The Age of Drones

Imagine our world as a giant petri dish and we are all inside of it. Experiments can be conducted on our “wetware.” There will be no escape from the drones.

To read or listen to the entire essay, please go here: https://khmezek.substack.com/p/the-age-of-drones

While researching my piece, The Truth about Luciferase, I came across a patent that blew my mind and I absolutely had to write about it.

The patent is described as “Systems and Methods for Mobile Sample Collection” and it has to do with drones.

We’re talking armies of drones of all shapes and sizes, down to the smallest gnat, working together in a “swarm” to take samples, administer drugs and regulate the health and behavior of ordinary citizens. The promise is that these drones will be deployed to make our lives easier—for our health and safety.

Embarking on this read, I would like to start with some important words:

metaverse, meatverse, wetware, software, hardware

Metaverse: a virtual-reality space in which users can interact with a computer-generated environment and other users.

Meatverse: you will not find this word defined anywhere on the internet. It is the word technocrats derisively use when describing the real world.

In June 2018, Oculus executive Jason Rubin sent an email to Facebook board member Marc Andreessen with the subject line “The Metaverse.” This paper was like the first page in the history of a new world, written by one of the gods.

Ruben described the Metaverse as a place where users “float 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.”

We are assured that at a certain point, humans will prefer spending time in the razzle-dazzle metaverse rather than the drab and restrictive meatverse. And lest you think, oh what’s the big deal, Zuckerberg’s metaverse is on the way out, it isn’t. If he isn’t successful, someone else will be—whatever form it takes over the next 10 years or so.

We are just pieces of meat to our controllers.

Wetware, Software, Hardware:

The human body is now being described in terms that are similar to robots, making us seem as if our differences are only technical. The human body and central nervous system are “wetware” as opposed to the “software” and “hardware” of machines.

Technopedia describes wetware like this:

…where neural networks and similar artificial intelligence technologies would be described as hardware, the human brain that they attempt to simulate and model would be the “wetware.” Biological systems are described as wetware because of the water that makes up so much of the biological tissue of humans, animals and plants. The term “wetware” will become increasingly useful as technology makes its way into the fields of biology and biological engineering.

We are wet. Machines are dry. We have temperatures—both emotionally and physically. Machines do not. Defining humans with these new words adjusts us to accepting identification based on similarity or dissimilarity to machines.

It’s hard to fight against our controllers if we don’t even know who or what to attack. The biosecurity state is all pervasive. There isn’t one government, organization, or person to point the finger at.

As of July 2022, the United States is just behind China in camera surveillance of its citizens, with an average of two cameras for every 10 people in its major cities. The UK is in third place with one CCTV camera for every 16 citizens in its larger cities.

Ever since 9/11, we have been programed to accept constant surveillance for our health and safety. The January 6th attack on the Capitol building opened the door for even greater surveillance due to increased risk of “domestic terrorism”. As for online surveillance, in 2019 alone, the US government investigated over 800,000 of its own citizens personal data.

Thanks to Covid, citizens came to accept greater and greater levels of control.

A 2020 New York Times article described this post-Covid world we now live in:

Drones have been working as police officers, soaring over the banks of the Seine in Paris and the city squares of Mumbai, to patrol for social distancing violators.

They’re delivering medical supplies in Rwanda and snacks in Virginia. They’re hovering over crowds in China to scan for fevers below.

“Yes auntie, this is the drone speaking to you,” said one drone, speaking to an elderly woman below in an eerie bullhorn echo, according to a video published by Global Times, a state-controlled newspaper. “You shouldn’t walk about without wearing a mask.”

Global Times also published an account of another drone. A voice from above castigated a small child peering skyward while seated with a man who was violating quarantine rules by playing mahjong in public: “Don’t look at the drone, child. Ask your father to leave immediately.”

Drones can be equipped with so-called stingrays to collect information from people’s mobile phones, night-vision cameras, GPS sensors, radar, lidar (laser detection technology for creating three-dimensional maps of an area), as well as thermal and infrared cameras.

Frank Wang is the world’s first drone billionaire. His company DJI, headquartered in Shenzhen, has a 77% share of America’s consumer drone sales, according to this Bloomberg article.

The same drone surveillance system being used in Xinjiang, a region in northwest China that human-rights groups have described as a police state because of the oppression, horrific abuse, and confining to camps of as many as 1 million Uighurs, are being used by Flymotion, a Florida-based drone services company that uses its devices to support dozens of police departments. “DJI owns the global market,” says Flymotion CEO Ryan English.

Agencies in all 50 states have drones now, about 90% of them made by DJI, according to a recent Bard College study.

Now that we have figured out ways to connect machines with our bodies, creating the Internet of Bodies (IoB), drones can be used as intermediaries between our machine-controlled bodies and the elite who control it all.

To read or listen to the entire essay, please go here: https://khmezek.substack.com/p/the-age-of-drones