It seems important to ask: why is this happening and how did we get here? We might start with a kind of combination koan and insight from world-renowned conservationist and humanitarian Dr. Jane Goodall who said: “Here we are the most clever species ever to have lived, so how is it we can destroy the only planet we have?” How indeed? Hyper-capitalist acceleration and the collapse of many long taken-for-granted social and political structures seem inextricably linked as if going in one direction and we inadvertently slide into another. As humanity reaches the pinnacle of technological mastery, we simultaneously seem to be descending into a kind of archaic chaos. 

Economic Globalism and AI

We’re being told by the scions of global wealth and power that AI is the answer to all of humanity’s problems. But perhaps this in and of itself is just one more problem. Not only are we the most clever species but we appear to be “clevering” ourselves into even more havoc by depending on a technological advance that hasn’t proven itself. It’s a half-baked end product even in the corporate marketplace let alone as a solution to an ever-growing swath of global social and political problems, often categorized under the moniker of polycrisis. And how curious it is that we’re seeing AI applied more to war than to addressing critical issues such as climate change. 

In this journey into uncharted waters, we may be witnessing a head-on collision with the limits of an overly rational view of the world. AI systems are supposed to represent the epitome of intelligence, but is it an act of intelligence to create something that even its Big Tech creators admit might precipitate humanity’s demise? The struggle between a Western world dominated by rationality and a detached view of the natural world has been percolating in the collective for a long time. In the 18^th century, poet and visionary William Blake railed against “the dehumanizing idolatry of reason.” In one way of looking at things, AI is the apotheosis of reason, further leaving human emotion, compassion, and appreciation or the need to connect to the natural world in the dust as it races towards the Next Big Thing. It appears to be a kind of Trojan Horse to promote hyper-capitalism and limitless economic expansion to the exclusion of all else.

The Fragility of the Global Village 

To understand the need for a return to a local-friendly future, it’s important to unpack how economic globalism is starting to unravel. The mis-application of advanced technologies has a huge hand in this. Visionary Marshall McLuhan’s illuminating notion of a “Global Village” has eroded as the Internet and digital technologies – once promising tools for education and enlightened collaboration – have now been corporate-captured. The formerly useful meme of being a “planetary citizen” somehow seems no longer viable. And the much-vaunted globalized system of communication and awareness that modernism depends on, and at one point seemed so promising for new human possibilities, has now shown itself to be a fragile construct that can be wiped out by bits of computer code gone awry. The inherent fragility of the digital foundations for globalism has now been exposed and revealed with two massive worldwide digital outages wreaking havoc in airports, hospitals, schools, and other core institutions which modern life relies on to function. 

The reality on the ground is that economic globalism is totally dependent on a privately owned and operated digital infrastructure for its very existence. Localism on the other hand is dependent on ordinary people doing ordinary things and connecting at human scale in a right-minded way. The contrast is stark but instructive. The first is dependent on the good graces of a few powerful oligarchs and a vast corporate infrastructure with tentacles reaching into every country. The latter is available via simple human empowerment and decision-making. The choice seems clear enough. 

***

Tom Valovic is a writer, researcher, and media analyst. He is the author of Digital Mythologies (Rutgers University Press), a series of essays that explored emerging social and cultural issues raised by the advent of the Internet. Tom has served as a consultant to the former Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and was editor-in- chief of Telecommunications magazine for many years. He has written about the effects of technology on society, the media, and on environmental issues for a variety of publications including Common Dreams, Columbia University’s Media Studies Journal, Counterpunch, The Technoskeptic, Annals of Earth, the Sierra Club Newsletter, Wisdom magazine, the Whole Earth Review, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Examiner and many others. He can be reached at cloudhands5885@gmail.com. 

Following up on the Unplug to Uplift webinar we’ve assembled a List of Resources on some of the adverse impacts of technology on children and ways to mitigate the harms.

Many people can sense that tech and over reliance on screens negatively impact our children, and studies and data increasingly corroborate this felt sense. But many people still don’t know that wireless radiation (RF) from smart phones, tablets etc. also adversely affects the mental and physical well-being of children.

This list of resources includes both mechanisms of harm – screentime and wireless radiation.

Sadly, according to and excellent Epoch Times article only 1 in 10 children play outside even once a week, choosing rather to spend their time indoors on a screen. Our kids are missing out on developing essential life skills while their physical and mental health decline.

We trust you will find these resources useful and will consider incorporating some of what you learn into your own life and that of your children. After all, our kids are our future.

List of Resources on Children and Technology

Unplug to Uplift Webinar Recording

Unplug to Uplift: Aching for a Tech Safe Society

List of Speakers on the Unplug to Uplift Webinar (List includes their websites, books, Substacks etc.

For up-to-date resources, info, and commentary on all-things-tech please check out
Patricia’s Substack for Safe Tech International.

By Kate Kheel from Safe Tech International

Sitting here at home tonight, internet service down, time expands. And so does my appreciation for this stunning home I have been blessed with. This home speaks to my heart and to the heart of almost all who visit. It’s an answer in the form of a dwelling place to the yearning that is welling up inside so many of us for simplicity, nature, harmony, and peace.

The “smart world” with its tech-buzzing homes insists on faster, evermore connected, AI, and “convenience”. Life is reduced to services delivered through buttons and buzzes, devices and data. But much of humanity is saturated to the point of indigestion. The thought of even one more “byte” is repugnant.

Many people don’t realize they’re over-consuming. It’s the norm, what everyone does. But when people enter this home, my sanctuary, I sense in them a palpable sigh of relief. Time slows down, and they begin to see once again: Irregular shapes and textures, the varied forms of nature, replace insistent angular forms and synthetic materials of mass-produced homes. Heavy stones reminiscent of times long gone, reclaimed wood, and boards from fallen trees, each one conveying a unique life story, all meld together to form a tapestry inside that reflects the varied textures, colors, and forms of the exquisite and open surrounding landscape. This home feels different, strangely different, yet so familiar. Entering this home is not stepping out of nature but rather transitioning to an enclosed nest that is nature.

Designed around the natural sunlight of the seasons, the passive solar orientation with a wall full of windows on the south side of the home provides sunlight in the winter throughout the day. And in the summer, when the sun is high in the sky, an overhang above the windows ensures the home stays temperate. So, the energy required to heat and cool this home are but the finishing touches. The bulk of the “work” has been accomplished by nature — a stark contrast to “smart” homes, which ignore the natural world and superimpose draconian measures to replace what has heedlessly been discarded.

The workmanship of this home is exquisite. It’s difficult to find words for the perfection of the imperfections. Edges and corners are seamlessly and intentionally woven together without harsh, machine-generated definition. Colors that mimic nature blend, complementing one another with no single one claiming sovereignty.

In typical homes, the dulling of our senses is only surpassed by the assault on our health from toxic materials, not to mention the embodied energy needed to manufacture all the so-called “smart” features of newer homes. But with this home, enormous care has been taken to ensure that all materials (to the degree possible) are free of toxins and ethically sourced. Solid oak doors reclaimed from an estate in Connecticut lend beauty while escaping early retirement to a landfill. Kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities give seasoned barn wood a new lease on life.

Thankfully Satiety Cove is situated far from cell towers and for the time being has not been targeted by Telecom for a 5G “small cell”. Minimalistic but wise use of technology untethers this home from the energy grid, smart meters, and the attendant electrical pollution. No dimmer switches, internet of things appliances, or other such gadgets that proffer far more than they offer. 

Outside, chirping birds replace the incoherent sounds and electromagnetic frequencies so unavoidable in urban living. A tree, brimming with activity and life, lovingly offers herself as a dwelling place for squirrels and other little critters. Why on earth are humans trading these treasures of nature for radiating antennas outside of homes?

We all consume…it’s a reality of being alive. The only question is how to do so causing the least harm to other beings and to our shared planet. Though certainly not perfect, this has been the aim in building Satiety Cove. It is a precious and cherished “understatement” that embodies the sweet point of satiation – thus its name, Satiety Cove. I feel blessed and truly satiated, and I pray that our civilization comes to value the preciousness of “less”, simpler, and so-called “dumb,” so Earth can regenerate and we humans can once again experience the beauty of being fully alive.   

Putting attention on EHS/EMR-S across the globe with a vital message for all that breaks taboos and transcends boundaries, Remembering Nearfield is a film that has positive take-aways for everyone.

Why watch the film?

• The film is narrated by a person with EHS speaking about her experiences.
• It is translated into most languages.
• It is FREE, short and clear, and suitable for most audiences.
• Challenges preconceptions, examines the problems & empowers us to be part of the solution.
• It is an award-winning independent film that is open, helpful and frank.

Helping people to understand EHS/EMR-S in 9-minutes, Remembering Nearfield is highly recommended viewing. It resonates with audiences and is standing out in prestigious international film festivals. From Singapore to Africa, from Hollywood to Cannes, it has been globally well-received winning multiple awards and receiving recognition since 2023.

For those interested, the official film festival results in their entirety are listed at the end of this blog. Notably, it has won Best Health Film, Best Film about a Disability Issue, and Award of Recognition for film about Human Rights/Raising Awareness.

Highlighting a disability

As part of the billing for the Inheritance Festival’s Winter show, the film was televised in the UK on Thursday 21st December 2023. It was listed as “A rewarding true story of achievement, loss, difference, disability, radiation, resilience, science, and hope.”

Film Festivals are increasingly emphasising disability films. Many have been keen to present the film like the “Seize the Film” festival in Serbia in 2023 (an international film festival addressing disability partnered with the European Film Academy).

The International Festival “Reflection of Disability in Art” (iRoDi) aired the film at Macedonia University in 2024. In short this awareness-raising film has done remarkably well. People across the world are certainly open to learning more about EHS, especially through film.

Seeing EHS/EMR-S through film

In film, especially animation, it is easier to represent electrosmog and express the intrusive nature of wireless radiation and EMFs. Remembering Nearfield shows how radiation is like a toxic cloud, something those with EHS experience with unpleasant symptoms or a debilitating reaction. For the film’s protogonist, oppressive lethargy, pain and anxiety become a daily burden, with virtually no escape from today’s unprecedented levels of man-made electromagnetic radiation in our world.

Many web sites dedicated to healthcare and EHS/EMR-S now include the film. Recently it was translated into Finnish, to feature on an EHS/EMR-S focused YouTube channel called “Sähköherkät ry”. The film officially resides on Vimeo, where it can be watched and shared.

The film highlights the isolation experienced by those with EHS, who are sidelined in a wireless world with little respite from the prevalent levels of this man-made radiation. Audiences today understand that most would want to live in an inclusive world, where independence, equality and freedom are preserved in healthcare choices and as a basic human right.

The idea that people are being excluded from society and denied appropriate support, consideration and care because of the nature of their disability is an uncomfortable thought. However, the thought of losing a 5G signal in the mall is a “tragedy” to some people, and represents a big dilemma. We are still in that place where society’s attitudes must change in order to acknowledge the problem, if people with EHS are to have any freedom or respite from wireless radiation, to have a bearable quality of life.

No-one wants her freedom from isolation more than the film’s central character, a woman with severe EHS who is stigmatised and neglected in a society reluctant to acknowledge her health condition – and, the “taboo” cause: radiation from man-made electromagnetic fields, which includes wireless radiation.

Solutions oriented

Focused on solutions and desiring proper recognition of EHS, she envisages a world that accomodates her health condition, so that she may live, not in isolation, but in a world mindful that wireless radiation carries risk and has left over 5% of the population unable to sustain an adequate quality of life. The film amply illustrates the unpleasant sensations she feels, living urrounded by an exponentially increasing electrosmog that vast swathes of the population are convinced is of no consequence to their health.

“A wife and entrepreneur devoted to her family and business tragically loses everything as her health mysteriously declines. Why is she now left alone and unable to function in society? All is revealed through a series of startling events and a final, uncomfortable diagnosis.” – Excerpt from the film synopsis.

In Remembering Nearfield we come face-to-face with a vulnerable but resilient woman, showing us what it means to live with severe EHS/EMR-S today. This animated character has the voice of Corriëlle van Vuuren, suffering with EHS, who had a successful life and was fit and active with everything to live for.

That changed. With frank openness, she acknowledges how she once believed exposure wireless radiation was safe, and traces the troubling development of her disability, expressed in her compelling and insightful personal testimony.

Drawing our attention to various situations and emotional content, the animated character brings Corriëlle’s experiences vividly to life, in a way that seeks to break down barriers to understanding, helping the audience feel empathy as part of becoming educated about the debilitating condition afflicting her.

Empowerment and hope

This is an animated film without any commercial constraints and thankfully it doesn’t trivialise, nor rely on unhelpful stereotypes, and certainly doesn’t avoid the harsh realities of its subject.

It is an animated short film, but also a documentary often depicting challenging subject matter – which brought one reviewer acquainted with EHS to tears. Remembering Nearfield, however, doesn’t just move us and show the adversity (which is wholly necessary). Focused on a vulnerable yet resilient woman who doesn’t give up, it is a film of empowerment and hope, that points to solutions and positive changes.

You can read more of its aims and achievements in depth, and interesting reviews by several scientists who commend the film, on the official movie web site.

The film’s message stretches around the world

The film has been submitted to an array of juried film festivals worldwide with a positive impact. It has surprised audiences, but fundamentally educated them, because so many people didn’t know about EHS/EMR-S. The film is succeeding in its purpose, raising awareness to encourage proper recognition of EHS/EMR-S.

The Film’s Impact

Remembering Nearfield has registered 367 submissions achieving 54 official Selections from international film festivals, visually expressed on the infographic map above.

On IMDB [ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27747210/ ] Remembering Nearfield is listed as having 13 wins and 7 nominations in total. Including awards from non-IMDB listed festivals, the film has accrued 16 international awards in total.

Remembering Nearfield in Africa

The Film has now been Officially Selected by The East African Tanzanite International Animation Festival. This is a big animation event.

“The Tanzanite International Animation Festival is an annual Animation Film festival, [is] an event that celebrates creativity, films, animation and all creative projects. Tanzanite Festival Features Kids Corner space, red carpet, industry discussions, exhibitions, music jam sessions, and an award ceremony. It brings together fans, creators, and professionals to share stories, explore trends, and enjoy creative experiences.” It’s another excellent opportunity to raise awareness about EHS/EMR-S to an enthusiastic and diverse audience enjoying animation from around the globe.
https://tukiio.com/experience/tanzanitefestival https://filmfreeway.com/Tanzanitefestival2025

Acknowledging the Official Selection of the film, addressing the Director, Sean Carney, the jury said, “Your work stood out among many exceptional submissions, and we are delighted to showcase it at this year’s festival.”

Please do watch this celebrated film to learn more about EHS/EMR-S. You have many choices on the internet where you can see Remembering Nearfield. Most people watch Remembering Nearfield here (featuring subtitles for many languages) or here.

News & Reviews: Highlights

“European Citizens’ Initiative – Pernille Schriver speaks about Remembering Nearfield and EHS”
My Life in Airplane Mode

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29XEVryegnE

“Remembering Nearfield Awarded “Best Health Film” at Cannes World Film Festival, July 2023″
 Children’s Health Defense – Electromagnetic Radiation and Wireless

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/emr/remembering-nearfield-awarded-best-health-film-at-cannes-world-film-festival-july-2023/

“Exposing the Truth: The Fight Against Microwave Radiation and the Erosion of Our Rights”
RF Safe / Featuring Remembering Nearfield

https://www.rfsafe.com/articles/cell-phone-radiation/exposing-the-truth-the-fight-against-microwave-radiation-and-the-erosion-of-our-rights.html

“Overseas electromagnetic hypersensitivity animations that are evaluated at film festivals in each country”
Japan EMF Action

https://dennjiha.org/?page_id=16797

“Remembering Nearfield screening at the University of Macedonia”
RODI – Reflections Of Disability Festival Programme 2024

https://rodi.uom.gr/en/programme

“Remembering Nearfield a Semi Finalist at SIFF 2024″
Sussex International Film Festival – 2024 Semi-finalists

https://www.sussexiff.co.uk/copy-of-2024-competition

“EHS Documentary ‘Remembering Nearfield’ Selected by CINEHEALTH 2024 Film Festival, Philadelphia”
Safe Tech International Blog

https://safetechinternational.org/ehs-documentary-remembering-nearfield-selected-by-cinehealth-2024-film-festival-philadelphia/

“Winner – Best Health Film”
Cannes World Film Festival – June 2023 Winners

https://www.cannesworldfilmfestival-archive2023.com/june-2023-winners

“Remembering Nearfield translated by Finnish EHS Organisation, “Sähköherkät ry””
YouTube channel of “Sähköherkät ry”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8fK1gDzcYo

“EHS i ny prisnomineret animationsfilm: Remembering Nearfield”
EHS-Foreningen (Danish EHS Association) / LinkedIn post

https://dk.linkedin.com/posts/ehs-foreningen_remembering-nearfield-activity-7054336550335066112-skmk

“Game-changing films – SOHO LIFF Reels / Remembering Nearfield”
Instagram – SOHO LIFF event

https://www.instagram.com/soholondonfilmfest/reels/

“Venus on Broadway Int’l Film Festival-Interviews & Awards-Part 2″
Stage Screen and In Between with Helen (Interview with Kate Kheel)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ke4_Qo1VZnM

“EMF/RF: “Remembering Nearfield” May NYC Film Festival”
Activist Post

https://www.activistpost.com/2024/05/emf-rf-remembering-nearfield-may-nyc-film-festival-irish-film-freequencies-canada-international-ehs-day.html

“Congrats to Remembering Nearfield”
Cognac’s Corner Magazine/Film Festivals

https://www.cognacscornermagazine.com/film-festivals

“Remembering Nearfield – Winner – Venus On Broadway IFF 2024″
Indie Film Online

https://indiefilmonline.com/vobi-winners-2024

“EMF/RF: ‘Remembering Nearfield’ May NYC Film Festival; Irish Film Freequencies; Canada; International EHS Day”
Safe Tech International Blog

https://safetechinternational.org/emf-rf-updates-remembering-nearfield-may-nyc-film-festival-irish-ehs-film-freequencies-international-ehs-day/

“SAVE THE DATE: MAY 19, NY ‘VENUS ON BROADWAY INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL’ INCLUDES EHS FILM ‘REMEMBERING NEARFIELD’”
Safe Tech International

https://safetechinternational.org/save-the-date-may-19-ny-venus-on-broadway-international-film-festival-includes-ehs-film-remembering-nearfield/

“Remembering Nearfield Wins “Best Animated Short Film” in Santiago”
Santiago World Film Festival – Winners

https://sanwoff2022.wixsite.com/santiago-world-film/ganadores-de-edicion-2023

“Remembering Nearfield is Televised in the UK”
The Latest”

https://thelatest.co.uk/brighton/2023/12/01/winter-is-coming-our-environmental-festival-is-back/

“EHS knowledge base with link to Remembering Nearfield”
Safe Tech International

https://safetechinternational.org/electromagnetic-hypersensitivity-ehs/

“Remembering Nearfield at Next Generation Indie Awards”
The Knockturnal

https://theknockturnal.com/next-generation-3rd-annual-indie-film-awards/

“Exposing Radiation Risk – Sensitivity to Electromagnetic Waves Ignored in Health Policies – Sean Alexander Carney”
Magster.com – Stories – News

https://www.magzter.com/stories/news/The-Light/EXPOSING-RADIATION-RISK

“Soho London Independent Film Festival and Why the Audience Choice Award matters… “
Europeans For Safe Connections

https://esc-info.eu/en/soho-london-independent-film-festival/


“Screening of Remembering Nearfield in Lisbon”
Lisbon Film Rendezvous Programme 2023”
https://www.lisbonfilmrendezvous.com/programme-2021

“Remembering Nearfield nominated at Mesa International Film Festival”
Mesa International Film Festival – Schedule for event

https://mesainternationalfilmfestival.com/film-guide/


“Sheffield Global Cinema Festival Finalists 2023 – incl. Remembering Nearfield”
SGCF website
https://sgcf.uk/finalist-films-2023/

“Remembering Nearfield Wins Award for Best Film on Disability Issue”
TGCCM MONTHLY RESULT: AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 2023

https://tgcc-maldives.com/aug-sep-2023.php

“Next Generation Indie Film Awards Announces 2023 Nominees – Remembering Nearfield Nominated for Best Animation”
Awards Daily

https://www.awardsdaily.com/2023/09/21/next-generation-indie-film-awards-announces-2023-nominees/

“Remembering Nearfield – Social Justice Short, Finalist”
Lane Doc Fest Finalists and Winners 2023

https://www.lanedocfest.org/?page_id=7818

“TVIFF Showcase of Best Animation Selections – including Remembering Nearfield”
Whats On – Tees Valley International Film Festival, Stockton Arts Centre

https://arconline.co.uk/whats-on/tviff-showcase-of-best-animation-selections/

“Awards of Recognition May 2023 – Sean Alexander Carney (United Kingdom), Remembering Nearfield, Disability Issues, Contemporary Issues / Awareness Raising, Animation”
ACCOLADE GLOBAL FILM COMPETITION WINNERS

https://accoladecompetition.org/awards-of-recognition-may-2023/

“Remembering Nearfield screening, Dorking, UK”
8th Dorking Film Festival in 2023, Documentary & Young Adult Short Films

http://www.dorkingfilmfestival.com/programme-2023/documentary-young-adult-short-films-2023/

“Official Selection 2023, Animation, (FICIT – Peru)”
Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente de Trujillo (FICIT-PERÚ)

https://ficitperu.weebly.com/2023-selec.html

“Remembering Nearfield is nominated for Best Animation”
2023 Wales International Film Festival Nominations / Enwebiadau 2023 GFR Cymru

https://vimeo.com/861625210/7bb447dc68

“Wales International `Film Festival – Remembering nearfield”
Screenings 14 Sept 2023 – 16 Sept 2023

https://walesiff.sparqfest.live/en/index.html

“Animanima Festival 2023 is screening Remembering Nearfield In Čačak, Serbia”
 Animanima Special Screenings Program 2023

https://www.animanima.org/en/special-screenings-2

“Review by Dr. Paul Heroux – Professor of Toxicology & Health Effects of Electromagnetism”
Remembering Nearfield Official Web Site

https://express.adobe.com/page/2ZIwbVt65B75R/

“VERASHORT Animation Short Film (Official Selection)”
VERACRUZ ITINERANT SHORT FILM FESTIVAL Selection 2023
https://verashort.wordpress.com/selection-2023/

“Remembering Nearfield – Liverpool Indie Awards”
Official Selections – Summer Season 2023
https://www.liverpoolindieawards.com/official-selection-summer-2023/

“Remembering Nearfield – Nominated for Best Animation Short Film”
Barcelona Indie Awards
https://barcelonaindieawards.com/official-selection-of-summer-2023/

“Review of Remembering Nearfield”

FilmNet.io
https://press.filmnet.io/review/1680745041857×789472722062934000

“Let’s Go to the Movies: Week of August 14, 2023: Remembering Nearfield”
The Solari Report – Catherine Austin Fitts

https://home.solari.com/lets-go-to-the-movies-week-of-august-14-2023-remembering-nearfield/

“‘Remembering Nearfield’: Short Film About EMR Sickness Wins Cannes Film Award – By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D.”
The Defender

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/remembering-nearfield-film-electromagnetic-hypersensitivity/


“Remembering Nearfield Awarded “Best Health Film” at Cannes World Film Festival, July 2023″
Safe Tech International – Web Site

https://safetechinternational.org/remembering-nearfield-awarded-best-health-film-at-cannes-world-film-festival-july-2023/

“REMEMBERING NEARFIELD, FILM ON ELECTROMAGNETIC RADIATION, AWARDED BEST HEALTH FILM AT CANNES WORLD FILM FESTIVAL”
Environmental Health Trust – web site
https://ehtrust.org/remembering-nearfield-film-on-electromagnetic-radiation-awarded-best-health-film-at-cannes-world-film-festival/

““Remembering Nearfield” Awarded Best Health Film at Cannes World Film Festival, July 2023″
Activist Post / Health

https://www.activistpost.com/2023/07/remembering-nearfield-awarded-best-health-film-at-cannes-world-film-festival-july-2023.html

“EHS Film “Remembering Nearfield” is Finalist: Cannes World Film Festival”
Children’s Health Defense

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/emr/ehs-film-remembering-nearfield-is-finalist-cannes-world-film-festival/

“EHS Film “Remembering Nearfield” is Finalist: Cannes World Film Festival”
Activist Post

https://www.activistpost.com/2023/07/ehs-film-remembering-nearfield-is-finalist-cannes-world-film-festival.html

“Winner – Remembering Nearfield –Awarded Best film on a Disability Issue”
World Film Carnival Singapore – Results

https://worldfilmcarnival.com/monthly-results-march-2023-april-2023/

“Remembering Nearfield – Best Animation”
Brussels Capital Film Festival – Winners May 2023
https://brusselscapitalfilmfestival.eu/winners-2023-05/

“Winner “Remembering Nearfield” Best Film on a Disability Issue”
Gangtok International Film Festival – Results

https://giff-sikkim.com/monthly-results-april-2023/

“Remembering Nearfield selected by Seize the Film, Novi Sad, Serbia”
SEIZE THE FILM FESTIVAL – Official Selection 2023

https://uhvatifilm.org/selection-2023/

“Review by Professor Olle Johansson – Neuroscientist”
Remembering Nearfield Official Web Site
https://express.adobe.com/page/cLOLpPR7x33Vt/

“Remembering Nearfield recommendation | Homepage”
Women’s Medicine Bowl – Beverly A. Jensen, Ph.D.

https://bowl.zazentech.com

“Review by Dr M. Nisa Khan – Industry Optics and Radiation Expert”
Web Page of Remembering Nearfield Official Web Site

https://express.adobe.com/page/IRS1EibCSp2Gx/

“Shabnam Palesa Mohamed’s video Interview with Sean A. Carney about “Remembering Nearfield.””
Children’s Health Defense CHDTV

https://live.childrenshealthdefense.org/chd-tv/events/new-animated-short-film-shines-light-on-electromagnetic-hypersensitivity-ehs/%20new-animated-short-film-shines-light-on-electromagnetic-hypersensitivity-ehs/

“Sunderland filmmaker shines global spotlight on electrohypersensitivity”
University of Sunderland News

https://www.sunderland.ac.uk/more/news/story/sunderland-filmmaker-shines-global-spotlight-on-electrohypersensitivity–2147

“Sunderland filmmaker shines global spotlight on electrohypersensitivity (EHS)”
North East Connected

https://neconnected.co.uk/sunderland-filmmaker-shines-global-spotlight-on-electrohypersensitivity-ehs/

“Sunderland man’s award winning film shines light on debilitating impact of magnetic fields from mobile phones”
Sunderland Echo (Newspaper)

https://www.sunderlandecho.com/education/sunderland-mans-award-winning-film-shines-light-on-debilitating-impact-of-magnetic-fields-from-mobile-phones-4184522

“Remembering Nearfield: An Animated Film about Electromagnetic Harm”
Electromagnetic Sense Ireland
https://es-ireland.com/2023/04/08/remembering-nearfield-an-animated-film-about-electromagnetic-harm/

“Remembering Nearfield: Safe Tech International’s Film Review”
Safe Tech International blog
https://safetechinternational.org/review-of-remembering-nearfield/

“Film Review by Karen Churchill – Human Rights Campaigner”
Safe Tech International Blog
https://safetechinternational.org/remembering-nearfield-a-review-by-karen-churchill/

“Winner at Better Earth International Film Festival – Best Film on a Disability Issue”
Results page

https://beiff.wordpress.com/2023/06/07/better-earth-international-film-festival-5th-season-result/

“Selected – Monthly Picks, March 2023 – Best Animated Short, Finalist”
Rome Prisma Film Awards

https://www.romeprismafilmawards.com/march-2023-monthly-picks/

“Best Animation Short”
April 2023 Nominated Finalists Rome Prisma Awards

https://www.romeprismafilmawards.com/april-2023-finalists/

“Winner – Best Film on Disability Issue”
Black Swan International Film Festival – Results

https://bs-iff.com/monthly-results-april-2023/

“GIFF WInner – Best Animated Film”
Ganges International Film Festival – Results

https://gi-ff.com/films-of-the-month-april-2023/

“Winner – Remembering Nearfield – Better Earth International Film Festival Season 5″
Better Earth International Film Festival Results 2023

https://beiff.wordpress.com/2023/06/07/better-earth-international-film-festival-5th-season-result/

“New Film on Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS) Nominated for Awards”
Activist Post
https://www.activistpost.com/2023/04/new-film-on-electromagnetic-hypersensitivity-ehs-nominated-for-awards.html

“FILM GIVES VOICE TO ELECTROMAGNETIC RADIATION DISABILITY”
Environmental Health Trust web site

https://ehtrust.org/film-gives-voice-to-electromagnetic-radiation-disability/


“New Disability Film Shines in Europe”
Principia Scientific International

https://principia-scientific.com/new-disability-film-shines-in-europe/

“Electrohypersensitivity Day/Science article recommends Remembering Nearfield”
Europeans For Safe Connections Newsletter

https://esc-info.eu/de/newsletter/newsletter-may-2023

“Remembering Nearfield IMDb Page”
IMDb Page

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27747210/

“Better Earth International Film Festival Post”
Better Earth International Film Festival Instagram Page

https://www.instagram.com/betterearth_intl_filmfestival/?ref=buffer.com


”Remembering Nearfield – Nominated for Best Screenplay”
Screen Power Film Festival: MAY 2023 OFFICIAL AWARD NOMINATIONS

https://www.screenpower.org/nominations-may2023


”Sunderland filmmaker shines global spotlight on electrohypersensitivity (EHS)”
North East England Chamber of Commerce, Member News

https://network.neechamber.co.uk/member-news/sunderland-filmmaker-shines-global-spotlight-on-electrohypersensitivity-ehs/


”Davida van der Walt, Health Author and Industry psychologist, Author of “Electrohypersensitivity (EHS) – Curse to blessing 2023″”
LinkedIn Post: “This is a powerful documentary”

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/davida-van-der-walt-6a391612_remembering-nearfield-activity-7056934265724239872-NKrK


”Remembering Nearfield recommended by Massachusetts for Safe Technology & Education Services Director”
LinkedIn Post – Cecelia Doucette

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cecelia-doucette-09655155_remembering-nearfield-activity-7090691031955857408-ilqG


”Sean Carneys film “Remembering Nearfield” won best health film at Cannes World Film Festival.”
RFinfo – News – Health and Research

https://rfinfo.co.uk/news/


”SHORT FILM ABOUT EMR SICKNESS Wins Prestigious Cannes Film Award”
Environmental Health Watch – New Zealand

https://envirowatchnz.com/2023/08/12/82977/


”Electro-Hypersensitivity – Watch “Remembering Nearfield” – by Dr Apelles Econs”
The Burghwood Clinic – Health Blog

https://www.burghwoodclinic.co.uk/280/Electro-Hypersenstivity


“Watch ‘Remembering Nearfield’: Short film about EHS that has won many international awards”

StralingsBewust.info
https://stralingsbewust.info/2023/08/12/bekijk-remembering-nearfield-korte-film-over-ehs-die-vele-internationale-awards-heeft-gewonnen/

“AWARD-WINNING FILM ABOUT ELECTRICAL HYPERSENSITIVITY”
Suomen Sateilyturva ry. (Finland)
https://sust.fi/sv/prisbelont-film-om-eloverkanslighet/

““REMEMBERING NEARFIELD” AWARDED BEST HEALTH FILM AT CANNES WORLD FILM FESTIVAL, JULY 2023″
Truth Comes to Light

https://truthcomestolight.com/remembering-nearfield/

““Remembering Nearfield” Awarded Best Health Film at Cannes World Film Festival, July 2023″
Invex News

https://invexnews.invex.net/item-715454-remembering-nearfield-awarded-best-heal

“Remembering Nearfield – Best Short Animation, Monthly Winner”
Veneto International Film Festival – Monthly Winners May 2023

https://venetoiff.com/may-2023/

“What Is Electro-hypersensitivity and Do I Have It? (Featuring Remembering Nearfield)”
Growing and Healing

https://growinghealing.com/blog/what-is-electro-hypersensitivity-and-do-i-have-it/

“Remembering Nearfield listed in Awards of Recognition”
filmfestivals.com / Blog

https://www.filmfestivals.com/blog/accolade_competition/the_accolade_global_film_competition_announces_latest_winners_may_2023_season

“FILM GIVES VOICE TO ELECTROMAGNETIC RADIATION DISABILITY”
The Web Site of Dr. Kathy Veon, DAOM, AP, CCN.

https://drkathyveon.com/health_news/film-gives-voice-to-electromagnetic-radiation-disability-environmental-health-trust/

“Remembering Nearfield (Short Animated Film)”
Recent News /
Electrosensitivity.co
https://www.electrosensitivity.co/home2.html

“Remembering nearfield – Krátky animovaný film britského “
Elektrosmog Info

https://elektrosmog-info.voxo.eu

“Films and videos about EHS (Includes Remembering Nearfield)”
Stichting EHS (The EHS Foundation), Netherlands

https://stichtingehs.nl/meer-weten/videos

“Seize the Film – Remembering Nearfield”
Seize the Film – Film Festival About Disability

https://uhvatifilm.org/remembering-nearfield/

“World EHS Day – Featuring Remembering Nearfield Trailer”
Massachusetts for Safe Technology – Campaign Archive

https://us20.campaign-archive.com/?u=62f2cbcbd8eeef4c8fe3da281&id=318f5bdb05

“11TH INTERNATIONAL ANTAKYA FILM FESTIVAL – ANIMATION SHORT FILM COMPETITION – Remembering Nearfield featured”
Sozcu Gazette: Uluslararası Antakya Film Festivali çadır ve konteynerlerde gerçekleştirilecek

https://www.sozcu.com.tr/hayatim/kultur-sanat-haberleri/uluslararasi-antakya-film-festivali-cadir-ve-konteynerlerde-gerceklestirilecek/


“The International Antakya Film Festival Will Be Held in Tents and Containers – Remembering Nearfield to be shown”
Akilli Gundem: Uluslararası Antakya Film Festivali Çadır Ve Konteynerlerde Gerçekleştirilecek

https://www.akilligundem.com/uluslararasi-antakya-film-festivali-cadir-ve-konteynerlerde-gerceklestirilecek/

“Finalists of Antakya 11th International Film Festival have been announced – Remembering Nearfield is Animation Short Finalist”
Anatolia 11th International Film Festival Web Site

https://www.antakyaff.org/finalistler/

“11TH INTERNATIONAL ANTAKYA FILM FESTIVAL – ANIMATION SHORT FILM COMPETITION ANNOUNCED”
kilispostasi.com – Press

https://www.kilispostasi.com/uluslararasi-antakya-film-festivali-nin-11-cisi-basina-tanitildi/1223848/

“Press Conference of the 11th International Antakya Film Festival Held – Remembering Nearfield announced”
https://www.yenigungazetesi.net – Culture Section

https://www.yenigungazetesi.net/kultur-sanat/11-uluslararasi-antakya-film-festivalinin-basin-toplantisi-gerceklesti-145072h


”The 11th International Antakya Film Festival was Introduced to the Press”
www.habereguven.com – Art and Culture

https://www.habereguven.com/uluslararasi-antakya-film-festivalinin-11cisi-basina-tanitildi


”The 11th International Antakya Film Festival was introduced to the press”
www.magazinsortie.com
https://www.magazinsortie.com/meral-orhansaya-antakya-film-festivalinde-onur-odulu-verilecek

“Remembering Nearfield’: Short Film About EMR Sickness Wins Prestigious Cannes Film Award”
 – SOVREN MEDIA

https://sovren.media/p/310521/432cb0b89cb7c08bb7fca0acb9d35260


“Un film d’animation sur l’électro-hypersensibilité (EHS)”

Over-blog.com
https://collectif1815.over-blog.com/2023/08/un-film-d-animation-sur-l-electro-hypersensibilite-ehs-recompense-partout-dans-le-monde-et-au-festival-des-films-du-monde-de-cannes-en-juillet-2023-remportant-le-prix-du-meilleur-film-sur-la-sante.son-realisateur-sean-a.carney-presente-son-film-re


““Remembering Nearfield” Awarded Best Health Film at Cannes World Film Festival, July 2023″
Al-ayam Saleh – First Syrian Blogger
https://news.alayham.com/content/remembering-nearfield-awarded-best-health-film-cannes-world-film-festival-july-2023


“Understanding EMFs – Remembering Nearfield (9 minutes)”
Understanding EMFs – Documentaries

https://sites.google.com/site/understandingemfs/expert-video-clips/documentaries


“UHVATIFILM Films About Disability– Remembering Nearfield” – 
UHVATIFILM Schedule

https://uhvatifilm.org/remembering-nearfield/


“11th International Antakya Film Festival”
Altyazi – News, Matinee

https://altyazi.net/matine/11-uluslararasi-antakya-film-festivali/


“The 11th International Antakya Film Festival was Introduced to the Press”
Mazgal Hendek Ajans – Culture, Art, Music

https://mhajans.com/2023/10/07/uluslararasi-antakya-film-festivalinin-11cisi-basina-tanitildi/


” The 11th International Antakya Film Festival was Introduced to the Press”
IMAJ TV

https://imaj.tv/uluslararasi-antakya-film-festivalinin-11cisi-basina-tanitildi


“THE 11TH INTERNATIONAL ANTAKYA FILM FESTIVAL HAS BEEN INTRODUCED”
Gazete Hasat Zamani

https://hasatzamanigazetesi.com/uluslararasi-antakya-film-festivalinin-11cisi-tanitildi/


“Introduced to the press at International Anatakya Festival Feshane Artistanbul”
ITV HABER
https://www.itvhaber.com/uluslararasi-antakya-film-festivali-feshane-artistanbulda-basina-tanitildi.html


“THE 11TH INTERNATIONAL ANTAKYA FILM FESTIVAL WAS INTRODUCED TO THE PRESS”
Teke Tek Haber

https://teketekhaber.com/uluslararasi-antakya-film-festivalinin-11cisi-basina-tanitildi-132380h.html


“International Antakya Film Festival will be held in tents and containers”
Sanatia Yasam

https://www.sanatlayasam.net/uluslararasi-antakya-film-festivali-cadir-ve-konteynerlerde-gerceklestirilecek/


“World EHS Day Event – Remembering Nearfield”
Safe Tech International – Events

https://safetechinternational.org/event/world-ehs-day/


“NEXT GENERATION INDIE FILM AWARDS 2023 WINNERS ANNOUNCED / Remembering Nearfield Nominated”
Script Mag / News

https://scriptmag.com/news/next-generation-indie-film-awards-2023-winners-announced


“Next Generation Indie Film Awards 2023 Winners Announced / Remembering Nearfield Nominated”
Awards Daily

https://www.awardsdaily.com/2023/10/29/next-generation-indie-film-awards-2023-winners-announced/


“Film Showings at the Sheffield Global Cinema Festival 2023 event – Featuring Remembering Nearfield”
Eventbrite feature

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/film-showings-sheffield-global-cinema-festival-tickets-746824842207


“Next Generation Indie Film Awards Winners Announced – Remembering Nearfield Nominated”
ISA Insider / Script Magazine

https://www.networkisa.org/script-magazine/view/next-generation-indie-film-awards-2023-winners-announced


“סרט אנימציה על רגישות לקרינה – Remembering Nearfield”

EHS.org.il
https://ehs.org.il/סרט-אנימציה-על-רגישות-לקרינה-שזכה-בפרס/


“Film Showings Sheffield Global Cinema Festival – Remembering Nearfield screening”
Happening Next

https://happeningnext.com/event/film-showings-sheffield-global-cinema-festival-eid4so5orsucv1


“Wales International Film Festival 2023 – Official Selections”
walesiff.sparqfest.live
https://walesiff.sparqfest.live/en/selections.html


“Understanding Electro-Hypersensitivity (EHS)”
Building Biology (Remembering Nearfield is recommended viewing)

https://buildingbiology.in/understanding-electro-hypersensitivity-ehs/


“2023-07-17 EHS FILM FINALIST AT CANNES”
Citizens For Safe Technology

https://citizensforsafertech.ca/2023-07-17-ehs-film-finalist-at-cannes/


“EHS- werden diffuse Krankheiten zur neuen Normalität?”

elektrosensibel-ehs.de
https://www.elektrosensibel-ehs.de/ehs-werden-diffuse-krankheiten-zur-neuen-normalitaet/


“Children’s Health Defense’s Post – Watch Remembering Nearfield”
Linked-In

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/childrens-health-defense_watch-remembering-nearfield-short-film-activity-7096943572502859776-POZE


“Safer Tech Australia – Remembering Nearfield”
Instagram

https://www.instagram.com/p/CrAewZluy5H/?img_index=1


“EMF VIDEOS – Remembering Nearfield”
EMF Solutions – New Zealand

https://www.emf-solutions.co.nz/symptoms-of-emf-exposure


“Remembering Nearfield at 11TH INTERNATIONAL ANTAKYA FILM FESTIVAL”
fikrisinema.com
https://fikrisinema.com/11-uluslararasi-antakya-film-festivalinin-basin-toplantisi-yapildi/


“Remembering Nearfield – SHORT SHORTS | Life Fest XXIV”
Life Fest 2023

https://lifefestinternational.uscreen.io/catalog


“Remembering Nearfield: Finalist, Social Justice Short”
 LANE DOC FEST: Finalists and Winners
https://www.lanedocfest.org/?page_id=7818


“Remembering Nearfield screening Lisbon Film Rendezvous” – 
Lisbon Film Rendezvous/Programme

https://www.lisbonfilmrendezvous.com/programme-2021


“”Remembering Nearfield” a multi awards winning film on Electro hypersensitivity (EHS)”
- Wellbeing Singapore

https://www.wellbeing.sg/videos/remembering-nearfield-a-multi-awards-winning-film-on-electro-hypersensitivity-ehs


“”Remembering Nearfield” a multi awards winning film on Electro hypersensitivity (EHS)”
 – EMFMax
https://emfmax.com/
https://emfmax.com/blog/b/remembering-nearfield-a-multi-awards-winning-film-on-electro-hypersensitivity-ehs


“Film Gives Voice to Electromagnetic Radiation Disability”
 – Vuink

https://vuink.com/post/rugehfg-d-dbet/film-gives-voice-to-electromagnetic-radiation-disability


“Venus on Broadway Int’l Film Festival-Interviews & Awards-Part 2″
Stage Screen and In Between with Helen (Interview with Kate Kheel)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ke4_Qo1VZnM


“Remembering Nearfield”
 – Graphic Story

https://www.graphicstory.com/animation/36725/remembering-nearfield


“”Remembering Nearfield” a multi awards winning film on Electro hypersensitivity (EHS)”
EMFMAX/BLOG & GUIDES

https://emfmax.com/blog/b/remembering-nearfield-a-multi-awards-winning-film-on-electro-hypersensitivity-ehs


“Sunderland University Graduate and Film Maker Shines Light on Electrohypersensitivity”
Twitter/X/Uni Of Sun Comms

https://x.com/UniOfSunComms/status/1668952390286884864


“Remembering Nearfield – A documentary on health effects caused by electromagnetic radiation”
Adult Child Health and Environmental Support (ACHES)

https://aches.international/downloads/


Black Swan International Film Festival Listing
https://www.imdb.com/event/ev0032446/2023/1/?ref_=ev_tl_yr_3

Please note, some Film Festivals and Media Organisations have changed names, website ownership/content or platform since the results were first announced, and so some links may be missing relevant information about Remembering Nearfield. For Example, the Lane Docfest where the film was a Finalist is now called the Jackson Doc Fest and has altered its content. However, as the results recorded on FilmFreeway platoform below show the update even if the website does not: Remembering Nearfield’s final Judging Status was, Finalist as it was for several other film festivals.

Film Festivals – The Official Results

Which film festivals selected Remembering Nearfield? The official full results are below, supplied by Director/Producer, Sean Carney.

The Grand Cine Carnival Maldives website no longer lists Remembering Nearfield in the awards for 2023, yet on the FilmFreeway platform (and IMDB) the win is recorded. In 2025 the festival, as noted on IMDB, awarded the film the “The Grand Cinematic Brilliance Award”.

Awards listed on FilmFreeway:

In 2023, the Black Swan International Film Festival awarded Remembering Nearfield Best Film on a Disability Issue, though has moved from FilmFreeway to another platform, and the festival website doesn’t mention it now, listing only awards from 2024. The certificate is shown above. In 2024 the same festival awarded the film with the “Patron of Cinema” award, as listed on IMDB.

FilmFreeway also records the Semi-Finalist Selections relating to the film:

… and the Nominee Selections:

Finally, here are the currently listed Official Selections:

Header image and film stills included are copyright Sean Carney 2025.

Is the climate crisis becoming the latest example of media-driven reality distortion? I find myself increasingly concerned about pronouncements coming out of the corporate sector and mainstream media echo chamber that seem questionable. Over the years, I’ve learned some hard lessons about the process of co-optation and how good ideas get distorted and twisted into confusing or false narratives by clever corporate PR campaigns. Now that government and corporate power have merged into one unseemly multi-headed hydra, it seems like everything we hear and read about is put under some kind of microscope for a reality check. Even if you’re a journalist like myself, it’s hard and tedious work.

The climate crisis is clearly accelerating but apparently many governments have not gotten the memo — at least not really, in that a kind of bureaucratic paralysis seems to have set in. So, it’s clear that not enough is being done or attention being paid to accelerating weather-related disasters around the world. The warming and weather instability is serious, real, and it deserves our utmost attention. But what I’d like to discuss is something else entirely: how the climate crisis seems to be subtly or not so subtly overshadowing another aspect of planetary change that deserves just as much of our attention — the ecological crisis.

I find it distressing that the climate crisis is continually reduced to a matter of human CO2 related activity i.e. so-called greenhouse gases. The global warming picture is, in my opinion, far more complex than this narrative suggests. While the degree to which human activity is responsible for global warming is still debated (despite media assurances that it’s “settled science”), it seems clear that the increasingly consumer-driven way of life that humanity has adopted, especially in the last 50 years or so, has gone in directions that work against the ability of Planet Earth to sustain us. This is a very different issue from climate change per se.

The initial warnings were clear and strong in the 60’s and 70’s. Unfortunately, many were largely ignored because they were often coming from either marginalized thought leaders in the counterculture or ahead-of-their-time scientists. Since that time, out of control Earth-unfriendly consumerism, corporatism, technological overkill, extraction-based approaches to precious and finite resources, all primarily based on the “more, better, faster” values of Western scientific materialism, have continued to advance this ecological crisis. This pattern involves species extinction; the poisoning of the food chain with chemicals, microplastics, and other toxic materials; and, as a result, the deterioration of the biosphere life support systems in a rather astonishingly rapid period. So it seems important to ask: why do we now hear so much about CO2 and the climate crisis and so little about the ecological crisis? Applying Occam’s Razor, the answer seems clear enough: because government policies and their alignment with profit-driven corporate folly have significantly contributed to it.

The Limits of Science

Many scientists and the mainstream media now discuss the incredibly complicated factors associated with climate change with great certainty. Putting aside the dangerous and often unethical work still being done by corporate profiteers involving genetic engineering, it needs to be noted that the current capabilities of science and technology are beyond impressive. However, as a former futurist and research analyst, I can say fairly confidently that predicting the future is not in any way shape or form a scientific process.

Science can describe physical phenomena in the present very well. To a lesser extent, the same applies to validated historical data sets. But, by definition, the work of science is descriptive in nature. How can it describe something that doesn’t yet exist? Our current climate science has built-in limitations based on the reality that past data is not necessarily predictive of future outcomes and computer modeling also has its limits. This is not to devalue the important work of climate scientists about where things might be headed, which is welcome and useful. The area of concern is the tendency to posit the current body of science as absolute or all-encompassing truth with little room for questioning.

One climate scientist, Judith Curry, President of the Climate Forecast Applications Network, has noted a huge margin of error in IPCC climate predictions. She points out that, contrary to media reports, there is also considerable uncertainty about how much humans have contributed and not enough scientific understanding of solar influence in climate change including solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). In terms of how much human activity is responsible, viewed from the perspective of deep history, planetary upheaval and instability of the global ecosystem has happened many times in the past. This includes ice ages, extinction level events, continental instability and re-formation, and many other types of systemic disruption. With respect to the climate crisis itself (not the ecological crisis) the degree to which we humans are responsible is something that can’t in my opinion be scientifically established. This simply because so many factors and unknowns are at play although continuing scientific analysis remains important. So, given these observations, it seems legitimate to ask: how accurate are the predictions of climate scientists as to what will happen 5, 10, or 20 years from now?

Downplaying the Ecological Crisis

There’s a pressing need to restore balance and accuracy to climate crisis narratives. The constant emphasis in the media on CO2 and carbon reduction narratives has deflected attention away from the ecological crisis. Here we’re faced with the limitation of semantics. Wittgenstein said, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world”. What special language might we need to describe something as outsized and existentially huge as the destruction of our planetary habitat by humanity’s collective actions? We necessarily struggle to describe it in the state of overwhelm that we call “polycrisis”.

Over-emphasis on CO2 and carbon narratives deflects from several important issues: 1) The still unexplained and poorly understood worldwide extinction of plants and animals, 2) the role of pollution including microplastics and nanoplastics as a major contributing factor in health declines worldwide, 3) the role of major corporations and the military in this extensive pollution, 4) the way that our Western-imported consumerist lifestyle now increasingly adopted in BRICs countries is a major contributor to both the climate crisis and the ecological crisis, and 5) The threat of AI to accelerate unchecked Western-style hyper-capitalism thereby accelerating all of these deeply concerning trends. AI requires the buildout of massive data centers which consume enormous amounts of energy. Microsoft, for example, will have exclusive use of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power its AI farms. Largely because of AI, Big Tech giants are planning to triple the world’s nuclear capacity by 2025. These massive data centers will require the production of AI chips and yet more rare earth minerals both of which will lead to more mining and extraction further aggravating geopolitical tensions.

It’s hardly surprising that the government-capturing corporate sector has every reason to deflect away from giving the public a full and complete picture. So, they continue to harp on carbon reduction as the primary driver of the climate crisis. They do this, of course, while continuing with unsustainable practices that have known negative consequences to the Web of Life, especially large-scale pollution. Ongoing military actions in Ukraine and the Middle East have released tons of pollutants into the atmosphere with more to come — a fact that’s barely mentioned. Planet Earth is now clearly in a state of upheaval and indigenous cultures have warned us about this reckless path for a long time. This ancient wisdom has gone unheeded — in fact Western cultures have worked especially hard to ignore it — and now we’re all paying the price.

I could list many ways that other narratives have been hijacked via greenwashing. For example, there are now 8,000 new companies working on “solving” climate change mostly based on CO2 and carbon footprints. With some exceptions I’m sure, their emphasis of course will be on profitability and many of these efforts will take on a life of their own, meaning that any changes in the science will also threaten profitability. And there are several companies using AI-based genetic engineering to bring back long extinct species like the Wooly Mammoth and the Dire Wolf. Species extinction? No problem, we’ll just create some new and improved animals in the lab. Then there is the fact that the full story behind some “green” initiatives such as electric vehicles is not being told. The batteries needed for EVs, are highly dependent on earth minerals typically shipped thousands of miles. For example, lithium mined in South America is shipped to China where most electric-vehicle batteries are made, a voyage that emits large amounts of CO2 not to mention the environmental impacts of extraction.

Life comes at us so hard and fast these days that there’s a natural tendency to want to latch onto oversimplified narratives that explain complex realities. But whatever contemporary science has to offer, it still remains a work in progress because the empiricism that drives it has to be dynamic by its very nature. This means the possibility exists that scientific consensus can simply be wrong about certain climate issues and predictions. Unfortunately, humanity in the collective simply has no completely accurate idea about what the future holds in terms of the habitability and ecological transformation of the planet. It’s not beyond the realm of the possible that we might be heading for an ice age, a superheated planet, or even some kind of unexpected stabilization. Unfortunately, this also means that there’s no truly rational way to invest billions of dollars preparing for something that we’re still not sure about when there are such pressing needs in our polycrisis world. But this is not time to cede power to new entities that represent an unholy alliance between government and already overweening corporate power. A new locally oriented model for governance is sorely needed that rejects top-down and simplistic narratives and empowers planetary citizens with local grounding to build, rethink, and re-invent how we think our way forward out of polycrisis.

***

Tom Valovic is a writer, researcher, and media analyst. He is the author of Digital Mythologies (Rutgers University Press), a series of essays that explored emerging social and cultural issues raised by the advent of the Internet. Tom has served as a consultant to the former Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and was editor-in- chief of Telecommunications magazine for many years. He has written about the effects of technology on society, the media, and on environmental issues for a variety of publications including Common Dreams, Columbia University’s Media Studies Journal, Counterpunch, The Technoskeptic, Annals of Earth, the Sierra Club Newsletter, Wisdom magazine, the Whole Earth Review, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Examiner and many others. He can be reached at cloudhands5885@gmail.com. 

Disclaimer: Safe Tech International is comprised of a diverse group of people from various countries who have come together to advocate for safer digital technologies. We do not have a uniform stance on all global political issues, nor do we feel this is necessary in advocacy for safer internet and telecommunications technologies. We support diversity of thought, and feel that well-researched blogs and outreach materials that both awaken and inspire others to seek the greater good are essential in our times. In light of that, please note that all members of Safe Tech International do not necessarily agree with every political statement made in the following excellent and well-researched blog.

The world would be a different place without smart technology, which is personified by the ubiquitous smart phone. However, more than that, the world would be a different place if smart technology didn’t come first – in every political decision.

These technologies have helped to create the police state of today. It is nurtured by the political climate in which Digital ID is being sold to us. Governments are digitally dividing society into an “us and them” equation – through AI-driven smart technology. In that world, the smart phone – a data-mining surveillance tool for the police state – is made conveniently mandatory.

Digital surveillance and Digital ID

The potential of the smart phone to disempower society, piece by piece, is no secret – phones are being tracked and personal information is leaking via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. It may shock people to realise that Wi-Fi “sensing” enables AI to see us through walls and monitor our movements in real time with 5G.

Our data, in a multiplicity of forms commonly derived from routine smart phone activity, is the prized possession of government agencies and, the corporations and organisations that profit from it, who are lobbying for Digital ID, which enables more intrusive data-mining. There are numerous consequences of this vast “data-mining”, proving that the smart phone is anything but an “empowering” device.

Some social groups more than others received a taste of this reality during the “pandemic” – notably activists, journalists and other campaigning professionals using social media and smart phones to raise political awareness when human rights were under assault. Reliance on smart phones exposed their data to increased scrutiny, left them open to international government, military and police efforts to target social media, control information, monitor persons of interest and deter protests. Society witnessed a hike in intrusive data-driven surveillance and algorithmic censorship, as well as calls for Digital ID in the form of digital “Vaccine Passports”, all of which could now be empowered by AI and 5G wireless infrastructure.

Climate of social and racial manipulation

Among the targets in the climate of social unrest was the “Woke” organisation Black Lives Matter (BLM), protesting in 2020, and invested in “smart phone activism”. However, soon BLM discovered that their smart phones were an “Achilles Heel”. Big Tech had been aiding the police, with social media surveillance and facial recognition technologies (FRTs), targeting protesters.

BLM had known social media surveillance for many years (targeted by police through the social media intelligence platform Geofeedia). However, they had never highlighted this technological side of “colonialism” in their midst.

In September 2020 – according to the BBC – officers at a [Black Lives Matter] protest in Washington’s Lafayette Square “…requested a “heat ray” weapon for possible use against protesters in a park next to the White House…The heat ray weapon [Active Denial System] uses a microwave beam [millimeter wave energy] to make human skin feel like it is burning.” That same month, Facial Recognition Technologies (FRTs) had also been deployed against the protesters.

BLM supporters toppling colonialist statues in recent times, have liberally targeted the past. However, they didn’t target the Big Tech companies, Big Tech figureheads or smart phones/smart surveillance technology, or microwave weapons of the present. An opportunity to highlight digital/electronic colonialism as the threat of contemporary Imperialism – exemplified by the symbiosis of Big Tech and the police to target and ID protesters with data-driven technologies – was ominously missed when unprecedented global attention was on the organisation in 2020.

BLM, it can be argued, avoided the technological “elephants in the room” and thus seemed to change very little for civil rights, because policing is inseparable from microwave and smart technologies.

A technological, data-gathering warzone

Predatory, data-driven policing is today at the heart of recent anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles, as are identity politics. The surveillance of and confrontations with protesters are portrayed as a crackdown on those in the US who may not have the necessary Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) documents that prove their identity.

Police brutality (with military tactics and manpower) aligned to “technological supremacism” characterises the “sweeps” on the streets of LA, which are fuelled by data from smart surveillance infrastructure and tools.

Biometric Update author Anthony Kimery, in the article “Police, federal video surveillance of anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles raise alarms”, observes that, “In the wake of escalating protests in Los Angeles over U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and broader immigration enforcement policies, civil liberties advocates and technologists are sounding the alarm over the scale and scope of surveillance that’s been deployed against demonstrators…While aerial footage and law enforcement presence dominate the visible landscape of the protests, a quieter form of monitoring is unfolding in the digital realm where facial recognition tools, [Amazon] Ring camera footage, and social media surveillance intersect to create a sprawling matrix of protester identification.”

Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has made significant investments in wireless Internet of Things (IoT) technologies – as admitted by Deputy Chief John McMahon who believes, “Virtual reality and technologies like the [wearable] Apple Vision Pro goggles, which double as a computer, offer endless possibilities for enhancing law enforcement operations.”

(The same has been said about smart glasses, wearables that are currently being used by law enforcement in China and the Middle East, and will be coming to a town near you, with facial recognition technology built in. According to Greenbot, “facial recognition in wearables may soon become common despite ethical concerns.” As Harvard Technology Review observes, “…while European regulations have restricted the use of real-time facial recognition, no such protections exist in the United States.”)

Smart technology automates much of policing, and supports the militarisation of the police, which has continued since 9/11 when “surplus combat equipment [was] procured and assigned to local police departments”. Source. The trend has seen units that “mimic Special Forces”. According to stopspying.org, in the US amidst anti-ICE demonstrations, “federal immigration enforcement have flown Predator drones, Black Hawk helicopters, and other military aircraft typically deployed in warzones overseas above the protests.”

Reports of “masked, unmarked agents” assigned to work with ICE that are targeting demonstrators and others reinforce the “Special Forces” dimension to the technologically assisted ICE policing. Arguably this is a terrorising tactic, and one that is challenging legal frameworks, undermining transparency and creating fear.

In a discussion in bylinetimes.com concerning the “militarisation of police departments, and the domestic deployments of armed units trained and staffed by Special Forces soldiers to our cities”, Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale – author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century – is quoted as saying, “This is a classic way that violence happens in authoritarian regimes… The people who are getting used to committing violence on the border are then brought in to commit violence against people in the interior.” Source.

MSN reported that, “Some city and Police Commission leaders have called on the LAPD to do more to identify masked individuals who are taking part in immigration sweeps.” The streets are becoming a technological, data-gathering warzone.

Smart technology for health, or authenticating ID?

As this “militarised” climate of fear over “proving identity” is raised to fever pitch, I’m sure it won’t be long before the subject of Digital ID becomes centre stage issue the US – targeting Americans with smart phones. Digital ID in the US is sold as “more convenient, secure, privacy-protective, and usable than a physical ID”.

A centralised database built by Big Tech data-mining firm Palantir is already proving more than attractive to the Trump government – which would support a Digital ID framework, and, ICE deportations. As Vice observes, “In a CNBC interview at Davos, Palantir CEO Alex Karp admitted that his company “[finds] people in our country who are undocumented.” Source.

For Digital ID to be a success, biometrics are a key dataset. Currently, “Palantir gathers biometric and behavioral data for removal operations“. The function-creep of smart phones has ensured this dataset can be obtained with ease, “conveniently”, for biometrics capture is hardwired into the technology – as it is in fashionable smart “wearables”.

In the US, health secretary RFK Junior recommends that all citizens own wearables, “envisioning that every American will use them within four years“. Like smart phones, wearable devices are a desirable “data-mine” for the police, and governments – and such data would greatly assist Palantir. Wearables offer many opportunities for “tapping” rich sets of data.

The safety of sensitive, personal health data remains in question, however, when Big Tech is greedy for it and is prepared to breech data guidelines. Fines seem inconsequential. For example, facial recognition company Clearview AI “was fined just over €30M (close to $32M) by the Netherlands’ data protection authority in September 2024. In 2022 it was also fined the maximum possible (€20M or around $22M, based on its revenue at that time) a full three times by DPAs in Italy, Greece and France.” Source.

AI-driven smart technology: who wants your data?

Influencers who are outspoken on social issues, like RFKJnr and Patrisse Marie Khan-Cullors Brignac (formerly of BLM), must see that smart technologies are invasive surveillance tools. However, RFKJnr believes that wearables are vital for health, which is questionable. Meanwhile, former Black Lives Matter (BLM) leader Patrisse Marie Khan-Cullors Brignac helped empower a movement against colonialism in the 21st century yet the movement hasn’t spoken out against targeted smart phone surveillance, Facial Recognition Technologies (FRTs) Digital ID, or AI algorithms that can be inherently racist or disciminatory, (proven in study after study).

Failing to politically highlight the invasive data-driven surveillance underway courtesy of smart technology has consequences. A centralised database of Americans is now on the cards whether US citizens of any colour agree or not. Murals of 2020 supporting BLM are torn up and military installations are renamed in support of the Ku Klux Klan, as the Whitehouse makes deals with Big Tech and data-mining company, Palantir. Meanwhile, wearables for every American is promoted as a mantra.

There is a deep political desire to control the public’s data, and to keep mining it, intrusively though smart technologies – something the police are relying on more and more. The “terrorising” policing tactics and data-driven technologies being rolled out at demonstrations today take on a different dimension when we realise that the US and UK police alike are being trained in Israel, a country that reinforces apartheid through surveillance technologies, and is engaged in ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

According to Amnesty International, “Public or private funds spent to train our domestic police in Israel should concern all of us.” Yet how many of us know that the police are adopting Israeli tactics? Consider also, that Israeli technologies like those made by Israeli spytech company Cellebrite – a digital forensics company that sells tools to access and extract data from smartphones – which has “contracts with the British police” may access “police and security surveillance data”, because they are part of the “The 2030 roadmap for UK-Israel bilateral relations” signed off by the British Government.

Concerningly, Cellebrite has a “disastrous human rights record” and assists repressive regimes. For example, in 2021, as the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre reported, “Evidence of surveillance technology being used by the Myanmar state [formerly Burma]…was revealed when it surfaced that the military used phone-hacking technology from Israeli spyware firm Cellebrite to arrest two Reuters journalists for investigating a military massacre of ten Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine State in 2017.”

Cellebrite is interested in more than access to and data from smart phones, however. According to Cellebrite, “Digital wearables, such as Fitbit, record seemingly mundane activities — the number of steps we take in a day, our heartbeats, sleep schedules, locations, and distance traveled. To the trained eyes of criminal investigators, the data from wearables can be used to document our daily lives, right down to the last footstep and heartbeat. This data can prove invaluable when investigating crimes….extraction of data from wearable devices [has] led to arrests and prosecutions.”

Techno-anarchy in the UK

Clearly smart phones and wearables enable a society governed by Digital ID, underpinned by AI. It’s the direction the US, and UK, is headed, with the tragedy of racial unrest continuing, driven by technology that promotes over-policing and racially biased targeting.

In the UK as in the US, Palantir are at the centre of data-mining activities. According to Liberty, the “…controversial US spy tech firm [Palantir] has landed a contract with UK police to develop a surveillance network that will incorporate data about citizens’ political opinions, philosophical beliefs, health records and other sensitive personal information.”

In the UK, Digital ID is increasingly in the news. As the political dimensions around it are comparable with those of the US in so many ways, they deserve our attention.

The UK government launched “Gov.uk Wallet, a digital identity system that will consolidate government-issued credentials into a centralized mobile application. The initiative marks a significant advancement in the UK’s broader digitization strategy, following the country’s recent engagement with private sector stakeholders on digital identity solutions…The technical implementation will use facial recognition capabilities available on most contemporary smartphones for identity verification.” This offers clues as to how the UK’s vision of Digital ID will look.

The Digital ID initiative progresses as racial unrest in the form of Gaza protests and continuing immigration-related “troubles” spark police controntations where facial recognition technologies (FRTs) and smart phone surveillance are hastily rushed out (without ethical regulations) and serve to deter public demonstrations and “dissent”.

Regarding the Gaza demonstrations, these events are democratic rights that communicate to us all how unpopular Israel’s “genocidal” war is, and also show us that predominantly in the media, protesting against the killing of Palestinians and waving their flags in demonstrations is being sold as “anti-Israel” as if that type of protesting were “antisemitic”. UK Foreign Office “staff officials [questioning] the UK’s continued arms sales and what they called a “stark… disregard for international law” by Israel,” have been warned that they should consider resigning if they “disagree” over Gaza.

Citizens opposing Israel’s “genocide” can be labelled antisemitic for expressing alarm, or demonstrating – though when 100,000 Israelis take to the streets to oppose the war, the popular media either has no name for it, or avoids highlighting it. “Antisemitism” describes “bigotry, prejudice or discrimination against Jews“. “Bigotry, prejudice or discrimination against Palestinians” who are also “semitic” people is defended by the British State. In Israel the oppression of Palestinians has been progressed over decades of the authorities collecting biometric data on Palestinians (and even Jews) to control both populations, helped by growing smart phone use, and the rise of facial recognition technologies being developed in Israel.

Britcard: for silencing voices?

In the UK a Digital ID could equally be employed to silence criticism to the government line. “Government officials have suggested that digital IDs could be linked to facial recognition technology and biometric data, creating a system that closely monitors every citizen’s movements and interactions.”

In the context of this “autocratic” UK government stance, where political divides arise over Israel/Gaza and immigration-fuelled controversies, we’re seeing a biometric Digital ID emerge with the proposition of “Britcard”.

It is a proposition progressing from a speculative and “voluntary” status towards being pushed as mandatory – on the back of Britain’s infamous “Immigration” and protesting problems.

Immigration problems in the UK have fuelled protests and dissatisifaction for some time – but only after protests against wars (that have been causing the refugee crisis) failed, falling on the deaf ears of governments determined to support or wage them. Deterring protest with AI’s assistance has since become a priority of governments and the police. Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch (BBW), believes “…AI surveillance turns members of the public into walking ID cards, is dangerously inaccurate and has no explicit legal basis in the UK.” BBW found that “Over 60% of UK residents are concerned about the use of facial recognition in public spaces.”

Britcard should be viewed as an extension of this desire to control, for who would protest if their data could instantly be assigned to a “watch list” courtesy of an AI driven app and deprive one of essential services? It is an existential threat, along with the growing arsenal of FRTs and Drones to support the program.

“Britcard”, is presented as a proposition for a national Digital ID, and is being advertised a solution for “immigration out of control” though deserves closer scrutiny. As CCN reports, Britcard is touted as a way to “help Britain control illegal migration and secure its borders.”

“What else could Britcard be used for?” is a question everyone should be asking. What about backing a national conscription program? National ID cards introduced in 1939 assisted in conscription – the last time a mandatory ID system was introduced in the UK. Could that happen with Digital IDs? Its happening in Europe which seeks to conscript 300,000 troops as a deterrent to Russia.

Beyond the obvious and advertised

Talk of resuming UK conscription was in the air recently, concerning Vladimir Putin who is seen as a threat because “Britain sees its number of soldiers dwindling“. Europe also appears to be preparing populations for conflict aimed at Putin.

However, according to inews.co.uk, “Downing Street has dismissed a warning from the head of the British Army that members of the public could be called up to fight in the event of a war with Russia.” Governments have been known to U-turn. The UK government seems desperate to implement national Digital ID. Any war might help achieve that, from the “immigation war” to the world war three scenario suggested by the spectre of Putin.

War is spoken of a lot today, though some seek to create it casually through their influence. Big Tech attempted to fan the flames of immigration discontent in the guise of Elon Musk, partner in the techno-eugenecist rebrand of politics under President Donald Trump who is deliberately engineering a racially tense atmosphere in the US, in every way possible (while Elon promotes the idea of “Smart-people” enhanced by smart technology). “Sir Keir Starmer [became] embroiled in a war of words with Elon Musk, after the tech billionaire suggested that “civil war is inevitable” following violent unrest in the UK”, as the BBC reported in 2024.

Britcard remains a politically divisive “us and them” type of proposition. CITIZENS vs IMMIGRATION is currently the main narrative to convince people to accept a life where digital proof of ID permits access to private and public sector services digitally. Fear and “othering” are the UK government’s usual tried and tested ways of introducing more surveillance on the population, and biased AI algorithms ensure that will continue be the case.

No doubt “othering” comes into play in conscription as well, as it did in the UK in 1939 when ID Cards were forced on the population, and resisting conscription was frowned upon. In a similar way, Digital ID could be used as a coercive tool for purposes beyond the obvious and advertised, empowering governments in gaining the compliance of citizens for a multiplicity of political goals.

The UK and US governments are funding energy guzzling data centres and utilise Real Time Crime Centres (RTCC) (spearheaded by Fusus “the most widely used and trusted real-time crime center platform in US public safety”). Here police use all the latest bells and whistles of surveillance technology and data analytics, so we are seeing the foundations of a Digital ID being built.

The RTCC system brings together the smart technology platforms of Big Tech to policing to carry out the State’s divide and rule political and strategic tactics on society. Digital ID will be a critical data-driven tool linking to these systems. According to breechmedia, “While creating the centres, police forces have sought out advice and technology from major corporations like Motorola, IBM, and Palantir, many with controversial ties to military and spy agencies.”

The UK’s future – who is allowed to join it?

We’re at the threshold of the QR code society, which is a surveillance economy – where you are the product, giving your profitable data through every digital transaction with a smart phone Digital ID app. Like a product on a shelf, a human acquires an ID number and barcode (QR code), to be tracked anywhere like a pet or a prisoner with a GPS bracelet. Wearables can only assist in the “progressive” Digital ID world.

A think tank closely aligned with the government called Labour Together believes that “For a progressive society to work, it needs to be able to collectively agree who is allowed to join it. Because it will exclude those who cannot join it, it needs to give its members proof that they belong.” This is the logic behind the UK’s Digital ID scheme “Britcard”.

According to The Week, “Number 10 appears to be…rolling out [the] voluntary scheme that could become mandatory at a future date. Labour Together has estimated the BritCard system would cost up to £400 million to build and around £10 million a year to administer as a free-to-use app.”

State in a Smart Phone

A Digital ID is already being used in the UK-backed Ukraine as the country endeavours to achieve a state of technological supremacy, and guard against Russia. A Digital ID backed by a government app drives the Ukraine into deeper autocracy, and an “us and them” world. The “State in a Smartphone” project handled by the Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Transformation passed a Digital ID law and now all authorities and private business are equipped “to be able to scan the relevant QR-code of the New Digital IDs” to verify identities.

Ukraine, by adopting Digital ID places itself on a par with other repressive regimes that have imposed the same with the aid of profit hungry Big Tech companies like Palantir. “Currently, Diia, the national government’s app which is used by over 20 million people.

Today, nearly all of Kyiv’s adult population relies on the apps”. This ensures complete digital dependency, meaning that with immediacy, access to healthcare, resources, and vital services can be refused and withheld, on the basis of the political control of a person’s data. Victoria Itskovych, Chief Information Officer of Kyiv City (CIO) said: “For any emergency – be it floods, earthquakes, or pandemics –…cities need a trusted channel of communication that cannot be hijacked to spread fear and panic.” Clearly only the voice of the State matters, when State-driven apps come into town.

Digital ID, for the Ukraine, establishes a questionable form of technology for a questionable “democracy” that has faced massive protests over government corruption, and brought “draconian” anti-protest laws that curb protest rights, free speech and NGO involvement in these processes. Deterring protest is also an agenda in the UK and US, today, with governments employing Facial Recognition Technologies (FRTs) and social media surveillance to build watch lists and target protesters or “dissidents” – a police state gaining power.

Can a Digital ID promote “Humanness”?

This interpenetrating Digital ID surveillance system, wherever it is implemented, UK or Ukraine, requires sustaining fast wireless networks (5G for example) and massively expanding data-centres, a drain on earth’s resources – fundamentally in the name of mass surveillance – and, it means sacrificing our freedom and “humanness” to “belong”, when our existence is digitally organised by AI algorithms.

Firmin DeBrabander, the Cambridge University Press author of Life after Privacy: Reclaiming Democracy in a Surveillance Society, believes that, “In the digital net that envelops our everyday lives, it will become increasingly more difficult and rare to perform any task without revealing ourselves, and opening our lives to spying eyes. And our spies are not content to watch us from without; they will install sentinels in our very bodies, and monitor us from within.” Source.

This is the future being constructed. Digital ID is a political choice, and it advertises that a fascist surveillance state is the preferred existence, above all other possibilities. Where is that future going to lead us?

Moonshot R&D calls the intensely surveilled future we’re heading towards a new world of inspiration “where people, robots, and biological cyborgs collaborate and co-evolve”. It’s the so-called “fifth stage of human evolution”, a prospect Japan is embracing, where a “Super-smart” Society 5.0 (an agenda evolved since the advent of 5G in 2016) represents “a visionary roadmap for the future of human civilization”, as described by innovaromorir.com.

Sounds like the endgame of the “Great Reset” which advances the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and, dictates technological evolution. How does that work? Sociable.co asserts that, “…the unelected globalists at the World Economic Forum (WEF) are envisioning an “augmented society” ruled by digital identity and transhumanism via the Internet of Bodies….They want digital identity…embedded into every aspect of our lives — even under our skin…” where sensors on or inside the body “monitor, analyze, and even modify human bodies and behavior.”

Such views and observations no longer seem outlandish. Smart technology, and in particular wearables and implants, are posing many ethical questions, though Big Tech companies are banking on what Klaus Schwab calls “a fusion of our physical, our digital, and our biological identities” while no ethical oversight can prevent any movement in that direction.

Put in this light, we can see how an acceptance of Digital ID is like throwing “humanness” onto the trash heap in favour of inhabiting a “post-human society” (discussed by the Global Posthuman Network) where people are, through new markets like smart dust and implants, technologically augemented (which in today’s parlance means people are being “progressive”).

People accepting of a Digital ID are trading any other alternative life for a digitally “remastered” and reinforced “self” (as populations under repressive regimes have discovered) consenting to centralised surveillance, and technologically targeted control over individuals, using health data (digital health), and mental health status or any other data of strategic value that can set limits and reinforce Big Tech monopolies and government policies.

Digital ID is not about setting anyone free, but nudging the population to a place where AI comes to dominate life more. Government has a revolving door with Big Tech companies which accelerates the pace of digital surveillance transformations, which are about implementing AI for profit and control.

AI and the lens of repression

Keir Starmer of the UK Labour government said, with AI “…there are huge opportunities and risks, and we need to marry the two…We need to push it through”. Today, the UK like everywhere we know, is a surveillance economy, being pushed through, which can be measured in the sheer density of data-collecting CCTV cameras alone which are, to be clear, a technology invented by the Nazi regime.

CCTV cameras are now enhanced by AI, and are the eyes of the AI-data-driven State today, using facial recognition and other algorithmic surveilance tools – biased towards destroying dissent and activism, while proving inherently “racist”.

Speaking out on the issue of AI’s racist interpretations and language models, Timnit Gebru was fired by Google in 2020. She had been “supporting rigorous research on AI ethics and algorithmic auditing” while the company romanced Black Lives Matter (BLM), Diversity politics, and Civil Rights to bask in “political correctness”, to promote products to a wider audience. This is a road that Big Tech in general has walked profitably, though now distances itself from as the political climate changes towards one of technologically assisted intolerance, a climate which Big Tech arguably now exploits, and assists.

Google’s credibility to “Do No Evil” has waned immensely with the development of Project Nimbus, which is enabling data-driven AI surveillance for Israel. As Middle East Monitor explains, “Beyond the sphere of social media, Google and Amazon’s collaboration with the Israeli military under Project Nimbus casts an even darker shadow over the tech industry’s role in this conflict [the war in Gaza]. The $1.2 billion cloud computing contract…provides critical infrastructure to power Israel’s AI-driven Lavender and Gospel targeting systems – systems that are directly linked to the mass civilian casualties in Gaza [and use facial recognition].” It’s a lesson for us all, especially when it is clear that Israel has a grip on our police and governments, and seeks to influence strategies and technologies.

Israel’s grip on Western police forces

In April 2025, aoav.org.uk reported that “In a delayed response to a Freedom of Information (FOI) request submitted by Action on Armed Violence (AOAV)”, Essex Police in the UK “…refused to confirm or deny whether any of their officers have met with representatives from Corsight AI, a controversial Israeli facial recognition technology company whose software has reportedly been used in IDF military operations in Gaza….a practice that human rights organisations have condemned as constituting “automated apartheid”.

This lack of transparency is similar to the US government refusing to be open about its facial recognition agenda, a policy of secrecy that raises concerns. The UK appears reliant on intrusive surveillance tactics and tools from Israel. It is worth asking, to what extent?

What power do Israeli tech firms have over police in the UK?

According to Inside Telecom, “Over 500 Israeli tech and non-tech companies operate in the United Kingdom (UK), and the UK Israel Tech Hub is located within the British Embassy in Israel…This raises multiple questions about the relationship between the UK and Israel. The main aim of the organization is to secure private and public sector contracts for Israeli technology companies in the UK. Earlier reports from Palestine have also suggested that several Israeli tech firms act as fronts for Zionist intelligence agencies.”

Further, “…NICE Systems, [is] another Israeli company with a contract with the British police to handle parts of their investigations. NICE Systems also holds a contract in Scotland for facial recognition in CCTV.”

A freedom of information request asking “Has the Met Police run training or exchange programmes with Israel’s police or military from 2020 to present?” received the following reply from the government:

“Confirming or denying that…information is held relating to the types of training, meetings and exchange programmes provided to other countries between The Metropolitan Police Service and the Israeli Police, Israeli Civil Administration or Israeli Defence Forces between 2014-present, would provide terrorists with a greater understanding of where specific training and exchange programmes are provided…In a partial answer to your first and third answer, On Wednesday 18 May 2022, the Met’s Central East Command Unit hosted an Israeli police delegation.”

Further information reveals that “The purpose of the visit from the Israeli Police delegation was so they could learn from the MPS about how we work with communities…Policing authorities rely on international co-operation when combatting crime, particularly that which is cross-border in scope.” A meeting was held at Stoke Newington Police Station. An official redacted PDF disclosed an agenda concerning the policing of “Faith and Hate Crime” and “Policing COVID” and centred on “Community Key stakeholders and partners”. Stoke Newington (an area in the northwest part of the London Borough of Hackney) has a high white demographic with black and other ethnic minorities, and a history of police brutality against minorities, suspicious deaths, and alleged police cover-ups. “Stoke Newington Police Station in Hackney, east London, was infamous in the 1980s and 1990s for police corruption and racism,..” according to Socialist Worker in a very revealing article where the behaviour London police forces echoes violent law enforcement tactics of Israel that for years has brutalised Jews and Palestinians.

Further involvements with Israel have been disclosed by aoav.org.uk. “The UK government has confirmed it is actively training Israeli soldiers on British soil…[casting] fresh light on Britain’s ongoing military relationship with Israel amid continued conflict in Gaza and military escalation in southern Lebanon….Dr Iain Overton, Executive Director of Action on Armed Violence (AOAV), said: “The UK’s training of Israeli forces during a period of alleged war crimes raises serious questions of moral complicity. The British public deserves transparency when our armed forces are directly engaged with a military accused of violations that have left thousands of civilians dead.”

Other links to Israel influencing UK police are reflected in a report by Global Research, concerning the policing of 7/7 bombings in London, which can be read here.

What power do Israeli tech firms have over police in the US?

According to Forbes, “If you’re in New York City today, there’s a very good chance your face will be captured by surveillance cameras and run through facial recognition software. If you’re in a predominantly Black, Asian or Hispanic community in New York City, that chance is even greater.” Forbes also highlights “…the NYPD’s purchase of more than $277 million in secret surveillance equipment that had previously been hidden from the public.” According to incarcernation.com, since 2012, the NYPD has a “strategic partnership” with Israel, “…focused on counterterrorism, urban warfare, and crowd control.”

truthlytics.com goes further, “The NYPD, one of the largest and most well-funded police departments in the world, has long faced criticism for its use of excessive force and discriminatory policing, particularly in communities of color. These patterns of behavior, critics argue, echo the tactics used by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in the occupied West Bank and Gaza—ranging from mass surveillance to brutal crowd control techniques.”

NYPD: employing Israeli technologies and approaches

In the US, policing approaches are influenced by Israel. We may recall that Israel’s NICE Systems has a contract with the British police to handle parts of their investigations and holds a contract in Scotland for facial recognition in CCTV. Supply Chain Market in 2007 reported that “NICE Systems Ltd., the global provider of advanced solutions that enable organizations to extract Insight from Interactions to drive performance, recently announced that it has won a $9M contract from the City of New York (NYC), on behalf of the New York Police Department (NYPD) for NICE Inform, multimedia incident information management solution for its next generation 9-1-1 emergency call centers…NICE Inform will enable the City to capture, manage, analyze and reconstruct multimedia incidents.”

According to haaretz.com, in 2023, “New York City Mayor Eric Adams lauded security technology developed by Israel Police…vowing to bring Israeli tech to the New York Police Department.” moguldom.com reported in 2022 that, “Crime has increased by 23.5 percent in New York City during New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ first year in office, and the former cop-turned-mayor — a fan of facial recognition technology — is promising to implement new policing technology that he said more accurately identifies common criminal patterns and develops profiles of perpetrators….Adams has promoted the use of cameras and championed facial recognition devices…“

Adams said in an interview with Politico. “…Big Brother is protecting you.” Albert Fox Cahn, head of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, said, “The NYPD has a decade-long history of abusing its surveillance operations to target Black New Yorkers, Muslim New Yorkers, political protests and every aspect of dissent,” Cahn said. “These are technologies that would be chilling in anyone’s hands. But to give an agency with such a horrifying record of surveillance abuse even more power, at a time when they face dwindling oversight, is a recipe for disaster.” Source.

Howard syndrome and rejection of technological tyranny

It is interesting to hear a Jewish perspective concerning the brutality of Israel’s regime (now influencing our governments and police). In Israel as any society, there are those who are authoritarian and corrupt, and those who want peace and to denounce tyranny. The Israeli historian Shlomo Sand asks, “Is not the very fact of defining oneself as a Jew within the State of Israel an act of affiliation to a privileged caste which creates intolerable injustices around itself?” Source.

Sand’s observation of a “priveleged caste” that “creates intolerable injustices around itself” evokes the actions of our governments too, which are always employing deeper surveillance and eroding human rights, which can lead to brutality and racism.

In the UK, we are experiencing technological authoritarianism through the new Labour Party. It is almost a replay of the authoritarian zeal exhibited by the UK’s Home Office under Conservative Home Secretary Michael Howard, an authoritarian figure who imposed expensive CCTV installations all over the UK, pursued a National ID card scheme, and established controversial DNA databases in the 1990’s.

Britain, under successive Labour governments, interestingly, has inherited that “vision”, which takes on a notable complexion through Starmer’s “vision” of “Putting AI into the veins of Britain“. What did Howard do that Starmer continues to ardently pursue? He pursues a CCTV, ID-based police state.

Howard believed in cutting edge CCTV surveillance technology, operating with racial biases, at the expense of eroding privacy and human rights for society at large, reinforcing the vulnerabilities of minorities in the process. He used technology as a solution, without tackling first the underlying problems influencing crime, like rising unemployment. Technology seemed to be the priority, as now.

Howard established, while neglectful of privacy concerns and consequences for human rights, an intrusive police state in the midst of soaring unemployment and social unrest, which spied on people and held as much information on guilty and innocent alike. Howard, like many progressive politicians and futurists felt human rights policies, an obstacle to his ideals.

Howard felt that the Human Rights Act (which passed in UK law in 1998) and the the Regulations of Investigating Power Act (RIPA) of 2000, (affecting powers of surveillance and communications interception) placed “inhibitions on the ability of the police to tackle crime effectively” and thought adjustments should be made.

The Home Secretary didn’t entirely get his own way, and some of his policies were successfully legally challenged by the public. An ID card was passionately advocated by Howard, though despite his campaigning, became voluntary, not mandatory.

National ID had faced immense public resistance (a wartime card was abolished in 1952). CCN reports that “In the past, when the government tried to centralize the U.K.’s national identity system, it was met with stiff opposition.” From 2006 to 2010 as more mandatory ID card schemes were being planned, thankfully, public resistance stopped them.

Resurfacing, over and over

The ID card idea constantly resurfaces. The government has been keen to calm fears concerning the Digital ID agenda. According to www.gov.uk, “No, there are no plans to introduce national digital ID cards…Using a digital identity will be voluntary. People will be in control of their data and who it is shared with…People will still be able to prove their identity using physical documents if they choose.”

However, according to enablingdigitalidentity.blog.gov.uk, “On 19 June [2025], the Data (Use and Access) Act received Royal Assent. As well as putting the National Underground Asset Register on a statutory footing and supporting the future of smart data schemes…The new UK legislation formalises the system that is currently operating as a pilot. This will pave the way for trusted digital identities to be used in more places.” According to thinkdigitalpartners.com, “and has set digital ID as a key focus area for 2024. It will be a critical part of the UK’s national infrastructure.”

Labour Together have stated, Britcard “could lay the foundations for a fully-functioning digital identity system…building on the existing One Login and Gov.UK Wallet. Our polling suggests it would be immensely popular; around 80% of the public support use of digital identity for a range of use cases.” The aim is to “…rebrand the Gov.UK App and Gov.UK Wallet as the “BritCard app””. That is, to make Britcard from an existing placeholder entity, the Gov.UK App and Gov.UK Wallet being the “Trojan Horse” that was always meant to bring in a mandatory Digital ID.

Criticism

“Britcard”, was criticised by David Frost (who served as a Minister of State at the Cabinet Office between March and December 2021) who believes, “A normal ID card, bad as it is, is proof of your identity and status. A digital ID is also an instrument of control – because it can shape-shift according to the government’s wishes. That’s why introducing digital ID is to cross a Rubicon. It changes forever the relationship between government and citizen….Think back.

Have we forgotten the lessons of the pandemic, when we all had to have proof of our Covid test status on our phone before we could go certain places or access certain buildings? Briefly, at the end of 2021 – the issue that finally forced me to resign from the Cabinet – we introduced a “vaccine passport” system, which actually denied you access to certain environments unless you had a full vaccination record. This was all done via an app – in effect a digital ID. The government could change the conditions at will and you had no choice but to comply.”

Frost has a point, and as the World Health Organisation and other “Stakeholders” in the smart future relish achieving more gains with more powers, from mining our data, including the police and governments dismissive of concerns over AI ethics and the insecurity of our data.

A stake in the heart of freedom and privacy

People must not forget how controlling governments can be, obsessively, ideologically. With xenophobic overtones, Britcard has been sold in the UK on the basis of an “us and them” proposition, reinforcing “discrimination” to help “sort out” a persistent problem, namely the UK’s problematic Immigration crisis, that feasibly could have been prevented or managed in other ways beyond the scope of a “Digital ID solution”. Certainly, all the CCTV money could buy wasn’t enough.

“Today, police surveillance cameras disproportionately installed in Black and Brown neighborhoods [in the US] keep a constant watch” just as do they in the UK. According to National News, the “United Kingdom has the dubious honour of having the most CCTV cameras per head of any country in the world; the British Security Industry Authority has claimed that there is one camera for every 11-14 people.”

According to Liberty, the UK is “most intrusive mass surveillance regime of any democratic country.” With smart phones requiring mandatory status to make a national, mandatory Digital ID function, one smart phone to every person linking them to their digital self, would spell a definitive blow against freedom.

Big Tech and countless other corporate entities want your data, more of it than you can imagine, and Digital ID would serve it up without any problems through every QR code scanned to prove you exist. This enhanced data grab will not solve immigration and will more likely exclude large swathes of the population who rightfully live here, as happens in repressive regimes where any individual, or minority, suspected of dissent or any not acting as the government demands can be digitally disempowered, or, disappeared.

As salzburgglobal.org observes, “…the developing world has seen the rise of….national digital identity systems, promoted by the World Bank…not enough is done to shield privacy, embed protection safeguards…The implementation of Digital ID is a high risk territory for human rights.” This article lists some excellent cases that describe why. It covers developing countries and Digital ID issues, but could the same “issues” happen in the UK? Or US?

Most likely, they will. Because, “Digital IDs, especially those that integrate biometric data, can be used to track individuals’ movements, purchases, and online activities without their knowledge or consent. Governments may also unduly target specific individuals, using Digital ID blockage or other methods as a weapon against political opponents or vulnerable groups such as migrants.” We know this is happening already.

Collecting information without limits

As the UK government becomes increasingly autocratic and presents technology as the solution for everything, UK citizens should thoroughly question the motivations behind any Digital ID proposition, especially as the government goes to great lengths to erode data privacy, and becomes more repressive.

The UK now has the “Snooper’s Charter” to assist in massive datamining. As Liberty asserts, the Snooper’s Charter allows “State authorities to collect information about everything we do and say online and order private companies to store it…[with] wide-ranging powers to scoop up and store all of our emails, texts, calls, location data and internet history. They can also hack into our phones and computers and create large ‘personal datasets’ on us – all without needing to suspect us of any criminal wrongdoing.” It has many implications for UK citizens, leaving nothing private.

A Digital ID system can only add to this concerted effort for government and corporate stakeholders to control and own data on the population. Clearly this goes well beyond any Immigration policies and drives a stake into the heart of freedom and privacy for all.

That our governments and police enlist the tactical help of Israel (viewed by many as an ideological, repressive regime) has been revealed and can’t be left out of the current political technological situation in which we find ourselves.

The Jewish historian Schlomo Sand is critical of that regime. Of it, he says Zionism, “…was an ideology deeply rooted in a European vision of the nation-state, one which had a racial dimension, required a demographic majority and was permeated by European colonialism and orientalist thinking.”

Arguably, Israel is marred by exlusionist politics, with colonialist baggage. Exclusionist politics reinforce the “digital colonialism” at work in Israel and across the world, which includes campaigns involving smart technologies and biometrics databases, moving towards achieving Digital ID. Politicians and the media so often highlighting border control and other immigration issues seek to drive support of Digital ID, often in divisive language. Keir Starmer, for instance, in relation to immigration issues warned of an “island of strangers“.

Digital ID is being implemented at scale in the EU “mandating compliance from Big Tech and member countries in supporting the EU Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet”) Source. “Many countries have already announced wallet project and pilots, and some have even rolled out production digital ID wallets at population scale.” Source.

Digital IDs can bring many risks worth noting. According to Reclaim the Net, “…these IDs are susceptible to hacking and identity theft, placing individuals at risk of financial and reputation damage. Often, citizens are coerced into participating without genuine consent, and the lack of transparency and oversight in these systems increases the risk of misuse.”

Digital colonialism

Michael Kwet, observing the strategies of domination waged through digital technologies, states, “…just as they did in 20th-century South Africa, today’s largest U.S.-based technology corporations see an opportunity to profit from Israeli apartheid—a by-product of U.S.-driven digital colonialism.”

Author Renata Avila, also recognises that we are living in times of “digital colonialism” “referring to the deployment of imperial power over a vast number of people, which takes the form of rules, designs, languages, cultures and belief systems serving the interests of dominant powers. In the past, empires expanded their power through the control of critical assets, from trade routes to precious metals.”

Big Tech has long been under scrutiny over its “conflict minerals” supply chains from oppressed, developing colonies in countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Zambia and Angola. Big Tech companies have regularly been accused of complicity in slavery and abuse of ethnic labour forces, as well as fuelling conflict, and assisting repressive regimes. This represents racial abuse in order to achieve infrastructure targets, and technological supremacy in global geopolitics.

Author Renata Avila, asserts that, “Today, it is not states but technology empires that dominate the world through the control of critical digital infrastructures, data and the ownership of computational power. By collecting the personal data of citizens on a scale unprecedented in human history, companies can serve as conduits of misinformation campaigns that can alter the flow of global geopolitics and even change the outcome of elections.”

According to www.europeandatajournalism.eu, “Far from the free and open platforms they were upon their inception, Big Tech companies and social networks have risen to an unprecedented level of power from which they play an active role in politics through vested financial and political motives, exerting influence through algorithmic alterations, subjective censorship and calls to action on their platforms.”

For control of everyone’s data

The “….emerging trend of data colonialism (Couldry & Mejias, 2019) is of critical importance given the fundamental reliance of AI technologies on data, and because organizations gain access to, control data, and develop algorithms in ways which not only emphasize the digital divide but increase data inequality (Zheng & Walsham, 2021). Source.

“Data colonialism” according to Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry in their book Data Grab is “the continuation of colonialism’s inherited inequalities and colonialism’s acquisition of new tools that potentially affects human life in radically new ways…” This “toolset” which exploits data-driven surveillance enables the companies to “explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate.” As lawfaremedia.org highlights from Mejias and Couldry’s research, data colonialism facilitates “the [harmful] classification of people into disadvantageous categories”.

Today, the UK government is arguably advancing data colonialism’s harms by pushing ahead with a Digital ID “with major financial and tech companies, government agencies and regulators and the likes of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, among the prominent forces behind the push…”, according to Reclaim The Net.

The UK government sees digital identity as “one of the cornerstones of a modern digital economy [a surveillance economy]” and seeks to promote adoption of “these secure and trusted [data-mining] technologies.” Digital ID remains a controversial idea, for many reasons. As Rebecca Vincent of Big Brother Watch points out, “The debate about digital ID isn’t really about immigration; it’s about access to, and control of everyone’s data.” Source.

Case of digitally-assisted genocide

We know now that the UK’s ID initiative is called “Britcard”. Marketing an ID system to the public has always been a challenge of governments, and in recent times the public has become divided over immigration which relates to UK government inolvement in more overseas war efforts (colonialism) whicle the public reaps the refugee crisis (fuelling data-driven suerveillance at home).

With datamining becoming so expansive and intrusive, and, with governments and other agencies like the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and Big Tech pushing for Digital IDs in the UK (which can link together numerous datasets including biometric data), are any of these corporate political actors really acting in our best interests, and, if not, are they able to be held legally accountable if found aiding and abetting genocide, through abuse of our data, for example? Is a Big Tech company able to be held accountable if discovered complicit in the killing of citizens?

You might be shocked to know the answer…

Michael J. Kelly, Professor of Law at Creighton University School of Law states in “Prosecuting Corporations for Genocide”, that, “While corporations can realize enormous profits from such complicity [in genocide], they are immune from international prosecution in The Hague…As key participants in the world economy, corporations have been accorded tremendous latitude and granted extensive rights…If a state or a person commits genocide, they are punished. International law demands such. But corporate actors have successfully avoided this through an array of legal arguments…”



Kelly makes it clear that, “while multinational corporations have been complicit in genocides over many years, none have been prosecuted.” Source.

Today Big Tech companies, assisted by US and UK support, together are an asset to Israel supplying high-tech data driven systems and weapons. International condemnation grows over what is clearly a case of AI fuelled, biometrical oriented techno-genocide against the Palestinian people – demonstrating that this could, and most likely will, happen again.

There is plenty of historical precedence for utmost caution regarding National ID programs, and especially regarding trusting Big Tech with any data on the population.

Blast from the past

According to the British Medical Journal, “Eugenics is too frequently overlooked in histories of both the United States and Europe, even though the story is a fascinating and important one.” Social changes brought about by Eugenics and “Big Tech” in the US fascinated the Nazi regime which aquired IBM’s Hollerith Machines, (punch card computer systems) being used in America (which gave the US government important population data and assisted in evolving “the quantified self” (a being defined by computers and collected data)).

Collecting population data with Hollerith Machines, the US of the 1930s was steeped in eugenics (a “racist” pseudo-science). At this time Americans performed the “Bellamy salute” that inspired the Nazi salute, and sought to oppress black communities, (leading to discrimination and sterilisation programs inflicted on Blacks and minorities which ultimately gave rise to pushback and the civil rights movement years after the Second World War).

With IBM’s assistance, the fascist government of Nazi Germany exploited stratified datasets on the public sorting people into groups. According to historian Edwin Black, “IBM technology was used to organize nearly everything in Germany and then Nazi Europe, from the identification of the Jews in censuses, registrations, and ancestral tracing programs to the running of railroads and organizing of concentration camp slave labor.”

In Nazi Germany, segments of the populace simply had no right to live and were considered by the eugenicist technocracy as “life unworthy of life”. Nazism fuelled social divides, fanned flames of hate, and facilitated euthanasia programs like Aktion T4, organised round-ups of targeted populations, and “discretely” sterilising selected groups. All was the result of enforced structural racism by “supremacists” using eugenics and technology hand in hand to re-organise society along technocratic lines – with much of it financed by US corporations. Nothing has changed, today Big Tech still assists and profits from apartheid regimes and exploiting data in ways that create harmful discrimination, which conforms with a technocratic, eugenicist outlook.

Dehumanisation into data points

We may remember the Rwandan genocide, characterised by the use of data to eliminate people. As KTPress reports, Rwanda saw genocide facilitated by National ID data. Despite the “hard lesson”, today, as reported by Biometric Update, “The government of Rwanda is investing 12.2 billion Rwandan francs (approximately US$8.5 million) in the upcoming 2025-2026 fiscal year to advance the rollout of the nation’s digital identity program, including fingerprint and iris biometrics enrollment.” KTPress reports that, “At the World Economic Forum, Minister Ingabire announced that Rwanda expects AI to contribute up to 6% of GDP in the near future.” Turning people into data points is the future, in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT), a system connecting everyone to an infrastructure of smart technology.

Anasuya Sengupta, Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy and co-director and co-founder of “Whose Knowledge?” addressing issues of power, privilege, and accessibility, states that, “…the Internet not only helps to promote solidarity and connect people in different places, but also reinforces existing injustice, discrimination, and violence. Technology and algorithms are not neutral, they are political. Technology follows a certain architecture, which is why it reinforces discrimination and prejudice – depending on who designs it…the majority of the world is not represented on the Internet…People have turned from consumers into data points – and therefore into products.”

Ulises A. Mejias and Professor Nick Couldry from the State University of New York in their book “Data Grab” show that little has really changed since the Nazis or Rwandan governments exploited machine data, as technological empires utlising the IoT “…explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate”. In an interview with the London School of Economics (LSE) Couldry explained that, “human experience, potentially every layer and aspect of it, is becoming the target of profitable extraction.”

Demand the end of Digital ID

From the UK to Ukraine, and from the past to the present, we can see what is becoming of our world. Through intrusive forms of smart surveillance allied to military-style policing, the streets of some cities are becoming technological, data-gathering warzones.

In this authoritarian atmosphere, of technological “supremacism” smart phones – as demanded by industry and governments, for Digital ID-based digital transformations – are gravitating towards becoming mandatory devices. This is to guarantee one’s very existence, and, extract the profitability of one’s identity, with AI algorithms that contain uncomfortable biases and are known to be highly discriminatory.

This trajectory, devoid of any ethical oversight, promotes the predatory data-mining environment of the Big Tech companies and other corporate “stakeholders” exploiting the unfettered digital monitoring of everyone’s lives. This is life in a “surveillance economy” powered by “Digital Colonialism” – which operates to the benefit of dominant powers while limiting individual autonomy.

This AI-driven digital colonialism amounts to unprecedented surveillance of the population, or “datafication” driven by profit, where corporations and governments claim ownership of data generated by individuals. Nobody owns their data, or knows for sure how it may ultimately affect their lives.

As I said at the start, the prospect of a national Digital ID should amplify myriad questions, highlighting, in addition to any notions of convenience, the inescapable darker sides, that we dismiss at our peril.

With wireless radiation still posing a threat to black and white communities alike – in terms of posing a health risk – as well as being the means by which data is conveyed to empower the AI-surveillance society we never wanted, we have every reason to challenge the erosion of our rights and demand the end of Digital ID which, if made mandatory, brings huge potential to disempower more of our freedoms, choices, and human rights, including activism and protest itself, which will push us further into darkness.

Smart wearables, associated with “Digital Health”, are body-monitoring, data-collecting, wireless devices that interface with the internet and Big Tech companies.

We have learned to our cost that the internet isn’t neutral. It “…weaponises neuroscience by using the brain’s reward system to drive continuous engagement” Source. All internet-connecting devices (generally referred to as smart devices) promote addictive behaviours, functioning to inflict a deep, biologically induced, reliance on internet connectivity so we can be isolated and targeted for our data by corporations, government agencies and, often, hackers.

The internet has enabled a culture of digital dependency and further, digital addiction – centered on smart technology. Comforting convenience is part of the addiction and AI automation is further accelerating society’s “dependency” on smart technology, as the virtual reality and wearables industries know.

“Health” move?

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the US is promoting such a dependency, recently advocating all US citizens invest in wearables to improve health. This type of initiative chimes with the World Health Organisation (WHO), which has a “Digital Health” agenda that encourages smartphones and wearables, devices that give up troves of health and other data to corporations. The US is withdrawing from the WHO but seems determined to take advantage of digital health. But is it about health? As startus-insights.com reports, wearables are “biometric technologies [that have] become integral to security, authentication, and identity…”

Kennedy’s move draws attention to data privacy issues, as well as the health issue of radiofrequency exposure. We can only wonder what has led to his advocacy of technology that enables wireless body area network (WBAN) architecture and sensor-based human activity recognition (HAR) which are integral to the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) and wireless technology markets associated with the Internet of Bodies (IoB). These frameworks for smart technology promote deep data acquisition through implants and smart dust, and includes “…electronic sensors and computer chips embedded in edible pills“.

Data sharing

Grand View Research reports that “This industry is expected to rise as a result of a number of factors, including strong government initiatives, growing use of contactless biometric in context of the pandemic, and expanding usage of face recognition in both public and private sectors.”

Speaking about facial recognition technology to Politico, Albert Fox Cahn, head of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, said, “The NYPD has a decade-long history of abusing its surveillance operations to target Black New Yorkers, Muslim New Yorkers, political protests and every aspect of dissent,” Cahn said. “These are technologies that would be chilling in anyone’s hands. But to give an agency with such a horrifying record of surveillance abuse even more power, at a time when they face dwindling oversight, is a recipe for disaster.”

There are biometric data sharing schemes between police forces and the private sector. Can we imagine wearables data landing in the hands of the NYPD, for example, adding to their surveillance data?

Has Kennedy been lobbied? After all, stakes are high and it’s a big year for Big Tech companies, and the wearables industry which catalyses other industries like AR and even, Neuralink – Elon Musk’s company. Meta’s Reality Labs, according to The Verge, is working on all kinds of wearables, boasting that, “If there’s a part of your body that could potentially host a wearable that could do AI, there’s a good chance we’ve had a team run that down.”

2025 is the year AI is set to transform wearables with “predictive analytics,” and generative AI features. Altogether wearables represents a multi-billion dollar industry that is a critical part of “automating” society, supporting smart cities and harvesting data to influence behaviour as well as health choices.

The data we leave behind, cannot be left behind

Battery-free wearables (smartwatches, fitness trackers, smart rings, and smartglasses) are a class of smart technology that can interface with smart phones and personal computers to collect a variety of data, which is a security concern, especially with data synchronization. According to Stetson Law, “owners may be unaware that the data collected by these devices is discoverable [and admissible in court].”

Wearables empower smart dust technology (tiny sensors using nanotechnology), and 5 GHz backscatter technology that is “a way for a device to communicate with a WiFi router [or a 5G cellular network] by reflecting the very signals it sends out back at it….to send data back and forth” for energy harvesting and efficiency.

Wearables technology is rapidly evolving and collects biometric data, which is highly valued by Big Tech firms and governments that can use these datasets, working in concert, to support controversial immigration policies, for example. Today, Palantir’s reach into biometric and personal data has become unprecedented, and is raising concerns. According to The Debrief, “the enigmatic tech company Palantir, co-founded by entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel…has reportedly been contracted to assist in building a centralized database that will contain sensitive personal information on American citizens.”

People have come to believe that smart devices like wearables can improve wellbeing and may even make people ”smarter”. Though, as Economic Journal suggests, “Whether technology makes us smarter or just plain stupid is an ongoing debate. It is a fact that current technology changes us – the way we function, perform tasks and think. It also changes the way we obtain and retain knowledge.” As a result, ”…memorising, critical thinking and contemplation are skills we seem to lose.”

This raises additional concerns about reliance on wearables and smart phones, and so we can appreciate that these technologies contradict, in some significant ways, the idea that health, wellbeing or “smartness” are ultimately being reinforced. Only the dependency on such technology is being reinforced, beyond doubt, which is a boon to the smart technology economy. Whether lives are “improved” is a sticky question.

RFK Jr’s recommendation of wearables to citizens is likely to profit Big Tech companies, including the wireless industry, not just in traditional economic terms, but from amassing data and from the ability to monitor populations.

Surprising move

This potentially huge data-grab relating to Digital Health and manouevres towards a “centralized surveillance infrastructure” involving Big Tech firms like Palantir, represents a surprising move for RFK Jr, whose recommendation of smart wearables also reinforces the idea – challenged by an immense body of research and science – that exposure to radiofrequency emitting devices 24/7 is not a health risk. All of this seems to represent a massive U-turn for him politically.

Stepping toward Digital ID

A wearable for everyone can also function as a stepping stone to Digital ID, something many Western governments are now obsessed with implementing, and a big reason 5G was implemented. Needless to say, further intrusions into our privacy are on the horizon.

RFK Jr is a political figure who formerly chaired The Children’s Health Defense who had this to say about wearables:

“We agree that people should be able to monitor their health in innovative ways using the technology they choose. But we do not think the federal government should try to push wearables on every American…We do not share this vision,” said Miriam Eckenfels, director of the Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Electromagnetic Radiation (EMR) & Wireless Program. “Quite the contrary, we oppose governmental pressure to incentivize the widespread use of wearables. They pose serious health risks, especially to children, and they threaten privacy.””

Kennedy has been well-regarded for challenging Big Pharma and the predations of the tech industry. That he is now encouraging 5G smart technology as a health enhancement for all is a development that raises many questions.

RFK Jr, who according to pcmag.com, “wants everyone to wear a smartwatch, fitness tracker, or other piece of wearable health tech as part of his “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) agenda”, is in the “vipers nest” so to speak, immersed in a government culture obsessive about surveillance and now fully infiltrated by Big Tech in the guise of Elon Musk.

Surveillance

There is likely more to Kennedy’s politics than first meets the eye and we can continue to observe. The Trump government certainly has a technological agenda, which reaches all of the way to Israel, and, despite tussles with Musk, the Trump administration continues to “deify” Big Tech as an instrument of American Imperialist domination putting it at the top of the agenda. Since 9/11 and the War on Terror, with the Snowden disclosures following, from the PATRIOT Act, to Facial Recognition Technology (FRTs) rollouts more recently, the US government’s agenda to “dominate” and surveil populations is relentlessly assisted by Big Tech.

Wearables exemplify Big Tech’s desire to make smart technology in various guises addictive and ubiquitous in the extraction of data. With Digital Addiction at an all time high and statesmen siding with Big Tech to promote a society controlled by smart technology from dawn to dusk, there is every indicator that a new Cold War is being waged from inside the White House against citizens who are not onboard with the smart technology agenda, or the political agendas in flow, such as the ICE controversy, which is also bad news for those on the wrong side of the digital divide.

Technological smart surveillance, which wearable technologies promote, is giving governments and corporations unprecedented powers over populations. We are reminded of the wisdom of Edward Thurlow, who said, “Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like.”

Corporations and statesmen alike believe they can support Big Tech and “…therefore do as they like.” This is deeply concerning and surveillance agendas have been called out from within the Big Tech companies by employees over recent years.

“I refuse to build technology that powers genocide, apartheid or surveillance.”
– Google Cloud employee (protesting at Google’s role in Project Nimbus)

Conclusion

Society is becoming very digitally divided. However, we all have an interest in unifying over the issues concerning digitally enabled erosion of privacy and the misuse of data through wearables and other technologies. We must decide what kind of society we are building.

Supporting the proliferation of smart technology is a sure way to entrench surveillance and deter democracy, as well as exacerbate racial discrimination. Is that the future we want?

“Emerging digital technologies driven by big data and artificial intelligence are entrenching racial inequality, discrimination and intolerance.”
– Tendayi Achiume, UN Special Rapporteur on racism

When we are now being told by government officials that biometrics-collecting wearables technology provides an effective means of caring for our health in the 21st century, we have every reason to be cautious. “Racial biases in the science behind wearable tech” can prevent “equitable health care for certain segments of the population“, as wesleyan.edu reports.

Nothing from Big Tech is “neutral”. Digital health is not neutral. Governments are not being transparent on the issues surrounding Digital Health. We should consider the ultimate consequences of adopting wireless smart technology and wearables, which not only enable further technological agendas for control, they also expose us to wireless radiation, can promote digital addiction, and may expose us to considerable data risks and algorithmic biases that are anything but “healthy”.

Wikipedia notes: Sir David Frederick Attenborough born 8 May 1926) is a British broadcaster, biologist, natural historian and writer. First becoming prominent as host of Zoo Quest in 1954, his filmography as a writer, presenter and narrator has spanned eight decades; it includes the nine nature documentary series forming The Life Collection, Natural World, Wildlife on One, the Planet Earth franchise, The Blue Planet and Blue Planet II. He is the only person to have won BAFTA Awards in black-and-white, colour, high-definition, 3D and 4K resolution. Over his life he has collected dozens of honorary degrees and awards, including three Emmy Awards for Outstanding Narration. [] He is widely considered a national treasure in the UK, although he does not embrace the term.^[3][4][5]

Beginning with Life on Earth in 1979, Attenborough set about creating a body of work which became a benchmark of quality in wildlife film-making and influenced a generation of documentary film-makers. The series established many of the hallmarks of the BBC’s natural history output. By treating his subject seriously and researching the latest discoveries, Attenborough and his production team gained the trust of scientists, who responded by allowing him to feature their subjects in his programmes.^[43]

Innovation was another factor in Life on Earth‘s success: new film-making techniques were devised to get the shots Attenborough wanted, with a focus on events and animals that were up till then unfilmed. International air travel enabled the series to be devised so that Attenborough visited several locations around the globe in each episode, sometimes even changing continents in one sequence. Although appearing as the on-screen presenter, he restricted his time on camera to give more time to his subjects.^[44]

Five years after the success of Life on Earth, the BBC released The Living Planet.^[45] This time, Attenborough built his series around the theme of ecology, the adaptations of living things to their environment. [],

Life in the Undergrowth introduced audiences to the world of invertebrates.^{[49] []} At this point, Attenborough realised that he had spent 20 years unconsciously assembling a collection of programmes on all the major groups of terrestrial animals and plants – only reptiles and amphibians were missing. When Life in Cold Blood was broadcast in 2008, he had the satisfaction of completing the set, brought together in a DVD encyclopaedia called Life on Land. He commented: “The evolutionary history is finished. The endeavour is complete. If you’d asked me 20 years ago whether we’d be attempting such a mammoth task, I’d have said ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ These programmes tell a particular story and I’m sure others will come along and tell it much better than I did, but I do hope that if people watch it in 50 years’ time, it will still have something to say about the world we live in. – Wikipedia

The Endangered UK Phone Box

Every Phone Box is a National Treasure! Like You! Please Help Us Protect What is Useful, Precious, Sentimental, Nostalgic, Beautiful, and Irreplicable!

Cherished Landline Phones Also Endangered! On Every Continent! Join Conservation in Action!

A mom in Maine found the perfect alternative to a smartphone for her 10-year-old daughter: a landline. As a mental health provider, she had seen firsthand how social media and screen time were affecting kids’ focus and well-being. She wanted her daughter to have some independence without the stress and pressure that comes with a smartphone. The solution was surprisingly simple and incredibly effective. Soon, other families in the neighborhood joined in, setting up their own landlines. What started as one mom’s creative solution quickly turned into a small movement rooted in connection, nostalgia, and peace of mind.

Instagram Spiritlee on Instagram and Instagram CBS mornings

Read More Here: Why some parents are bringing back the landline and calling it genius | MadeForMums

And Here: Facebook https://www.facebook.com › thevintagenews › photos › a… The Vintage – A mom in Maine found the perfect alternative to a …

Will housing values increase in this Maine community?
We already know so many reasons why they will!

UK: Save our Copper Analogue Landlines Petition:

https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/save-our-landlines-help-us-maintain-full-access

There are hundreds of poignant comments by the signatories.

Telephone Action for Those in the UK!!!

1. Save your Phone Box: Organise a Save/Reinstate Our Phone Box Event and invite the local Press. If there is no Phone Box, demand it back. If it is still there, ensure that the Phone Box is used for the minimum 52 calls per year needed to be kept. If the phone doesn’t work, call BT on 0800345144 (the number is normally on the board next to the phone) and/or email: customer.serv.payphones@bt.com

2. Phone Home: If you are traveling, make a call or two from any phone box you can see!

3. Contact the Media: Contact the Media to express your concern about a Phone Box (or lack of one) near you and/or the general loss of the Phone Box + the phasing out of the analogue copper landline.

4. Contact your MP: If you haven’t done so already, please contact your Political Representative for a visit and request that the Copper Analogue Landline is protected in UK Law. Gladly present the “Save our Copper Analogue Landlines” Petition, which now stands on well over 2:600 signatures: https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/save-our-landlines-help-us-maintain-full-access

Learn More:

Tanja Rebel Talks Wireless Technology and the Necessity for Keeping Copper Wired Analogue Landlines:

The first part (twenty minutes) covers Copper Analogue Landlines, Telephone/Phone Box Action, the recent passing of Arthur Firstenberg and his Legacy, such as Global Radiation Emergency: https://radiationemergency.org/ and his iconic book “The Invisible Rainbow” as well as his last work – updated just before his passing – “The Earth and I.”

The second part (twenty minutes) zooms in on Digital Surveillance (Digital ID, Digital Currency) and the need to act on this, for example by joining/supporting Big Brother Watch: https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/

Here is a Draft Email for you to adapt and use for your MP:

Dear …..

We are writing to request a meeting regarding plans to phase out the analogue copper Landline network which is critical for National security and which urgently needs to be protected in Law.

Our copper analogue landlines are literally Lifelines. They provide a reliable, high quality, secure and affordable voice service, which is essential for the Electro Hyper-sensitive, the elderly, businesses and many others who have chosen not to use Wireless Technology and who do not want an Internet connection.

Dismantling landlines will cost us safety, health as well as jobs and cut off critical emergency communications access to millions of people. Re-investing in our copper telephone landline network will be beneficial for Public Health, Security and Ecology. Copper landlines serve as a necessary, reliable and safe alternative to power-grid dependent, energy-hungry communications systems like VOIP.

During a Power cut, VOIP will not be available which will be a direct danger to life. It will also require the modem to be kept on 24/7 for round the clock access, which will be an energy usurper and hence environmentally detrimental. Mobile back-up systems in their turn are not as secure and they would be harmful to health. Battery back-ups are only temporary (one hour guaranteed) and they are not an option for those suffering from Electrohypersensitivity (EHS).

People with EHS (now also called EMR-Syndrome) are the Canaries in the Coalmine: All Humans are Electrosensitive and there is no longer any question whether wireless Radio Frequency (RF) radiation – used in mobile phone communications and wireless devices – is harmful to Humans and Wildlife. Commonly identified health consequences of short and longer term exposures include insomnia, headaches and fatigue, as well as other serious and life changing ailments.Tens of thousands of scientific papers (linked herein) have cited connections to the role of EMFs in a multitude of adverse health effects, including depression, infertility, cancer, damage to DNA/gene expression, oxidative stress, pregnancy complications, Melatonin production, neurological disorders, immune dysfunction, Alzheimers/dementia, leukaemia, and many, many more.

Over 1,600 scientific papers can be found here: https://www.powerwatch.org.uk/science/studies.aspdarren

Another 4000+ studies can be found here: http://www.bioinitiative.org

And another 23,840 studies are linked here: www.EMF-portal.org

Finally, here is a recent compilation of the vast number of known biological effects from wireless radiation: https://www.5gfrequencyfreefairbanks.org

As this issue is urgent, we kindly ask for an appointment at the earliest available opportunity.

We look forward to your reply,

Yours sincerely,

Name(s)

Address

Telephone number

Postcards are available to send to:

• Peter Kyle at The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology: 100 Parliament Street, London, SW1A 2BQ, United Kingdom and/or an Organisation of your choice.
• A Charity/Organisation of your choice,
• Your MP
• The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology: 100 Parliament Street, London, SW1A 2BQ, United Kingdom
• NB: If your country has already lost the copper analogue landline, change the word “save” to “reinstate.” Remember, wherever you live, please make sure that you sign your cards before sending them –

Best to you all from the Telephone Rebel

Back of postcard reads:

The Copper Analogue Landline is a benign and secure form of communication which needs to be kept.

VOIP and WIFI are not secure. In case of a country-wide Power Cut or Cyber Attack, how will we communicate?

The Copper Analogue Landline urgently needs to be protected in Law as critical infrastructure for National – and International – Security.

People should have the choice whether they want to retain their safe and secure form of communication and should never be forced onto an inferior service.

For more information, kindly see: Save our Phone Boxes and Copper Landlines Public Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1612096892892600

Please share this post very widely! With love!

Snoop Dogg needs no introduction. He is well-known: a worldwide music and culture celebrity, ever exploring new projects and partnerships, and reaching new audiences.

Last year Snoop Dogg joined the television show “The Voice” as a judge. On the show. he projected a spiritual, supportive, collaborative, tender, genuine, family-oriented persona. That is the image he wants the public to “buy”.

The problem is he has become a spokesman for T-Mobile and appears in their television ads. and T-Mobile is selling services and devices that it knows, at a minimum, can cause serious health damage to the users, and may even cause death.

Snoop Dogg did not exercise his due diligence.

T-Mobile has known of the harms for at least 25 years, since 2000, when the company commissioned the ECOLOG Institute in Austria to review the scientific literature on microwave radiation and its biological effects. The public and Snoop Dogg can read what ECOLOG found and reported to T-Mobile here:

https://electromagnetichealth.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/ecolog2000.pdf (86 pages)

T-Mobile’s response to that report? They buried it and continued selling their wireless service and products to the public, including to children, and building their cell towers next to homes, schools, and workplaces. It’s highly profitable, after all, as long as the public buy

Snoop Dogg is their new and very appealing salesman, but he is representing and promoting products which thousands of studies have shown to cause harms ranging from oxidative stress and free radical formation, to cancer and tumors, DNA damage, neurological, reproductive and immune damage, children’s special vulnerability, electromagnetic sensitivity, and devastating impacts to birds, bees, trees, and other wildlife.

His alliance with the wireless industry will most certainly affect his image, his brand, and his credibility, and may even incur liability claims.

Will Snoop Dogg evaluate whether he wishes to associate his brand and himself with this industry? Or will he continue to represent and profit from an industry that uses and abuses people as mere commodities, valuing corporate profit above all else, without regard for the safety of its products and service, without regard for people, their children, or the Earth?

What will Snoop Dogg do?

More information at:

Physicians for Safe Technology www.mdsafetech.org

Electromagnetic Radiation Safety www.SaferEMR.com

Environmental Health Trust www.ehtrust.org

Healthy Tech at Home Project www.healthytechhome.org

Safe Tech International Safe Tech International – Uniting to Protect Life on Earth

Warning: Your Cell Phone May Be Hazardous to Your Health, Christopher Ketcham, GQ, January 25, 2010

https://www.gq.com/story/warning-cell-phone-radiation

State of New Hampshire: Final Report on Commission to Study the Environmental and Health Effects of Evolving 5G Technology

5G final report.pdf

“Increasing incidence of burnout due to magnetic and electromagnetic fields of cell phone networks and other wireless communication technologies” Isabel Wilke, Peter Hensinger

https://www.diagnose-funk.org/download.php?field=filename&id=389&class=DownloadItem

Cellular Telephone Russian Roulette, Robert Kane

https://www.icems.eu/docs/Robert_C_Kane.pdf

Environmental Pollution by Microwave Radiation – A Potential Threat to Human Health, John A. Tanner, Romero-Sierra, Bigu del Blanco, NRC Canada, (National Research Council of Canada), Division of Mechanical Engineering report, 1973

https://smartmeterharm.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/nrc-canada-1973-report.pdf

Bibliography of Reported Biological Phenomena (‘Effects’) and Clinical Manifestations attributed to Microwave and Radio-Frequency Radiation, for Naval Medical Research Institute, Compiled by,Zorach Glaser, 1972

https://www.magdahavas.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Navy_Radiowave_Brief.pdf

Safety of Wireless Technologies: The Scientific View, Richard Lear, Camilla Rees, 2025 –

“Of the 36 chronic diseases and conditions that more than doubled (1990-2015), the U.S. Navy study warned us of the connection between wireless radiation and twenty-three of those chronic diseases, predicting what has indeed happened to the health of Americans…

By ignoring the earlier science, U.S. regulators failed to protect the American people from the dangers of wireless technologies. In doing so, they imposed millions of unnecessary chronic exposure conditions on the American public. By 2015, the 23 diseases the U.S. Navy predicted may have added more than $2 trillion in annual health care costs to the U.S. economy due to their negligence.”

(PDF) Safety of Wireless Technologies: The Scientific View

EUROPAEM EMF Guideline 2016 for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of EMF-related health problems and illnesses.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27454111

How the Impact of Electromagnetic Fields on Plants Can Greatly Increase Severity of and Even Occurrence of “Wildfires”: A Four-Part Structure, Martin Pall

https://juniperpublishers.com/ecoa/pdf/ECOA.MS.ID.555631.pdf

Birds, Bees and Mankind: Destroying Nature by Electrosmog

https://kompetenzinitiative.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/ki_beesbirdsandmankind_screen.pdf

U.S. Department of Interior letter on communication towers impacts to birds, to Dept. of Commerce, 2-7-14

us_doi_comments.pdf

Freiburg Appeal, October 9, 2002

FREIBURGER APPEAL

Santa Clara County Medical Association articles on wireless radiation

Overloading of Towns and Cities with Radio Transmitters (Cellular Transmitter): a hazard for the human health and a disturbance of eco-ethics, Hecht and Savoley IRCHET International Research Centre of Healthy and Ecological Technology, 2007

https://smartmeterharm.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/hecht-overloading-towns.pdf

Bioinitiative Report 2012

BioInitiative Report: A Rationale for a Biologically-based Public Exposure Standard for Electromagnetic Fields (ELF and RF) (updated 2014-2022)

Nina Beety is a researcher, writer, and public speaker on public policy, the environment, and wireless radiation hazards. Her 2012 and 2019 reports for public officials “Smart Meter and Smart Grid Problems: Legislative Solutions” and “Fire and Electrical Hazards from ‘Smart’, Wireless, PLC, and Digital Utility Meters” are on her website www.smartmeterharm.org. She lives in California.

Terraforming isn’t a term that most people are familiar with or even hear about in the course of their day. It has a vaguely environmental or earth-friendly ring to it not unlike the term “permaculture”, and could easily be confused with something falling into that category. But terraforming is anything but.

I’d like to start with a story about what I consider to be a great turning point in the contemporary history of ideas and memes. I’m not a historian nor do I have pretensions to knowing how many times windows into new possibilities for our planetary existence have opened up over the last few hundred years. Maybe a lot, maybe not. But having lived through the fascinating consciousness expansion of the 60s and early 70’s, I can affirm that it was truly a magical time. A wide variety of human possibilities for positive change were being considered though a kind of spiritual and cultural kaleidoscope. These perspectives rejected many commonly held values of so-called establishment thinking and offered a plethora of new ideas for educational reform, urban living, natural health, living off the grid, alternative health, and many other areas.

Many of these ideas, especially those in education I would say, have been consigned to the proverbial dustbin of history and overcome by the cultural amnesia that information overload and our media saturation culture induces. The “movement”, as we called it back then, ended badly of course. In the patterning of the Zeitgeist that followed the 70’s and 80’s, we saw a kind of slamming down of this expanded way of thinking and living, as the inertia of conventional establishment norms re-asserted itself. Nevertheless, many important trends were set in motion even if other possibilities fell by the wayside. These newer trends included but are not limited to women’s rights and rights for people of color among other important social issues. But let me get to my story.

How Environmental Values Got Hijacked

In the early 70’s, a great existential betrayal took place. This is largely an untold story although Eric Utne has touched upon it. Back in the day, a large part of the 60’s transformation movement involved the Whole Earth Catalog initiative headed up by Stewart Brand.  This project was at the epicenter of 60’s expansion that took place in California’s Bay Area.  It was an exciting time. Originally Brand and his group of brilliant thinkers and activists were supportive of the “back to the land” movement, radical environmentalism, and Earth-centric mindsets such as the Gaia Hypothesis. Then came the Great Switcheroo: This “pied piper” steered many activists and alternative thinkers towards a different mindset altogether. (My second book “Digital Mythologies” explores this in detail.)

In the middle of the expansion of the new “Earth First” way of perceiving and thinking, Brand caught the imagination of a large number of consciousness movement followers and advised them that the real work that needed to be done was all about computers. Forget “back to the land” and environmentalism. Forget “natural living” and all that it entailed. One of his associates, John Perry Barlow, a songwriter for the Grateful Dead, bought into this false narrative and promoted it. He called it “The Great Work” and many were swept up into this false narrative.

What Brand and his cohorts did was a kind of existential bait and switch — a kind of Trojan Horse or  values inversion. Eventually Brand went on to associate himself with MIT’s Media Lab and worked for the CIA. Along with his hand-picked editor Kevin Kelly, Brand heavily promoted genetic engineering as the future salvation of our beleaguered planet. Sadly, many in the environment movement bought into the narrative of moving from natural living to living in the technosphere. Brand’s betrayal of the Earth First and environmental movement was that he fully endorsed genetic engineering and genetic modification of nature.

Let’s now fast forward to the present day and a biography of Brand called “Whole Earth” by New York Times technology journalist John Markoff. Last year Markoff was invited to participate in an online public discussion of his book conducted on The WELL, an online forum.  In that forum, as a participant, I took this opportunity to challenge Markoff to be more transparent about several issues he had written about. This included statements that he dodged in the forum about “terraforming the planet” which Brand strongly supported.

Big Tech and Genetic Engineering

At this point, let me explain what terraforming is and is not. Fundamentally genetic engineering is a way of hacking DNA life codes to alter biological life forms, growth, and patterning. It’s a core value of transhumanists such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and other Silicon Valley Big Tech overlords. In a vision of a future that they have unilaterally designed for the rest of us, genetic engineering will be used to modify all aspects of biological existence on Planet Earth including animals, insects, plants, and humans. Designer babies – something decades ago viewed with repugnance and moral horror — has now become a reality.

In 2023, for example, the New Yorker published an astonishing article called “The Future of Fertility.” It laid out how, in the future, corporations may have the opportunity to create and grow human eggs in the laboratory using a process called In-vitro gametogenesis, the next scientific development step after In-vitro fertilization or IVF. It discussed the possibility that human eggs could eventually be generated simply from a blood sample. Such a process would be done as a corporate endeavor and investor capital is already being poured into start-up companies. Speaking to the profit motive, the author casually noted that “analysts valued the global IVF market at more than twenty-three billion dollars.” The article hinted at artificial wombs as a possibility whereby humans would be grown in corporate settings for wealthy patrons who could afford such services.

Terraforming then refers to the biological aspect of the transhumanist movement and technocratic takeover. All biological life on our planet will be targeted for mass experimentation by an Oz-like coterie of elitists with unprecedented power and wealth. With AI, quantum computing, and other technology “magic”, this unprecedented level of control freakishness is deriving real-world power from government support and political involvement. The bottom line is that a handful of transhumanists with obscene levels of wealth and AI-reinforced power are planning to hijack biological life on the planet for purposes of both profit and control. This is something that has been planned and gradually implemented over many decades. For example, in the 60’s, there was research being conducted at MIT on integrating human minds with computers. And here we are.

But let me once again go back to my story. In The WELL’s forum, Brand’s biography was being discussed in a topic open to public comment. I had read in John Markoff’s book that Brand supported terraforming. And yet (curiously) any definition of terraforming was omitted. It was on this point that I wanted to press Markoff to be more transparent. Here’s the exchange:

On page 355, you write about Brand’s interest in terraforming. However, unless I missed it, there’s not a lot ofdiscussion in your book about exactly what his vision ofterraforming would entail other than the statement that we need to‘do it well.’ Can you expand on this a bit? 

Here is what Markoff replied:

On terraforming, I think that Stewart Brand has been pretty consistent on this all the way through. He realized early on thatAmerican Indians saw themselves as stewards of the land they livedon. He had taken the Outdoor Life Pledge and he addressesterraforming specifically in ‘Ecopragmatist Manifesto.’ On Page 19 heargues that we have been terraforming ‘inadvertently’ for tenmillennia, but that it has been unintentional. His ‘We Are As Gods’point is that we should get good at it. 

Notice that Markoff has suggested that wholesale biological interference with natural processes resembles something that has been going on for millennia, an apparent deflection. What is he trying to hide? Markoff also throws the reader off course by further deflecting the discussion of terraforming and conflating it with a vague and unexplained reference to indigenous peoples. This is, of course, absurd on its face. Wishing to press Markoff further on being elusive both in the book and in this public event I then asked him:

Would it be fair to say that Brand’s vision of terraforming includes large-scale genetic modification of plant and animal species?

Markoff replied:

He would probably quibble with the phrase ‘large scale,’perhaps ‘’targeted’ would be more appropriate. If you look at aspecies that is either extinct or endangered as is the case forRevive & Restore, I imagine you could make the case for ‘largeScale’ even when only a handful of creatures remain. 

Another deflection. Stewart Brand has advocated for using genetic engineering to bring back various species including the wooly mammoth, a real-life replay of the movie “Jurassic Park”.  He is famous for the clearly transhumanist motto of the Whole Earth Catalog which asserts “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”

Here I should probably mention that Brand’s protégé Kevin Kelly went on to become the first editor of Wired magazine, the very well-known publication for pushing and popularizing technocratic and transhumanist values. A subsequent editor of Wired magazine was Nicholas Thompson, who is now CEO of the Atlantic monthly organization and a key participant in the annual Davos event sponsored by the World Economic Forum. Funny how that works — a 360 degree pivot. Thanks to Brand, Kelly, and Wired magazine, many of the supposed rebels, activists, and free thinkers from the 60’s environmental movement have now become pillars of the corporate Big Tech establishment. And just as curiously, in the scheme of things, it didn’t take very long for that to happen.

***

Tom Valovic is a writer, researcher, and futurist. He is the author of Digital Mythologies (Rutgers University Press), a series of essays that explored emerging social, cultural, and political issues associated with the advent of the Internet and technocracy.  Tom has been involved in EMF safety advocacy with a number of groups since 2015. He can be reached at jazzbird@outlook.com.