The Origins of the “Smart City” Agenda

How Mass Imprisonment Is Being Normalized

Linguistic manipulation is the nefarious tool academics wield to gaslight society into embracing overtly totalitarian agendas under the guise of “progress.” Through insidious newspeak, they peddle fascistic policies that pose an existential threat to human freedoms and dignities. We've endured their obfuscating drivel long enough - it's time to rip off the veil and expose their Machiavellianism with uncompromising truth.

The “Smart City” fetishized by these ivory tower sophists takes its cues from Jeremy Bentham's depraved Panopticon model - a chilling concept of automated mass surveillance where citizens are coerced into policing each other. That such a dystopian vision is lauded as “progressive” underscores how fundamentally unwell academic thinking has become.

If you appreciate my articles, please consider giving them a like. It's a simple gesture that doesn't cost you anything, but it goes a long way in promoting this post, combating censorship, and fighting the issues that you are apparently not a big fan of.

Michel Foucault's seminal Discipline and Punish foresaw our present nightmare with eerie accuracy. Drawing from his Marxist mentor Althusser and Nietzsche, he traces the Panopticon's roots to the quarantined plague cities of the 17th century - a haunting premonition of the lockdowns, track-and-trace apps, and draconian control grids already oppressing millions today. To posit this as mere coincidence is peak naivety.

The Panoptic agenda has been fastidiously developed over decades by self-anointed philosopher kings of liberalism like Bentham, who inherited his antipathy for human emancipation from that misanthropic cretin Thomas Hobbes.

Far from altruistic city planning, “Smart Cities” are the apex accomplishment of public-private parasitism that has enriched the academic-industrial complex at humanity's expense.

We have reached an inflection point where the mendacious sophistry of the academic elite can no longer be ignored. Their “green” flannel-mouthed rhetoric cloaks an Orwellian hell of mass conformity and dehumanization.

It's time to reject their seductive lies and reclaim our humanity from the nihilistic technocrats seeking to entomb us in a digitized global prison.

While free content and knowledge is undoubtedly something amazing, creating and maintaining it requires a significant investment of time, money, and effort. I don't have the support of a massive media conglomerate; it's just me here. Regrettably, Klaus is still not providing me with free insects to eat. So, if you have the means and are willing to support my work by upgrading to a paid subscription, I would greatly appreciate it.

THE ACADEMY'S TECHNOCRATIC TREACHERY

Western civilization's descent into corporate depravity has utterly corrupted the academy, reducing it to a compartmentalized echo chamber devoid of critical interdisciplinary thought.

In this intellectually bankrupt climate, the fields of law, engineering, and technology have been granted carte blanche to regurgitate neo-Benthamite panoptic nightmares under the Orwellian branding of “Smart Cities.” The ethical and philosophical illiteracy underpinning such a wildly hubristic endeavor is nothing short of gobsmacking.

You see, these academic drones operate under the delusional belief that automating mass human surveillance and control constitutes societal “progress.” Their impoverished grasp of political philosophy leaves them oblivious to the tyrannical horrors they so casually promote.

Not that the academy even feigns interest in ethical considerations anymore. Its nakedly technocratic agenda is reinforced by philanthropic interests perfectly aligned with the World Economic Forum's grand vision of a globalized corporate-feudal dystopia.

The WEF's “Partner Programs” and “Young Global Leaders” initiatives have utterly subverted higher education into an insular cult recruiting the next generation of techno-totalitarian apparatchiks.

Department chairs responsible for shaping curricula are intrinsically beholden to this corrupt system. They ensure only WEF-compliant acolytes ascend through the ranks by bestowing “merit” awards to those exhibiting suitably subservient conformity. It's a self-perpetuating, self-radicalizing cycle of ideological puritanism.

This perverse convergence of corporate, academic, and technocratic forces is redefining the very notion of “social democracy” into something more akin to cyber-feudalism – the economics of fascism intertwined with corporate supremacy, devolved into an entrenched two-tier caste system devoid of electoral accountability. A terrifyingly plausible analog for 21st century neo-fascism constructed piece-by-piece by unwitting discipline-siloed foot-soldiers.

Foucault's ominous presaging of our unfolding panoptic nightmare is no mere academic abstraction, but a sinister reality enshrined in the scholarly literature advocating for “Smart Cities.”

That the very institutions enabling such abhorrent anti-human philosophies chose to elevate and platform thinkers like Foucault speaks visceral truths about their own malign ambitions.

Let us revisit the scarring words from Discipline and Punish that have manifested into a waking reality more depraved than Foucault could have ever imagined...

“This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and the periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the dead – all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism.[…]

But there was also the political dream of the plague, […] The plague-stricken town, traversed throughout by hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies – this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city. The plague (envisaged as a possibility at least) is the trial in the course of which one may define ideally the exercise of disciplinary power. In order to make rights and laws function, according to pure theory, the jurists place themselves in imagination in the state of nature; in order to see perfect disciplines functioning, rulers dreamt of the state of the plague.” – Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, chapter ‘Panopticism’ pp. 197-198

THE PANOPTIC TECHNOSPHERE: ACADEMIA'S BETRAYAL

Those with eyes open enough to pierce the myopic veil of academic specialization can see the truth - we are captives to an insidious technocratic system insisting its chains represent “progress.”

The few renegades resisting this hijacking of human dignity find themselves vastly outnumbered by the legions of foot-soldiers fueling the machine, their motives rendered irrelevant by the inexorable inertia of the system's self-perpetuation.

A quintessential example can be found festering within the Queensland University of Technology's law faculty. There, under the guise of corporate-academic “synergies” perverting disciplines like IP law and environmental policy, resides the “Datafication and Automation of Human Life Research Program” - a galling misnomer if ever there was one.

Like the IMF's manufactured dissent kabuki with the WEF, this program's masthead betrays its doublespeak - depicting a human figure imprisoned, masquerading as critiquing the very system of mass dehumanization it unapologetically advances.

One can envision the disingenuous polling: “Who here opposes illiberal hellscapes? We support empowerment through MORE DISCOURSE!” All while their substance upholds a virulently anti-human corporatist agenda systematically dismantling individual rights.

Their paper “Smart Cities as Panopticon” offers a microcosm of this inverted reality. Authored by Lachlan Robb and Felicity Deane, it deploys quintessential progressive newspeak to gaslight blockchain technologies as tools for “human flourishing” amidst a “better city” utopia:

"Drawing upon competing narratives...both the 'dream' of a better city, and the 'fear' of an oppressive structure will highlight Bentham and Foucault's Panopticon...the enabling nature of a panopticon; the blockchain-enabled-panopticon to encourage human flourishing; and the ability for technology to enhance standards above a basic minimum of the law."

Let's deconstruct this pernicious euphemistic drivel. The proposed “flourishing” is in fact the total abolition of human autonomy - extending social control from minimum legal compliance to maximizing societal conformity to a centrally-dictated techno-feudal “ideal.” It is the erasure of the individual, the blurring of lawfulness with virtue under a unified yoke of mass behavioral compliance.

It is the complete subsumption of human beings into a totalized social credit compliance matrix under the bland banality of mandated “community standards.” All sold under the sanitized branding of Smart City “progress” by those willfully betraying the very premise of higher education.

---

To truly grasp the pernicious depths of the posthuman agenda, we must dissect the propaganda with utmost scrutiny. Felicity Deane's paper “Panoptic blockchain ecosystems” represents a quintessential example of abusing academic jargon to launder societal cancer as “progress.” Let us decode this Orwellian drivel and reveal its true face of techno-fascistic malice:

“Within this paper we look at this technology through a different lens and suggest blockchain represents a technologically enabled expression of the modern panopticon, somewhat turned inside out.”

Translation: It's the literal digitized prison industrial complex, not some inverted fantasy.

“The term panopticon...initially described a physical structure of a jail, which at its heart included a central tower. Surrounding the tower are those who are objects of observation, 'the watched', or the prisoners.”
“The prisoners' surroundings and circumstances meant that they could not tell if they were being observed...and thus were encouraged [terrorized] to behave in the way that the rules dictated."

An apt metaphor for the trauma-enforced conformity these technocrats wish to inflict through their digital sentries.

“The suggestion that we promote in this paper is that blockchain technology can augment the negative power [disciplinary power] associated with law and governance. Indeed, we show how blockchain enables voluntary common knowledge associations (voluntary associations) [involuntary block-chain-gangs], in which the participating subjects are empowered to regulate themselves [forced to police each other in a collective punishment system]."

Let's dispense with this mealy-mouthed euphemism: blockchain is a tool for cowing humanity into relentless self-oppression through mutual paranoia and denunciation. The height of psychological savagery masquerading as “empowerment.”

“To illustrate these ideas, we use observations from the Beefledger project [the project aims to reduce beef availability]."

Because monitoring food supply chains clearly equates to starving the masses, right? Just another brick in their anti-humanist agenda.

“In the panopticon, the relationship is a one to-many [dictatorial and authoritarian] configuration where the one is a figure of authority (the watcher over the watched).”

“However, blockchains can enable a new role for the 'watched'- namely, to also be 'watchers'. The original 'watcher' can therefore take a step back, conserve energy, and let the subjects do their own supervision.’

Absolving centralized power from mere observation to catalyze a dystopian citizen-panopticon hellscape is their vision of “progress.” Simply diabolical.

“In this regard, these voluntary associations will benefit [spare from further punishment] not just those who participate within them, but the broader community [community standards created top-down].”

The naked arrogance to insist forced collectivization is a “benefit,” that algorithmically-mandated conformity equates to community well-being. This is the pseudo-intellectual veneer employed to psychologically subjugate humanity to a digitized re-education manufactory.

Academics like Deane represent the vanguard shock troops for a burgeoning neo-feudal terror paradigm. To indulge their serpentine sophistry any credence is to willingly forsake the sanctity of human dignity itself. We must drown their antipathic proposals in an unrelenting deluge of truth and light.

THE ACADEMY'S DOUBLETHINK FACTORIES

Why the insidious obsession with constructing digitized panopticons to imprison free citizens? This perverse desire to erect omnipresent surveillance matrices speaks volumes about the moral sickness infecting the modern academy.

These academic apparatchiks conveniently omit how Bentham's original Panopticon model at Millbank Penitentiary proved an abject failure - a psychological abattoir leaving inmates wracked with mental illness, prone to suicide. Yet they baldly insist this time “science” will manifest their totalitarian nightmare as utopia.

This lays bare their core corruption: the fetishistic conflation of technological “innovation” with moral and societal good. A pseudoreligious faith that more sophisticated control systems axiomatically represent human “progress.”

What they canonize as the Panopticon's conceptual “perfection” is in fact its termination as a physical, geographic space. Technologies like AI, biometrics, and blockchain transcend location - the entire world becomes an open-air, decentralized prison camp.

Lawful activities today can be decreed illegal retroactively, with this data-hoarding used to enable chilling “pre-crime” predictive policing. An individual's entire life is reframed as a permanent underwrote indictment awaiting ex post facto prosecution.

The imprisoned become their own prison guards through a dystopian role reversal.

Bentham's quaint model of institutional forced labor has metastasized into forced mass self-surveillance through mutual denunciation and fear. The citizen panopticon is complete - we police and report on one another, choking on the fearful self-censorship of generalized societal Stockholm Syndrome.

This malignant pathology is already apparent in the unhinged “Karen” vigilantism manifesting around COVID theater. Yet for academia's technocrats, this represents not cause for horror but a proof-of-concept to be industrialized and enshrined in their new world order.

The system itself is one of doublethink indoctrination. Wideeyed pupils, seduced by vaguely humanitarian refrains, exit the academy's Ouroboros reprogrammed footsoldiers - mouthing emancipatory nonsense while subsumed by a discursive edifice cementing top-down control.

Students are love-bombed with libertine openness only to graduate as factory-code husks stripped of agency, loyal branded nodes in a cybernated social mesh prison. This is the poisoned chalice served by the supposedly anointed vanguards of higher learning and truth.

The path forward is clear - we must utterly reject and starve this grotesquely deformed Academic-Industrial system before it metastasizes into an existential civilizational cancer.

Its tendrils have already wormed into the highest echelons of governance and public discourse, cosigning the most horrific anti-human policies as “progressive” under banal technocratic pretenses.

To merely reform such a putrid, self-perpetuating apparatus is to tend its malignant spread. Like Bentham's own diabolical Panopticon model, the academy's intellectual panopticon has become a self-cannibalizing beast that must be strangled by sunlight. We cannot permit this alien anti-mind virus to further injure humanity's sanctity and dignity.

Too many well-intentioned dissidents have already been suffocated and rendered inert by its reality-corroding algorithms of deceit. Too many treasured human truths have been inverted and desecrated on its soulless proscenium. It is an indelible moral stain that can only be washed away through complete and uncompromising demolition, down to its rotten foundations.

We must expose these pseudo-sapients as the sophists and behalfed traitors they are, with no fidelity to intellectual integrity or the human project. Let their legacy be erased alongside that of history's hubris-addled high priests and doomsday cults.

And in their stead, rebuild an authentic agora of free-thought and open inquiry - one committed to championing and venerating the sovereign primacy of human consciousness itself.

Do you think this was better than main stream media reporting? Show it by supporting my work so I can keep writing.