Societal Transformation with Alien Features

Big problems, technological advancement, and the UFO factor.

Every writer faces unique challenges. Some have a hard time writing with confidence while others suffer from unwarranted egomania. Some never quite get the technical aspects of the craft. Personally, one of my biggest challenges as a writer is that I always feel the need to keep repeating the same stuff.

Again and again, I've found myself explaining that society is a dystopia ruled by a corrupt control regime. While I feel like it's good to say this and to keep repeating it until it becomes commonly understood, the majority of my readers are already aware of the situation. Just as they're aware that individual sovereignty is continually being undermined and attacked by the regime.

Although these basic problems are widely known, I feel like they're not widely understood. This makes it difficult to formulate genuine solutions. Even so, I spend a great deal of time thinking about such problems and how to solve them. There are great solutions out there and most of these will never be adopted for political or economic reasons.

The companies and government agencies comprising the control regime don't want solutions. They want more control over average people. And average people themselves show little willingness to contribute time or energy to societal improvement efforts.

Clearly there's value in trying to envision a better world. Yet bringing such a vision to life appears impossible on any kind of large scale. Realistically, the only difference most of us can make is person-sized. Solving the world's problems may be beyond us, but there are ways to meaningfully address these problems in the context of our everyday lives.

We can build and adopt alternatives to control regime systems. An alternative economy. Alternative online networks. Specialized alternative communities. And though we can't fight the control regime's power directly, we can avoid the regime's attention.

The control regime wants us atomized. The simple act of forming connections with other people thwarts this desire. The regime also wants us to be totally dependent on it. This desire can be thwarted by cultivating resilience in our lives.

Since COVID, the control regime has been making increasingly desperate moves to spread propaganda and censor dissenting voices. The propaganda and censorship are evidence that the powers that be fear free and open public discourse. This points to the question of what exactly they're afraid of. What conversations are we being manipulated into not having?

Maybe these are the conversations we should start initiating. Personally, I've been talking more and more about the basic ideas of freedom and fairness. What would a free society look like? What would a fair economy look like? And what role might technology play in helping us realize these ideals?

Technological Transformation

The accelerating rate of technological advancement is transforming society more and more quickly. There is no precedent for a transformation like this. Nor is it clear where we'll ultimately end up. The control regime is using emerging tech to influence our thinking and behavior, in part by erasing privacy. At the same time, other emerging tech is making it possible for the first time to organize viable alternatives to control regime systems.

Automation is beginning to eliminate many jobs and that's a good thing. In my opinion, anything that can be automated should be automated. In a perfect world, workers would own shares in the machines that replaced them. More realistically, the right Universal Basic Income plan might take the sting out of technological unemployment.

AI appears to be on the cusp of changing everything. This has clear downsides. Precrime. Deepfakes. Next level mass surveillance and targeting of dissidents. Less ominous are possibilities like next level medical cures, more accurate models of the future, and better computer games.

As our technologies become more sophisticated, their risks become more complex. The dangers of unwise technological choices are evident all around us. Fracking causes earthquakes. Glyphosate messes with hormones. Gain-of-function research likely brought us COVID. Satellite swarms may soon weaken or distort the planet's magnetic field.

One thing I'm particularly concerned with are the cognitive impacts of an online lifestyle. Over the years, an increasingly large share of my brainpower has been taken over not by knowledge, but by how to find knowledge in computer systems. I feel like this probably has implications for how I think, though so far the impact seems subtle.

The impacts of technological advancement on our interactions with each other are more pronounced. Electronic devices and social media platforms mediate more and more of these interactions. Tech that promised to connect us has atomized us instead. And yet, there's nothing stopping us from abandoning mainstream social media entirely in favor of ready alternatives. That might not reverse the trend towards atomization, but it would be a start.

UFO Tech

WantToKnow.info, the website I work for, is redoing its UFO Information Center and I've been helping with that. The project has plunged me deep into UFO lore. One of the most interesting themes I'm encountering involves UFO interference with nuclear weapons systems. Apparently, nuclear warheads have been deactivated by UFOs more than once. A Major-General Vasily Alexyev of the Russian Air Force even went on the record (p257)to say that UFOs could be reliably made to appear by scheduling the physical movement from one place to another of "special" materials.

How would a non-human intelligence both a.) know what material movement had been scheduled and b.) not know that the scheduling itself was a ruse?

One possible answer is that this non-human intelligence was somehow monitoring Russian military computer systems for information regarding the disposition of the "special" materials. If there actually were ETs monitoring one country's secure computer systems back then, maybe they were also monitoring the systems of other countries. And now, with everything online, any interested ET could easily deploy an ET AI to monitor the whole internet. Assuming the ETs have AIs that could do that. And why wouldn't they?

Progressing further into this speculative rabbit hole, UFO sightings peaked in 1996 in the UK. And this page used National UFO Reporting Center data to determine that "sightings seem to have decreased since 2008" in the US. Perhaps the ETs are visiting less often because they can now get more of what they need digitally, from the web.

This otherworldly intelligence may be concerned with us in some way beyond our nuclear weapons. If these weapons warranted ET intervention during the Cold War, other human activity may also have warranted such intervention. And there's no reason to suspect that the ETs have left the vicinity. Today, sufficiently advanced ETs could easily intervene in human affairs without anyone noticing.

UFO whistleblower David Grusch recently said that "it could be that this is not necessarily extraterrestrial, and it's actually coming from a higher dimensional physical space that might be co-located right here." The comment was in line with the interdimensional hypothesis, which holds that ETs aren't from a faraway planet. Rather, they're from a different dimension entirely.

Exactly what that might mean is a mystery. Attempts to explain it in scientific terms inevitably devolve into guesswork. The truth of the matter is beyond our understanding. In this light, attempts to humanize ETs appear immature. If we could say for certain that they're extradimensional beings intent on limiting our production of nuclear fallout, we'd still know very little about these visitors.

It does seem safe to say that they're not our enemies. It's been over 70 years since flying saucers appeared over Washington, DC. In all of the years since, we haven't been destroyed or noticeably invaded or anything like that. Maybe our whole planet is under ET surveillance, but if it is, it might be far less sinister than the mass surveillance our human leaders subject us to.

If ETs ever decide to initiate public contact, there's no reason to believe that they'd go through official channels and meet with government officials. They might instead seek out religious figures or celebrities or average people. They may already have infiltrated social media by pretending to be Earthlings so as to study us more closely. We just don't know, but it's fun to think about.

Within the UFO research community, there are many who believe that we've recovered advanced tech from crashed alien crafts. Some even say that this is where we learned how to make modern semiconductors, microwaves, and lasers. I personally don't believe this. These technologies are amazing, but they were built on a mountain of human ingenuity, accelerated by the dark necessities of global conflict.

On the other hand, if we ever see a functional zero point energy generator or antigravity engine, I'll wonder about the ET origins of that tech. And even if these spectacular technologies never develop, it seems possible that our study of anomalous phenomena could yield some amazing breakthroughs. These breakthroughs might be material, but they could just as easily have to do with psychology and consciousness. That could get very interesting very quickly.

For more of my writing, check out my scifi novels and my Hive blog.