Virtual life in the future MatrixJon Rappoport But it barely scratches the surface of the potential of the technology. The addiction of the viewer is a mere shadow of what it will be when he can live, for an hour a day, inside the news, selectively inhabit the environments, and experience what a non-human simulated anchor knows. That will no longer be television. It will be a full-on tactile ride in the river. The pixels of the virtual anchor will be built from the ground up, imbued with an inner sense of utter conviction, just as the perfect android is programmed to believe in the psyop called reality. Viewers will feel all the artificial emotions of this anchor, as they experience what he synthetically experiences. What about rebellion against the Virtual? Lets start here. The lid on rebellion is sealed through the distribution of pleasure. Force works, but in the long run pleasure is the greater method of control. Science fiction novels describe futures in which citizens access virtual experience to an extraordinary degree. The video games and holograms of today are stone wheels bumping along a dirt road by contrast. You want to be a star among star athletes? You can inhabit the mind and body of one. You can play the game as he does. You can live inside his body. You can feel what he feels, move as he moves, catch the overdrive of his extra reserve of adrenaline. You want to struggle to the top of Mt. Everest? Youre plugged in. Youre there in the cutting wind and snow, you feel the oxygen running out, hear the ice cracking, strain to peer through the fog, inch your way forward with every quantum of effort a human can musterand finallyyou arrive in triumph. Youre there, at the roof of the world. While youre in your crackerbox apartment. You want to sit in a richly embroidered carriage, as slaves carry you through the cacophonic sights, sounds, and smells of a crowded marketplace in Bombay, all the way to an emerald palace, where you suddenly find yourself in the dim high-ceilinged bedroom of the most famous and beautiful creature on Earth Pleasure. A million different ways. Todays technocrats strive and search to build the ultimate immersion event. Living in a time when this is possible, the overwhelming number of people will opt for pleasure, regardless of what happening in the outside world, regardless of who is running the world or how. Because they believe they are on this earth to choose pleasure over pain. Thats the pragmatic goal. Everything else is secondary. Theyll no longer need to imagine the life they want. They can choose from a full deck of virtual threads and live this one or that one in the blink of a connection. The actual planet and what it offers will become merely the default interlude between expertly simulated excursions. Eventually, some people will be able to enter these holo-experiences in a boiled down fashion. Theyll bathe in a ten-second trailer and absorb all the sensation and feeling in a flash. When they come back, they may not remember what took place, but theyll still bask in the afterglow. No thought required. Pleasure wins over pain. Thats how the formula will be presented to the mind. Choose one or the other. Nothing else exists. No principles, no basic freedoms. The familiar scene in a thousand TV shows and movies, where the suspect is arrested, and then the cops offer him an immunity deal to roll over on his bosses? On the level of the nervous system, this is the deal that is struck: Gain immunity from pain and confusion by the simple act of rolling over on yourself and choosing pleasure as your single ambition. This is what Pavlov was after in his experiments. The conditioned-reflex human. The missing piece he needed was the humans assent to a meal of pleasure as his sole and overwhelming choice. After that, everything follows. In his masterful 1986 novel, Count Zero, William Gibson describes an immersion in virtual life: And here is a brief exchange from Aldous Huxleys 1932 novel, Brave New World: The joys of endless shopping, buying, and consuming are merely an introduction to a far more extensive pleasure dome of the future, in which the notion that there is anything else becomes absurd. From an unfinished novel of mine, The Magician Awakes, here is a State medical doctor instructing his patient: The dynamics of mind control in a pleasure-oriented society are built on channeling pleasure and making it more absorbing. The shrinkage, as mentioned above, doesnt have to be radical because people have already brought it on themselves. Theyve glued themselves solidly to the five senses. Past and present US military experiments, using electromagnetic stimulation, to create soldiers who can function at high levels over an extended period on very little sleep, are just the rough beginnings of a technology that will be applied to civilian life. What is the best antidote to the addiction to virtual experience? The designers of the dystopian future are enlisting a small fragment of a human beings imagination to put him in an externally fashioned simulation. Give us just a bit of your imagination, and well do the rest for you. Whats called the suspension of disbelief in the theater is an imaginative act on the part of the audience: Yes, whats on the stage is real. Yes, Im here and Im involved. This is a clue to the titanic force that inherently exists in every human. Already, in 2013, we see it massively sacrificed on the altar of entertainment. They give us drama and we buy it. As opposed to inventing realities ourselves, full-bore. Imagination creates reality. The only question is: whose? Reality in modern civilization is a straight psyop. It surrounds us, even though the technology, by future standards, is primitive. The hook has been sunk; it needs to be removed. The psyop says: Experience THIS; feel it; then ask yourself whether you have the power to invent a more convincing world; the answer is no, isnt it; so just sit back, relax, and take it all in; you cant approach what we can do for you. The stakes are high. If you believe you cant exceed the power of the Reality Manufacturing Company, if you keep postponing the day when you become the artist beyond and against the System, then youre already prepped for the simulacra of the virtual future. The world is largely populated by the IS PEOPLE. These are the humans who accept and surrender, on many levels, to what already exists, without realizing that it comes to them as a package. Here is the conclusion to the above section of The Magician Awakes: Jon Rappoport is the author of two explosive collections, The Matrix Revealed and Exit From the Matrix, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com 