'What you think, what you feel: It's all just data': WEF event hypes era of 'brain transparency' in which companies will monitor employees' thoughts and emotions



Politicians and technocrats from around the world convened earlier this month at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss how best to orient humanity's future on its behalf. Among the speakers who had their ear was a so-called futurist and ethicist who hyped the adoption of neurotechnology that would afford employers, governments, and others to decode "brain activity in ways we never before thought possible."

"What you think, what you feel: It's all just data," said Nita Farahany, professor of law and philosophy at Duke Law School and faculty chair of the Duke MA in bioethics and science policy. "And large patterns can be decoded using artificial intelligence."

Farahany explained in her Jan. 19 presentation, entitled "Ready for Brain Transparency?" that when people think or emote, "neurons are firing in your brain, emitting tiny little electrical discharges. As a particular thought takes form, hundreds of thousands of neurons fire in characteristic patterns that can be decoded with EEG- or electroencephalography- and AI-powered devices."

Once decoded, the resultant data can be used for a multitude of purposes, good and bad.

The ethicist did not dwell long on the resemblances between the possibilities at hand and the dystopian nightmares previously imagined by science fiction writers such as Philip K. Dick and William Gibson.

Instead, Farahany focused on what she perceived to be the positive outcomes of monitoring and socially engineering the species, emphasizing that the adoption of these technologies could help address "some of the root causes of human suffering, from neurological disease and degeneration to mental illness, but of also unlocking a lot of the secrets of the human brain."

What would it look like in the field?

The WEF speaker indicated that wearable neurotechnology — contra implanted neurotechnology of the kind Elon Musk's Neuralink deals in — will herald an era wherein "you can have an EEG sensor in each ear as part of your ear pods, where you also take conference calls and you listen to music but you have brainwave activity that is being monitored all day every day."

Farahany began her talk with a series of hypothetical uses of such wearable neurotechnology, which she likened to "Fitbits for the brain":

  • An office employee monitors her stress levels as a deadline approaches and, noticing an unusual trend, sends her readings to her doctor for an update.
  • Her technology-inflamed neuroses momentarily dissipate and she begins entertaining romantic thoughts about a male coworker. However, an alert appears on her desktop reminding her to refrain from intra-office romance. The employee focuses back on her work. Her prompt obedience is recognized by her boss — also monitoring the worker's brain waves — who then rewards her with a bonus.
  • The next day, in an unrelated incident, her coworker is carted off by police, having been deemed guilty of wire fraud on the basis of his mental activity. Police will eventually scrutinize mental wavelengths in the office for possible co-conspirators.
\u201cAt the Davos event titled \u201cAre you ready for brain transparency?\u201d The WEF speaker explained how brain-wave data collected by your ear pods will be used by your boss to make you "more productive" and help government authorities "fight crime" (link embedded) h/t @peopleconspire\u201d
— Jeremy Loffredo (@Jeremy Loffredo) 1675022240

According to Farahany, it won't just be white-collar environments where workers' minds will be policed and tracked in this fashion.

With the purported aim of preventing distracted-driving accidents on the road, Farahany suggested that truck drivers could be equipped with hats containing embedded electrode censors that would score what stage of alertness they are at in any given moment.

Concerning the prospect of using brain surveillance to know when to preemptively intervene, Farahany underscored, "We as a society should want that."

\u201cWearable neurotech can now go so far as to detect what you are paying attention to, says @NitaFarahany. She predicts we may soon use this to help people snap to attention in the workplace, such as with the MIT Media Lab\u2019s haptic scarf that \u201cbuzzes\u201d when your mind wanders. #WEF\u201d
— LifeSiteNews (@LifeSiteNews) 1674239400

Farahany also championed the use of attention-tracking ear pods, noting that employers are now able to determine whether an employee's distractions are central, peripheral, or unrelated to their assigned task. She did, however, couch her support with the caveat that it should be optional on the part of employees, used to determine benefits as opposed to penalties.

Although erring on the side of positivity, Farahany noted that the widespread adoption of these technologies will "change the way that we interact with other people and even how we understand ourselves."

Furthermore, as technologies improve, she said, "more and more of what's in the brain will become transparent."

The WEF speaker suggested that there will be legal, privacy, and human rights implications, and societies will have to contemplate how they will safeguard or litigate around cognitive liberty protections, and big business will have to adopt best practices concerning how to adopt this technology.

Technologies here, adoption coming

Farahany's sense that this technology will inevitably and widely be adopted is grounded in part in her observation of the meteoric rise in businesses' adoption of employee surveillance tools during the pandemic. It is also grounded in the understanding that the technology involved in the above hypotheticals is already available today.

Presently, there are earbuds, headphones, and tattoos behind the ear that can be used to pick up or decode emotional states as well as a means to yank out mentally pictured faces, shapes, and numbers.

Neurotechnology company Brain Scientific has produced an ink composed of graphene that, when tattooed upon human flesh, can monitor brain activity.

Fast Company noted that Boston-based Neurable developed headphones that read the wearer's brainwaves and adjust noise cancellation levels in response.

Neuroscientists at the University of Toronto Scarborough developed a technique in 2018 by which they could reconstruct images of what people perceive based on their brain activity.

U of T News reported that Dan Nemrodov hooked up human test subjects to EEG equipment and then showed them images of faces. That brain activity was recorded and then used as the basis of a digital recreation of the image with the assistance of machine learning algorithms.

Extra to past interest in employee surveillance tools and the present availability of brain-monitoring tools, Farahany noted that 5,000 companies area already tracking their employees' "fatigue levels."

The South China Morning Post reported in 2018 that Hangzhou Zhongheng Electric, like many Chinese companies, had been mining data from workers' brains on an industrial scale to redesign workflows and adjust production speeds.

Sensors were hidden in safety helmets and hats that monitored wearers' brainwaves and streamed the data to computers where AI algorithms would note emotional states.

In the Q&A following the presentation, moderator and Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson said, "Speaking as a CEO, I'm sure all CEOs will use [this technology] completely responsibly," eliciting laughter from Farahany and the audience.

Didi Rankovic, writing for Reclaim the Net, said that with this new technology, for employers, it'll be "just like prodding cattle."

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Bugs to be used in bread, beer, and various other items 'intended for the general population,' courtesy of the EU



The next pizza or beer the American traveler to Europe consumes may be loaded with bug dust, thanks to the European Food Safety Authority.

According to the official journal of the EU, a company called Cricket One submitted an application in 2019 seeking authorization to place partially defatted house cricket powder on the market as novel food.

The company sought to clear it for use in the manufacture of various foods, such as "multigrain bread and rolls, crackers and breadsticks, cereal bars, dry pre-mixes for baked products, biscuits, dry stuffed and non-stuffed pasta-based products ... beer-like beverages, chocolate confectionary ... and meat preparations."

The EFSA concluded in early 2022 that cricket powder was "safe under the proposed conditions of use and use levels," despite admitting that there was "limited published evidence on food allergy related to insects in general, which equivocally linked the consumption of [house crickets] to a number of anaphylaxis events."

The EFSA also noted "evidence demonstrating that [the house cricket] contains a number of potentially allergenic proteins" and that such bug dust "may cause allergic reactions in persons that are allergic to crustaceans, molluscs and dust mites."

Prior the EFSA's bug dust approval, the New York Allergy and Sinus Centers reported that the protein in shellfish is also present in crickets, which means "that if you suffer from a shellfish allergy, there is a high chance that you will be allergic to crickets. The more you are exposed to crickets, the more likely you are to develop the allergy."

As of Jan. 24, 2023, Cricket One is permitted to peddle its pest feed in Europe.

Bloomberg indicated that yellow mealworms and grasshoppers have similarly been approved.

According to the Cricket One's website, "Cricket protein is nutritionally more efficient, high performing and complete. It is a reliable and sustainable source of alternative protein that does not harm the planet."

The company cites among its "sustainable goals" both "climate action" and "responsible consumption and production."

This push for people to consume bug dust reveals climate alarmists are not keen simply to discourage people from having children or to bereave Western nations of stable and ethical energy supply.

The Guardian ran an op-ed in 2018 claiming, "Reducing our meat intake is crucial to avoiding climate breakdown, since food production accounts for about a quarter of all human-related greenhouse gas emissions, and is predicted to rise. In western countries, this means eating 90% less beef and five times as many beans and pulses."

A 2017 review published in the journal Agronomy for Sustainable Development suggested that rather than meat, humans could instead try eating weeds, micro-algae, and bugs.

The World Economic Forum ran an article in February 2022 touting bugs as "an excellent alternative source of protein" and a way to "significantly reduce our carbon footprint." The WEF author went so far as to suggest that insects are "part of a virtuous eco-cycle."

When speaking recently at the WEF, Siemens AG chairman Jim Hagemann similarly called on people to stop eating meat to curb the specter of anthropogenic climate change.

"If a billion people stop eating meat, I tell you, it has a big impact. Not only does it have a big impact on the current food system, but it will also inspire innovation of food systems," Hagemann told a crowd of technocrats in Davos, Switzerland.

The multimillionaire predicted that "we will have proteins not coming from meat in the future. They will probably taste even better. ... They will be zero carbon and much healthier than the kind of food that we eat today. That is a mission we need to get on."

\u201cSiemens AG Chairman Jim Hagemann at WEF: "If a billion people stop eating meat, I tell you, it has a big impact. Not only does it have a big impact on the current food system, but it will also inspire innovation of food systems..."\u201d
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) 1674155754

A 2018 research article in Frontiers in Nutrition discussing how best to foist insects on human beings suggested that Westerners averse to eating lizard food "have a stereotyped knowledge of insects and other species, and the association of some of those animals with decaying matter and feces could have led to psychological contamination of the entire category."

The article intimated that social engineering may be necessary to bring about a "large-scale behavioral change in favor of insect-based diets."

The promotion of bug consumption on the basis of its purported environmental benefits isn't working, the researchers conceded, suggesting instead that "interventions emphasizing the delicious and unique culinary experience [would] lead to a higher increase in insect consumption."

Forbes recently reduced the matter of gustatory delight to mere utility, suggesting that "growing livestock for meat is an astoundingly inefficient rate of return on investment." The Forbes author alleged that extra to the efficiency of bugs, their consumption may also be good for national security.

Ligaya Mishan, writing in the New York Times, went the extra mile to couch her justification of eating creepy crawlers in Scripture, noting that John the Baptist too survived on locusts.

MarketWatch reported that the global edible insects market, valued at $486.6 million in 2019, is expected to reach $1.2 billion by the end of 2026.

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New Zealand elites claim that Jacinda Ardern, who embraced a 'two-tier society,' was chased out by 'excessive polarisation'



New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, 42, announced her resignation on Thursday, noting that after over five years in office, she could no longer hack it.

While Ardern, former participant in the World Economic Forum's Young Global Leaders program, was clear about her reasons for quitting, a number of Kiwi politicians and activists have jumped to another conclusion: that the prime minister was forced out by "excessive polarisation" and "vilification," in part by those critical of her excessive polarization of New Zealand during the pandemic and her government's vilification of those wary about receiving COVID-19 vaccinations.

The resignation

"I am human. Politicians are human. We give all we can for as long as we can, and then it's time. And for me, it's time," Ardern said tearfully on Thursday.

Ardern took power on Oct. 26, 2017, at the age of 37. Her resignation takes effect Feb. 7.

"I believe that leading a country is the most privileged job anyone could ever have, but also one of the more challenging," she said. "You cannot and should not do it unless you have a full tank plus a bit in reserve for those unexpected challenges."

The prime minister stressed that her party's underperformance in the polls ahead of the upcoming election was not the reason for her calling it quits and clarified that "the adversity you face in politics ... was not the basis of my decision."

\u201c"I am human. Politicians are human," Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand said as she announced her resignation. "We give all that we can for as long as we can, and then it's time." https://t.co/rLg6z9alAH\u201d
— The New York Times (@The New York Times) 1674134405

The actual reason, according to the prime minister, was simple: "I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do [this job] justice."

Ardern underscored: "I am not leaving because it was hard. Had that been the case, I probably would have departed two months into the job."

Perceived victimization

The Guardian reported that speculation is mounting that "abuse and threats" drove Ardern to throw in the towel, even though she made clear that was not the case.

"It is a sad day for politics where an outstanding leader has been driven from office for constant personalisation and vilification," said Māori party co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer. "Her [family] have withstood the ugliest attacks over the last two years with what we believe to be the most demeaning form of politics we have ever seen."

New Zealand's first woman prime minister, Helen Clark, said, "The pressures on prime ministers are always great, but in this era of social media, clickbait, and 24/7 media cycles, Jacinda has faced a level of hatred and vitriol which in my experience is unprecedented in our country."

"Our society could now usefully reflect on whether it wants to continue to tolerate the excessive polarisation which is making politics an increasingly unattractive calling," Clark added.

Kate Hannah, director of the so-called Disinformation Project, told the Guardian, "The scope of what we’ve observed over the last three years is such that there’s no way it could not have been a contributing factor – for any person," adding, "What we see now is absolutely normative, extremely vulgar and violent slurs … incredibly violent use of imagery around death threats."

Richard Shaw, a politics professor at Massey University in New Zealand, told the New York Times that Ardern "became the personification of a particular response to the pandemic, which people in the far-flung margins of the internet and the not-so-far-flung margins used against her."

Ardern's two-tier society

The suggestions that Ardern was subjected to unprecedented abuse, polarization, and vulgarity appear to be provided in a vacuum of context.

TheBlaze previously reported that in 2021, a reporter said to Ardern, "You've basically said, and you probably don't see it like this, but two different classes of people if you're vaccinated or unvaccinated. If you're vaccinated you have all these rights."

Ardern replied gleefully, "That is what is, yep, yep," thereby confirming, to borrow a turn of phrase from Clark, that the state intentionally mandated "excessive polarisation."

Accordingly, citizens of the purportedly free nation were not allowed to exercise their mobility rights until 90% of the country was fully vaccinated.

Ardern's government implemented a "traffic-light" pandemic regime whereby those who were vaccinated were allowed to travel around and use services freely, whereas those who refused the mRNA vaccines had their freedoms of assembly and mobility all but eliminated.

The unvaccinated were not permitted to eat in restaurants, work out in gyms, or drink in bars.

The prime minister, whom Ngarewa-Packer suggested was forced out by "the most demeaning form of politics," told citizens, "If you are still unvaccinated, not only will you be more at risk of catching Covid-19, but many of the freedoms others enjoy will be out of reach."

Ardern went on to erroneously suggest that the virus was majoritively spread by and between unvaccinated persons.

In August 2021, Ardern forced her entire country into lockdown after a 58-year-old man tested positive for COVID-19. Schools were closed. All gatherings were canceled. Citizens were confined to quarters. Residents were allegedly prohibited from removing their face masks to drink outdoors.

In February 2022, Ardern said that anti-mandate protests in Wellington, which she characterized as intimidating, "cannot be tolerated," reported the Associated Press

Extra to vilifying protesters and citizens struggling to exercise their bodily autonomy, Ardern compared free speech online with "weapons of war" during a September speech at the United Nations.

The New York Post reported that Ardern said that "mis- and disinformation online" constitute challenges "that we must as leaders address," adding, "We have the means; we just need the collective will."

Ardern adopted militant language, intimating that dissenting views on climate change and "dangerous rhetoric" should be crushed.

Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald was taken aback by Ardern's comments, writing, "This is the face of authoritarianism – even though it looks different than you were taught to expect. And it’s the mindset of tyrants everywhere."

"This is someone so inebriated by her sense of righteousness and superiority that she views dissent as an evil too dangerous to allow," said Greenwald.

During the pandemic, Ardern intimated that government disseminated information was the only true information, saying, "You can trust us as the source of that information. You can also trust the director general of health and the Ministry of Health. For that information, do feel free to visit at any time to clarify any rumor you may hear: covid19.govt.nz. Otherwise, dismiss anything else. We will continue to be your single source of truth."

\u201cMany of the people who deeply believed in Jacinda Ardern call those who question our institutions crackpots.\n\nWhen I heard her say the words \u201cYour single source of truth.\u201d I lost any ability to even understand who she was or what she believed. Seemed mad.\n\nhttps://t.co/M8ExPgpkZq\u201d
— Eric Weinstein (@Eric Weinstein) 1674197876

Ardern's curbs on Kiwis' freedoms were not all speech- or pandemic-related, however. In 2021, she announced a plan to ban smoking and put nearly all of the country's tobacconists out of business. A year later, the country implemented the world's first annually rising legal smoking age, with the intent of coercively phasing out the addictive pastime.

As she moves on from helming New Zealand's apparent "single source of truth," Jacinda said she wants to be remembered "as someone who always tried to be kind."

Ardern raised some eyebrows in December after calling the opposition leader David Seymour an "arrogant p****" in Parliament.

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Corporate Flat Art Proves Big Business Is Infatuated With Ugliness

Rather than just an eyesore, the visual style is emblematic of the sense of alienation that arises when a society crowns efficiency its preeminent virtue.