‘Planned-Opolis’: Take a Virtual Tour of Your Dystopian Future Techno-Prison

Originally published via The Daily Bell:

From digital ID to “smart homes” that surveil their targets in their most intimate environments, the ruling class is erecting a technetronic control grid. To add insult to injury, they market it as an ultra-modern utopia that you should be excited to participate in as its newest member/slave.

On the micro-level, that will mean implanting nanotech under the skin or into the bloodstream to monitor or control your activities and/or biological functions. On the macro-level, that will mean controlling where members of society:

• work

• how and when they travel

• with whom they are allowed to congregate

• what foods (and how much) they are allowed to eat (with potentially special treats like a piece of meat for their birthdays if they behave themselves)

Which brings us to Planned-opolis (as designed by Forum for the Future*) a techno-nightmare (or some version thereof) coming to an urban center near you in the not-so-distant future.

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*Forum For the Future, incidentally, the purveyor of Planned-Opolis, is sponsored by:

• Walmart (the largest corporation in the world by revenue)

• Unilever (“one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies“)

• British multinational retailer Marks & Spencer

• “Nonprofit” group FoodCorps (funded by Bank of America and agri-giant Campbell’s)

• Pearson (“education” company and infamous CommonCore profiteer)

A Day in the Life: Urban Techno-Hell

Note: THIS IS NOT BRILLIANT DYSTOPIC SATIRE

In the above video, an annoying zoomer character with a valley-girl-British accent named Vee — more appropriately named Techno-Kaylie or Techno-Skyler or whatever — takes you on a digital tour of your new dystopian hellscape home. Again, notice that she very presumptively expects you to be enthusiastic about your participation (might as well enjoy it; you don’t have a choice anyway).

A few key highlights of “Planned-Opolis”:

• Vee’s emasculated husband “works from home” as a “virtual engineer” digitally managing the desalination plant robots that have replaced meaningful human labor. “I think he basically plays computer games for a living,” Vee says, and giggles.

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• All travel is automated through a service called “Slick Travel Corps,” and permissions are “allotted” after an application process to move around your new techno-home. “Switch off brain and go to work,” as Vee says. “With this many people around, I’m glad there’s a mega-computer in charge.”

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• Calories are rationed.

• Jobs are “assigned” by some techno-entity as opposed to being selected by free individuals exercising free will. (Vee hopes her own children get assigned “something good.”)

• The techno-master has a “Global Food Council” that decides what kind and how much food the techno-slave receives. Meat is only available on your birthday. “You don’t get the choice you used to, but we’re better off than most,” Vee lectures.

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• Human contact is now digitalized. “It’s so much easier to meet your friends virtually now. So many cities have banned cars in central areas,” Vee says.

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Throughout her survey of ultra-modern hell, Vee appears remarkably upbeat about her techno-prison Planned-opolis. Like the Confucious proverb goes: “If rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it.”*

———–

Planned-opolis is far from the only dystopian vision of the ruling class; competing visions of techno-hell abound, with the slightest discrepancies. Billionaire and former Walmart executive Marc Lore, for one, has big plans for moving the peasants onto his own techno-plantation.

Via CNN:

“The former Walmart executive last week unveiled plans for Telosa, a sustainable metropolis that he hopes to create, from scratch….

“In addition to innovative urban design, the project also promises transparent governance and what it calls a ‘new model for society.’ Taking its name from the ancient Greek word ‘telos’ (a term used by the philosopher Aristotle to describe an inherent or higher purpose), the city would allow residents to ‘participate in the decision-making and budgeting process.’ A community endowment will meanwhile offer residents shared ownership of the land.

In a promotional video, Lore described his proposal as the ‘most open, most fair and most inclusive city in the world.’”

The “higher purpose” is turning humanity into an automated mass of techno-slaves. “Most fair” means, like Vee explained, that you get meat once per year on your birthday to save the planet or whatever. “Most inclusive” means plastering token minority figures on advertisements to sell the product to weak-minded “liberals.”

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Would anyone believe that a Walmart executive would fund a project with the aim of engineering a new utopia based on genuine equity and fairness? One would have to know literally nothing about Walmart’s ethos to be so naïve.

The Antidote: Become the Ungovernable Savage That Nature/God Made You to Be

Reject the servitude of Vee and her emasculated husband, who is so inconsequential in his sad existence so as not to have a name.

Instead, with your friends and neighbors, create a parallel society and economy outside of the budding social control grid. This might entail but is not limited to:

• Using untrackable, uncontrollable cryptocurrency instead of government-issued fiat currency whenever possible

• Growing your own food

• Moving out of the big cities

• Engaging in mutual assistant groups (MAGs) with neighbors in close-knit communities to multiply defensive capabilities with like-minded allies in close physical proximity

• Buy or build lots of guns

In short, like “the savage” in Brave New World who lived outside of the dystopian system, reject the machinations of a sick society:

“‘All right then,’ said the savage defiantly, ‘I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.’
‘Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.’
There was a long silence.
‘I claim them all,’ said the Savage at last.’”

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Ben Bartee is a Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Follow his stuff via his blog, Armageddon Prose, Substack, or Patreon.