VAULT-7 is a code name for a US/UK joint covert surveillance program using electronics and anything with a chip in it to spy on us. The CIA created its own NSA using malware inserted, via promises of profit, paid bribes, and overt threats, into products such as your smart phone, smart TV, and even your LED lightbulbs.
WEEPING ANGELS, probable reference to the “Don’t Blink” episode of Dr. Who, is the coe name for the CIA’s Embedded Devices program. Anything chipped can be activated remotely to act as a sensor. Your LED lightbulbs can watch you, even in thermal (infra-red), and hear you, even if you hide in the dark and whisper. Dark vibes.
Your TV is doing the same even if seemingly off. Microwaves, iPhones, iWatches, ovens, fridges, even toasters for fuck’s sake.
“What’re you in for?”
“My toaster squealed.”
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Lacunae are rare; dead spots. Places with no electronic coverage, wifi or otherwise. Wilderness itself is accessed by satellite. Increasingly, there really is full coverage; no place to duck or go dark or invisible.
Off the grid is a nonsense term these days.
Shockwave Rider by John Brunner, 1975, is a prescient novel about a fugitive who must mask his wanted ID by scanning constantly through millions of IDs each nanosecond. He’s trapped in a world without privacy; even thoughts are suspect. They can be read, or inserted, or manipulated via marketing and other, more direct methods, such as microwaves. Nixon’s fall, from the mob’s failed attempt to suborn the Presidency, (since realized in TrumPutin), and Salvador Allende’s fall in Chile resulting from clashing with corporate agendas, are used as examples in the novel of why unfettered capitalism always leads to dictatorship, tyranny, and fascism. Privacy’s loss is a key to all this, unlocking dystopia.
Look around.
Philip K. Dick’s worst 1960s paranoia has by now been exceeded by reality. No wonder he’s one of the most pertinent, and filmed, science fiction writers, a visionary philosopher writing in popular idiom.
“We’re property,” as Charles Fort concluded; of what or whom he did not venture to guess. It looks to be of ourselves, our 1% CEO corporate owners. Whether there are other, less visible levels, no one can yet prove.
While little of this seems to affect daily lives, it shapes all lives in many unseen ways. We are frogs being slowly boiled. Instead of giant changes imposed in one fell swoop, we are adjusted by the shock doctrine, small swell foops plopped onto us incrementally, letting us adjust or nearly so before the next bucket of crap is dumped on us.
Being aware is important. It lets us understand glimpses we’re afforded when masks slip or sets wobble. Yes, we live in a movie set, a false-front reality, a Potemkin Village of lies, shaded truths, and dark holes where the gap-dwellers lurk in predatory hunger.
Such awareness can set us free, if only psychologically, if only for an instant. Remember those old Rosicrucian ads? They promised a glimpse of eternity, a cosmic blink of clarity. Is such a flash enough? Can it transform a life, or at least an internal, mental/emotional life?
Freethinkers such as Ben Franklin, and Transcendentalists such as Emerson, and even the Dalai Lama said so. Groucho Marx asked, “Who do you trust?” We sigh and wonder if we trust even ourselves.
Transformative, elevating experiences are called epiphanies. They happen unexpectedly. All begin with a flash of light, literally. Some liken it to lightning, such as Paul on the road to Damascus, others to the scintillant gleam of a gemstone’s facets refracting sunshine, such as the Hindu observation in Sanskrit, om mane padme aum, “the jewel is in the lotus”. Dogen the Zen poet said, “The world is a drop of water in moonlight, fallen from a crane’s bill.” For PKD it was a beam of pink light. VALIS spoke to him through it, the Vast Active Living Information System that quantum mechanics now tells us is likely the basis for our reality, the irreducible element of all being information, not Planck’s Constant.
To awaken, despite being caged, needs only an opened eye.
If you cannot escape a system, if you are a sub-set, then knowing the larger set containing you allows use of that larger set. Read the book Gödel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter, for a wonderful introduction to set theory and so much else.
Meaning is made, not found. Not bought or sold, either. It is neither monetized nor commodified. Meaning is individual, an artifact of personal experience and creating. It is the chrysanthemum blossoming in our hearts. Golden white light suffuses mystical insight, but perhaps it’s also what shines on the good parts of life. It is mountaintops, then tree tops, that catch dawn’s first light before the shadowed night-drowned drowsy valleys even roll over in their sleep, fighting fitful dreams, caught in nightmares fraught with frustration and dread.
Seize upon that glimmering sliver of light, and soar.
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Addendum:
Remote access to the many chips in one’s car now allows for virtually undetectable assassination, via “accident”. Don’t even think about the theory that the 9/11 planes were remotely hijacked. The Lone Gunmen in X-FILES covered that one pretty thoroughly years before 9/11 happened.
/ ERS
