Transhumanist Futures Part 2: Humanity in the Crosshairs

Originally published by Propaganda in Focus. Part One of this article is available here and here.

The Transhumanist campaign against humanity, we have outlined in Part 1, is part and parcel of a sophisticated long-game strategy waged against bodies and psyches. With the manipulation of our primal fears and altruistic impulses, the prosecution of this technological onslaught against humanity is camouflaged by linguistic shell games based on sanitising, eulogising and euphemistic language; justification through appeal to valued collective activities such as space exploration; and by claimed threats that humanity is itself the scourge, including through its propensity for “unwanted” love, which is recast as an affliction needing treatment with biochips and neuroceuticals.

In this perverse “New Normal”, technocratic regimes of dispossession headed by transnational economic interests and, we argue, the military-intelligence complex, are presented as self-evident and morally justified. Social order, civil rights, and human sovereignty are reconceptualised, repackaged, and reframed in public discourse as “surveillance under the skin”.

Part 2 broadens scope beyond NASA and its purportedly space-oriented transhumanist agenda by offering analysis of transhumanist forecasting and planning in an array of military-intelligence strategic vision or ‘futures’ documents, which are focussed both on military personnel and civilian populations. We reveal that this evidence not only casts military personnel as fodder for transhumanist experimentation, but foresees societies and leadership agendas stratified along transhumanist lines.

The trail of documentation ultimately leads to an intersection with military-intelligence scenario planning for a pandemic-ravaged dystopian global landscape in the year 2020, with real and present implications for impending global governance under the World Health Organisation, with ratification of amendments to International Health Regulations and a new Pandemic Preparedness treaty pending in May 2024.

Introduction

Too often do we marvel at the power of the institutions we have constructed over time, and too often do we take for granted that ministers of state power have a genuine interest in attending to the needs of the citizenry who give consent to their rule. But how, in these times of systematic societal destruction, can we understand the ways in which a “New Normal” is being built before our eyes in the biological systems that comprise families, communities, and nations? How is the great transformation unfolding in real-time? Can the material evidence of fundamental change be discerned through the obscurity of official planning, policies and papers already published?

A Brave New Millennium: Nanotechnology, Policy, and the Building Blocks of ‘Life’

In September 2000, almost a year before NASA Langley’s August 2001 ‘futures’ presentation[1] to the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) described in Part 1, another ‘futures’ workshop took place a short drive along the Potomac River from Langley, at the National Science Foundation (NSF) headquarters in Alexandria Virginia. The workshop was titled ‘Societal Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology’. It was organised by the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), a cabinet-level council of advisers to the President,[2] which provides “the principal means for the U.S. President to coordinate science, space and technology policies across the Federal Government”.[3]

In hindsight, one can see how the little-known September 2000 NSTC workshop now stands on the science and technology policy landscape as an unassuming launchpad for what NASA Langley would term, in the following year, the BioNano Age. It was held two months after the US Government’s National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) was announced in July 2000,[4] whose aim was to accelerate progress in nanotechnology research, and was sponsored by the same Federal NSTC body that co-ordinated the NNI.[5] Shortly prior to the 2000 NSTC workshop, according to the workshop summary, “a White House letter (from the Office of Science and Technology Policy and Office of Management and Budget) sent in the fall of 2000 to all Federal agencies has placed nanotechnology at the top of the list of emerging fields of research and development in the United States”.[6]

In tandem with the nano-technological movement in the White House, the 2000 NSTC workshop spawned a modestly-worded 280-page report in 2001, which advised that “a revolution is occurring in science and technology, based on the recently developed ability to measure, manipulate and organize matter on the nanoscale — 1 to 100 billionths of a meter”. The report predicted that, “over the next 10 to 20 years [2010-2020], nanotechnology will fundamentally transform science, technology, and society”. It added, “there is little doubt that the broader implications of this nanoscience and nanotechnology revolution for society at large will be profound”.[7]

The status of such nanotechnology policies is significant to transhumanism’s trajectory in that nano-technological materials and tools are critical to the transhumanist project of re-engineering biological life. According to a 2010 report from the Air War College titled Nanotechnology: Threats and Deterrent Opportunities by 2035, “the ability to work in nanoscale is … leading to unprecedented understanding and control over the basic building blocks of all natural and man-made things”.[8] It goes without saying that one could not get more elemental than controlling the basic building blocks of all natural and man-made things. Nanotechnology, the report explains, “is about much more than dealing with the very small”. It quotes Mihail C. Roco, Senior Advisor for Science and Engineering at the NSF, as saying that nanotechnology represents the convergence of science and engineering “where the fundamental principles of life can be found.”[9]

In an applied sense, according to the 2001 Roco and Bainbridge NTSC workshop report:

… the nanoscale is not just another step toward miniaturization, but a qualitatively new scale; … among the envisioned breakthroughs are human organ restoration using engineered tissue, ‘designer’ materials created from directed assembly of atoms and molecules, as well as emergence of entirely new phenomena in chemistry and physics.[10]

Those entirely new phenomena, The Air Force Research Laboratory explains in Nanoscience Technologies: Applications, Transitions and Innovations, arise because nano-sized materials are smaller than the scales at which conventional physics apply and larger than those where atomic physics dominate.[11] This intermediate state between conventional and atomic physics results in oddities such as “forc[ing] electrons into unique energy states”, which in turn promote features including altered magnetic properties, “improved superconductivity” and exceptional strength.[12]

Among the potential applications of such nanotechnological oddities offered in the NTSC report are “wired humans”. The report foresees a day when, with the help of nanoscience, “nanoscanners” will project imagery directly onto the fovea (a small depression in the neurosensory retina where visual acuity is sharpest), while microphone implants in the throat, and implants in the inner ear, could be coupled with implantable transmitting and receiving devices. Should such developments come to pass, “then a human will be wired fully — not only internally but also externally to the vast network outside of the body.”[13]

In its capacity advising the US President, to facilitate the advancement of wired humans and other innovations, the NTSC report offers recommendations for social scientists and policymakers to “help us to take advantage of the new technology sooner, better, and with greater confidence.”[14] What ensued from this point forth is perhaps among the most significant, and the most under-reported, series of developments in national security affairs.

The following year a second workshop was held, titled, Nano Bio Info Cogno: Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance.[15] The 2001 workshop spawned a second report, edited by the same authors as the previous year’s NTSC workshop summary, Mihail C. Roco and William S. Bainbridge of the NSF. The second report, published in 2002, ran to 424 pages and launched what is now known as the NBIC initiative, an influential, international interdisciplinary convergence of activity across Nanoscience, Biotechnology, Information technology and Cognitive science / neuroscience (NBIC) domains. An introductory graphic to the report heralds the nascent NBIC convergence as “changing the societal ‘fabric’ towards a new structure”.[16] The seemingly innocuous description of ‘change’ to the structural ‘fabric’ of society may have passed to readers, at the time, as unworthy of deeper contemplation, but digging into the details of the international ‘interdisciplinary’ ‘convergence’ of nano-everything yields surprising results about what ‘change’ would actually entail.

Although not obvious in the NBIC report itself, a later NATO document made clear that the NBIC initiative had come about with DoD backing. The 2021 NATO report reads, “NBIC is a scientific project bringing together four previously distinct domains: nanotechnology (nanorobot technology, nano-sensors, nanostructures, energy, etc.), biotechnology (bio-genomic technology, bio-engineering, neuropharmacology, etc.), information technology (computer science, microelectronics, etc.) and cognitive technology (cognitive science and neuropsychology). The project was formalized with the encouragement of the US Department of Defense (DoD) in 2002 and subsequently taken up by major international institutions and a number of nations, to bring together future technologies”.[17]

Indeed, concurrently with the NBIC project, just as the White House had entered the 21st century with a focus on nanotechnology and a new National Nanotechnology Initiative, the DoD entered with a compatible Defense Science and Technology Strategy 2000, published in May of 2000. The Defense science and technology strategy declares that in order to “provide for national security in the 21st century”,[18] the DoD would need to be “building our portfolio of technology investments … leveraging the technology explosion, and enabling the Revolution in Military Affairs”.[19] Technologies of interest to the DoD are listed as including nanoscience, micro- and nano-robots, molecular engineering, augmented reality, nanoscale sensors, and biosensors with smart sensor webs, all together enabling “the combination of biology with information technology, electronics, optoelectronics, sensors, and actuators”.[20] In other words, the same BioNano technologies underpinning NASA Langley’s BioNANO Age, slated to commence in 2020, as discussed in Part 1. The subsequent DoD-backed NBIC initiative of 2002 cites the 2000 DoD Science and Technology Strategy report, offering “embedded bionic chips” in soldiers as an example of the revolutionary technologies emanating from the national security realm.[21]

Simply put, the DoD, NTSC and NASA Langley in 2000-2001, and NATO in 2021 (along with a cornucopia of military-intelligence projects and documents in between — a small selection of which we summarise below) have been singing from the same transhumanist DoD BioNano hymnsheet since at least the turn of the century.

The 2021 NATO report continues: “The object [of NBIC] is to encourage the development of tools and adapt or improve humans through an anthropotechnical approach to develop a hybridized human-system … Today, this project has led to the partial convergence of domains, mostly through pairing information technology and health nanotechnologies, new chemical cognition enhancers, embedded electronics, etc. Ultimately, it will lead to an augmented human operator (or even a hybrid one), injected with amplifying substances or nanotechnologies [emphasis added]”.[22] That is, it will lead to transhumans. With the help of hypodermic needles.

By way of illustration, the NATO document notes, “a number of enhanced soldier projects are already underway”.[23]

Cyborg Soldiers: Transhumanist Designs on the Military

As regards abbreviations, GI may be one of the most enigmatic. Originally, it referred to galvanized iron, which was used in the manufacture of, among other things, buckets for military use. With the rise of the permanent international arms industry, the abbreviation has assumed additional meanings: “government issue”, “general issue”, and “ground infantry”. The collocations of each meaning are interesting: the concept of infantry is derived from the French ‘infant’ whose mind represents fertile ‘ground’ for effective conditioning. Is this why ‘bucketheads’ who’ve been effectively conditioned like babes have long been sent out first as cannon fodder into conflicts in efforts to acquire ground in battle? The answer to this question may tell us something about the mindless cyborg on assembly lines around the world.

With a brave new nanotechnological millennium in mind, a simple browse through titles of relevant military-intelligence documents provides a brief overview of ways in which the bodies and brains of GIs and other military personnel have been positioned at the frontlines of battle plans between transhumans and humanity. Consider the following:

• Neural and Biological Soldier Enhancement-From SciFi to Deployment (2009):[24] Published by NATO and prepared by the Fraunhofer Institute for Technological Trend Analysis, a long-time partner to the Federal German Ministry of Defense. The report echoes the US DoD’s 2000 proclamation of a technology-driven ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ (RMA) for the 21st century,[25] and discusses the role of human augmentation, brain-machine interfaces and genetic engineering.
• Cognition 2035: Surviving a complex environment through unprecedented intelligence (2009):[26] A research paper for the US Air War College, the document similarly projects that, “by 2035, advances in nano-scale, biological, and information technologies will drive cognition toward unprecedented capabilities in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Enhanced Human Intelligence (EHI). These capabilities will have a dramatic effect on all levels of the Air Force”. The paper cites brain computer interfaces and neural prostheses, noting, “there may, also, come a time where adoption of these technologies is compulsory … military service may require certain computer-brain augmentations for its members … Coercive forces will drive extensive ethical and cultural debate”.[27]

Was compulsory adoption of bio-nano technologies involving synthetic RNA in 2020, ostensibly to ‘augment’ the human immune system, an opening gambit in the deployment of such coercive technological ‘enhancement’?

• Biologically fit: Using Biotechnology to Create a Better Soldier (2013):[28] A thesis from the Naval Postgraduate School, the document discusses genetic engineering to create a better solider, and argues that the DoD must overcome the natural genetic limitations of unadulterated service members, in the interests of creating a soldier with greater strength, speed, endurance, and resistance to enemy tactics. The paper proposes that, “the natural limitations of the human genome confines a soldier’s war fighting capabilities” to the extent that, “the soldier is the weakest link due to its natural genetic limitations”. (Note the dehumanising and gender-neutral reference to the human soldier as “it”). In a similar vein, the paper observes, “leaders are realizing more the importance of the soldier as an integral weapon system” [italics added].[29] Accordingly, the document summarises the DoD’s interest and investment in DNA research and genetic engineering. At the time — a decade ago — it was noted that “the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and other research organizations grow closer to ground breaking innovations that could have a major impact on the institutional practices of the DoD … DARPA is underway in their attempts to develop tools to enable genetic engineering that may one day enable the DoD’s ability to create a biological (sic) fit soldier”. By way of example, the paper cites a DARPA project involving artificial chromosomes: “By soliciting the help of private biotech corporations, DARPA aims to improve their methods to implant human artificial chromosomes (HACs) into mammalian cells as highlighted in a document on the DoD’s Small Business Innovation and Research page”.[30]

As much as the content of such documents is striking, with their cavalier recasting of human beings as weapons and instruments of war, whose utility is defined and designed by the military, the sheer number of like documents, along with the fact that they have been publically available for decades, is perhaps even more remarkable.

The list continues.

• Cyborg Soldier 2050: Human/Machine Fusion and the Implications for the Future of the DOD (2019):[31] Performing Organizations – Director, US Army Combat Capabilities Command Chemical Biological Center; Naval Research Laboratory; National Defense University; U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command; Georgetown University, and; the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. Sponsoring Orgnization – the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. The report outlines four domains of cyborg technology and notes that an upcoming two way data transfer between brains and machines and/or brains and electronics will create a “revolutionary advancement in future military capabilities”. Specifically:

This technology is predicted to facilitate read/write capability between humans and machines and between humans through brain-to-brain interactions. These interactions would allow warfighters direct communication with unmanned and autonomous systems, as well as with other humans, to optimize command and control systems and operations. The potential for direct data exchange between human neural networks and microelectronic systems could revolutionize tactical warfighter communications, speed the transfer of knowledge throughout the chain of command, and ultimately dispel the ‘fog’ of war. Direct neural enhancement of the human brain through neuro-silica interfaces could improve target acquisition and engagement and accelerate defensive and offensive systems.[32]

To be clear, this document reflects the fact that the office of the third highest ranking US DoD official (The Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering), second only to the Director and Deputy Director,[33] is presently focussed on turning military personnel into cyborgs. The plainly transhumanist nature of this reality, at such a high level of command, belies the common misperception that transhumanism is a quirky affectation of fringe-dwelling intellectuals, a figment of over-active imaginations, and/or an indulgence of elites with their heads in the clouds.

The report goes on: “The U.S. Government should support efforts to establish a whole-of-nation approach to human/machine enhancement technologies”, involving the commercial sector as well as government, with the rationale that, “a national effort to sustain U.S. dominance in cyborg technologies is in the best interests of the DOD and the nation”.[34]

And yet, despite advocating a whole of nation effort to achieve US dominance in cyborg technologies, the report acknowledges that, “how the use of integrated technologies will affect existing brain architectures and functions is not yet known and arguably, can only be known by implementing the particular interventions”.[35] In other words, through human experimentation.

Are there any parallels to be drawn, or lessons learned, from the Covid-19 experiment into which the world’s population has been integrated? [36, 37] As Barack Obama put it in April 2022, “we’ve now, essentially, clinically tested the vaccine on billions of people worldwide”[38] — the “vaccines” still being in clinical trials until 2023 when they were rolled out in 2021. Furthermore, is it a coincidence that the Covid-19 experiment was co-ordinated by National Security agencies, as opposed to health agencies, in at least two ostensibly democratic nations purportedly under civilian rule — the United States and Australia? (We examine this question more closely in Part 3.)

• Human Automation Integration for Supervisory Control of UAVs (Uninhabited Air Vehicles) (2006):[39] Published by NATO and prepared by the Defense Science and Technology Laboratory of the UK Ministry of Defense (MoD), the report describes approaches to “remote supervision of operations involving use of lethal force”. The technological tools include what it describes as advanced human-computer interfaces and multi-modal virtual media immersive synthetic environments.[40] That is, remote killing using ‘enhanced’ virtual reality.
• Ideas Lab for Imagining Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Cognition in the USAF of 2030 (2019):[41] Sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the paper is the final report of a year-long project to explore the mid-term (10+ years) future of Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Cognition (AI) in the context of the future USAF [US Air Force]. With an entire section on “Human Machine Fusion”, the report cites examples including a warfighter with micro- or nano-electronic implants allowing them to see a wider range of the electromagnetic spectrum,[42] to physiologically withstand extreme environments,[43, 44] or to control a plane as though it were an extension of his or her body through a brain-computer interface.[45] Such augmentations would form part of what the report calls a “human-machine matrix”, encompassing different levels of human-machine interaction, from simple human use of “smart” machines, to “tighter integration of humans with machines, where human-machine coupling creates an entirely new form of warfighter (e.g., something exemplified by the ‘cyborg’ concept)”.[46] The report observes of its contributors, who hail from academia, the NIH and military contractors including Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, “there was agreement that research on human-machine integration should consider a broad perspective on techniques to integrate machines with the full range of human bodily systems including the peripheral and central nervous system,[47-49] the musculoskeletal system,[50-52] the endocrine system,[53, 54] the viscera, the vascular system,[55] immunological processes and even patterns of gene expression”.[56, 57] Such transhumanist developments the report deemed necessary to achieve “success for the USAF in the 2030 military context”.[58] In other words, if the US Air Force and private military contractors have their way, military-grade transhumanism will leave no stone of human biology unturned.
• Opportunities and Implications of Brain Computer Interface Technology (2020): Air University Press, Muir S. Fairchild Research Information Center, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. The paper is part of a series of US Air Force publications that “aim to present cutting-edge, actionable knowledge — research” according to a foreword by a USAF Commandant Brigadier General.[59] It outlines the R&D status of emerging technologies designed to achieve “bidirectional communication between a brain and a computer” in order “to meet challenging national security objectives for the next 20 years”, “enhance combat capability”, and “ensure that the DOD maintains its war-fighting advantage”. The Brain Computer Interface technologies of interest included genetic modification of brain cells, utilising optical as well as electrical signals for Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs), and employing nonsurgical, including injectable, means of recording and controlling activity at “the basic working unit of the brain, the neuron”.[60]

It is worth recalling here that Dennis Bushnell, the NASA Langley Chief Scientist, told national security industry partners in 2001 that the fruits of classified R&D often remain “in inventory” for over 40 years.[61] Which raises the question as to how long injectable means of recording and controlling neuronal activity have been available to the military-intelligence establishment. Given Bushnell’s 2011 remark that brain chips had already been inserted into 10,000 people[62], the question seems a reasonable one. Which in turn raises the question of what Elon Musk’s public spectacle over surgically implanting a brain chip into just one person by 2024 is really all about.

Looking towards a 2040 timeframe, the Air Force paper notes that technologies such as genetically and optically-mediated injectable BCIs are part of an “exponentially growing” and “potentially disruptive” field.[63] Consistent with the foundational DoD-backed NBIC report published 18 years earlier, which launched an international “convergence” of interdisciplinary Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno R&D,[64] the 2020 paper explains that the BCI technologies it describes are the product of interdisciplinary collaboration between neurologists, biologists, engineers, geneticists, psychologists, computer scientists, and mathematicians. It adds that the “DoD has increased its investment and reorganized its efforts to lead in this [interdisciplinary BCI] field”.[65]

The report explains that the BCI technology of such interest to the DoD involves “a bidirectional communication pathway between the brain and an external device, designed to acquire, analyze, and translate brain signals for a specific action. The brain typically works by sending a signal to peripheral nerves and muscles to induce movement of a limb or to conduct a certain action. BCIs provide a new output channel for the brain to communicate with and ultimately control an external device. The external device could be an artificial limb, a simulated aircraft in flight, or anything that can be interfaced with a computer. BCI is also synonymous with brain-machine interface, neural-controlled interface, mind-machine interface, and direct neural interface, all of which are in other research”.[66]

The report, written in 2020, advises to expect within the next five to 20+ years technologies such as those under development by DARPA, including devices to “read and write memories directly into the brain” (the DARPA RAM/RAM-Replay, ‘Neuro-FAST’ initiative), implantable microchips, and DARPA’s Next Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology N3 program,[67] which includes a ‘platform’ enabling the brain to transmit or receive magneto-electric signals via transducers injected into the body.[68]

Lest any skeptics feel inclined at this point to mutter ‘conspiracy theorist’, ‘disinformation’, ‘Anti-vaxxer’ or ‘crackpot nonsense’, we note that the majority of the documents listed above, and the majority of primary source materials cited throughout this article series, have been formally authenticated and disseminated through the National Technical Information Service and/or the DoD Washington Headquarters Services Directorate for Information Operations and Reports, or through the DoD Executive Services Directorate.

The 2020 Air Force BCI paper concluded:

BCI and related technology are pushing humanity closer to the philosophy of Transhumanism, which seeks to enhance human intellect and physiology through the use of technology. This philosophy may lead to a new definition of what it means to be human ….

Within the military realm, the USAF and DOD should be the first to set the standards for the acceptable use of this technology and then apply those standards through international agreements. This will only be accomplished if we lead in the development and testing of BCIs ….

In order to seize these opportunities, the USAF needs to act now on currently available technologies to foster a culture of increased experimentation and calculated risk-taking”.[69]

As luck would have it for transhumanism, increased experimentation and risk-taking had already been written, three years earlier, into the very foundations of the office of the Under Secretary for Research and Engineering. When that role was created as part of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2017, a conference report accompanying the Act read: “The conferees expect that the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering would take risks, press the technology envelope, test and experiment, and have the latitude to fail, as appropriate.”[70] Two years later, in 2019, a paper sponsored by the DoD Under Secretary’s office was advocating for the United States to pursue dominance in cyborg technologies, including through trial and error with military personnel.[71]

Does calling for human lab-rats in cyborg experimentation fulfil some aspect of the US DoD recruitment process? We wonder.

In sum, each of these transhumanist soldier ‘enhancement’ papers, which represent but a selection of similar documents, are consistent with the 2001 NASA Langley proposition that human beings are too “large”, “heavy”, “tender”, and “slow” for warfare, particularly compared to robots, which, NASA Langley points out, possess “greatly improved lethality”.[72] The foundational 2000 DoD document on a 21st century technological Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) likewise opened by proclaiming, “the technologies that will make our forces lighter, more mobile, and more lethal will be key”.[73] However, whether re-engineering human beings to match robots in their lethality constitutes ‘enhancement’ is not a subject of serious debate in these and other military-intelligence strategic vision and ‘futures’ literatures. Like the forward march into a world that revolves around technological capability rather than human welfare, lethality as ‘enhancement’ is simply accepted as unquestionable, and taken as a given.

But what of transhumanist designs on the civilian sector? Armies will be armies and astronauts will be astronauts. Super soldiers for combat and extremophiles for space, as described in Part 1, are one thing. But do the DoD and its agencies concern themselves with artificially engineering civilian populations?

Cyborg Civilians: Deep State Designs on Global Citizens

When NASA Langley opened its talk to the national security conference in 2001 with, “The ‘Bots ‘Borgs ‘& Humans Welcome you to 2025 AD”,[74] audience members could have been forgiven for thinking that the sole aim of the playful title was to garner laughs. A spoonful of humour helps the dystopia go down, etc.

Copyright Yena_B, 2024, Artist’s impression of ‘Future Strategic Issues’ slide 2 from 2001

But could the same be said of publications from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)? Together with the US Army War College Center for Strategic Leadership (CSL)? And the National Intelligence University (NIU)? If those three organisations had jointly sponsored a 104-page monograph on the subject of bots, borgs and humans in the years to 2030, could that level of military intelligence co-ordination be considered a joke? If the monograph had been commissioned as part of an ongoing series on “new and emerging ‘futures’ concepts”, with the “overarching goal” of “assist[ing] strategic and high-operational level decision makers” in their “critical analysis of national, military and intelligence issues within the Joint, Interagency, Intergovernmental, and Multinational (JIIM) environment”, should that be dismissed as a little bit of banter?[75]

As reality would have it, in 2008 just such a document was published, as part of an ODNI think-tank initiative called Proteus. The Proteus consortium, like the DoD-backed NBIC initiative and the White House National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), dated to the turn of the millennium.

Copyright Yena_B, 2024, Artist’s impression of Proteus slide 1 from 2008

By 2008, Proteus had grown into an international consortium involving an alphabet soup of agencies under the aegis of the ODNI, including the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the US Joint Forces Command (USJFC), the US Marine Corps (USMC), the US Navy and others, along with numerous universities, international bodies such as Canadian, Israeli, British, Australian, Italian, French and Swiss military-intelligence bodies and institutions, the UN, and private corporations including Lockheed Martin. In 2008, the consortium published a monograph titled, Leadership in the Era of the Human Singularity: New Demands, New Skills, New Response.[76] **The monograph opened by noting:

The “human singularity” refers to the integration of technology into the human body so that levels of mental acuity and physical ability eclipse all previous known levels … A broad front of converging core technologies, such as nanotechnology, bioengineering, supercomputing, materials development, and robotics, may make such individuals commonplace by 2030; indeed, significant steps have already been taken to achieve this goal, and the singularity could arrive earlier.

The rise of the singularity and the resulting Enhanced Singular Individuals (henceforth referred to as ‘ESIs’), capable of outsized mental and physical performance, will have a major impact on the practice of leadership, a major factor in determining whether a society succeeds or fails … In fact, the singularity will override the parameters that traditionally define human performance, changing society in complex and subtle ways.

With the singularity [for instance], humanity will be heading into uncharted territory whose highly-talented denizens raise the specter that human beings will be rendered obsolete”. Similarly, “the singularity will change our ideas of humanness”.[77]

The careful and calculated modification of our self-perception as autonomous creatures in recent years is hardly surprising when seen in hindsight as part of the inexorable march toward full human automation. The paper stresses that in future decades “enhanced” individuals “will represent a growing portion of the population, not simply a small fraction … [which] will transform society”.[78] Building upon this projection, the bulk of the monograph concerns itself with the direction that such societal transformation is expected to take. Throughout, in order to assist ‘strategic and high-operational level decision makers’ in ‘the Joint, Interagency, Intergovernmental, and Multinational environment’, discussion revolves around leadership challenges associated with the anticipated emergence of three strata of ‘beings’: The ‘Tweaked’, the ‘Freaked’, and the ‘Geeked’ classes. The monograph explains:

The Tweaked’s abilities result from the integration of singularity technologies with individuals’ biological systems … [These individuals] represent the mainstream of ESIs, those who benefit from that broad front of technologies applied in as many ways as scientists can devise.

The Freaked are new creations: cyborgs or humans with significant mechanized parts; A.I.-guided robots, clones designed for single functions or operations, group minds operating through an open source mental system via embedded quantum- or protein-based chips, robots with animal or human brains, and even animals with human intelligence or humans with animal traits … As fantastic as these possibilities seem, all are based on technologies that are well along in development or are in the prototype stage.

The Geeked are un-enhanced individuals (henceforth referred to as ‘Norms’) who depend on external devices to achieve competitive advantage: access to super-computing; control of virtual worlds leveraged into ‘real-world’ advantage; and gatekeepers who exercise control over energy, resources, and the technologies of crowd control and manipulation. The Geeked, of course, are already among us in the high tech industry”.[79]

The document, published under the banner of the Proteus consortium, which involves ~30 military / intelligence bodies across 11 nations in conjunction with numerous universities, written in 2008, stresses that:

The singularity is not simply a conceit devised by scientists, inventors, and futurists unduly entranced with technology. It is, rather, supported by a continuous stream of scientific advances that already can extend human life, establish interfaces between biological and synthetic systems, improve brain function, integrate robotic elements into the human body, build implants that offer ‘superhuman’ sight or hearing, clone individuals, create species hybrids (usually one trait from one species grafted to another) via gene-grafting, and develop ways to translate a person’s neuronal activity into their actual thoughts, among a host of other innovations.[80]

To anchor the point in concrete R&D, consistent with the foundational NBIC paper[81] and countless related documents distributed by the the DoD Washington Headquarters Services Directorate for Information Operations and Reports, the monograph adds, “the accelerating development of a few key technologies — nanotechnology, super-computing, genetic engineering, and robotics — is propelling the singularity”.[82]

In terms of leadership challenges posed by the coming Tweaked, Freaked and Geeked classes, the document warns that:

Many ESIs, especially the Freaked, will start out pretty much as servants or curiosities, as will simulacra such as holographic entities, cyborgs, and clones. The Tweaked, on the contrary, will leverage power from the beginning. Conflicts will flare in regard to recognition and compensation: do ESIs or their designers, owners, and/or handlers receive credit and rewards for a job well done? What fate lies in store for ESIs rendered obsolete by improved technology? Norms will not necessarily be loyal to their ‘own’; many may align with ESIs, and Norm leaders who can work well with ESIs will flourish.[83]

Questions that are expected to arise include, “when can an ESI own property? When does a cyborg receive a paycheck?” Meanwhile, “geeked leaders who control singularity technologies will eventually yield leadership to the Tweaked and Freaked as the latter groups gain confidence and independence”.[84]

As part of a world in which this unfolds:

… sex is no longer the only generative force; that honor will be shared by the technologies that create the singularity. The true unseen powers are not higher powers per se, but the source of ESIs’ gifts and the networked links that connect them to that source.[85]

Some readers may see the reference to these “true unseen powers” as an uncanny fulfillment of Edward Bernays’ 1928 description: “Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power …” Others may see foreshadowing of Yuval Noah Harari’s 2017 pronouncement that “Divinity is not far enough to describe what we are trying to do.”

With technology supplanting reproductive and higher powers, the document counsels that, ultimately, “ESIs will influence social organization to reflect and favor the expression of their outsized talents”. It cautions, “as pre-Singularity humans, we need to discard the assumption that we will always exert control or leadership over technology … At no other time in human history has the locus of leadership shifted from the strictly human to beings with greater mental capacity than our own [italics original]”.[86]

Throughout, behind the brash and brazen forecasts, there is the unspoken assumption that Proteus’ military-intelligence power-centres and their private partners can and should steer civilian leadership into a transhumanist future. With the DoD having explicitly assumed leadership responsibility for the requisite R&D,[87, 88] societies’ transhumanist trajectory appears to have, thereby, effectively and quietly been placed under military rule, in the process removing that trajectory from public oversight and electoral accountability.

Operating safely outside public accountability and oversight, the military-intelligence community may take transhumanism in one of two directions. According to Proteus’ monograph, a technologically stratified Tweaked, Freaked and Geeked society “could imply a commitment to creativity and innovation, with society organized to favor artists, visionaries, scientists, and inventors rather than profit-takers. Or it could result in 1984-like scenarios due to the power endowed by invasive, body- and psyche-penetrating technologies”.[89]

We can’t help but posit here that the prospect of the military-intelligence establishment using its transhumanist technologies to craft a society of artists and visionaries is quite a stretch. The advent of 1984-like scenarios, however, particularly on the back of the Covid era, requires little imagination.

Either way, it seems sufficiently clear that, as with all other new technologies designed and produced with planned obsolescence in mind, the promise of market-driven solutions for corruptible flesh will continue to pit one class of tweaked against the freaked or the geeked. One need only glance at divisions between the new government-funded and promoted social classes of updated, castrated, and otherwise adulterated non-binary tweaked versus the ‘norms’, or the geeked, to see where this grand operation is headed. In the words of the historian of the future beloved by the Giant class, Yuval Noah Harari, “You want to know how super-intelligent cyborgs might treat ordinary flesh-and-blood humans? Better start by investigating how humans treat their less intelligent animal cousins.”

But is such rhetoric mere hyperbole? Do these “futures” scenarios bear any meaningful relation to reality, or Is “futurology” a quack science? Are the powerful actors and organisations behind those scenarios merely fantasising about what might be possible in some hypothetical future or alternative universe? More specifically, does Proteus have any track record forecasting world events?

Proteus Insights From 2020, Circa 2000

The International Proteus consortium (officially the Proteus Management Group) was established in 2005, for the purpose of advising senior decision-makers, planners and intelligence analysts internationally on how to apply what it called its ‘Proteus Insights’. Those Proteus Insights were intended “to help solve complex issues on the future geo-strategic landscape”.[90]

The ‘Proteus Insights’ around which the 2005 international consortium revolved came from an original, smaller group that had been sponsored by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). The original group involved members from the Canadian Office of Technology Foresight, the Naval Postgraduate School, the U.S. Army War College, the NRO, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the office of the Director, Central Intelligence (DCI). This original smaller group appeared on the national security landscape with a book in 2000 titled, ‘Proteus: Insights from 2020’.[91] The foundational book engaged in scenario-based forecasting looking specifically to the year 2020. On the strength of the book and its visions for 2020, the subsequent, transnational state-corporate-UN consortium was formed, in order to carry the ‘Proteus Insights’ forward. (Including in the 2008 Tweaked, Freaked and Geeked monograph.)

And just what were Proteus’ insights for the year 2020, advanced in the year 2000? What did the group foresee on the horizon 20 years hence? What was the vision so compelling that ~ 30 military / intelligence bodies across 11 nations came on board to build upon it? Was it Oxford transhumanist Bostrom’s vision of new “aesthetic and contemplative pleasures whose blissfulness vastly exceeds what any human being has yet experienced”?[92]

No. It was not. It was a pandemic. At least according to the contemporary definition of the term. In Proteus’ ‘insights’ for the year 2020, buried among a selection of other scenarios lay the description of a series of intractably mutating and recurring viral outbreaks around the globe. In the years leading to 2020 The Virus™ of Proteus’ storyline crippled societies and economies, saw revocation of citizens’ rights and freedoms, created social divisions and, finally, reached “a global dystopian level of intensity” by 2020.[93] As if given by some Divine revelation to the ancient oracles, the viral dystopia in the Proteus forecast had been sparked by a novel virus in an unfamiliar land: a “new” virus which, unlike previous deadly viruses “was highly contagious and could be spread human to human through airborne and/or aerosol contact”.[94] Proteus’ “new” Virus™ “mutat[ed] so rapidly that very few people remained immune”.[95] As in the real world of 2020, unlike the common cold or flu, “victims of the virus often did not show symptoms for two or three weeks after infection. Thus, it was much easier to spread the virus unknowingly through travel and daily contact with others”.[96]. Accordingly, “viable states” such as the US and Europe closed their borders.[97]

And so it seems that life in 2020 imitated not only NASA Langley slides, as we outlined in Part 1, but Proteus Insights™ as well. The perfection of the global pantomime seems uncanny. These facts may beg the question for many: Is Proteus some sort of new-fangled New Age prophet?

It is particularly noteworthy that in 2000 Proteus invented a Virus™ distinguished by its asymptomatic transmission. This was a fiction that justified authoritarian governance and totalitarian control both in the Proteus scenario and in the real world. In the 2020 that ultimately came to pass, already by November a large study involving nearly 10 million subjects yielded not a single case of asymptomatic transmission.[98] Other work pointed to misinterpretation of meaninglessly high PCR cycle thresholds as the culprit, underpinning specious claims of asymptomatic infectiousness.[99, 100, 101]

Nevertheless, as in the Proteus scenario, this particular claimed feature of The Virus™ — doggedly maintained by real-world authorities despite evidence to the contrary — is what enabled repressive, authoritarian police-state tactics such as border closures, lockdowns, checkpoints, and vaccine passports for travel and participation in society.[eg 102-110]

In these and other details, Proteus forecasting from the year 2000 for a viral dystopia leading into the pivotal year of 2020 clearly sets the stage for the Rockefeller 2010 “Lockstep” scenario[111], Event 201 in October 2019[112], and many other ‘pandemic preparedness’ exercises.”

In the year 2000, as it advanced its ‘Insights from 2020’ Proteus wrote,

the symptoms of the new Virus … were horrible and confusing … For the first 3–5 days they mimicked those of a bad cold or flu … [but] then symptoms worsened to include violent coughing, difficult breathing and extremely high fever. In some cases, patients bled into the skin and other organs[113]

(Recall that early in the Covid operation death from internal bleeding and organ failure formed part of the seminal scare campaign). In the U.S. the elderly and vulnerable urban poor were the Proteus pandemic’s main victims. Once again correspondence with the details of the Covid operation is remarkably close.

Meanwhile in the real world, looking back over the past few years since the rollout of the 2020 pandemic narrative, with its ravages on the elderly and vulnerable as Proteus had prophesied, one cannot possibly maintain with any serious appeal to logic the argument that a virus possessed the ability to commit the mass atrocities we witnessed, including foreseeable and preventable death through lockdowns,[114, 115] treatment-suppression[116, 117] and vaccine mandates,[118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124] numbering in their millions and counting.[125, 126, 127]

In its main point of departure from the 2020 that came to pass, Proteus scheduled its series of worsening outbreaks to begin in 2010 (recall, however, that the flu season of 2009-2010 in the real world saw the failed Swine Flu scare),[128] such that by 2020 a rolling and recurring pandemic had upended the globe. Imagine the opportunities for enterprising investors expanding their portfolios and entering the vaccine development sector back in 2000. A tip of the cap to Bill and Melinda Gates for their launch of the Foundation in 2000 that would become the centre of the Covid show in 2020.

The Proteus scenario explained:

The world of 2020 looks bleak. Since 2010, the globe has been swept by highly contagious, deadly viruses that flare, die down and return in mutated form. The World economy has declined sharply as trade and commerce have dried up, and is now mired in a serious, long-term recession. Many nations have become either authoritarian, ruled by demagogic strongmen, or simply succumbed to chaos.[129]

With this in mind we muse: Was the failed over-hyping of the 2009-2010 Swine Flu[130] an effort to build more gradually to the viral dystopia of 2020, as per the Proteus vision? Was it a coincidence that in 2009 the WHO definition of ‘pandemic’ was watered down,[131] making the Swine Flu scare (and the Covid operation) possible? Were it not for diligent and perspicacious European parliamentarians and rapporteurs thwarting a co-ordinated over-reaction to the Swine Flu in 2010,[132, 133, 134] might the timing and pace of The Virus™ that upended the globe in 2020 have more closely matched Proteus’ schedule? Needless to say, such questions will remain unanswered. It is, however, worth noting, as we explore in Part 3, that during a 2004 presentation on Proteus ‘Insights from 2020’ to a Command and Control symposium, the US Army War College Center for Strategic Leadership described “biological viruses” as “instruments of power”.[135] Regardless, it is a testament to the Blitzkreig shock-and-awe propaganda operations[136, 137] and psychological warfare[138] of 2020 that, ultimately, Proteus’ vision became a reality, seemingly overnight.

As Proteus’ fictional pandemic wore on, “the world economy continued in decline”. In the US, society became “highly divisive and fragmented”. Around the world, “developed countries struggled with civil libertarian issues … [By 2020] people have become adjusted to fewer personal freedoms … Individuals carry a ‘MedID’ used to enter anywhere, even one’s own home, and it is necessary to walk through an ‘AntiViro chamber’ to go out of the house, or to pass in and out of enclaves .…There is extensive security camera surveillance in high risk areas”.[139]

Fast forward from the Proteus’ scenario to 2020 and although MedIDs disappeared as swiftly as they arrived amidst mass global citizen resistance [140, 141, 142, 143], the failed real-world push for ‘vaccine passports’ had been planned in advance by the European Commission [144], and was backed by MITRE, a leading military-intelligence contractor.[145] Meanwhile, extensive security camera surveillance is on its way in 15-minute city zones.

Was it the erosion of citizen rights and freedoms and heavy biodigital surveillance that peaked the international intelligence community’s interest in Proteus following its publication of Insights from 2020?

Finally, in a development involving a pandemic-inspired global transfer of power, Proteus declared of its disease-ridden 2020 world:

The World Health Organization (WHO) is now the most important international organization … The United Nations coordinates military security efforts with WHO programs.[146]

Which seems rather prescient in light of the upcoming WHO pandemic treaty and revisions to International Health Regulations (IHR), under which unelected WHO functionaries would gain broad powers to unilaterally declare global health emergencies. With subsequent emergency powers the WHO could assume authority to compel, rather than advise, member states to comply with WHO directives. Those WHO directives could include the imposition of ‘health certificates’ and vaccine passports[147, 148, 149] — or ‘MedID’s’, vaccine mandates, quarantining of citizens, and ‘disinformation’ measures, together affecting freedom of movement, freedom of speech and other citizen entitlements and fundamental rights. Negotiations for the IHR amendments have been held largely in secret, and are slated for possible adoption, along with the WHO Pandemic Treaty, at the 77th World Health Assembly in May of 2024, more or less on schedule, if slightly delayed, according to Proteus’ ‘insights’.[150, 151, 152, 153]

In short, Proteus has an uncanny history of forecasting world events. Accordingly, we wonder, would it be wise to ignore Proteus — this time on the issue of Tweaked, Freaked and Geeked classes — a second time around?

To address these sorts of questions, we dig more deeply in Part 3 into specific preparations being made for transhumanists societies, both conceptually and in policy terms, with attention to dual use technologies (those with both civilian and military applications), and military operations in civilian disguise. Part 4 focuses on concrete underlying R&D, leading back to the Covid epoch and the role that injectable bio/nano platforms play in transhumanism and the new public health theatre.

Dr. Lissa Johnson is an independent researcher who writes about the psychological aspects of public affairs, psychological operations, human rights abuse, citizenship, and the exercise and abuse of power.

Daniel Broudy lectures in areas ranging from communication theory to visual rhetoric and from composition to rhetorical grammar. His research focuses on sounds, symbols, signs, images, and colors as tools deployed by centers of power to shape knowledge and influence human perception and emotion.

David A. Hughes lectures in areas including security studies, international relations theory, foreign policy analysis, globalization, and US exceptionalism.

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