Transhumanist Futures: Part 2: Humanity in the Crosshairs

Johnson, Broudy, Hughes, Propaganda In Focus

Abstract: The Transhumanist campaign against humanity, we have outlined in Part 1, is part and parcel of a sophisticated long-game strategy waged against bodies and psyches. With the manipulation of our primal fears and altruistic impulses, the prosecution of this technological onslaught against humanity is camouflaged by linguistic shell games based on sanitising, eulogising and euphemistic language; justification through appeal to valued collective activities such as space exploration; and by claimed threats that humanity is itself the scourge, including through its propensity for “unwanted” love, which is recast as an affliction needing treatment with biochips and neuroceuticals. In this perverse “New Normal”, technocratic regimes of dispossession headed by transnational economic interests and, we argue, the military-intelligence complex, are presented as self-evident and morally justified. Social order, civil rights, and human sovereignty are reconceptualised, repackaged, and reframed in public discourse as “surveillance under the skin”. Part 2 broadens scope beyond NASA and its purportedly space-oriented transhumanist agenda by offering analysis of transhumanist forecasting and planning in an array of military-intelligence strategic vision or ‘futures’ documents, which are focussed both on military personnel and civilian populations. We reveal that this evidence not only casts military personnel as fodder for transhumanist experimentation, but foresees societies and leadership agendas stratified along transhumanist lines. The trail of documentation ultimately leads to an intersection with military-intelligence scenario planning for a pandemic-ravaged dystopian global landscape in the year 2020, with real and present implications for impending global governance under the World Health Organisation, with ratification of amendments to International Health Regulations and a new Pandemic Preparedness treaty pending in May 2024.

Introduction

Too often do we marvel at the power of the institutions we have constructed over time, and too often do we take for granted that ministers of state power have a genuine interest in attending to the needs of the citizenry who give consent to their rule. But how, in these times of systematic societal destruction, can we understand the ways in which a “New Normal” is being built before our eyes in the biological systems that comprise families, communities, and nations? How is the great transformation unfolding in real-time? Can the material evidence of fundamental change be discerned through the obscurity of official planning, policies and papers already published?

A Brave New Millennium: Nanotechnology, Policy, and the Building Blocks of ‘Life’

In September 2000, almost a year before NASA Langley’s August 2001 ‘futures’ presentation[1] to the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) described in Part 1, another ‘futures’ workshop took place a short drive along the Potomac River from Langley, at the National Science Foundation (NSF) headquarters in Alexandria Virginia. The workshop was titled ‘Societal Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology’. It was organised by the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), a cabinet-level council of advisers to the President,[2] which provides “the principal means for the U.S. President to coordinate science, space and technology policies across the Federal Government”.[3]

In hindsight, one can see how the little-known September 2000 NSTC workshop now stands on the science and technology policy landscape as an unassuming launchpad for what NASA Langley would term, in the following year, the BioNano Age. It was held two months after the US Government’s National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) was announced in July 2000,[4] whose aim was to accelerate progress in nanotechnology research, and was sponsored by the same Federal NSTC body that co-ordinated the NNI.[5] Shortly prior to the 2000 NSTC workshop, according to the workshop summary, “a White House letter (from the Office of Science and Technology Policy and Office of Management and Budget) sent in the fall of 2000 to all Federal agencies has placed nanotechnology at the top of the list of emerging fields of research and development in the United States”.[6]

In tandem with the nano-technological movement in the White House, the 2000 NSTC workshop spawned a modestly-worded 280-page report in 2001, which advised that “a revolution is occurring in science and technology, based on the recently developed ability to measure, manipulate and organize matter on the nanoscale — 1 to 100 billionths of a meter”. The report predicted that, “over the next 10 to 20 years [2010-2020], nanotechnology will fundamentally transform science, technology, and society”. It added, “there is little doubt that the broader implications of this nanoscience and nanotechnology revolution for society at large will be profound”.[7]

The status of such nanotechnology policies is significant to transhumanism’s trajectory in that nano-technological materials and tools are critical to the transhumanist project of re-engineering biological life. According to a 2010 report from the Air War College titled Nanotechnology: Threats and Deterrent Opportunities by 2035, “the ability to work in nanoscale is … leading to unprecedented understanding and control over the basic building blocks of all natural and man-made things”.[8] It goes without saying that one could not get more elemental than controlling the basic building blocks of all natural and man-made things. Nanotechnology, the report explains, “is about much more than dealing with the very small”. It quotes Mihail C. Roco, Senior Advisor for Science and Engineering at the NSF, as saying that nanotechnology represents the convergence of science and engineering “where the fundamental principles of life can be found.”[9]

In an applied sense, according to the 2001 Roco and Bainbridge NTSC workshop report:

… the nanoscale is not just another step toward miniaturization, but a qualitatively new scale; … among the envisioned breakthroughs are human organ restoration using engineered tissue, ‘designer’ materials created from directed assembly of atoms and molecules, as well as emergence of entirely new phenomena in chemistry and physics.[10]

Those entirely new phenomena, The Air Force Research Laboratory explains in Nanoscience Technologies: Applications, Transitions and Innovations, arise because nano-sized materials are smaller than the scales at which conventional physics apply and larger than those where atomic physics dominate.[11] This intermediate state between conventional and atomic physics results in oddities such as “forc[ing] electrons into unique energy states”, which in turn promote features including altered magnetic properties, “improved superconductivity” and exceptional strength.[12]

Among the potential applications of such nanotechnological oddities offered in the NTSC report are “wired humans”. The report foresees a day when, with the help of nanoscience, “nanoscanners” will project imagery directly onto the fovea (a small depression in the neurosensory retina where visual acuity is sharpest), while microphone implants in the throat, and implants in the inner ear, could be coupled with implantable transmitting and receiving devices. Should such developments come to pass, “then a human will be wired fully — not only internally but also externally to the vast network outside of the body.”[13]

In its capacity advising the US President, to facilitate the advancement of wired humans and other innovations, the NTSC report offers recommendations for social scientists and policymakers to “help us to take advantage of the new technology sooner, better, and with greater confidence.”[14] What ensued from this point forth is perhaps among the most significant, and the most under-reported, series of developments in national security affairs.

The following year a second workshop was held, titled, Nano Bio Info Cogno: Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance.[15] The 2001 workshop spawned a second report, edited by the same authors as the previous year’s NTSC workshop summary, Mihail C. Roco and William S. Bainbridge of the NSF. The second report, published in 2002, ran to 424 pages and launched what is now known as the NBIC initiative, an influential, international interdisciplinary convergence of activity across Nanoscience, Biotechnology, Information technology and Cognitive science / neuroscience (NBIC) domains. An introductory graphic to the report heralds the nascent NBIC convergence as “changing the societal ‘fabric’ towards a new structure”.[16] The seemingly innocuous description of ‘change’ to the structural ‘fabric’ of society may have passed to readers, at the time, as unworthy of deeper contemplation, but digging into the details of the international ‘interdisciplinary’ ‘convergence’ of nano-everything yields surprising results about what ‘change’ would actually entail.

Although not obvious in the NBIC report itself, a later NATO document made clear that the NBIC initiative had come about with DoD backing. The 2021 NATO report reads, “NBIC is a scientific project bringing together four previously distinct domains: nanotechnology (nanorobot technology, nano-sensors, nanostructures, energy, etc.), biotechnology (bio-genomic technology, bio-engineering, neuropharmacology, etc.), information technology (computer science, microelectronics, etc.) and cognitive technology (cognitive science and neuropsychology). The project was formalized with the encouragement of the US Department of Defense (DoD) in 2002 and subsequently taken up by major international institutions and a number of nations, to bring together future technologies”.[17]

Indeed, concurrently with the NBIC project, just as the White House had entered the 21st century with a focus on nanotechnology and a new National Nanotechnology Initiative, the DoD entered with a compatible Defense Science and Technology Strategy 2000, published in May of 2000. The Defense science and technology strategy declares that in order to “provide for national security in the 21st century”,[18] the DoD would need to be “building our portfolio of technology investments … leveraging the technology explosion, and enabling the Revolution in Military Affairs”.[19] Technologies of interest to the DoD are listed as including nanoscience, micro- and nano-robots, molecular engineering, augmented reality, nanoscale sensors, and biosensors with smart sensor webs, all together enabling “the combination of biology with information technology, electronics, optoelectronics, sensors, and actuators”.[20] In other words, the same BioNano technologies underpinning NASA Langley’s BioNANO Age, slated to commence in 2020, as discussed in Part 1. The subsequent DoD-backed NBIC initiative of 2002 cites the 2000 DoD Science and Technology Strategy report, offering “embedded bionic chips” in soldiers as an example of the revolutionary technologies emanating from the national security realm.[21]

Simply put, the DoD, NTSC and NASA Langley in 2000-2001, and NATO in 2021 (along with a cornucopia of military-intelligence projects and documents in between — a small selection of which we summarise below) have been singing from the same transhumanist DoD BioNano hymnsheet since at least the turn of the century.

The 2021 NATO report continues: “The object [of NBIC] is to encourage the development of tools and adapt or improve humans through an anthropotechnical approach to develop a hybridized human-system … Today, this project has led to the partial convergence of domains, mostly through pairing information technology and health nanotechnologies, new chemical cognition enhancers, embedded electronics, etc. Ultimately, it will lead to an augmented human operator (or even a hybrid one), injected with amplifying substances or nanotechnologies [emphasis added]”.[22] That is, it will lead to transhumans. With the help of hypodermic needles.

By way of illustration, the NATO document notes, “a number of enhanced soldier projects are already underway”.[23]

Cyborg Soldiers: Transhumanist Designs on the Military

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Transhumanist Futures, Part 2: Humanity in the Crosshairs