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...had a moment from your past, long lost to memory, which came back to bring you clarity? I had someone special long, long ago. I didn’t quite understand what inspired him to be the image he portrayed, the research which created CDs of obscure music which he used for poetry to describe his dreams. I didn’t understand the importance of a certain book, the jacket, the colors, the shoes, the hair, the attitude. His preconceived notions were rhymes of spoken word truths, professing love like the Earth to the Moon.

“She Moves on to Forget”. 

“Will she ever know?”

“Will she ever read these words?”

The Old Shoe Does Not Forget. One minute heaven and another hell, we were two lost souls in an abyss of hurt. Deep wounds from the place we called home.

You see it was all about living the dream, making it out, setting ourselves free. We were not right for each other but we were together, alone on a one ticket due North.

“Once Again I Ask You, Will You Walk With Me”. A journal collecting the memories of my life, reminders of where I have been and who I used to be.

The school of life is more than white privilege can teach, more than the ego enslaved in a bubble of the few preaching to the same choir. It must get lonely. It does get lonely. Souls Sold. Stories Untold.

I remember the clothes, the car, the parties, the world that seemed small when traveling to far away places, only to keep running into the same people. I remember the level of control: being told who to be, what to love, who to befriend, when to speak. Appearing to be in Control. Money, funny how it destroys things. Unafraid of the world because they have never really been in it long enough to see the other faces. Not knowing what it feels like to have brown or black skinned, living in a reservation, or risking your life for the promise of the American Dream.

I remember the hypocrisy of success. The “opportunities” which created fame but added more empty time on an empty dollar. Smile. Wave. Pretend but keep dancing the hustle because no one knows you have to find some way to pay rent and just keep moving forward. 

The herd keeps walking with an empty gaze, looking down, never questioning. Unaware. Asleep.

Down the Rabbit Hole we go. 

Back on June 1st of 2015, the reputable IEEE published an article titled “Medical Microbots Take a Fantastic Voyage Into Reality”. This was the year after I had read about the Max Planck “micro scallops” and wondered what it would take to get critical mass implanted with these micro robots (and future nano bots). 

In referencing the article’s approach of having a Doctor implant hundreds or  thousands of “micro grippers” (developed by Johns Hopkins) into the human body to perform a biopsy, the natural progression of questioning its capabilities led me to ask if they can also be used to implant micro or nano chips into the body”?

What would be the purpose of this on the grand scale of humanity? Beyond medical applications of implanted technology (such as heart monitors) that can already be hacked, what if the ultimate goal was behavior modification of the masses? We know that this is possible based on previous lab tests on mice, but could it work on humans? 

I often wonder if US Patent #US6754472B1 filed by Microsoft was designed for more than just systems integration between wearable and implantable IoT technologies. (Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6754472B1/en)

"...a body of a living creature for coupling the first device to the second device and for conducting the electrical signal from the first device to the second device and the initialization information from the second device to the first device, wherein the first and second devices establish a master and a slave relationship there between."  Makes one think of the #Matrix and  #HumanBatteries 

On April 10th 2020, China’s CCTV went live with Bill Gates and made the following comment:

“You are being attacked in the U.S., they say the #CoronaVirus originated from the process of vaccine development under your supervision. What is your take on this Bill Gates conspiracy”?  

His response begins with: “I say it’s ironic, if you take somebody that is doing their best to get the world ready...”

I will tell you what is TRULY IRONIC! How about that “Event 201″ that took place on October 2019, TWO MONTHS before the COVID19 Pandemic began and was hosted  by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  Source: https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/about

About the Event 201 exercise

Event 201 was a 3.5-hour pandemic tabletop exercise that simulated a series of dramatic, scenario-based facilitated discussions, confronting difficult, true-to-life dilemmas associated with response to a hypothetical, but scientifically plausible, pandemic. 15 global business, government, and public health leaders were players in the simulation exercise that highlighted unresolved real-world policy and economic issues that could be solved with sufficient political will, financial investment, and attention now and in the future.

The exercise consisted of pre-recorded news broadcasts, live “staff” briefings, and moderated discussions on specific topics. These issues were carefully designed in a compelling narrative that educated the participants and the audience.

The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, World Economic Forum, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation jointly propose these recommendations.

Purpose

In recent years, the world has seen a growing number of epidemic events, amounting to approximately 200 events annually. These events are increasing, and they are disruptive to health, economies, and society. Managing these events already strains global capacity, even absent a pandemic threat. Experts agree that it is only a matter of time before one of these epidemics becomes global—a pandemic with potentially catastrophic consequences. A severe pandemic, which becomes “Event 201,” would require reliable cooperation among several industries, national governments, and key international institutions.

Recent economic studies show that pandemics will be the cause of an average annual economic loss of 0.7% of global GDP—or $570 billion. The players’ responses to the scenario illuminated the need for cooperation among industry, national governments, key international institutions, and civil society, to avoid the catastrophic consequences that could arise from a large-scale pandemic.

Similar to the Center’s 3 previous exercises—Clade X, Dark Winter, and Atlantic Storm—Event 201 aimed to educate senior leaders at the highest level of US and international governments and leaders in global industries.

It is also a tool to inform members of the policy and preparedness communities and the general public. This is distinct from many other forms of simulation exercises that test protocols or technical policies of a specific organization. Exercises similar to Event 201 are a particularly effective way to help policymakers gain a fuller understanding of the urgent challenges they could face in a dynamic, real-world crisis.

Recommendations

The next severe pandemic will not only cause great illness and loss of life but could also trigger major cascading economic and societal consequences that could contribute greatly to global impact and suffering. The Event 201 pandemic exercise, conducted on October 18, 2019, vividly demonstrated a number of these important gaps in pandemic preparedness as well as some of the elements of the solutions between the public and private sectors that will be needed to fill them. The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, World Economic Forum, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation jointly propose these recommendations.

When/where

Friday, October 18, 2019 8:45 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. The Pierre hotel New York, NY

Audience

An invitation-only audience of nearly 130 people attended the exercises, and a livestream of the event was available to everyone. Video coverage is available here.

Exercise team

Eric Toner, MD, is the exercise team lead from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Crystal Watson, DrPH, MPH and Tara Kirk Sell, PhD, MA are co-leads from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Ryan Morhard, JD, is the exercise lead from the World Economic Forum, and Jeffrey French is the exercise lead for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Exercise team members are Tom Inglesby, MD; Anita Cicero, JD; Randy Larsen, USAF (retired); Caitlin Rivers, PhD, MPH; Diane Meyer, RN, MPH; Matthew Shearer, MPH; Matthew Watson; Richard Bruns, PhD; Jackie Fox; Andrea Lapp; Margaret Miller; Carol Miller; and Julia Cizek.

Event 201 was supported by funding from the Open Philanthropy Project.

###

Then five months later (March 2020), in the midst of the CoronaVirus epidemic being declared a global pandemic, this news breaks from LinkedIn (Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/13/bill-gates-leaves-microsoft-board.html):

“Microsoft announced on Friday that Bill Gates is leaving the board, effective Friday. “I have made the decision to step down from both of the public boards on which I serve – Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway – to dedicate more time to philanthropic priorities including global health and development, education, and my increasing engagement in tackling climate change”.

Basically, the “pandemic scenario” of Event 201 became a reality. Bill Gates leaves Microsoft to focus full time on his Foundation, which coincidentially had been funding coronavirus research and has now been revealed to be the second largest funder to the World Health Organization (WHO), coincidentally, (yet again) in charge of coming up with the vaccine for COVID19. Who profits from the pandemic under this scenario? Bingo! Just look at the history of Microsoft and how Bill Gates became a billionaire. It was not by playing nice and more like a chapter from of the Art of War.

Yet the disbelief doesn't stop there. How about that #ID2020 and what Bill Gates calls for in a "national tracking system similar to South Korea, saying that "in Seattle, the [University of Washington] is providing thousands of tests per day but no one is connected to a national tracking system" and that "Whenever there is a positive test it should be seen to understand where the disease is and whether we need to strengthen the social distancing." (Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2020/03/18/bill-gates-calls-for-national-tracking-system-for-coronavirus-during-reddit-ama/#36c92b5e6a72)

Could this ID2020 be implanted? Would that benefit Microsoft’s U.S. patent #US6754472B1?

The United Nations seems to think there are significant risks associated with a digital identity roll-out, such as: “Digital identity carries significant risk if not thoughtfully designed and carefully implemented. We do not underestimate the risks of data misuse and abuse, particularly when digital identity systems are designed as large, centralized databases”. (Source: https://id2020.org/manifesto)

All in all, I would say that the sense of irony expressed by Bill Gates on the #CCTV interview, is a two-way street as #WeThePeople of the United States have more time to research in self isolation and petition the White House to investigate Bill Gates.

Who gets to play God in this time? Event 201 was a game of playing God to develop depopulation strategies for a Human Disruption. While the intent might have found a root cause in the question of how to survive Climate Change, why is the survival and evolution of the human species primarily in the hands of Bill Gates?

If human overpopulation is such an issue, why isn’t Euthanasia legal for humans everywhere? Think about it, how many people suffering from old age, disease, poverty, and extreme suffering would opt for dying quickly and peacefully. Why choose for others and take away someone’s power over their own body and existence? 

My advice: find out what magnets are needed to remove grippers, buy them and start developing methods for removing micro and nano bots from the body.  Also help to promote active voluntuary euthanasia around the world before pushing for legislation to place technology into the bodies of millions of people against their will.

1) Find out what magnets are used to get “grippers” out of the body.

2) Buy these magnets soon.

3) Start ideating on how to move and shift grippers and other such nano bots from different places in the body to a location where they can be expelled and/or removed. 

4) If they can remove, they can also implant.

5) Bring one of these removal devices to me. I think I might have had a micro scallop implanted at Singularity U. Not cool, but more about this on “Chapter 2″ of my upcoming story.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/medical-robots/medical-microbots-take-a-fantastic-voyage-into-reality

This was 2015. Imagine now!

Humans have a tremendous capacity for Altruism and Cooperation. We need to invoke that capacity to co-create a New Earth! 

Today I am opting to stay away from my Dark Knight stories. It is bad enough as it is with COVID19 impacting every story around us - from an underground war, to saving trafficked children under Central Park, to make-shift burial grounds due to the number of bodies stockpiling in New York, to the crazy train conductor who ran the train off the tracks at the L.A. Port to supposedly hit a Navy Hospital, to the Bill Gates conspiracy theory that this is all happening for human depopulation and future vaccines that will control our minds. Honestly, don’t we all need something positive to focus on instead?

Despair is the state we fall into when out imaginations fail. For this writing exercise I am just going to flow on a positive futurist projection.

Let’s say Earth wins. The unexpected curveball that no human with extreme power accounted for. It is the moment when Earth fights back, and not in the way we thought Climate Change would wipe us out with stronger hurricanes, rising ocean levels, destabilization of the planet’s magnetic field...but rather, in a war with the invisible. If Earth wins, animals make a come back, those that were endangered get a break and reproduce, habitats heal, air heals, water heals, even human survivors heal from the mass enslavement of the mind that used to be their reality and separated them from the true purpose of being alive.

Life slows down, and it feels good. No more rat race. No more working a routine as if we were robots. No more spending more time with co-workers than with our own families. No more brain fog because of exhaustion from waking up at 4:30am in the morning to sit in front of a computer all day, only to be exhausted at the end of the day from sitting so much, mentally drained and uninspired to think about anything beyond the next day. 

We ask ourselves why this feels good, why there is more time to love, walk, see the sky, hear the birds, connect with nature, read books, work on house projects we had left pending for weeks, months or even years. We look in the mirror and begin to recognize the human face behind the old sludge melting off, smiling and feeling liberated.

We drop the fear of not having enough, of not having a job, of living for an unknown tomorrow...and adopt the fact that we have more than enough, that we can grow our own food, revert to a trade and gifting economy, adapt to a new way of existing that includes working with immediate community.

The children being born now will not remember the world we are trying to hold on to. They wont remember the politics, the greed, the destruction of habitat, the Earth fighting back. They will see an old world in ruins and a New Earth flourishing, with elders shaken up by the extent of what happened, and a shift of consciousness towards equality, collaboration, altruism and contribution because there is no more Entitled Thinking left at the end of the pandemic. Only 5%-10% of humanity will survive and that will be enough to drop us to our knees in gratitude that we are still alive. It will be the wake up call to help us understand that we are part of that delicate balance and system which sustains our lives and ALL LIFE on the planet.

I have some ideas about the Future, post-pandemic, which keep me up at night. They have to do with biological warfare for population control, nano-RFID’s implanted into critical mass via a vaccine, and Morpheus coming to a brain near you via 5G. Are you ready to go down the rabbit hole? 

Welcome to my next mind dump - Chapter 1. Back in 2010 when I hacked the Musion Holographic Stage and teleported Second Life Avatars to the real world (they appeared on-stage as life-size holograms), I was already being contacted by certain people sending me their research papers and asking for my insights.

Let’s just say that prior to going to SU at NASA, I had read a paper published in 2009 that had to do with RFID human implants. Why was I into researching this technology? Well, my friend “F” confessed to me that he had been “chipped”. He showed me the place on the upper part of his arm and asked me to “feel it”. I pressed my fingers down on his skin and could feel something hard, then I traced the rectangular outline of the chip by feeling around it, eventually using my thumb and pointer finger to grab it and move it from side to side. 

Needless to say, I was shocked but not surprised. Prior to my friend getting chipped, he had a completely different personality. I should know, we used to hang out all of the time. Then he left to Florida to work on a project with a Doctor who then convinced him to get chipped, and when he came back he was a different person. How so, you ask? In two instances during road trips and with different groups of friends, “F” would wake up in the middle of night in trance, speaking some weird language that no one recognized, and would then jump up and look at us, but did not see us. It was almost as if he was looking through us. He did not respond to our questions either, but was fully awake with eyes wide open. He would then would run to the window and look out in a paranoid manner saying out loud that aliens were coming! Imagine having to explain that to him the next morning when he had no recollection of what happened. I red pilled on the subject trying to understand how someone could have changed so much. Other friends noticed it too and there was no explanation outside of the breadcrumbs “F” would drop on me in his few moments of clarity. He asked me to research the future RFID chips, not the ones the size of a grain of sand, but the Nano chips that could travel to the brain. 

A few conversations later with some military and Raytheon types who admired my avatar and holography work (one said it was “cute” that I made art with a laser they used as a weapon in his industry),  a research paper made its way into my inbox that shed some light on what was to come. In a nutshell, a certain lab managed to successfully implant mice and achieve behavior modification through hacking the implant.

Fast forward to SU at NASA in 2011. The head of the security team took a special interest in me and began to share case scenarios for me to “review” in my free time. They had to do with future crimes in the virtual world, “aka” cybercrimes that involved real money laundering using multiplayer virtual worlds and virtual currencies. The cherry on top of the cake was reviewing the case scenario for a virtual pandemic that could potentially spread from the virtual world into RFID human implants. Coincidence? 

At one point I was offered a job in D.C. if I decided to stay with the Security team. I did not, mostly because after a conversation with my buddy, who then worked with the NSA, I was told to be careful because the people I would be researching were “people who could track me down and do something bad to my family”. Maybe if I had been single, with no family and a recluse...alas, that was not my path.

What did stay on my mind and continues to bake my noodle is the question of how to microchip critical mass? It’s not like millions of people would want to WILLINGLY be chipped, for many reasons ranging from religious beliefs (the mark of the beast), to privacy issues (not everyone wants to be tracked 24/7), to potential security issues pertaining to chips being hacked. As it is now, people with heart implants are at risk because their monitors can be hacked. If someone wants you dead, and you have an implant, it is NOT GOOD.

So let me ask you, in a pandemic scenario, would millions of people run to get vaccinated? If implants were included in the vaccine and there absolutely had to be a disclosure about that, would ID2020 (microchips for a cashless society) be a factor in pushing legislation to make implants mandatory?

I do not agree with all views expressed in this video, but after what I experienced and just wrote about, the following does make you think...more so because it was published only 3 days ago! To put it into perspective, the story above took place 11 years ago.

https://youtu.be/QRYByDGaur8

Again, this is a mind dump. I don’t have time to spell check or edit, so spare me the comments on that. 

Coming for Chapter 2 is the story of the eye implants that enter the body through the mucus membranes of your eyes and my eye incident at NASA. Stay tuned!

Hello everyone out there! I am back! I know, it has been years and much has happened since. You’re probably curious as to what happened, in a way, me too. Sometimes writing things out helps us remember where we have been in order to know where we are going.

First of all, I came out of my cave for the first time because we are living in extraordinary times. A global pandemic with the COVID19 virus that is killing thousands of people, potentially millions within a few months if it cannot be controlled (as it seem to be the case). 

My mind drifts back to those days at Singularity University and Ray Kurzweil talking about the Singularity timeline, the 2045 Initiative starting soon after with their infamous “Open Letter to the United Nations”. I can’t believe the Dalai Lama jumped on-board, but more importantly, Ray signed it under his new role of Director of Engineering for Google! I was not surprised to see Google’s historical data of company acquisitions (one per week) starting 2012. It was epic to see Google give birth to Alphabet, acquiring and creating the tools it needed to build the Singularity. Yet it was still missing the magic sauce, the 5G network and DWave to make computational astrophysics a seamless integration of information spaces. 

There was also the underlying concern of the acquisition of Boston Dynamics and their military dog robots, which created an eerie sense of Terminator meets an apocalyptic future of hunting down “chipped” humans. Boston Dynamics has since been sold by Alphabet, and humanoid A.I. robots like Sophia were created, showcased around the world like a weird circus freak show, and then decommissioned because of their lack of empathy. Go figure, their vision of the future does not include humans.

Fast forward to mid 2012, I tore my achilles tendon which ended my days of glory in the tech world. At that point I was told that my blog was quite popular with Google employees, which came as a total shock because I thought no one read my blog. I had been writing and posting for myself, perhaps as a means to track my own personal leyend and remind myself of what I have achieved and accomplished in the times when I felt down, sad, depressed or like I hadn’t achieved anything with life. No I am not damaged goods, have never been on meds, but I have experienced (like most) challenges, gender discrimination, trauma stemming from being raped...but this writing is not about that, there will be other posts to address those topics at a later date. 

What this IS about is that long journey out of the hole I ended up in, 8 months to completely heal from the injury and be able to walk normally again. Being bed-ridden for weeks, then a wheelchair for months until I could handle crutches with excruciating pain. Trust me, anyone would feel like giving up during such a slow recovery. At the time we were living far from the city and my husband had to go to work, which meant I was alone most of the day and in bed unable to move. Amazing to see so many people on social media complaining about their “Self isolation” during the COVID19 pandemic, they have it easy compared to what I went through. Nevertheless, time went by and I came to realize I had to stop spending my day on social media trying to save what was left of my business contacts and network. No one was going to hire me anytime soon in a world that required hitting the ground running every day, travel, presentations, summits, face to face meetings, and physical production to stay relevant with the people that truly matter. The tech world sold the idea of remote work through telepresence, holographic displays, tele-conferencing, etc., but the reality was that it was not massively adopted or utilized for part-time or full-time distance-employment.

What I did manage to do during these hard times was vow to learn something new every day. So I went on an exploration of YouTube videos and open source tools, which taught be how to edit videos, create websites, get started on bitcoin and blockchain foundations, and then learn to use multiple audio and visualization platforms for Transmedia. I then took a deep dive into multiplayer gaming, and not just as an Avatar-user roaming the virtual creations of others, but as a builder of simulations. By the time I was done with my healing journey, my Avatar had gained more notoriety than my real life persona. I was co-producing virtual art experiences, like a concert inside of a Volcano, gallery openings and plays and then live-streaming to the real world. My Avatar was making virtual money as my real self was on unemployment.

Eventually, my family felt sorry for me so they hired me to manage the company finances. My parents and grandmother had been to the hospital within weeks of each other, so I felt the need to contribute and help out with their legacy as well. It was a decent exchange, for about a year, but as the saying goes “it’s not a good idea to do business with family”. I had completely given up my dream and was now living a reality of something that wasn’t my passion, only to realize I had dug myself in a deeper hole. I should have left sooner, but my sense of responsibility and “ I got this” blurred the way back to my life in Tech. Eventually when I did leave, it was hard to find work as most employers were not open to the value of being employed by the family business where I had a posh position that paid well. 

“Why did you leave”, is all I kept being asked.

What was I supposed to answer? Tell the truth about wanting to stand on my own two feet, not have to go into meetings where people kissed my ass because I was the daughter of the owners of the company. The employees did not value the work that I did or felt I deserved the title or position, and they were right. I could have been a hypocrite and ride that nepotism until the fat lady sings, but it is not right or optimal for the better good of the company.

I would opt to answer the “why did you leave” question with the general answer of  “I wanted to move toward a better opportunity”. Unfortunately most of the hiring managers I encountered didn’t consider their company or work as “a better opportunity”. It reminded me of the time at Burning Man in 2007 when I worked as a lead coordinator of Entheon Village, worked all week during the worst dust storms and winds, only to leave at night on break to “see the city” and “find the cool things to do” and have everyone I met tell me they were going to Entheon. Surely there must be other options.

Flash forward, I obviously had to recreate myself, start from zero and build from the ground up. It was no easy task! I had to swallow my pride and understand that if I had achieved great things before, I could do it again. 

Eventually I ended up going back to my roots of what inspired me about the Future in the first place. Guess where I landed? I closed my eyes and found myself in front of Ray Kurzweil again, talking about the Singularity and challenging us to positively impact 1 billion people in the next 10 years. I opened my eyes, looked at the calendar, how much time did I have to make that happen? Approximately 1 year and 8 months. Was I in a position to go for it? Yes, I had managed to get my foot in the door at a Fortune 300 that provides global food supply to over 100 countries. So what did I do? I applied to Harvard (HBS) and pitched the most batshit crazy personal statement imaginable, mentioned the goal of positively impacting 1 billion people by May 2021, and added the cherry on top of the cake by mentioning a disruption in 2020 that could potentially disrupt humanity, permanently. 

The result was an acceptance letter into the Harvard Business Analytics with Artificial Intelligence program AND a partial scholarship, the VP of Analytics for the Fortune 300 I work for agreeing to supply me with company data to build my case scenarios, Ethics and Compliance agreeing to back me legally with NDA’s to Harvard (after making me sign on the dotted line about “Safeguarding Company Information”). One month after this happened, the Coronavirus hit Wuhan, then spread to China, then became a global pandemic. Prophetic timing? 

I have some ideas about the Future, post-pandemic, which keep me up at night. They have to do with biological warfare for population control, nano-RFID’s implanted into critical mass via a vaccine, and Morpheus coming to a brain near you via 5G. Are you ready to go down the rabbit hole? Stay tuned for my next mind dump.

Disclosure: I am mind dumping right now, so yes, there will be spelling and grammatical mistakes. Remember, I am writing for me, not because I think anyone out there is following or reading this. However, if any Hollywood types want to use my Mind Dumps to pitch movie or Netflix ideas, include me in as a writer. Don’t just hijack my life and expect me not to find out. We live in a time of technology where you can’t get away with that anymore.

That is awesome! Sorry I have been missing in action for so long. I will write about it starting today.

By NICK BILTONFEB. 4, 2015

This is a story that involves lots of public intrigue, a futuristic wearable technology, a secret laboratory, fashion models, sky divers and an interoffice love triangle that ended a billionaire’s marriage. This is the story of Google Glass.

Before we begin, this is the part in the tale where I should probably explain what Google Glass is. Except, I don’t have to. Google Glass didn’t just trickle out into the world. Instead, it exploded with the kind of fuss and pageantry usually reserved for an Apple iSomething.

From its unveiling in 2012, it was considered the Gadget, yearned after by everyone from nerds and chief executives, to chefs and fashionistas. It was the must-have toy that was going to set the gold standard for a new class of wearable computers.

Time Magazine named it one of the “Best Inventions of the Year.” It got its own 12-page spread in Vogue magazine. “The Simpsons” devoted a show to Google Glass, though Homer called them “Oogle Goggles.” Glass did the rounds on the morning and evening shows, and it was the subject of numerous comedy skits including on “Saturday Night Live,” “The Colbert Report” and countless YouTube videos. Presidents from around the globe tested them. Prince Charles wore a pair. As did Oprah, Beyoncé, Jennifer Lawrence and Bill Murray.

There was also the moment at New York Fashion Week in 2012, when Diane von Furstenberg sported a red pair, and sent her models down the runway with different-colored ones. Later, in a slickly produced video, Ms. von Furstenberg (wearing a new pair produced by DVF | Made for Glass) told Isabelle Olsson, a Google designer, “We revealed Google Glass to the world.”

And in another sign of its cultural import, The New Yorker ran a 5,000-word feature on what it was like to wear the novel device, written by a so-called Google Glass Explorer invited by Google to test the product. Here, Gary Shteyngart comically recounts an impromptu product demonstration he gave on the 6 train. “Are those them?” one businessman asked him. “That is so dope,” a college student says. “You’re lucky.”

But perhaps the biggest splash took place last week when, out of nowhere, Google announced that Glass, as we know it, was going away.

Poof! Gone. All that fanfare for nothing.

According to a half-dozen current and former Google employees who were involved with Google Glass, this wasn’t how the story was supposed to end. But the introduction of Glass — and the hoopla that accompanied it — was also not how the story was supposed to begin, either.

To understand what went wrong, we need to travel back a few years to Mountain View, Calif., deep inside the sleek offices of Google. There, amid the colorful campus logos and swaying sycamore trees, the company’s founders and a handful of trusted executives came up with a list of 100 futuristic ideas.

These included indoor GPS and a project called the Google Brain. But the excitement was reserved for a new genre of wearable computers that could be attached to skin or, possibly, worn like glasses.

By late 2009, Eric Schmidt, then Google’s chief executive, approached Sebastian Thrun, a genius jack-of-many-trades researcher at Stanford University, and recruited him to build out these ideas. Mr. Thrun, instructed to come up with a cool name, temporarily called the lab “Google X,” hoping to choose something better later.

According to several Google staff members who worked on the early stages of the X project (all of whom would discuss the project only with the promise of anonymity, either because they continued to work for the company or because they still had business relationships with it), the lab soon found a covert home on the Google Campus, taking over the second floor of a nondescript building at 1489 Charleston Avenue. There, the lab’s first project was born: a sort of virtual-reality-type thing that would later become known as Google Glass.

Mr. Thrun recruited a slew of rock-star scientists and researchers to work on Glass, including Astro Teller and Babak Parviz, both at the forefront of wearable computing, and Ms. Olsson, the designer. Before long, Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, joined to help run X.

It’s important to note two things about Mr. Brin here. At the time, he was married to Anne Wojcicki, a genetic-testing entrepreneur and the mother of their two children. Second, he had a reputation at Google for having what has been widely quoted as “project attention deficit disorder,” becoming obsessed with one project and then sauntering off to the next. (Mr. Brin declined to comment for this article.)

With Mr. Brin and Mr. Thrun at the helm, Google X and the glasses project managed to stay under wraps for more than a year. “Everyday Google employees would walk by and have no idea what was going on inside X,” one Google X employee said.

That was, until 2011 when my colleague Claire Cain Miller and I broke the news about the secret Google X Lab, which detailed some of the projects in the works at X.

At the time, unknown to anyone outside X, an impassioned split was forming between X engineers about the most basic functions of Google Glass. One faction argued that it should be worn all day, like a “fashionable device,” while others thought it should be worn only for specific utilitarian functions. Still, nearly everyone at X was in agreement that the current prototype was just that: a prototype, with major kinks to be worked out.

There was one notable dissenter. Mr. Brin knew Google Glass wasn’t a finished product and that it needed work, but he wanted that to take place in public, not in a top-secret lab. Mr. Brin argued that X should release Glass to consumers and use their feedback to iterate and improve the design.

To reinforce that Glass was a work in progress, Google decided not to sell the first version in retail stores, but instead limit it to Glass Explorers, a select group of geeks and journalists who paid $1,500 for the privilege of being an early adopter.

The strategy backfired. The exclusivity added to the intense interest, with media outlets clamoring for their own piece of the story. As public excitement detonated, Google not only fanned the flames, but doused them with jet fuel.

“The team within Google X knew the product wasn’t even close to ready for prime time,” a former Google employee said. The Google marketing team and Mr. Brin had other plans.

At a Google developers conference in June 2012, for example, Glass-wearing sky divers landed on top of the auditorium, raced across the roof on bikes and into the conference hall to thunderous applause. (I was there and it was unlike any demo I had ever seen.) Mr. Brin seemed to revel in the attention and was labeled a real-life Tony Stark, from the Iron Man comics. Later that year, Mr. Brin would sit front row at Ms. von Furstenberg’s show, proudly accessorized with a pair of Glass.

This wasn’t how Glass was supposed to be introduced. This wasn’t the quiet experiment that Google X engineers had hoped for as they tinkered away. It was like watching someone whisper a secret with a bullhorn.

But sky divers and models can only do so much, and the shine started to wear off. Tech reviewers who finally got their hands on Glass described it as “the worst product of all time,” aptly noting that it had abysmal battery life, and that it was “a product plagued by bugs.” Privacy concerns were raised, with people afraid of being recorded during private moments, like at the urinal, as I experienced at another Google conference where I was surrounded by Glass wearers. It was also banned from bars, movie theaters, Las Vegas casinos and other places that did not want customers surreptitiously recording.

Glass went from being coveted to becoming a punch line. There was a Tumblr site called White Men Wearing Google Glass.

Then, in early 2014, a tabloid-worthy scandal hit the Google X labs. Amid the 3-D printers and microchips, a love affair had developed between Mr. Brin and Amanda Rosenberg, a marketing manager on Google Glass who had helped organize the Diane von Furstenberg fashion show. Mr. Brin was leaving his wife for Ms. Rosenberg, who was in turn leaving her boyfriend, who also worked at Google. In an even stranger twist reported in Vanity Fair, it turned out Mr. Brin’s wife had been friends with Ms. Rosenberg.

From there, Google Glass seemed to wither away. Early X employees left, including Mr. Parviz, who decamped to Amazon. Mr. Brin, who was dealing with the fallout of his affair at Google, stopped wearing Glass in public, too.

And that’s how we arrive at last month, when Google abruptly announced that it was shuttering its Glass Explorer program. It has largely been reported as the death knell for Glass. But maybe it is not.

In its new life, Glass is overseen by Ivy Ross, a jewelry designer who runs Google’s smart-eyewear division, and Tony Fadell, a former Apple product executive and the creator of Nest.

“Early Glass efforts have broken ground and allowed us to learn what’s important to consumers and enterprises alike,” Mr. Fadell said in a statement. “I’m excited to be working with Ivy to provide direction and support as she leads the team and we work together to integrate those learnings into future products.”

Several people with knowledge of Mr. Fadell’s plans for Glass said he was going to redesign the product from scratch and would not release it until it was complete. “There will be no public experimentation,” one adviser to Mr. Fadell said. “Tony is a product guy and he’s not going to release something until it’s perfect.”

As for Ms. von Furstenberg, she has no regrets. In an interview Tuesday, she said that Google Glass was nothing short of revolutionary. “This was the first time that people talked about wearable technology,” she said. “Technology moves on faster and faster, and Google Glass will always be part of history.”

A version of this article appears in print on February 5, 2015, on page E1 of the New York edition with the headline: Broken Glass. 

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/05/style/why-google-glass-broke.html?src=twr&smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0

February 3, 2015

So I deleted my Instagram and Twitter accounts each of which had nearly a million followers. I lost almost two million followers in just a couple clicks. Yes, was ranked as the 1,511th most followed person on Twitter, not bad out of 284 million supposedly active users. And on Instagram I was the most followed person from India. But I didn't feel good about it. And it's not because I hate social media, nor do I find it intrusive, matter of fact I believe it's one of the most powerful tools we have for the benefit of humanity. So was I mad to do so? And am I mad in revealing what I am about to to you? I don't think so.

I have blanked out the full identity of "R" the fake followers dealer, as there are so many out there it feels unfair to reveal only one on here. R offers me a "very very good price" on fake followers by the million. How could a boy refuse?

It was eating me up inside, I felt like such a phoney and I couldn’t go on like that anymore. I started getting all these offers, brands wanting to pay me to post about their products to even a University inviting me to lecture. I was getting away with it, and I could have started making money from it. I even ended up getting genuine and influential followers like Nick Cannon and Shawn Sachs the publicist of DiCaprio. Perhaps they would have followed me regardless, but I just felt so low, and soulless, how could I accept any of these offers knowing what I was doing? What I was doing was building up an arsenal of the weapons of cultural mass destruction.

But sadly everyone is doing it, the leaders of nations, even the politicians I used to admire like the President of the United States, Barack, how can he have millions of fake followers? Even the Dalai Lama has millions of fake followers. It’s just not right. After knowing how this works, I feel like I cant trust anyone. Followers are not commodities, Followers were meant to be sacred.

The whole thing has gotten sickening, and I think it’s dangerous for our cultural health. It’s seriously skewing fair competition and our ability to judge quality. It negatively impacting our cultural potential and collective psychology. In a democracy we’re indoctrinated to respect the popular, so we need to be aware when popularity is being rigged or inflated. Just as you wouldn't accept a rigged election or an inflated vote count, why should you accept the attempt to sway public opinion by rigged and grossly over inflated social media profiles? When now elections or even revolutions can be influenced and won by the power of the virtual realm, the people need to be aware.

Yes, I lost a few thousand dollars in seconds by deleting my profiles, and some credibility too. But I feel like I have done the right thing. I don't make my art just for the sake of money or popularity. Andy Warhol had it so wrong. Good business is not the best art, but simply, the greatest art will be the best art. Sadly, a generation of people are religiously trapped in this fickle Warholian bubble of pop art, wrongly believing whatever is the most popular or expensive is the best. Making money is important, but cultural and political leaders need to transcend that as well. And you know that culturally things are bad, when Warholian fundamentalists are revered. Like the art exploiting industrialist Damien Hirst who states money is “as big as love, maybe even bigger.” This bubble will burst. You have my word, even if I have to pop it myself.

So I got into the dark arts, first by using fake views for promoting youtube videos. Eventually I got so good at it I rigged one video by 5 million high retention views, it was even trending in some countries on Youtube, getting as a result about half a million real views. With the right budget I could have probably even recreated Gangnam, they didn't even use high retention views in the beginning of that "campaign". When everybody is doing it, you feel you cant compete. It feels like a cold war. Your videos are being judged before they are even seen. But Youtube was too difficult to compete in, even with the faking, the market was so saturated and overinflated, and Youtube realising this also started updating and cracking down hard on fake views. I needed fresher pastures.

Later I would move onto fake followers on Twitter and then Instagram. Though in the very beginning I did use Facebook ads to try and build up a following completely legitimately. Actually, I had almost 200,000 real followers on my Facebook page with these efforts. But as irony would have it, I had to disable my Facebook page too, because of a random 5,000 spam followers which appeared over night. I don't know who sent them, it certainly was not me, I was dealing in much larger numbers. Facebook noticed and kindly deleted these spam followers, but this resulted in corresponding technical faults which never seemed to get resolved. It rendered my ability to communicate with all those real followers virtually useless.

My Facebook page with nearly 200,000 real followers got the hard, time consuming and expensive way. Ironically it has been effected by technical errors that never seem to get fixed.

While it took me two years to get 200,000 real followers, it only took me two days to acquire 2 million fake ones. The process to acquire real followers and views, to do it the right way, was very expensive and time consuming in comparison, in some cases by a factor of a 100 or even more. I felt I couldn't afford to keep up with the competition that was blatantly cheating and being rewarded for it. So I adopted the if you cant beat them join them approach. I should have known better then to fall for a cliché.

With a bit of research, experimenting, reading black hat forums and studying the strategies of the competition, I was able to orchestrate a social media fixing operation on a mass scale, and not just limited to fake followers. But also to comments, likes and even mass commenting and liking. I employed social media fixers, like exchanges and bots across the world including in the UK, USA, Russia, the Far East, Sri Lanka and Eastern Europe. One fake followers dealer I used from Pakistan even boasted about working on Charlie Sheen’s and NBC Today show’s Twitter accounts. It’s worrying when you meditate on this. That some how democracy here and our perceptions of our leaders and media outlets can be manipulated by people in countries that have deplorable track records of upholding democratic values.

I was doing my research and thought Shawn Sachs could be an interesting guy to follow and comment on. He started following me back.

On Instagram I really excelled though, I was running the show. You see it's not just the followers that are fake it's, the likes and comments too, the whole thing is a circus, and for a bit I was the ring master. I had several apps on my phone that would allow me to trigger bots or access like exchanges to make the whole operation happen in real time where ever I was. Monaco, Milan, Como, Paris, London or Cannes, I was getting thousands of likes per post, and as many comments as I desired. I would then use a macros to auto-like and mass comment on thousands of profiles I would never actually see, waiting for the real ones to bite. While personally I'd research and target select influential accounts. And bite they did. I got real comments and real interest, I had become the most followed Indian man on Instagram, number one out of a billion, and all of it manufactured. Even today, Abhishek Bachchan has less then 500K followers. I would exchange flirts with models and I was followed and acknowledged by Shawn Sachs the publicist for DiCaprio, Affleck and Naomi Campbell. He even once asked me to share his photography, he's actually a really good photographer. As did my real life friend the fashion designer Nicole Coste, she had opened her first store in London and sweetly asked if could help her brand get some exposure. I felt bad because nobody was actually looking, I wish I could have really helped them.

My comment are no longer visible as I deleted the account but you can notice not everybody gets a reply.

This is the horse head photo, Shawn asked me to share. I started feeling guilty, my million followers were fake and my thousands of likes were low quality, it would never receive the attention he believed. I ignored the request as not to be any more deceitful.

Then, in started coming the real offers that I hadn't planned for. Money to post for brands, big and small from Prada to ThinTea. When I researched into this I realised I probably could have been getting around $5,000 a post, that would have made the whole operation profitable in just one post. I thought to myself, should I take the money, post to empty followers and then reinvest to grow it even bigger. Once I knew the formula and started raising revenue, I could have easily pushed this to 10 million followers, 100 thousand likes per post, and thousands of comments. I knew exactly how to do that, without getting caught. After a few close calls with temporary bans on activity, I had worked out how to feel the limits. Sure Instagram would keep updating to catch out the bots but I kept adapting too, finding new strategies to stay one step ahead. Who knows what other influential people I could connect to if I grew my "following", I mused. I would have probably started getting TV interviews, record deals, film contracts and endorsements. You may have heard about me as the next "viral" fairly tale, smiling and lying on the Ellen Degeneres show, besides I was already in touch with the most powerful publicist in the world. And after all the Ellen Show too has millions of fake followers. I was one of themnow, and this was all part of the game right? Soon I would be able to influence the hearts and minds of the people. To a degree I was already doing this. I could see where all this was going, but I was torn. I had started four years ago as the sweet naive boy wanting to share his lo-fi music video "People are my Favourite Thing" with the world to make it a better place. But here I was now turning into a well-oiled sinister and wolfish bot King.

In the end, I couldn't take the money for something that I knew wasn't real. That is fraud. My mother had taught me better, she is a lawyer. I decided I didn't want to be part of that deceptive world. Every time when I would look at my profile my heart would sink. And this would happen quite often. Because let's face it social media reflects on you day to day or for some even hour to hour. I was even embarrassed to meet new people and see them get impressed by my "following". The deception, it's implications and pressures were always on my mind. I started wondering if my new contacts in my virtual and real life were drawn to me just for my hollow following. Whenever someone looked at me in admiration or said "Ankit could make you famous just by tweeting", I felt so empty. I then started to try and explain in private how this was all a marketing trick, yet as in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart", the guilt kept pulsing on my conscience.

So I felt so good when I deleted my accounts. I felt emancipated. As if a weight had lifted off my body, mind and soul. Writing this makes me feel more cleansed and righteous too. Sometimes it's hard to quit the deeper you go down that path and the bigger the lie gets. Especially when money gets put on the table. I am glad I did though. I can be me again. I feel more creative and now I can focus on making my art quality, instead of constantly worrying about getting banned or living up to artificial expectations. I have already restarted my new Instagram, and have just a few followers now, but they are human and that's what I want.

It was funny because a little after I deleted my Instagram account, by sheer coincidence the great Instagram purge came in December. It wiped of millions of followers from most of the celebrity profiles including Akon, Kim Kardashian and Justin Bieber. Hordes of fake followers were annihilated. Just the top 20 most affected profiles alone lost over 30 million fake followers. I didn’t know they were going to purge accounts like that, but it did make me smile when it happened. The real extent of the situation is far worse though, I probably would have only lost 20% of my fake followers in that purge. Because all fake followers are not created equal. Some are made to be more sophisticated. The bots that incubate these culture devouring zombies, can make them appear more real too. They do this by giving the fake followers profile photos and even a few tweets of their own. Sometimes these zombies get classified as “inactive” instead of fake, creating an even deeper layer of deception, confusion and even depression.

We need to be vigilant about this now and find mechanisms to put a stop to this fraud. Because as artificial intelligence technology matures, it perhaps won't be the physical robots wanting self determination we need to worry about, but instead those invisible advanced bots enslaved by ourselves. Designed to manipulate our minds and hearts. To some degree this is already happening. I used bots that could mass like and comment based on precomposed text and hashtags. But what happens next, when millions of fake followers may be able to debate, create false consensus and suppress ideas? What if they could be programmed to clandestinely indoctrinate us with certain agendas or ideologies?

“For I want my art to stand for the truth. And if this is too lofty and unrealistic then atleast for the most beautiful search towards the truth.”

You know, if I can come out about this as an independent artist, they all can afford to come out too and start again. It would be the right thing to do. The thing is if we are deceptive on these social networks, where and when does the deception end? Could this influence banking, stock markets, politics or our personal lives? (Perhaps this is the sort of deception on large and small scales that builds up and contributes to boom and bust cycles.) And if the social networks cannot control these fakes, why don’t they just stop displaying the numbers all together, or at the least display them less prominently in an effort to curb this depraved behaviour? Unless ofcourse they know and it serves their interests to have inflated number of followers for their networks too, to turn a blind eye to celebrities, and for shareholder "confidence".

And while there is an aspect of deniability or random spam followers, from my own experiences I know that this can be and is being done systematically to the tune of millions. It's hard to be sure what's real and what's not. And this is not acceptable in societies based on the freedom of media. Numbers and data also have a scared quality. We even use them to try and make sense of our Universe. On a day to day basis we use numbers and statistics to form opinions, debate and make decisions. They effect our conscious and subconscious. To fudge them with such gross disregard, especially in terms of our social fabric could lead to dire consequences. The real scary thought however is that, Barack, Ellen, Charlie and the Dalai Lama and many of the others may not even know that their followers, daily likes and comments are fake, they too may buy into the lie of marketing and pr campaigns. Then if it's not me, then who is it that's really behind all of this? Are there already a few sinister bot Kings who could control our minds and media? And do they inflate the system across the board (on a daily basis) to inflate both perceptions and advertising rates? Something is happening, and in a democracy, we have the right to know.

So I feel that political, media, religious and cultural leaders have a responsibility to state clearly and ensure that they and their representatives are not involved in such deceptions. It’s crucial now as the virtual world directs the real world in so many ways. It affects our decisions from what we buy to where we go to what we eat, even how we select mates. And crucially it impacts the media and information which we are exposed to.

I really believe in the potential of social media to improve the human condition. That is why I feel so strongly against the use of fake followers, as the Internet has this egalitarian like essence which I feel is being perverted. Especially when you think that they’re targeting and tricking young people who are sensitive and developing their tastes and ethics. I wonder, how our behaviour at this present time will be judged in history. Will they look upon these acts in the future as a mad barbaric thirst to achieve popularity for the sake of power and money at all costs?

This dark digital propaganda is a weapon of cultural mass destruction and it’s virtual stock pile must be swiftly put to an end. I call on all leaders to disarm from their nuclear phoniness. I hope this can be done before it plays anymore havoc on our perceptions of the real world.

For I want my art to stand for the truth. And if this is too lofty and unrealistic then atleast for the most beautiful search towards the truth.

A screenshot of my Instagram just before I deleted it. I was the most followed person from India on Instagram when I deleted it in late November.

Statistics from my deleted twitter account as recorded by Twitter Counter.

Analysis of Barack Obama's Twitter following by Status People. From my experience inactive can also be fake, just a harder to detect fake. Think about it proportionally too, how many inactive twitter followers are there total and why such a large proportion of inactive followers tend to gravitate to these inflated accounts? Something is not right.

Analysis of Ellen Degeneres Show's Twitter page by Status People.

R my Pakistani fake followers dealer had said he remembered sending Charlie Sheen's account 7 to 8 million followers. 0.12+0.52=0.64. 0.64x11,358,958=7,269,733. Now, isn't that a coincidence?

This email invite caught me by surprise. Even a University was pitching to me. Their innocent respect made me feel I just couldn't address "the youth" and those "future decision makers", not like this, I had to make a change.

-Ankit Love 

Forget the Human Implants the size of a grain of rice. Check out the newer version!

It's probably best that you don't get implanted, but at the end of the day, the choice is up to you. These chips are hackable. 

_________________________________________________

 February 2015

The chip allows employees to open doors and use the photocopier without a traditional pass card.

Want to gain entry to your office, get on a bus, or perhaps buy a sandwich? We're all getting used to swiping a card to do all these things. But at Epicenter, a new hi-tech office block in Sweden, they are trying a different approach - a chip under the skin.

Felicio de Costa, whose company is one of the tenants, arrives at the front door and holds his hand against it to gain entry. Inside he does the same thing to get into the office space he rents, and he can also wave his hand to operate the photocopier.

That's all because he has a tiny RFID (radio-frequency identification) chip, about the size of a grain of rice, implanted in his hand. Soon, others among the 700 people expected to occupy the complex will also be offered the chance to be chipped. Along with access to doors and photocopiers, they're promised further services in the longer run, including the ability to pay in the cafe with a touch of a hand.

On the day of the building's official opening, the developer's chief executive was, himself, chipped live on stage. And I decided that if was to get to grips with this technology, I had to bite the bullet - and get chipped too.

The whole process is being organised by a Swedish bio-hacking group which was profiled by my colleague Jane Wakefield recently. One of its members, a rather fearsome looking tattooist, inserted my chip.

First, he massaged the skin between my thumb and index finger and rubbed in some disinfectant. The he told me to take a deep breath while he inserted the chip. There was a moment of pain - not much worse than any injection - and then he stuck a plaster over my hand.

Before trying my chip out, I wanted to know more about the thinking behind it. Hannes Sjoblad, whose electronic business card is on his own chip and can be accessed with a swipe of a smartphone, has the title chief disruption officer at the development. I asked him whether people really wanted to get this intimate with technology.

"We already interact with technology all the time," he told me. "Today it's a bit messy - we need pin codes and passwords. Wouldn't it be easy to just touch with your hand? That's really intuitive."

When I tested my chip, I found that it was not all that intuitive - I had to twist my hand into an unnatural position to make the photocopier work. And while some of the people around the building were looking forward to being chipped, others were distinctly dubious. "Absolutely not," said one young man when I asked him if he'd sign up. An older woman was more positive about the potential of the technology but saw little point in being chipped just to get through a door.

But Hannes Sjoblad says he and the Swedish Biohacking Group have another objective - preparing us all for the day when others want to chip us. "We want to be able to understand this technology before big corporates and big government come to us and say everyone should get chipped - the tax authority chip, the Google or Facebook chip." Then, he says, we'll all be able to question the way the technology is implemented from a position of much greater knowledge.

I've returned to Britain with a slightly sore hand - and a chip still under my skin which has my contact details on it. Not that useful, but no doubt more sophisticated chips will soon replace wearable technology like fitness bands or payment devices, and we will get used to being augmented. All sorts of things are possible - whether it becomes culturally acceptable to insert technology beneath our skin is another matter.