, Zuckerberg (along with his monopoly-centric investors and NWO puppet masters) have gone ahead with the full-blown immersion commercial model to take whatever is left of your life and monetize it (and YOU) inside of the Metaverse.
Lanier is very insightful on this point as he has done a lot of thinking on VR, which increasingly becomes relevant as we are being quickly herded into FB’s abhorent “Metaverse” simulation.
Anyway, I highly encourage you to check out what he has to say. He’s a smart guy and he’s got a very human soul that has long been fighting against the transhuman current - for as long as I can remember, and though I haven’t heard much from him lately, I assume he’s still doing that - probably through the medium of books that one may have to track down as I don’t see them circulating around social media much.