Zooming Our Way Into Oblivion

Todd Hayen

Look at all of the wonders that technology has brought us! I am certainly not going to start listing them here; it would take volumes to come up with even a partial list. We can bask in the marvels that technology has made for us in our modern world.

What would we do without this special form of human know-how?

That being said, there is a shadow to everything, and people are just as familiar with this darker side of technology as they are with the brighter side.

Needless to say, we have been inundated with the disasters of our insatiable desire to create conglomerations of various individual components that when properly animated with some sort of power source “do” something that we find useful, exciting, and entertaining—or deadly.

Most of this inundation comes from fanciful science fiction stories about killer robots and strange mechanical implants or, the most horrific addition to this plethora of “bots gone bad”—nanotechnology—tiny cell-sized, or even smaller, mechanical creatures that can penetrate the inner sanctums of our body and wreak a special sort of bedlam.

We have been slowly approaching an era where AI will become the primary way of life—we will live under the authority of a technocracy. Humankind will be just a whisper in some octogenarian’s late night dreams. Humankind will be gone.

Not so fast, in the words of alt-news hero James Corbett:

Here’s a great big white pill for you: the technocratic system of tyranny is going to fail. This is not wishful thinking; it’s a cold statement of fact. Technocracy, in all its facets—from the UN’s 2030 Agenda to the brain chips and AI godheads of the transhumanists to the CBDC social credit surveillance state—is anti-human. It goes against nature itself. It cannot work in the long run, and it is destined to fail.”

I wish I could be so optimistic. I cannot.

I remember in a past life I was a Hollywood film composer (no, not THAT sort of “past life,” just a long time ago). This memory goes back to about 1982. I showed up to a music scoring date and found the control room empty. Everyone was gathered around the keyboard player on the soundstage who had brought in the newest fangled keyboard sensation called the E-Mu Emulator.

“The way of the future,” people were saying as Clark Gassman, the keyboardist at the session, played a few licks of music using the violin sample. The string section wasn’t impressed, “have it play this!” was shouted out from the back of the room as one of the violinists effortlessly performed a dizzying dance on his instrument’s fingerboard.

It was a particularly difficult passage of Paganini. Everyone laughed, but it was a strained laugh, as most knew when some technological brainchild started its march into the future it left a lot of bodies in its wake.

Sure enough, it did. Although not quite yet perfected, advances in music sampling over the next few decades after that faithful day in Hollywood have indeed put a lot of musicians out of work. Needless to say, that is a common result as the march of technology carves its way through the human landscape.

As good as it is in emulating human artistry, though, it is never quite as good…but eventually people forget how good it was at one time, and even the memory whispers of the “good ol’ days” eventually fades away.

Technology, as it relates to the humans who develop greater and greater ways to replace themselves, is like a snake eating itself. No one seems to be the wiser, in the name of efficiency (both temporal and financial), humans will always take the brunt of it.

Should humans do away with technology entirely? Of course not. But there is something about being conscious, being connected with a deeper and divine “purpose and meaning” and not being so consumer focused that is significant in importance. We need to be a bit more aware of the impact certain advances in technology may have.

Kurt Vonnegut, the sweetheart of “aware young people” of my generation, wrote a book titled Player Piano. It is quite excellent. In it he describes a war against technology (primarily to get jobs back for the working class—it was written before the electronic revolution).

The last few lines will send chills up your spine if you can find the time to read it.

Human curiosity, combined with some strange innate drive to build a better mousetrap, seems to continuously get us into trouble, as more and more machines (an old term, I know) suck the soul out of humanity. This part of our ignorance (and tail eating) is not the major problem in today’s world. The major problem is that some elite group of very evil people have found that dangling the techno-carrot in front of hypnotized humans can be very effective in brainwashing the masses.

There are dozens of ways they are doing this: the pseudo-science behind the virus, the vaccine, and everything related to the great hoax of the 21st Century. Cellphones, iPads, Apps for every possible form of distraction, video games, screens, screens, screens. Self-driving cars, AI art, sampled music, virtual reality, on and on and on and on. There are so many examples of this mind manipulation through technology it is mesmerizing.

But I am going to focus on only one example. Zooming/virtual meetings/virtual classrooms, and anything else that smacks of keeping people in their houses and not mingling with fellow human beings where they can experience their kin in analog—touching, seeing, hearing, smelling, all from countless perspectives, in 3D.

Next to wearing masks and social distancing, virtual reality and the intended avoidance of human contact in a visceral context, is the greatest assault to humanity yet on record. And no one cares.

In fact, they like it. It is easy (red flag number one, as nothing “easy” ever is of much import), fun because it satisfies that odd human nature to excitedly engage in technology (“fun” is the other red flag of meaninglessness). “Fun” and “easy” are not bad at the right time and place, but they are destructively addictive if engaged in unconsciously.

I have noticed here in Ontario the rage currently is online psychotherapy…and now even online medical doctors. There probably isn’t anything that plunges the dagger into the healing power of human interaction than having medical doctors and psychologists seeing their patients on a screen. And everyone loves it, practitioners and patients alike.

Even I was into this idea when it first became available (I will admit, there is a time and place for this sort of intervention, but again in my humble opinion, the price is way too high to pay if it becomes a norm for convenience’s sake—and especially if it is part of this nefarious agenda to dehumanize humans, which I believe it is).

I used to participate in a Crop Circle conference held in the picturesque Wiltshire hills of rural England. A small hotel in a small town called Devizes was the setting. Meeting with like minded attendees in the restaurant of the old world hotel before the conference, wandering around the beautiful country fields looking for fresh crop circles, and laughing with new found friends at a local pub was certainly the appeal.

These experiences cannot be replaced with a virtual conference, which this event has now become.

Even meetings next to the proverbial water cooler in an office environment are largely a thing of the past. Sitting in front of a screen to do your work, or meet with family and friends, or business colleagues, is a slow death of the spirit. This simply cannot be sustainable—yet it will be attempted, things never go back as they were if technology is allowed to lumber along, sucking in and destroying anything of any real value in its path.

Live violins never came back to the degree they were in Hollywood studios before 1980. The unbelievable skill level and divine talent of so many human musicians is now rare compared to the presence of these attributes in previous generations.

The soul is slowly being sucked out of everything. And now it is consciously and purposefully being stripped away—masks, social exclusions, work from home in front of a computer screen, medical doctors online, and schools offering virtual only classrooms—all in the name of convenience, economics, and efficiency (as well as in the name of the New World Order).

It is a central part of a very subtle aspect of the agenda to strip away human dignity, human connection, and human soul. What better way is there to create a world of zombie-like, compliant, and soulless labourers? This is what we are experiencing, right now.

Todd Hayen is a registered psychotherapist practicing in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He holds a PhD in depth psychotherapy and an MA in Consciousness Studies. He specializes in Jungian, archetypal, psychology. Todd also writes for his own substack, which you can read here