A DARK AKASHA

As we access the internet, the internet accesses us

Tues 7 January, 2563 BE (2020 AD).

The old lady was up before dawn, as she always is. She and her husband farm a few rai of land in Isan, North-Eastern Thailand, growing vegetables, rice and sugar. On this landlocked plain it gets hellishly hot in the middle of the day, and the best hours are from 5 or 5.30 a.m. until about 10 or 11, when they break for rice. Back to work at 3, till it’s getting dark around 6.30. Then eat, and sleep. And that’s it, every day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. Every hour of light is spent outside. They only come inside to sleep.

So Buaphan was cooking breakfast on her wood stove — with so much wood lying around, why waste gas? — when her eye was caught by something strange: a procession of bright lights moving silently across the sky. A straight line, evenly spaced, a taut string of stars.

There was something eerie about it. Nothing natural, obviously.

So she asked her daughter to ask me if I knew what it was. I thought I did. With a little checking online, I established that she had witnessed a SpaceX-Starlink satellite ‘train’. Every three weeks or so, a Falcon-9 rocket blasts off from Cape Canaveral Airforce Base in Florida with a payload of sixty satellites. Bua had seen a portion of the third deployment. In total, I learned, there would eventually be 12,000 satellites, rising in the future to 42,000, subject to Federal Communications Commission approval. The planet was to be encased in three ‘orbital shells’ at 340, 550 and 1,150 km above the earth’s surface. This architecture of tens of thousands of satellites, known as a ‘constellation’, would use lasers and powerful phased-array transmitters to bring internet coverage to the entire inhabited surface of the planet.

I share the old lady’s unease.

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The technological leaps forward represented by Starlink sound fantastically impressive… propulsion landings, krypton ion-thrusters and momentum-control gyroscopes, attitudinal positioning systems and autonomous debris avoidance, silicon carbide lasers, light-pulse data transmission… I can’t pretend to understand much of it on a technical level, but in any case I’m more interested in the impacts — technological, societal, even philosophical — which must surely be profound. And the motivations. With investment in the billions of dollars and the extraordinary levels of problem-solving ingenuity being applied, and the unprecedented nature of the space-based infrastructure being constructed, the objectives of the Starlink project must indeed be far-reaching. It’s a new Wonder of the World, isn’t it? — a huge, ambitious, epoch-making achievement on a par with the pyramids at Giza. And as with the pyramids, there’s a discussion to be had about the purpose of their construction.

Starlink’s website talks only about meeting the needs of consumers. At the end of 2019, more than half the world’s population remained offline. Starlink terminals will be vastly cheaper than the competition, though still out of the reach of a Third World subsistence farmer, of course.

Starlink creates ‘a global network unbounded by ground infrastructure limitations’, to ‘deliver high speed broadband internet to locations where access has been unreliable, expensive, or completely unavailable.’ The powerful phased-array transmitters and lasers mounted on each satellite bring fast, reliable broadband internet to populations with little or no connectivity virtually anywhere on the planet, even the most isolated areas, as well as low latency connectivity to already well-connected cities, though Musk has said that population centres are not his primary market.

Billions of dollars of investment. The sheer scale of the project. 42,000 satellites, in three orbital shells. And all to bring internet to deprived rural populations? It seems a very modest aim for such a spectacular project. Where’s the pay-off?

“There is significant unmet demand,” says Elon Musk.

My question would be — demand from where? From Third World peasants, whose significant unmet demands might also include water, sanitation, food, electricity, medicines, peace, life-expectancy?

Or from somewhere else? Where does this demand to encase the earth in satellites come from?

As well as abundant bandwidth and global coverage, the system also offers another crucial advantage over terrestrial systems — low latency. The unique features of Starlink are designed to shave vital milliseconds from the latency of existing systems, and these fractional economies will be decisive for high frequency traders, offering total domination of the markets. That’s where Elon Musk and SpaceX will make their billions back, many times over — from premium subscriptions paid by algorithmic traders.

So that’s the motherlode.

And is that it? Do our questions stop there, as soon as we hit the profit-motive? Is money a sufficient motive for this drive to connect every human being on the planet? The fact that it’s always about money doesn’t mean that it’s only about money.

Despite Starlink’s dominance in the field of LEO satellite communications, it isn’t the only such scheme or even the first in the field. I hadn’t realised that Bill Gates has been heavily involved in this area, investing from the 1990s onwards in projects such as Kymeta, Teledesic and EarthNow. Robert F Kennedy Jnr has been talking (uneasily) about a Bill Gates constellation of 61,000 satellites which aims to provide advanced imaging capabilities and high resolution video coverage of (almost) anywhere on the surface of the planet to governments and corporations. As far as I can make out, he is referring to planned projects rather than something already in existence, and progress on Gates’ EarthNow project seems to be currently stalled, held up in corporate mergers. Then there are smaller constellations like Branson’s OneWeb and Bezos’ Project Kuiper (Kuiper Systems LLC, a subsidiary of Amazon). Even Facebook wants to get in on the action. One way or another we are looking eventually at a planetary telecosm of more than a hundred thousand low earth orbit satellites shrouding the planet in concentric shells.

Five years into the project, Starlink’s first orbital shell is now complete.

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The burgeoning of infrastructure for an all-pervasive telecosm isn’t only happening in Low Earth Orbit, but on the ground, too. As Buaphan stood there, staring at the strange trail of lights crossing the pre-dawn sky, the ‘pandemic’ was already on the horizon, a couple of thousand kilometres to the north in Wuhan, China. Two and a half months later, the lockdowns would come down like a great suffocating blanket across the planet, as weak or complicit politicians shut down their economies under pressure from the WHO and the WEF. All ‘non-essential’ human activity — work, business, education, health-care, travel, worship, leisure, performance, sport, social interaction, political activity, protest — was suppressed. Small towns in many places turned into reverse zoos as animals — deer, wild pigs, monkeys, depending on the location — wandered the deserted streets while humans cowered in their homes.

Interestingly, however, the co-ordinated roll-out of fifth-generation internet infrastructure across every country, rich or poor, only quickened pace. Regardless of what was happening economically, the towers continued to go up. There were reports that the schools, hospitals and public buildings standing empty were being retro-fitted with the phased-array transmitters of the new system, the deployment of which was clearly considered essential by someone.

It is usually assumed that the 5G and Starlink systems will compete with each other in the lucrative market of internet provision, but I read that that is not necessarily the case. The headlong deployment of both systems might suggest a race to get ahead of the competition, but it’s also possible that the two infrastructures, terrestrial and celestial, will be complementary, with the satellites providing a ‘backhaul’ network for the towers.

There has been much speculation about the potential applications of 5G beyond internet provision — questions which Starlink seems to have been spared. These questions, derided and suppressed as ‘conspiracy theories’ by mainstream and social media companies, are perfectly justified, since there has been no safety testing of 5G, which can be used as a weapon system — indeed, as Frank Clegg, former President of Microsoft Canada, has revealed, that’s what it was designed to be: an ‘active denial’ crowd control technology.

In any case, in the twenty-first century, is there any longer a functional distinction between communications and surveillance systems?

‘Connectivity’ works both ways.

Marshal McLuhan, with inexplicable prescience, pointed this out more than half a century ago.

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library, the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. (The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962)

As we access the internet, the internet accesses us.

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Starlink has groundbreaking implications for communications in space, replacing the radio-frequency systems that have limited space exploration for decades and potentially enabling human beings to connect instantaneously over vast distances. However, we should not get too starry-eyed about Musk’s Star Trek-inspired visions of our interplanetary future. Experience has shown us that low earth orbit has always been the ultimate strategic ground, not for the exploration of far-flung planets but for the domination of this one. In his book One Small Step? The Great Moon Hoax and the Race to Dominate Earth From Space, Gerhard Wisnewski argues that the civilian space program was first and foremost, from its inception, a cover for military programs.

The NASA Act of 1958 made explicit provisions for close collaboration with the Department of Defense, and in practice, the Pentagon was involved in all decisions regarding the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. Erlend Kennan and Edmund Harvey documented this point in Mission to the Moon: a critical examination of NASA and the space program, as early as 1969, and concluded: ‘It remains imperative to have NASA keep its status as the decorous front parlor of the space age in order to reap public support for all space projects and give Defense Department space efforts an effective ‘cover’. (Wisnewski, 296)

Crucially, the space program provided cover and budget for the development of the Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile. As the late great Dave McGowan wrote in his peerless account of the deception, Wagging the Moon Doggie:

“In truth, the entire space program has largely been, from its inception, little more than an elaborate cover for the research, development and deployment of space-based weaponry and surveillance systems.”

So it was never about new horizons, exploration, anything about the noble human spirit. Near-earth orbit was all that mattered, as strategic high ground from which to dominate the planet. The rest was all just a manufactured dream to keep us asleep to the development of space as a weapons platform. For all we know, Musk’s drive to ‘Occupy Mars’ is just another such fantasy, another propaganda meme. In fact, if it wasn’t, that would be a major departure from precedent. Back on Earth, or in Low Earth orbit, nothing has changed: like the barbed wire in concentration camps, everything is pointed inwards.

The construction of this planetary telecosm is, above all, necessary for the deployment and navigation of autonomous vehicles of all kinds, from cars and trucks to ships and planes to drones and military robots. That’s where low-latency is crucial. We should think of all robots and autonomous machines, now, as the visible manifestations of an invisible system: an intelligence moving into the physical space. Just as mushrooms are the above-ground expression of a fungal mycelium, they are not separate entities but expressions of an invisible super-organism; the fruit of an invisible tree. Starlink, and similar overlapping systems including the terrestrial phased-array towers, creates an all-pervasive medium, a sea of data for automated entities — vehicles, robots, brain-chipped humans — to swim in.

A digital Akasha.

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The Akasha is an ancient concept, first articulated in the Sanskrit Vedas, the oldest scriptures of Hinduism, orally transmitted from at least the second millennium BC and regarded by orthodox Hindus as apauruṣeya — that is, not of man: authorless, impersonal, revealed; first intuited through intense meditation by the ancient sages. Akasha is the invisible foundation of all existence, the all-pervasive medium within which all matter, all phenomena arise. Through the Akasha is transmitted Prana, the primal energy and information which shapes and animates all living forms.

The concepts of Akasha and Prana influenced Western thought through Stoic natural philosophy, which grew from the lost book of Heraclitus to anchor the Graeco-Roman mind for six hundred years, until the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. In the developing Stoic tradition, Akasha becomes the intelligent aether permeating a living universe which is itself God, while Prana is pyr teknikon, the creative, universal fire. In later Stoicism, this is renamed pneuma, or breath (still often with the epithet fiery), which transmutes into the Christian idea of the Holy Spirit, and disappears under the veil of religion.

Why dark? What is it that spooks me about these billionaire constellations?

Well, Starlink is SKYNET, as visualised in the Terminator movies, though you don’t have to imagine a literal war against the machines to find its manifestation in the real world uncomfortable. It’s not just the idea of automation of all surface systems and the concomittant loss of human roles and challenges, individual sovereignty, agency and meaning. Such a system is, by its very nature, part of a panoply of technologies of absolute surveillance. Gates’ projected Earthnow system is explicitly geared to the surveillance market. In comparison with the insidious, ubiquitous Gates, libertarian free-speech-enabling Musk looks like a hero of human empowerment, but surveillance is central to his system too: satellite-based AI-operated transport systems must also minutely surveil the surface, geo-locating their millions of mobile nodes.

And there are new factors in play. Whether or not it is already with us (or within us), the drive in neuroscience is towards self-assembling, injectable brain/cloud-interface nanotechnology. The COVID crisis constituted an opportunity for prototyping such technologies in a world-wide experiment in merging humans with the machine — which cannot be done without a pervasive, extremely low-latency system like Starlink.

…The primary challenge for worldwide global cloud-based information processing technologies is the speed of access to the system, or latency. For example, the current round-trip latency rate for transatlantic loops between New York and London is ∼90 ms (Verizon, 2014). […] A neuralnanorobotics-mediated human B/CI, potentially available within 20–30 years, will require broadband Internet access with extremely high upload and download speeds, compared to today’s rates. — ‘Human Brain / Cloud Interface’ by Martins et al, Frontiers in Neuroscience, 29 March 2019

Bearing in mind that covert military and corporate research tends to be decades ahead of public perception, I believe it is highly probably that experimentation and prototyping of nanoscale brain/cloud-interface is exactly what we are witnessing in the blood of vaccinated individuals, as documented by Dr Ana Mihalcea and others — and increasingly, that of the the unvaccinated, too, as other vectors come into play. It is well worth reading the Martins metastudy to get a sense of the radical possibilities inherent in neuralnanorobotics. Biometric surveillance and data-mining are just threshold applications. Wait til you hear about Transparent Shadowing.

Now, I’m not accusing Musk of being the evil mastermind behind all this. He may be the ethical humanist he likes to play, the benign oligarch seeking to mitigate the impact of AI, and so on. But his commercial and research interests — bandwidth abundance, autonomous vehicles, robotics, brain/machine-inferface, artificial intelligence — are dripping with new world order connotations, essential technologies in the transition to a scientific dictatorship the outlines of which have revealed themselves to us rather clearly through the murk of the last five years. It might seem a contradiction for technocrats like Musk and Peter Thiel to be gravitating towards the libertarian MAGA movement — though Patrick Wood, probably the world’s foremost authority on the technocratic movement dating back to the nineteen-thirties would point out that technocracy has shown itself to be compatible with any political party or ideology.

“Technocracy is not ideological, so it hides behind any political system — left-wing, right-wing, even Nazism in Germany during World War Two. Today, it is bonding with the populist movements in Europe and America.” (From CHD’s Omniwar Symposium provides an excellent series of presentations: Wood has the second hour.)

Is Musk a mitigating influence or driving force in the technocratic movement? Certainly he has articulated and promoted its most radical aim, framed as a survival measure, of ‘merging’ the human mind with artificial intelligence, something he argues we must do to have any chance of being ‘along for the ride.’ One way of merging humanity with the machine, of course, would be through injectable brain/cloud-interface technology in a global ‘vaccination’ campaign. Another, I suppose, might be (feasible according to the Martins study) the ‘massive distribution’ of nanotechnology through aerosols, pharmaceuticals, and the food supply, all of which I tend to think are already happening. Martins estimates the time-scale at 20-30 years from time of publication (2019), so 14 years at the lower range. Based on historical precedent in military technology, I’d say that time will pass by in a flash. I’d say it already has, and they’ve been prototyping and beta testing this technology on us for the past five years. Why wouldn’t they?

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Ubiquitous internet access. Every inch of the earth’s surface apart from the North Pole. Every inch of every landmass. In this future, there will be no more going off the grid — in this future, you are the grid.

I have a suffocating sense of how enclosing the Earth in concentric shells of technology changes the essential timbre of human life, perhaps all life, on this planet — and that is the stated ambition of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a ‘biodigital convergence’ over-arching the ‘digital transition’ which can only be about power, about the hyper-centralisation of all human existence, right down to the level of cognition and consciousness. You might tell me that I am being irrational in opposing it, and I’m perfectly comfortable to agree. My response is visceral first: a shudder, not a thought. How am I better, then, than a poor farmer in North-Eastern Thailand, spooked by seeing that satellite train before dawn? I’m not, and nor would I ever claim to be. But you don’t have to be an ignorant peasant to find something uncanny about that train of lights crossing the night sky. You just have to be up before dawn.

Totalitarian power always wants a monoculture and now it’s within reach to create one. Wood tells us that technocracy does not tolerate outliers. McLuhan told us long ago that the end of the print era will coincide with the end of the era of individualism. The movement towards technocratic totalitarianism (technocracy is by definition totalitarian, even if many would see it as a kind of soft or benign totalitarianism) creates the ultimate human monoculture. I’ve seen what monoculture in its agricultural form does to the soil. There is no more fragile ecosystem. But of course that’s the point of it. A monoculture only exists for easy harvesting.

The train of lights in the sky before dawn, and the progressive enmeshing of the Earth in an information sphere, a cloud of knowing, is going to proceed in the background whatever else happens. I see it as part of the deep principle articulated in Baudrillard’s simulation theory; the progressive (and to him irrerversible) masking and denaturing of profound realities. The artificial noosphere represented by Starlink is essentially a simulation. The aether, the subquantic medium that underlies all phenomena, the Akasha which connects everything in reality must, like every other aspect of this creation, it seems, be replicated by humans; mapped, simulated, substituted and usurped. The drive among our technological and power elites is to detach us not just from nature but from reality itself, to infiltrate, replace and supersede it in its entirety with a false reality of which they are the immortal gods. C A Fitts has called it ‘the last gasp of a dying model’ — the machine model of Descartes, that is, to which Musk, in his innocence, knows no better than to subscribe.

The doppelgänger mindset cannot create, only recreate; only map, analyse, replicate, infiltrate and displace. From biologically-inspired robots to machine-music to agent-driven synthetic worlds, it is obsessed with simulation, not as sacrament but as sorcery. As Western civilisation enters its Fourth Industrial Revolution and remodels itself around unprecedented technological capabilities, integrating humanity ever more deeply into the Machine, a digital Akasha is the final element the technocracy must recreate to empower its global reach.

In order for the telecosm to reach every cranny of the surface of the planet, it must build a pervasive radiative infrastructure of control, a meta-connectome, an all-pervasive field for its digital-physical, digital-biological chimaeras to swim in.

Once the Starlink system confers ubiquitous bandwidth abundance, it will have this; its travesty of aether, its anthropogenic pseudo-akasha.

A digital World Soul.

I share the old lady’s unease.