Picture Your Dream Home. Then…. Virtual Society by Herman Narula – A Review
Picture Your Dream Home. Then….
Virtual Society by Herman Narula – A Review
Tim O’Connor – Center for the preservation of Humanity – 4/15/2023
My dream home is one of those gigantic old Victorian homes which dot the east coast of the United States. I want it on about 50 acres of land, half for farming and half wooded with a running body of water on the property for fishing. I want about an acre around the house to lounge on, surrounded by a white picket fence with a dirt driveway. Ideally there are greenhouses large enough to grow oranges and apples behind the house. The only mandatory interior feature would be a hearth. Hidden passages would be a bonus. A guy can dream, right? And dreams can come true if we work for them, right? Not so fast there dreamer. In reality none of this is to even be possible – not the house existing, not the personal property, not even the ability to work, earn, and save money.
One of the earliest people to seriously suggest such a future reality – the one where it is impossible to even conceive of me ever living in my dream house – was Ray Kurzweil in The Age of Spiritual Machines (2000) and The Singularity is Near (2005). There is a progression of humanity Kurzweil writes about in The Singularity is Near – a ‘progression’ which increasingly obsoletes our bodies biological functions. Our bodies will be able to live forever with the introduction of nanobots to act as our immune systems, repair DNA, and serve as an enhanced elimination system (pp 299-300). By having the nanobots cross the blood-brain barrier and interact with neurons, it, “will provide full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses, as well as the neurological correlates of our emotions, from within the nervous system,” Kurzweil suggests (p 300). He goes on to suggest, indirectly the rise of the hive mind, the rise of nanobots and cyberwarfare being the warriors fighting wars, and the planned destruction of work as we know it.
This is where we are at now in the real world, at least at the initial adoption of these things. Nanobots are being introduced into our bodies with and without our knowledge or consent. Biological nanobots are destined to be human beings immune systems, digestive systems, and allow us to live forever. On top of that, all human thought will be able to be centralized as these nanobots connect themselves to an artificial intelligence to sift through the massive amounts of data produced by the endeavor. The coronavirus pandemic served to show how this would work (where are your DNA samples from all of those PCR tests? - genetic labs around the world being decoded, cataloged, and data-based), as well as to serve as the impetus to goad us into going along with the idea because of the fear of new man-made pandemics.
As a result of the nanobots; however, eating (pp 301-3) will need to be completely re-imagined according to Kurzweil. He suggests that technology create new human digestive systems (pp 303-5), programmable blood (pp 305-6), hearts and whether or not humans even need to have a heart (pp 306-7), brains (pp 307-9), and then suggests that we are to become cyborgs. The introduction of nanobots hijacking all human biological process promises this future as reality and, at the risk of sounding like a neo-Luddite, the only way to prevent Kurzweil’s future is to stop conducting the research to create it. We have already crossed the red line to prevent that future; however. Thus, eighteen years ago, Kurzweil imagined with eerie accuracy, “Let’s consider where we are, circa early 2030’s. We’ve eliminated the heart, lungs, red and white blood cells, platelets, pancreas, thyroid and all of the hormone-producing organs, kidneys, bladder, liver, lower esophagus, stomach, small intestines, large intestines, and bowel. What we have left at this point is the skeleton, skin, sex-organs, sensory organs, mouth and upper esophagus, and brain,” (p 307). [links inserted are mine and are intended to provide a starting point for research into any of these artificial human biological materials]
Kurzweil isn’t necessarily writing about artificial replacements for broken parts though. He wrote the quiet part down and had it published – these things will no longer need to be a part of the human body whatsoever. The nanobots will replace all of them. This is what Kurzweil refers to as “human body 2.0,” (p 310). He opines, “One attribute I envision for version 3.0 is the ability to change our bodies. We’ll be able to do that very easily in virtual reality environments,” (p 310). The virtual reality he described in 2005 is on pages 312-7.
In this swiftly-becoming-reality dystopia, my dream house would sit, rotting and uninhabited, until the day it collapsed from it’s own weight. What a waste and a tragedy! Sure, I could ‘live’ in it in virtual reality but, no matter how immersive and ‘real’ the virtual world is, it’s still a computer generated facsimile of real life. The creek running through the back yard wouldn’t really have any water in it, it would be an illusion which served no real purpose and neither would the greenhouses, cropland, wooded areas, nor anything else. But Kurzweil’s descriptions seem to be the way the world is going and instead of rejecting the ideas, more and more people are trying to engineer their way into making Kurzweil’s dystopic ideas reality not just for themselves – for all of humanity.
But a problem has arisen. Engineering all of this technology has not occurred as quickly as certain men’s desires to make it reality. As a species, we have developed severe forms of technologically enhanced surveillance systems in the environment and even in our own bodies. We have developed systems which are able to collect all data about the entirety of any given resource and allocate it to the ‘winners of the earth’ and stiff the ‘losers of the earth’. We have figured out any number of ways to scare most people into compliance for the benefit and with the interests of the elite of the world (the ‘winners of the world’). Children are being attacked through the baby-murder industry as well as by the determination of the alphabet mafia’s access to children. We have developed nuclear, conventional, chemical, and particularly, biological weapons, which can exterminate whole races of people, entire zip codes, and wipe entire land masses off of the earth. Jobs can easily be destroyed. Stores of wealth are being obliterated. To a greater or lesser extent, all of these are part of Kurzweil’s intentions.
The overall idea is to get people to revile the real world and favor living in the virtual ones being created. Permanently. The technology isn’t up to snuff quite yet; however, the jobs are being destroyed, the currencies decimated, and the real world made increasingly miserable and much less free or affordable to have to live in. This situation has given rise to a class of people Guy Standing dubbed The Precariat in 2011. The subtitle denotes this precariat class is “the new dangerous class.” We are dangerous to the powers that be that are trying to reshape the world in Kurzweil’s vision.
Standing defines the term precariat in two ways. The first is under a Marxist class scheme which is identifiable by socioeconomic status (p 11). Under this definition the terms precarious and proletariat are combined to create the precariat – a working class of people who work and work and work and get no where. It is clear today that billions of people have acknowledged the existence of this class in the number of protests around the world as well as the rise of the gig-economy and the exploding costs of anything based on artificial scarcity.
Four classes are identified by Standing in order to arrive at the second definition. There are the elite – “a tiny number of absurdly rich global citizens lording it over the universe, with their billions of dollars, listed in Forbes as among the great and the good, able to influence governments everywhere and to indulge in munificent philanthropic gestures” (p 12). Below the elite are the salariat, a class of people who have stable jobs in government and multinational corporations (p 12). The word professional and technician are condensed to create the proficians which exist below the salariat. Proficians are highly paid and usually commit to contract work for short terms and are highly sought for the expertise they hold in their fields (pp 12-13). The manual labor class is described as shrinking, having lost its solidarity, and as income goes, below the proficians (p 13).
“Underneath those four groups, there is a growing ‘precariat’, flanked by an army of of unemployed and a detached group of socially ill misfits living off the dregs of society. The character of this fragmented class structure is discussed elsewhere,” (p 13) Standing wrote to serve as the second definition. The rest of the book is the elites guide to how people end up in the precariat, who those people are, how they should be viewed by the rest of society, and how to pacify them to mitigate the danger they pose to the classes above them. He offers two ways to mitigate the danger.
One is the creation of an open air prison system he calls “the panopticon society,” (p 228) featuring invasions of privacy, digitized schooling, business management monitoring a broader set of social and biological factors of their employees, disapproving certain speech in an effort to eliminate information streams, having us believe that jobs make us happy, creating therapy states, putting restrictions on welfare, demonizing the precariat, and the rise of fascism at the expense of democracy (pp 228-65).
Conversely, Standing favors the so-called ‘politics of paradise’ for pacifying the Precariat by redefining them as denizens and suggesting he knows what’s best for them. It’s exactly the same thing he rails against under the panopticonic society only with different mechanisms and increased misery for everyone. He wrote, “The precariat’s foremost need is economic security, to give control over life’s prospects and a sense that shocks and hazards can be managed. This can be achieved only if income security is assured. However, vulnerable groups also need ‘agency’, the collective and individual capacity to represent their interests. The precariat must forge a strategy that takes account of this twin imperative,” (p 270). When dealing with illegal aliens, deportations should be avoided, a UN sense of a right to work needs to be recognized, and special rights need to be afforded to non-citizens and the precariat alike (pp270-3). Rights should be redesigned based on one’s identity and the concept of nations being a melting pot should be replaced with multiculturalism (pp 273-4). Professional educators should unilaterally set the educational content, students should be able to suggest how they are taught and what outcomes they desire, and producing a productive member of society should be abandoned altogether according to Standing (pp 274-6). Standing invokes John Maynard Keynes – that great economic apologist for all of the death, destruction, and degeneracy caused by every Marxist leader anywhere throughout all of modern history – in order to redefine work (pp 277-8).
Additionally, all labor should be made into a commodity (pp 278-80). Volunteerism should be recognized as work (pp 280-3), work rights should preclude labor rights (283-5), the precariat should take collective action to demand rights and constitute a voting bloc (pp 285-88), and the Orwellian idea that freedom only exists in collective slavery (pp 288-93). Equality of outcome through theft (pp 294-5), a universal basic income (pp 295-99), a level basic security should be sought and collectivized at the expense of a whole slew of God-given rights (299-303), financial capitol should be redistributed (pp 303-6), time should be reallocated (pp 306-8), leisure activities should be granted by state authorities (pp 311-4), according to Standing. He demands the precariat rally around the hoax of man-made climate change as the precariat causes insurrections to physically take the commons (pp 308-11).
Standing finishes his book off by citing Pastor Martin Niemoller’s famous ‘first they came for me’ quote and following it with, “[t]he warning is relevant because the dangerous class is being led astray by demagogues like Berlusconi, mavericks like Sarah Palin and neo-fascists elsewhere. While the centre-right is being dragged further to the right to hold its constituents, the political left is giving ground and haemorrhaging votes. It is in danger of losing a generation of credibility. For too long it has represented the interests of ‘labour’ and stood for a dying way of life and a dying way of labouring. The new class is the precariat; unless the progressives of the world offer a politics of paradise, that class will be all too prone to listen to the sirens luring society onto the rocks. Centrists will join in supporting a new progressive consensus because they have nowhere else to go. The sooner they join, the better. The precariat is not victim, villain or hero – it is just a lot of us” (p 315).
Neo-liberalism has it’s problems, without a doubt. Yet, under neo-liberalism everyone has the ability to dream their dream, work towards achieving that dream, and know that the harder they work towards the goal the closer they will be to realizing the dream. Under neo-liberalism I had a chance of actually buying a Victorian home on a picturesque and productive piece of land. Standing, just like Kurzweil, posits that my dream should not even be a dream. It certainly should never be realized.
The idea is to create the largest precariat class possible to push all of these progressive prerogatives upon all of humanity. Entities like Standing want to point at problems which affect everyone, exacerbate them, and destroy every structure, relationship, and meaning mankind has built all of civilization upon. These entities seek to create divisions – the more irreconcilable the better – throughout all of society. For those in the precariat, a socioeconomic status which is purposefully being increased, life is worse and worse for them. Kurzweil’s promise of escape from this dismal world is appealing to more and more people as a result. Until technologies are developed to actually get rid of our bodies entirely there is the meteoric rise of the promises and mysteries of the virtual worlds of the metaverse.
The metaverse is one of the best ideas the World Economic Forum has ever heard of. The WEF would like nothing more than to entice people to live permanently in virtual worlds. Of course, to like in a virtual world bodies would no longer be necessary in the real world. The lie is that we can live forever as a digitized ‘human’ in any number virtual worlds. This idea is one of the reasons that Davos 2023 assembled 95 representatives from the worlds most promising start-ups working at the cutting edge of various innovations in various technological fields. Among the 95 invited, Improbable’s CEO, Herman Narula was one of them.
Herman Narula wrote a 2022 book titled Virtual Society: The Metaverse and the New Frontiers of Human Experience. Part of the motivation for Narula’s effort was to promote the ideas his business is involved with. In some regards, it is 237 page brochure to convince people the metaverse is where they want to be. Well, it’s not where I want to be. Not ever. I don’t want to spend one second anywhere near any technological innovation Narula created or assisted in the creation of.
The book starts off in the introduction by attempting to shock the reader, “One day this book will be read by a person without a body” (p iv). Having read the two books by Kurzweil mentioned above, I immediately recognized where Narula was coming from and the future he wants to help steer humanity in. The first chapter is an effort to convince the reader that all of the stories and theologies which have ever existed are myths which represent metaverses themselves. The chapter concludes with echos of Standing’s nonsense, “In order to understand why the rise of virtual society will be a good thing, you must understand how and why today’s production-focused society wants you to think that it won’t” (p 30).
In the second chapter Narula tries to convince the reader that their existence is should be repurposed to seek fulfillment above all else. It is here that the groundwork is laid to make the claim that the real world is unfulfilling almost all of the time but the virtual worlds already developed and being developed offer that fulfillment.
What drives the sense of fulfillment is experiences. This is the topic of the third chapter. It also lays out the purpose of the whole book. “The purpose of virtual worlds is to create fulfilling and useful experiences for their participants. Their unique ability to process and manage complexity will allow them to produce these sorts of high-quality inner journeys with precision and regularity. The key to maintaining quality standards will lie in our ability to measure and quantify the relative fulfillment and value of an experience in one virtual world, compares to a similar experience in another. The relevant metric here isn’t just attention, but engagement, over both the short and the long run” (pp 71-2). Thus, the purpose is to redefine everything about our lives with the goal having fulfilling experiences.
Chapter four is dedicated to the technical aspects which are not considered in too much depth. Fulfillment and experiences are not always dependent upon the most cutting edge graphics. It’s more about building relationships and working together for a common purpose according to Narula. “As the number of people simultaneously engaged in a virtual world grows, so too does the value of the world” (p104). But this, so far, only applies to the virtual world when the point is to create fulfillment right now in the real world. According to Narula, “[w]e must forge and indelible connection between virtual worlds and the real world if the value created in these digital realms is to be transferred into our own. This nexus between worlds is what we mean when we talk about the metaverse” (p105).
Narula suggests that meaning needs to be created in the metaverse. Narula has this bad habit of attacking those who disagree with him throughout the book in order to demand they comply with moving into the metaverse when they are ordered to. Naively he doesn’t think the metaverse will need coercion to be used; however, I will never use it willingly so there is at least one person that only coercion will have a chance of seeing me in the metaverse. “The people who suggest that a metaverse is simply a rich virtual world with various rich experiences therein are missing the point. A metaverse is more accurately described as an “other world” of living ideas that intersects with our own world in various ways. These worlds of ideas feature shared histories, shared economies, and imagined sets of events or states of affairs that serve as the basis of mythology. They are populated by personalities, events, and things whose persistence is powered by the collective belief in their existence. These things in turn are connected to and have real consequences for the society that creates them” (pp 117-8). Again, Narula shows is solidarity with the Standing in the collectivization of fractures segments of society. Instead of fixing Standing’s precariat through really awful social and government interventions or Kurzweil’s outright commitment to destroying the bodies God gave us because His design was flawed, Narula takes a more moderate path to achieve both outcomes and suggests how to make that happen. “The interplay between worlds, and the associated ongoing creation and transfer of value, is the foundation for virtual society” (p 126).
The exchange Narula envisages is the topic of chapter 6. Overall, he defines it, “[a]n exchange can be a place, an activity, or a philosophy. It’s where you go to buy and sell things, to trade value, it’s where you go to share ideas and conversation and experiences. Implicit in the very notion of exchange in that value is bilateral. You don’t go to am exchange to hold on to something, you go there to put it into the world. An exchange is a bridge, across which meaning and value and consequence can flow and develop and transform and evolve. This image is a relevant one around which to construct an organizational model for the metaverse” (p 150). This is where the real world he wants to do away with meets the digital world he wants to usher in. The idea isn’t to keep what happens in the metaverse in the metaverse and forgotten as soon as the VR goggles are turned off – this is how the worlds mix.
“This leads to another component of part of a valuable metaverse: We’ll need a meta layer of social and economic value that ties these worlds and experiences together. If there are clear ways to create, store, quantify, and exchange this value, then these worlds and experiences will carry meaning and consequences that matter on more than just an individual psychological level. This is where I foresee blockchain-style mechanisms coming into play: intricate computing processes that serve as independent guarantors and clear ledgers of value within the world,” (p152) Narula wrote. He is telling us that human beings are intended to spend increasing amounts of time in these digital worlds until we finally decide to move there permanently.
The seventh chapter explains how to get people into the metaverse through job opportunities. He describes the way he sees this happening – “As virtual worlds grow and expand, their users will find new opportunities to earn money providing goods, services, and experiences that meet other users’ needs” (p164). He follows this up by suggesting the metaverse is perfect for all of the miscreants in Standing’s proletariat, “[t]he jobs to be found in an optimally valuable metaverse have the potential to eliminate the structural inefficiencies that have made so many real-world jobs so dissatisfying for so long” (p165). If we didn’t know better, we could almost say that life is being wrecked purposefully in the real world to get people to line up for the fake ones so loved by Narula and Kurzweil.
In chapter eight Narula warns that there could be tyrants ruling the digital spaces being built for us to inhabit. Of course it’s going to be ruled by tyrants. Who owns the hardware and the software? Who gets to set the basic rules? Who controls the infrastructure? The idea that Narula presents is that the digital space should be ruled by their users. In human history we have exactly one such example and that is quickly falling apart because people can no longer tell what is right from what is wrong. That issue will only be exacerbated in a digital world. He exemplifies his willingness to paint tyranny as pretty as he can but underneath the colorful painting lies a tyranny one will never free themselves from.
He does this by correctly pointing out that the internet started out as decentralized and is now very much centralized. Instead of coming up with solutions for existing problems, Narula proposes, like so many others in his field, that Web 3.0 (where the metaverse is and is being built) will avoid the centralization issues faced by our current Web 2.0 internet. Narula notes “[t]he problem with the modern internet is often mistakenly described as a problem of misinformation. While misinformation is indeed endemic online, and while the real world has suffered tangible consequences as a result of its spread, I see it more as a symptom of structural failures than an underlying disease. Regulatory lapses aside, the main structural problem with the internet is rooted in the network’s naive architecture, which did not anticipate the adversarial nature of a decentralized network’s economic incentives” (pp 194-5). In other words some people don’t like people and they are a problem which can be fixed through deplatforming them going forward. At the same time, economic incentives will be decentralized so if any individual steps out of line the virtual mob can bankrupt them if Web 3.0’s overlords don’t get to them first.
Narula is absolutely lost when it comes to the nature of human beings whether they be in big government, big tech, or in any other big industry and even at the individual level. Men are evil by nature, we can use our free will to change that with God’s help. Instead of having government regulators stand back and allow the big tech companies to roll out the metaverse, Narula demands that government step in now and be the overlord of the metaverse, softly at first so as to spur development, and more robustly as the platforms grow. That notion then gives rise to the idea that, “[t]here is nothing inherently wrong with the notion of seperating, to some extent, the governance of real-world and virtual societies, and there is nothing wrong with businesses organizing more like states, around communities with voting behavior, with the business aspects of these entities becoming distinct from from the governance aspects” (p 213).
Then Narula gets dark, as in portends the end of civilization. “We must end up in a position where people can make meaningful choices about the lives they live online. To get to this point, we’ll need transparent and ethical governance guaranteed by democratic principles: elections, voting, accountability. When this transition happens, and it will [is that a Bush I reference about the NWO?], then these worlds will have no reason not to become their own countries. The context of these worlds will be so meaningfully removed from the context of the real world, to a point where it wouldn’t make sense – and wouldn’t be effective – for them to exist exclusively under real-world control. These other worlds will become so meaningful that they will become as real as the real world for many people. This will be the first step toward metaversal speciation” (213-4). We don’t have to build these things, but we are. The metaverse doesn’t need to exist to rival the real world, but people like Narula are making sure it does. Why? So people live there without all of the problems people pose in the real world. Digitized ‘human’ intelligences don’t need to eat, use water, drive cars, or do anything else to the real world – they only require error-free or correctable coding and a little bit of electricity.
The last chapter, nine, is title On Speciation which, to me, is a shout-out to Charles Darwin and his evolutionary theory. Maybe Narula sat down with Kurzweil and picked his brain, prayed to Lucifer, drank some blood and then wrote this chapter. The debauchery described in the final 22 pages of Virtual Society rivals anything Kurzweil has ever written about the future of mankind. First he set the reader up for his visions by comparing our current lives to the lives of those chained to the walls in the allegory of Plato’s cave. Iun order for us to loose our chains and free ourselves from a life lived through shadows on a wall and enter the real world (which is the metaverse for Narula) he asks a question:
“But what happens when the biological structures of our bodies and minds [the chains in the allegory] become the very limits that we yearn to transcend?” (218). He answers this question by coming clean about what the metaverse really is – the extinction of the human race as God made it. “At this juncture, I’d ask you to leave the confines of the metaverse we’ve been considering throughout this book. Set aside the idea of a virtual world you might access through a screen or device or even a VR headset, and instead imagine a world to which your mind can connect more directly. Imagine a world, for example, that bypasses the limitations of the human eye and injects directly into the visual cortex a vivid set of experiences that no human has yet seen or imagined. In this world, you will literally be able to see things that are now impossible” (p218). Kurzweil’s nanobots anyone? Before you run out to go get nanobots implanted into your visual cortex, answer this question – who saw the Mona Lisa before it was painted by Leonardo da Vinci; the Sistine Chapel artwork before Michelangelo painted it, or heard Beethoven play Symphony No. 5 before he wrote it? No one. Men did those things and some of them are quite beautiful. We could hear them and see them with the senses God gave to mankind. They are enjoyable without having to give our minds over to artificial intelligence to produce them and allow us to recognize them. So the question is really – do YOU want to continue to do your own thinking based on your own input devices or would you like a silicon based artificial intelligence which operates a hive mind internet of people (slaves) to it to do your thinking so ‘you’ can ‘see’ what the AI made?
The book doesn’t get any better either. Narula shows his Luciferian devotion by dismissing anything moral. He does this to promote his preferred version of post-humanism. Destroying objective reality and the morality that comes from the Bible is, actually, the only way to get anyone to think the metaverse would be preferable to the real world. He writes (p 219):
“As I’ve noted throughout this book, many of our culture’s fictional stories about the digital future are morality tales that warn of the hazards of disconnecting our minds from our bodies. These stories often present virtual worlds as destructive and dangerous. Why are there so few positive stories about this future? What is the fear really about?
“I think that we fear a virtual future because we worry that the inherent transmutation might somehow make us less human – which strikes me as a very arbitrary worry when juxtaposed with all the changing and becoming you already did when you grew up. […] Developing new capacities isn’t just a good thing: It’s evolutionary imperative on both and individual and a social level. If humanity is to continue to grow and thrive, we must overcome our fear of change and press on towards new frontiers.”
Forget everything you have ever learned about morality – it stands in the way of Narula murdering all of us – is all he is saying. He is parroting one of the most deceptive and murderous people of all of human history when he wrote these paragraphs. Yuval Noah Harari wants everyone to become cybergenetic science experiments and to be implanted with nanobots to help ease the move from the physical world into the digital. Narula does things Harari does, he used false analogies and relied completely on evolution for his justification. Hitler’s ploys were no different except he never promised you could live forever like Narula and Harari do, making them worse because forever will only last in these worlds until the power is switched to off. It’s also not actually you in the metaverse. It also requires the permanent resident of the metaverse to die in the physical world.
As Narula and Harari and Kurzweil nudge humanity closer to the edge of the post-human cliff, Narula postulates, “[t]he prospect of a post-human future – of connecting yourself to a computer and having your brain fully enter a virtual context – might seem alienating at first, but I would submit that that sense of alienation is perhaps a function of the many fictional warnings against it” (p225). This is the same demonic ‘logic’ that the alphabet mafia has used since a female named Audrey Hale murdered six Christians in a school. It’s our fault she did it because she wanted to be acknowledged as a boy named Aiden. We didn’t do it so she felt bad. Her bad feelings and warped sense of reality which society rejected justified the murder of six inoccent people according to the alphabet mafia. Narula is saying exactly the same thing using exactly the same flawed logic. He describes developments in the metaverse as the literal depictions in The Matrix and then, using that same ‘logic’ demands that it isn’t the Martix because robots didn’t force humans into the pods – we chose that for ourselves he claimed. Not only does that defy logic, it betrays the concept of coercion and denies the reality of human nature because the elites will order their salariats to have their favorites of the proficians throw everyone into the metaverse they can. But robots did it in the Matrix so it’s not the same Narula contends despite the fact that when the metapurge occurs it will be ordered by transhumanists and carried out by non-human, only partially biological, entities – or robots in the broad sense of the word.
Narula also sees himself as a god. “By simulating things that could never actually be, these worlds will give us landscapes of new ideas, and opportunities to develop societies that could never otherwise exist. We’ll be able to live in in realities that differ from our own in every imaginable way: geography, physics, temporality” (p 227). And because he hates God so much, and expects us to decide to hate God as well, he presents the future as he sees it again. “As we go farther and farther down this path, the entire premise of society will change. As you come to spend more and more time within your chosen world, you will lose a certain shared context with people who have opted to exist in other worlds” (p228).
Fragmentation is the end goal and Narula doesn’t hesitate to call that goal good. “Human beings from every culture and background on Earth will understand common frames of reference: the changes of the seasons, the cycles of the moon, the linear progressions of age and time, the force of gravity. The relationships between people n Earth – and between people and Earth – all presume this shared context. […] The real world is real because it is real in the same ways for everybody. We speak fundamentally the same kind of language of the ancients, because we fundamentally have the same kind of brains” (pp 230-1). Well, it also works to give humans a sense of purpose, a sense of longevity of the species, and a sense of honor and dignity and community. Narula wants any common bond between humans to be destroyed beyond repair. He wants to weaponize one of the greatest gifts God gave men – free will – to get us to choose in which manner we would like to separate ourselves from God by choosing with fantastically fake reality we would rather dwell in. In so doing, society will, itself, be fractured. There will end up being Narnia people and iRobot people.
I want everyone to die is all Narula is saying. I want to help throw the entirety of human history, achievement, meaning, and context out and usher in the end of God’s creation. “But I want to push your thinking about the metaverse one level further, to a place that might feel relatively alien within the context of the “real world,” and argue that the metaverse is the first step toward the post-human, experientially capacious societies that I predicted in this books introduction – toward infinite societies that are infinitely different. The metaverse is the first step towards speciation” (p 231). This is what build back better really means for these types of people. They want to absolutely destroy everything God created, the people, the animals, the earth, the DNA – everything. And they want to be the new authors of the new forms of life. They actually believe “metaversal society will be stronger than society today” (p 235).
“We cannot approach the metaverse thinking that it is just the next phase of the internet. Instead we must do so fully expecting that the metaverse will transform what it means to be human” (p 236). There can only be one answer to the question of why we should want to change what it means to be human – an absolute hatred of God. They have no fear of God. And they have no fear of making themselves gods. “I don’t fear this vision of the future, and neither should you. I believe the metaverse will make the physical world a better place, and will improve our lives – primarily by freeing us to do more, know more, be more, and experience more. Throughout human history we/ve sought out virtual worlds in order to expand our capacities for growth, feeling, knowledge. And relatedness. The era of virtual society will be the apotheosis of this quest. We’ll be more ourselves than ever before” (pp 236-7). Apparently being ourselves somehow makes human beings the aliens the Fermi Paradox asked.
To be ourselves we must forget everything about ourselves and recreate ourselves in a silicon, digitized version. And, by doing this, we will become more ourselves than we were before we decided to take this stupid metaverse journey....
Virtual Society is literally an advertisement for killing yourself. If you have ever seen Futurama they feature suicide machines and this might as well be an advertisement for a souped up model which doesn’t just kill the body but vivisects the brain and converts it into digitized ones and zeros. The claim is that you could live forever in the metaverse. The truth is that you are dead because human beings are three things – mind, body, and spirit also known as the intellect, the physical, and with a soul. In my opinion Narula has no soul making his severely under-qualified to give a prediction or assess anything about actual, fully embodied, human beings. At the very least, Narula has severed any connection his soul (which I still doubt he has) may have had with God which, also, leaves him in a position of being unqualified to opine about any of this. But it is telling that this soul-barren entity who has decided to denounce God in pursuit of his own follies has taken a course of action to get others to reject God as well as to reject the body God made for us.
Kurzweil wrote about humanity becoming merely an intellectual component loaded onto AI-created logic chips installed in swarms of nanobots traveling across the entire universe and colonizing everything. His prediction is basically that our science and technology should be the most invasive species imaginable and it should invade every atom of matter in the universe. Why would the masses want to do that? The masses would only ever do that if their real lives were made meaningless. Relationships breaking apart, social fabrics being ripped up, crime going off the charts, silencing any possibility of dissenting, eliminating the Bible, criminalizing God, devaluing national currencies, ending any sense of privacy, forcing people into unemployment all lead to less fulfilling lives. Guy Standing decided that this is a great combination of developments and that the only thing which must be done is to cater to those who have been negatively impacted by these events. In doing so, more and more people end up in similar circumstances until there is no one to steal from, there is no one to tax, and there are no more ‘classes’ as Marx understood them. There will be the slave and the master at the end of Standing’s road map to Hell, a set of circumstances any Medieval feudal lord would readily recognize.
People are realizing this and saying ‘nah, let’s get off this road and go a different way’. Even when they see the street sign reading TRUTH, they keep right on driving – past eternal life, past what is good, past fulfillment of their purpose on earth. They know they don’t want to be thrust back into feudalism. They also know that they don’t want to go down the road paved by Kurzweil because there is no meaning there. Virtual Society serves as the anti-human and anti-God middle road. Using the issues identified by Standing as the motivation to get people to the metaverse in the first place, Narula offers the same vision Kurzweil does but with an added layer of lies that there will be meaning and purpose in doing so.
If human beings seek to exist as human beings in the future – this is literally a fight against our own extinction – we will start taking that 180-degree turn to seek the TRUTH. At the end of that road lies true eternal life. At the end of that road lies the end of all suffering, the embrace of He who created us, and the fulfillment of what human beings were always intended to be – with God. We don’t need the metaverse because the metaverse seperates us from God. The amount of delusion necessary to get one to think it’s a good idea is a reflection of how far from God that individual has grown. But the developments revolving around the metaverse and its adoption by humanity is more sinister than than individual choices. The choice is being made for us by the likes of the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, the Bank of International Settlements, and the Builderberg Group. From digitized central bank currency to 15-minute cities and from democracy to totalitarian technocracy the world is going to be made to exist only in the metaverse for the vast majority of us. We are being given a choice – die or die and go to the metaverse.
I don’t really want to have to die to have my dream house. How would I be able to really have my dream in reality if reality is turned into the dream of an artificial intelligence and I am nothing but a series of ones and zero’s? I could get a copy of autoCad or something similar and design my house like a digitized doll house and put it into some world like Minecraft. I could go build this house in Minecraft, actually. But what is the point if I cannot eat the oranges and watch the sun set from my front yard? I want to smell the dirt kicked up from the few cars passing by the house. I want to see for miles down into the valley to the east on clear days. I want to weather the storms and I want to enjoy the peace. Nothing is at stake in the metaverse. Everything is at stake in this world, the one God created, the one God created people in, the one God told us how to worship Him in, to love the sacrifice of Jesus in, and to use our dominion over tempered by our command for stewardship. I’m not in a cave chained to the wall – I’m in the real world that is real because God made it for me, and you, and everyone and everything else upon it. If I never get to live in my dream house in this world, so be it. I’ll still keep trying until I get it and open up the next set of problems (repairs, improvements, and maintenance) or until God calls me home. In the metaverse that house will never be real, I won’t be real, and God will have written off me and my stupid fake house with my stupid avatar living in it. It’s not worth it at all for me.
For as much as I don’t want any of these technologies to go online or to ever have to make that choice, they are coming and we will all have to make those types of choices. The only thing any of us can do to deal with those new and soon-to-come realities is to decide now the course of action we plan to take. It is odd though, those that believe in Jesus Christ are immediately confronted with such questions. We are told that those who believe in Jesus Christ will be arrested, tortured, and murdered just for our belief. The believers in Christ are uniquely positioned to offer answers to the existential questions posed by such demonic technologies because of our belief. We must think these things through now. The time will soon be upon us when we will have to decide: continue following Jesus Christ and His Father as described by the Bible and in our own lives; or succumb to that base frequency of the fallen angels trying to physically claw their way into this world by standing upon the decapitated heads of those it has deceived? Will we seek Heaven or Hell, mercy or punishment, grace or debauchery, God or the world?
Learn the TRUTH then pay attention to the events occurring around you. Even if you do those two backwards, the way of the world should be enough to convince anyone with common sense that the world is very wrong and that the truth is out there somewhere. That truth is in the Bible. That truth is in the testimony of the believers in God and Jesus Christ. That truth is in the miracles, both small and great, which have been and are still being performed by God. That truth is not going to exist in the metaverse – it will be deemed hateful and oppressive. That truth is certainly nowhere to be found in Virtual Society either. Know the truth, expose the lies.
Bless God and God bless.