Do you remember a video game called Lemmings, where a bunch of human-like creatures fall off cliffs, drawn themselves, walk into fire pits, and so on?

What makes this game so fun is the cognitive dissonance involved. Why would a living thing voluntarily fall into lava?

Sounds hellish, doesn’t it?

Lemmings was not the first piece of art to explore collective stupidity. In 1944, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a play in which “hell is other people”. And from there, Hollywood popularized the zombie genre.

What those movies, plays, and video games illustrate is the dark fate of large human collectives. They serve as a warning:

Bad things happen when humans merge into big groups.

When societies grow past a certain point, value shifts away from the individual and into the collective.

As numbers continue to increase, those masses coalesce into a superorganism. There is no more independent thought at that point – only stories, ideologies, and dogma. And the fate of each person is determined by that dogma.

No wonder millions of people have been voluntarily harming themselves over the last 3 years (“w3 are all 1n this t0gether”). It may be hard to believe, but they are not behaving like humans any more. Or mammals, for that matter – do you know of any mammal that voluntarily blocks their own breathing?

When Homo sapiens merge into giant collectives they lose their backbone, they become invertebrates. Spineless people cannot walk straight any more. Call them Lemmings, zombies, or insects – for all intends and purposes, they are no longer human.

Welcome to our colony, I mean, democracy.

The architects of “our democracy” do not like natural humans. They prefer synthetic creatures and algorithms. No wonder they want to dehumanize us.

After observing mass behavior over the last three years, I’ve started to use it as a counter-indicator for my own survival and humanity.

I used to think I was weird for not fitting in. Now I take some solace in it. As such, I no longer have qualms about doing certain things my way, even if it pushes other people away. Which brings us to the main topic of this article.

I recently started asking the closest people in my life to keep their smartphones switched off when we spend time together.

“What? How weird.”

I know, right? Trust me, there is method to the madness.

In today’s piece, I will tell you why I’m asking close friends and partners to keep their “smart” devices switched-off in my presence, and why you may want to do the same. If you want to survive the zombie apocalypse, that is (all puns intended).

Are you ready? Let’s get started.

In early October, PayPal added a sneaky clause in their terms of service which permits them to fine their customers $2500 if they partake in “misinformation”. The T&Cs literally allow them to withdraw that money directly from their customers’ bank accounts.

A few days later, in response to some push-back, they took those changes back. But the question, remains:

Why on earth would PayPal do something like that?

I’ll tell you why.

The entire thing was an experiment, conducted by PayPal’s handlers who wanted to gauge popular sentiment.

Every top-down measure you’ve witnessed over the last couple of years was rolled out after similar tests.

Here is what they do.

They prod the population of one specific demographic and measure the response. They then collect, aggregate, and pass that data to their behavioral science boffins – aka “ministry of truth” – who use algorithms to generate talking points for next day’s news cycle. They’ve been refining and automating this sausage factory for decades.

And lest you believe PayPal when they say that those T&Cs were an “unintentional error” ask yourself, where else have we seen this?

Oh that’s right.

In 2021 Scotland passed a law which criminalizes vaguely defined “hate speech”. What is interesting about this law is that it pertains to what citizens say in their own home. As BBC points out, “Offences can now be committed even in private, an abandonment of an earlier ‘dwelling defence’ in race hate law.”

So there you have it, no more dwelling defence.

“Wait a minute, how can they possibly know what I say in private?”

Here is what most people don’t understand.

The infrastructure for 24x7 monitoring of everything we say – and everything we think – is already in place. The technological heavy lifting is already complete. The legal templates are also complete. Everything the architects of “our democracy” have been working on for decades is now firmly in place.

All that stands between the tenuous quasi-freedom of expression we think we enjoy today, and a full-blown technocratic wet dream where humans get fined and jailed for thinking the wrong things, is just a few contractual clauses.

The only thing that’s missing is that signature on the dotted line. They still need our consent.

“I don’t understand, how on earth can they hear what I say in my home?”

Sounds impossible, doesn’t it? How could they pull this off? How could they eavesdrop hundreds of millions of people?

Only a few decades ago you’d have to bug someone’s phone line. An actual human would then have to listen in, take notes, and organize those notes in elaborate and expensive physical databases.

And yet, the main challenge those tyrants faced was not technological. It was legal. That’s because they lacked consent from the people.

So, not only was their surveillance apparatus primitive and manual, it also had to be deployed and operated in secret.

Fast forward to today.

Look around you. At any given point you have dozens of miniaturized, wide-spectrum microphones listening in to every word you say.

And there is no secrecy involved.

Apple is openly telling you that their handsets are recording your words 24x7. That’s how voice assistants like Siri work – they constantly listen in, waiting for users to summon them with a voice command.

They are also telling you that they store your voice on their servers.

In their privacy spiel, Apple claims that “Siri Data is associated with a random, device-generated identifier.” But only a few lines below they admit that “Apple may use the IP address of your internet connection to approximate your location …” So, unless Apple’s customers use a VPN 24x7 (and even if they do) matching those “random” identifiers to real identities is a piece of cake.

In other words, unless their customers are technical masochists, Apple – and their handlers – know exactly who says what.

And it only goes downhill from there.

Google’s Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa, Samsung’s Bixby, and Xiaomi’s Xiao Ai don’t even bother to pay lip service to privacy, so who knows what they’re up to. Expect the worst.

“Okay, so they record what I say. What then?”

They keep it, forever.

What do you think all those mega datacenters are for?

Your words are stored together with myriad of metadata, things like time-of-day, precise micro-location, identities of people in the vicinity, and sensor readings like barometer, gyroscope, accelerometer (which tell them if you’re walking, driving, cycling, etc).

No data sets are too large or too complex for their “big data” systems. Machine-learning is incredibly good at crunching enormous amounts of data and generating scarily accurate behavioral and predictive analytics.

Day by day, those systems get smarter and smarter, extracting deeper and deeper insights from the same data sets. As such, our personal information carries immense future value. No wonder why email and social media apps are dispensed to the masses for “free”.

So, let me say it again for the people at the back:

The technical infrastructure required to monitor everything you say, think, and do is already in place. The legal roadmap, complete with detailed terms and conditions is also ready to go.

PayPal’s PR stunt and Scotland’s crime law are just a taste of what’s to come. We are a hairline away from the full-blown re-enactment of Minority-Report-style “pre-crime” law enforcement. Who needs old-fashioned spies and police constables when you can detect aberrant behavior the moment it is conceived in the “criminal’s” mind, and have a drone apprehend them in minutes?

Before you dismiss this as crazy talk, please consider the following:

Humans act different when they know they are being watched. It doesn’t matter if you have something to hide; you are simply not yourself when surrounded by microphones and cameras – even in your own home.
Oh, and about the argument “I don’t have anything to hide”: The things you say may be perfectly appropriate and legal today but they may not be in a few years. The fact that you misspoke at some point in your prerecorded past could serve as grounds for losing your job, bank account, insurance, and perhaps even freedom.
Since we are being recorded 24x7 and our words stored indefinitely, it becomes easy for authorities to retroactively punish anyone they don’t like. Everyone has lapsed in their words and thoughts at some point in their prerecorded past.
It is precisely that fear — the fear that anything I say today may be used against me in the future — that suffocates free expression. Because even if I don’t use a smartphone, the people around me do.

And if you still think this is a c0nsp1racy theory, here is how the World Economic Forum describes life in 2030:

Once in a while I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. Nowhere I can go 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.

The rest of that piece portrays life under technocracy and Big Brother as an utopia.

Wait, did you say utopia? Where have I heard this word before? Oh, that’s right, The Communist Manifesto.

Can you see what world we are walking into?

Millions of humans are opting in to their own surveillance. They pay for their own watcher and guard. They take pride in the “Space Black” and “Midnight” shades of their new iPhone. They adorn it with trendy cases and beaded lanyards. And they don’t stray more than a few meters away from it.

The majority has already given their consent. Humanity has crossed the Rubicon. Our collective institutions are compromised. The collective is hypnotized and complicit.

It is up to the individual now – you and me.

“Okay, I get it. What can I do?”

Earlier this year, I described what happens when your phone stays switched ON all day, and proposed a simple solution:

Need to engage with the world? Do so, with intention. Switch the phone on, do what you need to do and then switch it off. Use it as a tool. Tools are not meant to be ON all the time. If you leave the phone ON all the time, then the the phone is no longer your tool; it becomes the tool of those who farm your attention, capture your privacy, and mine your life force.
If you are a caretaker and need to be available in case someone needs you, just use a dumb-phone. No need for 24x7 smart surveillance just because someone might need you.

Here are some additional steps you can take:

Cover the cameras and microphones of your handset. When you need to make a call, just plug-in a wired headset.
Divert all your computing needs to your laptop. Only use your smartphone for navigation, Uber, and other mobile-only scenarios. Uninstall everything else.
Store your handset in an EMF case, like Silent Pocket.
If you have an iPhone, deactivate the U1 chipset to prevent your handset from staying ON even after you switch it OFF.
Get rid of “smart” appliances like Amazon Alexa, Apple HomePod, and Apple TV and so on.
Deactivate Siri on all your Apple devices, and do the same with Google Assistant on your Android-enabled gadgets.

Don’t look for high-tech solutions and don’t get swayed by those “privacy” apps. There is no such thing as online privacy. So, keep things simple: Switch it off and keep it switched off until you have a good reason to use it.

Last but not least, you can join me in asking your loved ones to keep their smartphones switched off, if they:

Want to have a meaningful, intentional, and un-distracted moment with you.
Value your relationship more than they value Instagram, TikTok, and Candy Crash Saga.

And fear not, gentle reader, because there is a silver lining to all this.

Given how hard the architects of “our democracy” are accelerating their playbook, we will not be running out of topics to talk about any time soon. You can count on me staying here, by your side, witnessing all the craziness of the world and distilling actionable insights for you.

If you want to help out, share this article with your friends and followers on social media. If you enjoy my work and get value from it, you can buy me a coffee or send me some sats.

Insanely Free

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