5 videos.
Alison McDowell is a mother and dedicated researcher studying the working parts of the World Economic Forum’s declared “Fourth Industrial Revolution” and the global takeover of industries and public policies by the central banks, multinational corporations, big tech technocrats and billionaire funded foundations.

Follow Alison’s work at Wrench In The Gears.

Alison McDowell:

In mid-May 2020, Jason Bosch, documentary filmmaker and activist from Denver, came to Philadelphia to pick my brain about the things I’ve been researching for the past five years. He edited that footage into a series of five videos covering issues related to racialized technology, global finance, the Covid lockdowns, digital identity, and the rise of human capital data markets.

A lot of this is ground I have covered in previous posts, but I sense the conversational nature of this exchange may make some of this information more approachable.

Very grateful to Jason for sharing his talents. Phone videos can only take you so far.

• Part 1: Data is the New Oil
• Part 2: Covid, 4IR, & Human Capital Data Markets
• Part 3: Human Capital Bonds
• Part 4: 39:57, mp3
• Part 5: 39:46, mp3

• Part 1: Data is the New Oil
  video, 59:41, mp3
  Partial transcript

  My name is Alison McDowell and I’m a mom, I live in Philadelphia. I spend a lot of time doing independent research and following money. A lot of my work as an activist started out around the privatization of public schools in Philadelphia. I used to just be a mom that would help volunteer in the schools and I work half time so I do have a chunk of time to devote to other things. And that’s a great privilege.

  Initially I was just working to support my child’s neighborhood school and eventually in 2013 Boston Consulting Group recommended for the closure about 23 schools in the city. It threw everything into upheaval, laid off 3,000 teachers and was really devastating for the district, for the educators, for the families who are coming to grips with that. Later that summer—that happened in the spring—the district hired a consultant to come in and start pitching this idea of school report cards, grading schools, and it would impact the regular public schools and not the charter schools. We organized in opposition to that. That work was underwritten by the Dell Foundation, Michael Dell, Dell computers Dell Dell computers works with—is a major contractor to the NSA.

  So those public meetings were shut down and so in response I jumped in to working with education activists around opposing standardized testing. That was my first big effort and I was coordinated actually with a national group because this was happening nationally at the time through United Opt Out and Peggy Robertson who is based in Colorado. So we connected, this loose coalition of parents who were trying to oppose the use of both the standardization of education curriculum as well as the weaponization of scores against schools to close schools.

  I did that for a while but then realized that really the endgame was shifting more towards all the time data collection on students through educational technology. Then my focus shifted towards looking into the Ed-Tech as a global industry and what it meant for both surveillance of content delivered in the classroom, the commodification of children as data, and then again the use of the data collected to further privatize public education.

  Social Impact Investors Eye Public Education Market in Philadelphia, 25 Jan 2018 Deployment of “innovative” technological “solutions” is central to social impact investing, because profit is generated by combining predictive analytics with Big Data “impact” metrics. Services addressing social problems must increasingly be delivered through digital platforms that extract the data demanded for program evaluation and profit-taking.    Those receiving services, including public school students who spend their days slogging through benchmark tests and online modules and who are often tracked via classroom management apps, generate vast data-sets that can be used to profile them and inform future “impact” investments. “Success”=profit. Success is determined as meeting narrow, specific targets defined in terms of data points. The need to generate outcomes then shapes how services are delivered, more screen time and less face time. See the rise of ed-tech “solutions” forced on our public schools and on refugee populations. We are seeing this dehumanizing shift in service delivery take place not only in public education, but also in healthcare, social services, and mental health treatment....    Central to this method are outcomes-based government contracts that employ Pay for Success and Social Impact Bonds to extract profit from those enmeshed in oppressive social systems. Technology is key to this strategy, as “impact” data must be seamlessly collected for cheap, scalable deal evaluation. This, along with the rise of IoT monitoring, Big Data, behavioral science (economics-nudge) interventions, gamification, and blockchain digital ID (many of which are being researched at UPenn) will lead to the platform delivery of human services, including but not limited to public education, over the next decade. See also tele-health, tele-therapy, VR counseling, prescription video-gaming, etc....    The Economy League sees impact investing as our future economic engine. They are planning to build an economy that mines poverty for profit. Programs like The Germination Project are even training promising high school students at Wharton to run these programs. They are planning decades ahead. None of this is about fixing structural systems that cause poverty. No, these systems are meant to maintain poverty and use it to control the general populace and maintain racialized systems of power rooted in white supremacy. Our schools are not charities. Education is for the people. We claim our schools. They will be sites of resistance.

  A lot of that work—I blog at wrenchinthegears.com—that’s the blog that I have—and over time I realized that even though I had come into it through public education, that this issue of commodifying people as data and doing the digital control and disciplinary mechanisms was really part of a much larger global financial apparatus. One of the parents that I organized with is Cheri Honkala. Our kids were in the same school at the same time. She has been doing work around housing rights and rights of the poor, organizing the poor, for decades [POOR PEOPLE’S ARMY: The Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC)] and doing really amazing work outside the system.

  So we connected and then my lens just expanded much more broadly: that this wasn’t simply about controlling public schools and children and families and educators but it was really about creating systemic global poverty and then managing that. That’s how I came into things. Now it’s gone from poverty management to pandemic which is creating poverty, just keeps getting bigger.

  Jason Bosch: What did you say about the weaponization of data? What do you mean by that?

  Eric Schmidt, former chair of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, said data is the new oil. I think that’s this common understanding at this point, that we’re reaching peak petroleum. This next extractive resources is data and a lot of the data in the world—increasingly as we smart up with sensors and things, our environment and even our phones are just a very basic sensor mechanism—our interactions with devices, with sensors embedded in the built environment, amongst sensors—that’s all generating data and the entities that can capture and analyze that data have tremendous power.

  One of the things that I got into when I was working in the education front—ultimately when I was doing testing I realized that wasn’t the answer. That withholding the test wasn’t gonna be the thing to stop it because then they moved into this technology. The lesson I learned at that point was: they would like for you to do the work for them, to their end. You have to think a couple steps ahead because they have a 20 or 30 -year plan. And if they can give you a little lead on a controlled opposition—even though you may not understand that that’s what you’re doing—they’ll let you advance their agenda to a certain point. I didn’t want that to happen again.

  What I saw happening was there was a huge organization around data privacy, student data privacy. While I’m very much in support of the premise of data privacy, for me the larger philosophical context is they would like for us to ask to become digital commodities. Those in power would like to offer us privacy in exchange for having our life turned into data so that they can extract value from that. That has to be a mutual agreement, that we will agree to be a data commodity. So it’s a false choice around data privacy; that we will get privacy but then essentially it won’t stop the educational technology, it won’t stop telemedicine, it won’t stop tele-therapy. We’ll still have to live in a digital world but somehow we can sell ourselves as data.

  When I talk about weaponization, there are subtle nuances. They like to frame the argument in certain ways and though I probably lean—I mean at this point a lot of the educational process that I do with people is through digital. I’m not saying it’s easy to completely walk away from it. But I’m trying to say that living in a world of data is a world of binary decision trees that are only a shadow of the actual world and a shadow of actual relationships. By buying into that we’re allowing ourselves to live in their apparatus that they have constructed. Google builds a really nice box. It’s got a lot of bells and whistles. It’s fun. It can do things. We can share stuff. But ultimately it’s Google’s box.

  So we’re not going to be able to conceive of things outside of Google’s box if we decide to live there. These are questions. I don’t tell people how to think about it but these are the things I think about.

  That’s the commodification piece. The other piece is a book that was really influential for me, is Yasha Levine’s book Surveillance Valley [†] [isbn.nu] [58:00] It’s a military history of the internet and if you understand the Internet as a militarized space it puts a very different spin on things. And if you understand that it is this intersection of the corporate state and the militarists state and potentially predatory philanthropy are all operating in this digital space, that feels really cool, but also has a lot of risks that people are not aware of if you don’t know the historical context.

  You have to consider the power and who actually in a cloud computing world—even though we’d like to imagine it’s decentralized with blockchain and different things—the people who are in control of the cloud, it’s a very small number of people, mostly a lot of white guys. Not exclusively but that power is highly concentrated and to operate in that space means to operate in their world.
  Ends at 7:55

  [

  • Essential reading: Blockchain Education, A Ticket To Digital Serfdom, Wrench In The Gears, 22 Sep 2020
    “We risk swapping our vibrant human spirits, beautiful in their passionate creativity and flawed vulnerability, for sanitized digital twins that will be managed as human capital by callous technocrats to profit social impact investors.”
    Alison McDowell’s research focuses mostly on original sources. For many of those related to blockchain, see https://littlesis.org/search?q=blockchain+; source URLs are on the right side of each record.

  ]

  Beginning at 13:20:

  But money is power and that money and power is very concentrated. So I would say if you go to any of the major foundations and you start to peel back where their grants are from you can see how they can control things. Hewlett Packard is an entity that very few people—the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation—it’s not really one of those top ones that you hear pointed out. But they’re very influential. Essentially they have restructured the nonprofit industry to be data-driven to run these human capital markets that are coming.

  [Wrench In The Gears began in 2016; search on Hewlett Foundation for more:

  • Toxic Philanthropy Part 1: Surveillance, 18 Nov 2018
  • Toxic Philanthropy Part 2: Hewlett Packard Re-Engineers the Social Sector, 25 Nov 2018
  • Hewlett Packard And The Pitfalls Of “Deeper Learning” In An Internet Of Things World, 7 Jul 2019

  ]

  I spent a good couple months essentially entering all of the data around these grants to nonprofits into this database system so that I could track it. And you can see—you can see this is how they bought all of the identity politics organizations. This is how they bought all of the philanthropic news media. This is how they bought all of the online giving programs. So you can actually map it by mapping the money and the nature of it it appears.

  There are so many people who tell me, Alison, this isn’t coordinated. There can’t be a place where everyone’s planning this out. And I’m like, no there is. It’s Davos. It’s Necker Island. There are groups of people who are at this high level who maybe they don’t all have all the parts but they definitely have the overall strategy of what the plan is and they have like a 20 to 30 year maybe 50 year plan of how this is going to roll out and then they have backup plans depending on what the resistance is. So yes it is a conspiracy. It’s not hidden if you actually spend the time to look at the money which is what I do and which is why I’m not just taking somebody else’s word for it. I’m actually looking at what they’re saying in their white papers, in their grant projects, in their boards and seeing how it’s playing out in the real world.

  [Wrench In The Gears began in 2016; search on Davos for more:

  • Good Guy in Davos? Not So Fast, 31 Jan 2019
  • Who Voted In Davos? How Data-Driven Government and the Internet of Bodies Are Poised To Transform Smart Sustainable Cities Into Social Impact Prisons, 27 Oct 2020
  • The Webinar You’ve Been Waiting For: Alison McDowell, Joseph Gonzalez, and Incite Seminars Present “Level-Up”, 25 Aug 2020

  ]

  The resistance will not come from the middle class. At the beginning it certainly won’t. It’s gonna come from the people who have been systematically—who are—if we can get to a point that people’s basic needs are met enough that they can collectively resist. To try to convince the middle class of what’s happening—most people—I’m not a normal person for whatever reason. I saw this and I can’t walk away from it. But that’s not most people.

  Jason Bosch: Was it impact investing that got you seeing beyond just, the standardized testing or whatever. What was the next step for you?

  I’m trying to remember how I first got to looking at pay for success.

  [Wrench In The Gears began in 2016; search on Pay For Success for more:

  • Pandemic, Public Health, Policing, And Pay For Success “Solutions”, 3 Apr 2020
  • Silicon Valley Leverages Pandemic-Induced Poverty To Advance Pay For Success Finance , 19 Apr 2020
  • Pay for Success and the Human Value Chain, 30 Nov 2018
  • https://wrenchinthegears.com/2019/02/05/ace-adverse-childhood-experience-scores-part-of-the-pay-for-success-plan/, 5 Feb 2019

  ]

  One of my mentors—his name is Tim Scott—wrote a couple of pieces that touched on social impact bond finance. This was at the time where I was looking into educational technology and Gates was part of that.

  [by Tim Scott in Dissident Voice:

  • Impact Investing and Venture Philanthropy’s Role in Sowing the Seeds of Financial Opportunity, 17 Feb 2017
  • Social Impact Bonds: The Titans of Finance as the Altruistic Merchants of Schooling and the Common Good, 2 Nov 2016
  • Education Technology, Surveillance, and America’s Authoritarian Democracy, 29 Oct 2016

  ]

  There’s a very compelling presentation I recommend to everyone online and it’s Justin Leroy who I believe is an academic, a professor at UC Santa Barbara now, called Race, Finance, and the Afterlife of Slavery (1:03:15, May 2017). It was about social impact bonds in the afterlife of slavery. [See Also: BONDED LIFE - Technologies of racial finance from slave insurance to philanthrocapital, Zenia Kish and Justin Leroy, Cultural Studies, 2015.] What was really interesting was the context of that talk. There was an exhibit at the Whitney where Cameron Roland who’s actually a Philadelphia artist—he does work around found objects and ready-made and in relation to the carceral state and racial capitalism and that’s his work. This was an exhibit around debt. And he had used his apportionment to make art to actually buy a share in this social impact bond which was targeting incarcerated youth in Ventura County, which is interesting because that’s one of the county that’s coming up with the covid stuff now. So he bought—because that was the only way to get the terms of this social impact bond conference and contract and he framed it and he put it on the wall of the Whitney. And he asked Justin Leroy to come and speak as part of the the exhibit.

  This talk was given and it really hit home that what we’re looking at now with the turning of people into data and using predictive analytics to essentially set up these larger systems to gamble on people’s lives—and this is something that’s happening as a direct result of automation of labor and globalized labor management processes—this is the outgrowth of the carceral state. [i.e., “policing, courts, custody, and state supervision. Policing should be understood to include not just municipal law enforcement, but the ‘soft’ policing of welfare officials, state and federal law enforcement, the US military, as well as private security forces. All enact violence against poor communities, though the methods vary. The carceral state works hand-in-hand with ‘smart cities’ and IoT deployment.”

  Operation Relentless Pursuit: Test Beds For “Smart City” Signals Intelligence?, 13 Jan 2020]

  This is what’s coming next: social impact finance tied to different forms of state control that are outside of prison systems but also really brutal. It’s this legacy, it’s this arc on which our nation is built, which is below the surface in many ways and I think people who tend to rely on the constitutional rights and the good of democracy, often conveniently forget that the wealth and power of this country was built on land theft of the indigenous nations and genocide of indigenous people, enslavement of black people and family separation of those families and then unfree labor and forced labor until very recently. Those pieces, when we go back to the Constitution, don’t apply and the Constitution is really written to protect the property rights of powerful white men, many of which founding fathers were real estate speculators.

  Where we are now with Trump is very much part of that larger trajectory. That is why, for me, understanding human capital finance and understanding that it is embedded in the way in which we were so brutal to indigenous people and black people is central to understanding that now this system is gotten to the point that it’s coming after everyone and we need to both reconcile with that history and really own it and also to look to those ongoing resistance strategies to enslavement as we move forward and try to come to some resolution and be allies in that process. That’s my personal understanding and the framing of it.

  Jason Bosch: The challenge here is this issue splinters off into so many other things. As you were talking I was thinking about some of the things that he was saying in his talk about insurance and seeing humans as commodities that can be discarded or kept or that that’s even an option.

  Right. It’s the commodification of humanity and that’s what’s really interesting because there’s another academic, Calvin Schermerhorn who has a really good talk about commodity chains and supply chains, about looking at the finance, the “innovative banking” that was associated with the transportation, the brutal relocation of black enslaved people from the Chesapeake Bay Area into sugar plantations—at the time, in the early 19th century, there wasn’t a common currency—and the ways in which northern finance played this intermediary process in terms of making these financial trades happen.

  Moving forward, I feel very strongly that blockchain, this idea of the trusted third party, is going to be replacing, in an automated way, these northern financiers and in these human capital bonds that are going to be coming online through these central banking systems. I don’t really think that the people at Wharton and Stanford are looking at 18th century bank finance around the domestic slave trade but it’s very eerie how close it is that these patterns, these cycles keep coming back.

  There’s a term that I would encourage people to look up that really helps me think about it. It’s called hypothecation and that was in Calvin Schermerhorn’s [talk]. This idea of being able to draw capital out of human bodies while the person who “owns them” still maintains use of that body—like mortgaging against humanity while still controlling that humanity. I think that’s going to be something key moving forward with these pay for success deals, human capital bonds, and hypothecation.

  Jason Bosch: I’ve never heard that term. What are the arguments they make for this? If I were to listen to you I’d be like, wow this sounds like a terrible idea. We shouldn’t do that. Why do you think it connects with people—what are the arguments that they make that we should be doing this? Or is it just because it’s all done behind the scenes? What are your thoughts on that?

  The human capital finance mechanism that I believe will be likely to roll out in the aftermath of this global economic reset; they pitch UBI, Universal Basic Income as they’ve been preparing the ground for that for the past few years. I think they want people to believe there’s no strings attached to that or they’re just giving you a suitcase of cash a thousand bucks. It’s not going to be that. It’ll be tied to digital currency and within that very much conditioned on how you can use that money. Within blockchain systems there are ways of actually programming money through tokens.
  Ends at 23:09:

  Beginning at 39:10:
  What we need is a society where the resources are not all locked up in these mega transnational global capital entities that are not accountable to anyone, underwriting systems that are very narrow. Because the other piece of this is it’s not just stripped-down in-person Pre-K. They’re also developing online Pre-K and this is Waterford Upstart.

  This is being used in the city of Philadelphia right now on refugee families. They’re pushing poor kids, refugee kids into online preschool because it’s an impact market. It’s a data profiling market. These kids don’t have a chance to say, No thank you, I’d prefer not to have a digital identity, I’d prefer not to be your data commodity. It’s incredibly predatory and there are a lot of ethical questions about that.

  The other piece is they need new ways of getting data and this Pre-K program particularly is based on something called the Heckman Equation. Jim Heckman at the University of Chicago, economics, he’s a Nobel Prize winning economist, developed this equation setting that return on investment (ROI) which is 7 to 13 percent if you include health impacts on Pre-K. It was paid for by JB Pritzker who’s the Governor of Illinois now.

  They’ve created this equation and what they’ve said is, We can’t shift the data for Pre-K. We can’t make the numbers work for cognitive skills. IQ hardens up at the age of 10, it doesn’t work for the hedge funds. That doesn’t work. We don’t have enough movement on the data dashboards to make that work to get our ROI. We can manipulate character. That’s what we can manipulate. We can move character data on a dashboard. And this is these Ocean 5 big “personality traits” [OCEAN: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism] and then we can do that digitally through gamification.

  [Heckman and Pritzker Pitch Apps as Poverty “Solutions” Yielding a 13% Return on Investment, 10 Jun 2018

  This is the fourth in a series providing context for the Global Business Summit on Early Childhood that ReadyNation will be hosting in New York City November 1-2, 2018. The featured image is from an article pitching Waterford Upstart online preschool, piloted in Utah, a state experimenting with funding early childhood education using social impact bonds. The caption on the photo states that this four year old doesn’t have running water in her home, but she does have access to literacy education on a chromebook.

  The focus of this post is Dr. James Heckman, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago since the early 1970s. Much of his research focuses on investments in early childhood as it pertains to labor markets. In 2000, Dr. Heckman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for contributions to the field of micro-econometrics. James Heckman; Arthur Rolnick, former senior researcher at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve; and Robert Dugger, venture capitalist and ReadyNation advisor, have worked together for decades. Below is a relationship map for Heckman. See the interactive version here.

  ]

  What that looks like is there something called Hatch. I’m sure there are many of these but Hatch education has something called a WePlaySmart table. This is real. It is a large play table. If you imagine it’s like a big screen TV, flat. On two sides of the the display are fisheye lens cameras and the children are supposed to come “together” to “play” at this table, like moving puzzle pieces and things, where the cameras track their social behaviors. Their social behaviors—not just how they’re personal but how they interact with others and are scored. And that is the data that drives these impact deals.

  

  I confronted the woman in charge of this who is with Goldman Sachs. With the flyer I went to the Dirksen Senate building when they were all celebrating what’s called the Social Impact Partnerships Pay For Results Act (SIPPRA). They had a big champagne toast over finally getting this passed, this seed money to start these impact markets. I had—I’m a mom and I might not be able to stop this but I’m going to show up and tell you I know what’s happening and it’s not okay. I had my little half sheet flyer with the Hatch surveillance play tables and I said, This is wrong. You don’t put at-risk kids on a surveillance play table to profit Goldman Sachs—it’s evil actually—and say we’re going to brainwash kids essentially for profit.

  If you understand it within a historic context, clearly we’ve always done that to certain communities, to certain people’s children. I’m not acting shocked that this is happening. But I felt compelled to show up with my little half sheet paper and say, I know what you’re doing. I am bearing witness to this, that it’s not okay. I’m hoping maybe more people will know about it because it’s shocking. If you see the Hatch WePlaySmart table you will be shocked to see it. That it’s real.

  

  I have confirmation. I went to to Tulsa in January. There are centers where this is rolling out—in Dallas—the Federal Reserve is part of a lot of this, the Dallas Fed. I visited Dallas and Tulsa. Tulsa is a target of a lot of this rollout. And they have something called Educare. This is going to be run through these Educare franchise programs and they’re already using WePlaySmart tables and Educare in Tulsa. I intervened at one of these impact events, these events where they were celebrating, patting each other on the back over their impact investing opportunities, and again calling them out just like with my banner saying kids are not impact investments.

  

  I had confirmation from—this is coming through something called Strive Together, they have “collective impact” programs all across the country. I [asked] do you know about Amply? Digital identity? Do you know about these smart play tables? They [said] well of course. I’m in education, of course I know about the smart tables.

  Jason Bosch: How does this affect the relationship between the student and the teacher and the child and the parent?

  This is something that I’ve been struggling with—and again we’re all on this uneven ground. What is the world we want for our kids? On the one hand there’s, What does it mean to parent? What does it mean to have time to care for your kids? There’s a whole argument around affordable child care. What if affordable child care means your kid’s on a surveillance play table?

  What kind of world are we creating that you have to have two full-time parents—maybe he’s working two jobs to sustain a family—so your kid can be on a surveillance display table for Goldman Sachs? These are these larger questions. And I’m not sitting here saying any one parent should forego their having a satisfying career to do this work but I think we really have to balance what corporate child care, what franchise child care means when it’s starting to come with these predictive analytics and data analytics systems.

  We know kids shouldn’t be on screens. We know behaviorally, profiling—because it’s not just the WePlaySmart tables, they have these other little tablets that they’re collecting all this data from. So increasingly the teachers—and this is not just in Pre-K but in K-12 and higher—are supposed to be data managers. The kids interact with devices and then the teachers queue up playlists under the pretense of “personalized learning” and it’s a consumer based model. As the teacher I will queue up your 30 resources that you are to consume, digital resources, then I will track your engagement with those resources, and then I will prepare your next playlist of items. And then every kid gets something different and then increasingly the teachers won’t even be running the playlist it will be AI. That’s what IBM is about, is that you are optimized through artificial intelligence.

  I guess the question is To what end? Do certain types of people get optimized to certain pathways? Because clearly with this Fourth Industrial Revolution that’s happening the premise is that most people are going to be dispossessed out of their jobs. So if you start profiling kids at the age of three at the surveillance play table and putting them in feedback loops, digital feedback loops, that maybe they’re not even aware they’re in, essentially you can control their future.

  It might not even be, I mean, clearly even existing schools have always—we have to understand that compulsory education has been about social reproduction for the purposes of industry; to reinforce race and class and to stratify people and separate people into different groups. I’m not under any dream that that isn’t the truth. I mean that is the function of compulsory education. Doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t strive to do better. Once you put people isolated on devices you lose knowledge sharing, you lose, you break community bonds. You have no space in which to collectively build something different. Essentially your world is limited to what the digital interface says you have access to. We know even now within what’s going on with social media censorship around hot topics, if they don’t want you to have them the information it will just be taken off.
  Ends at 47:58:

  Beginning at 49:06:
  The thing that has really hit me within this past month is understanding that turning people into data isn’t simply about surveillance. It isn’t simply about extracting profit from people as managing the data. It’s that extracting data from people is meant to feed machine learning systems. That there are groups of people who know that they intend to catalyze the singularity with this data, to actually create a future of sentient, general, artificial intelligence beyond the control of people.

  This is something that I’m trying to come to grips with now and I’ve known for a while. One of the big rabbit holes I fell down in doing education research was something called the Global Education Futures Forum which was led by Pavel Luksha who’s connected to SKOLKOVO in Russia but has a well placed panel of advisors around the globe. Tom Vander Ark who is formerly with the Gates Foundation and a key figure in virtual learning and Ed-Tech and venture capital was the U.S. contact. I think they’ve actually recently taken the website down which is very interesting to me. [Archived 1 July 2018 copy: https://www.edu2035.org/] But if you look at their agenda, Pavel Luksha, who’s also connected to World Skills building, was very much also about transhumanism.

  So this idea of, as we approach climate change end times, that we would merge with the cloud, that we would merge with machines, that we would upload our consciousness to the Internet and be immortal. Which sounds really wacky unless you actually look and see the people who are in that sphere and there are a lot of very sophisticated thinkers who are thinking that this is something that we need to do. Even a few weeks ago Whitney Webb wrote an article [“Techno-Tyranny: How The US National Security State Is Using Coronavirus To Fulfill An Orwellian Vision,” The Last American Vagabond, 20 Apr 2020] that they were looking at a FOIA request about the AI task force of the U.S. that was very concerned about keeping up a China, with data, and they’re building AI and this idea of whoever gets to general and artificial intelligence first can essentially rule the world or rule the technological systems of the world. There are people out there who think that we need to merge with computers or we will be eliminated.

  So that’s a whole nother layer. It’s not just about making money and controlling people as actually they would prefer to have us become data so that we can be batteries to fuel this future that really doesn’t have a place for humanity as we know it in it. I’m just not willing to go there, yet.

  Jason Bosch: Yet.

  Because I think, it’s all in motion, right? This is something in my journey, too, under this lockdown situation, connecting with people in different parts of the world who come from backgrounds of faith and spiritual practice of all kinds who are tapping into energy systems. And I know this may sound sort of—but I think the belief that we know all the things is pretty misguided. Like with string theory and particle physics and there are many things that we may not know and there are many things that may go on faith and spirit and energy of which I feel the people who are part of this transhumanist domination zone would like to put us in their box and capture that all up and put us in their digital box. But then there’s a counter group of people who may not fully be aware that they’re working in a counterpoint to that, this yin-yang who are the goodness of the world of energy in a free and liberated fashion.

  I know this may sound kind of new agey but if you look back to cybernetics, that has been their goal since the the post-World War Two era, the mid-1940s, is to create the cybernetic world. That’s a very, in my mind, western white male dominating version of the world; that you can control it and you can have power and dominion over it. But then there’s a whole big other part of the world that isn’t that. That’s why for me, I think, coming at this from an anti-colonial mindset like an eco-feminist mindset, is the counterpoint to the tech bro’ mindset.
  Ends at 53:53:

  Beginning at 55:11:
  You have to have a structural analysis. The people who are running these systems are not benevolent actors. The money that they give away is to certain ends, to accomplish, to reinforce their own power and influence. It’s not generative and redistributive and it’s dominating. To think that the people who run the cloud are not dominating us, that are just, they’re somehow our benevolent overlords, I think it’s incredibly misguided to think that. I don’t think anyone can look and see the military contracts and the prison contracts and all the things that Amazon Web Services and Google, these smart cities—we see what’s happened in Toronto with them pushing back against sidewalk labs and saying, We don’t want smart cities. We get where you’re going with this and we don’t trust you.

  The thing that I think is really critically important to understand in this moment, too, because while we’re under this lockdown situation—clearly the 5G structure, infrastructure is rolling out, the satellites, the oneweb, the satellite StarLink, all of those are going up—there’s this convergence of technology both in the atmosphere and on the ground in terms of creating almost these fencing and control systems for people. People are getting these digital identities, there probably seems like we’re going to end up, the digital health passports are going to be the open door to give everybody, get your QR code and know what your status is so we can track you everywhere you go.

  These systems are coming online now and if you look towards satellite-linked livestock management, that I believe is the model. That you would have these satellites and you have cows with the tag in their ear or goats or whatever, collars, that you can manage “free-range” through geo fencing. It’s like your electric dog fence but you don’t actually have the wire in it. Just when you get up close to the edge you can bump up and the vibration if you keep going, you get shocked.

  We’re almost to the point at which we can manage that with people. And if you imagine your UBI is on your phone, when you are situated in different digital containment zones, they can control you at that level. They can control your access to basic needs of life: your shelter, your food, your water, your healthcare. All of those things can be predicated, if they’re digital, linked into geofencing.

  Paul Romer is out of NYU and he has been theorizing for some time, collaborating with the World Bank, about things called Charter Cities. That you would have these carve-outs within cities that were sort of like no rules apply and you can just make up own rules for the free market and that we would manage refugee populations in that way.

  So all of these pieces are running together. I think if we understand that Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates are not really benevolent entities, that they are there to to aggregate more power unto themselves, the tools that they’re creating are not empowering us and disempowering them. They’re essentially adding more and more layers of digital control onto us. These Silicon Valley people who would push all of this onto the masses and Ed-Tech and have—all of it’s about interoperable data because that’s what they need for the predictive analytics. There’s a company called Clever that has QR code badges for kindergarteners to log into their online Ed-Tech education to maximize the data collection because the little kids couldn’t remember their passwords because they’re just five years old. So you could decorate your QR code with fun stickers but that’s the data extraction purpose and that’s running through charter schools in the Bay Area, Rocket Ship Academy charter schools. the people who are in Silicon Valley who are running these systems don’t send their kids to schools that do that to them. Their kids get blocks and books.

---

• Part 2: Covid, 4IR, & Human Capital Data Markets
  video, 51:01, mp3
  Partial transcript

  Jason Bosch: You mentioned the fourth industrial revolution. What is that?

  The fourth industrial revolution is a concept that’s advanced by the World Economic Forum. That’s the Davos crowd, transnational global capital and it is this future that is imagined for the world that is largely based on a digital world. It uses Internet of Things [IOT] sensors so that the way in which we interact with the world is digitally mediated, artificial intelligence, increasing use of synthetic biology, and bioengineering. Literally—I talked about us being commodities as data—but literally being potentially re-engineered at the cellular level which I believe is also linked in with these mRNA vaccines that are backed by Gates which are also bioengineering which has real concerns about eugenics and robots and automation.

  [Wrench In The Gears: Hewlett Packard And The Pitfalls Of “Deeper Learning” In An Internet Of Things World, 7 Jul 2019
  Timpsila, Medicine for Tech-No-Logic, 7 Aug 2020]

  When we were talking about key dates and things to think about—like when I say that this has been at least in place since the late 1940s—is this idea of the Macy Conferences in Cybernetics and Norbert Weiner and human-computer blending. Norbert Weiner was the father of cybernetics and AI who actually was a brilliant man in philosophy and mathematics and was almost like a human computer. He calculated trajectories for missiles in the Second World War, in his head. But he was very thoughtful and by the end of his life he realized what had happened. He realized what they had created and the implications and that the implications of widespread adoption of robotics would lead to enslavement of humanity like humans cannot compete with robots on many of these tasks. And he started to speak out and was was soundly criticized for it by these institutions that wish to advance it.

  [The Human Use Of Human Beings, Cybernetics and Society, Norber Weiner, (Free Association Books: London, 1989)
  Wrench In The Gears: Quilting Resistance: Fabric, Humanity, Serendipity & Cybernetics, 14 Apr 2019

  But now we are very much getting towards not just robotics but also platform labor, telepresence labor, avatars, and digital—there’s humanoid robots, there’s other kinds of robots. They’re all of these manifestations of digital work that are taking place that are further marginalizing human beings doing the work and that’s what clearly we’ve seen with Ed-Tech in schools, that’s what we’re seeing with telemedicine and healthcare teletherapy and social workers.

  So the fourth industrial revolution is about this seismic shift and essentially to me it feels like it’s about dispossession from the world and in a wholesale clearing even further of the commons to the point that people may not may no longer even have full control of their bodies and their mental states in this world that is planned by the fourth industrial revolution.

  It’s being planned by the telecommunications companies and the finance companies—these sectors. And so humans will be redundant. The billionaires I think would like to imagine a world that’s mostly them and their class and the robots and a few people batteries to keep the AI going, to feed off their data. It really is like the matrix, is where things are headed.

  There’s a new center for the fourth industrial revolution that’s based out of the Presidio in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was watching a talk by Robert McChesney, it was from 2016, where he said—even then they had gotten into Davos and were listening to these talks and everybody in Davos is like, Oh yeah it’s like in a few years we could actually automate all of our factories around the world but the middle class would burn so we’re trying to figure out how to navigate that. We could do it but what would happen if we did it?

  What I’m seeing and have been seeing in the rollout even in Philadelphia, which is a city of a lot of poverty already, is that we’ve seen increased high-tech policing, we’ve seen more and more surveillance systems, more and more social control systems. UBI I believe is the kind of the thing that’s going to try to keep the lid on the pot—keep it from boiling over—give people a little bit so that they don’t totally rebel....
  Ends at: 4:34

  Beginning at 17:41:

  COVID and The Fourth Industrial Revolution

  I think there are many aspects to the situation that we’re not meant to know. We’re not meant to have all the facts because not having all the facts leads to more speculation and more friction. For me I had done all of this research about the fourth industrial revolution leading up to this and I never would have figured that pandemic was going to be their trigger moment to make all of this roll out happen—wasn’t anything that was on my radar at all. But clearly once I started reading the World Bank stuff around pandemic bonds it was pretty obvious that there are whole markets set up in advance of pandemic to take advantage of the situation.

  I think this crisis brings to the fore a lot of larger issues of control, safety, privilege, thoughts about life, what is the meaning of life?, how do we deal with death? There are many things that are packed into this that when we get in these online discussions the gray area falls away. I think we would all like to feel that we’re in control of having a good life and that’s something that as white people we feel like we’re used to having that—many other people in the world are not used to having that so I think in many respects that may be feeding into some of this dynamic.

  The stakes are super high on getting this industrial revolution thing in place around the world. It’s very clear that governments around the world have been very invested in biological weapons and synthetic biological weapons and printing viruses, synthetic biology viruses on computers. To me to think that at some point governments wouldn’t decide to use those technologies against domestic populations to accomplish the end that they want—I feel like it’s a possibility. I feel like there are no guarantees of safety.

  I think people would like to roll back and feel like if they did all of the right things then we would be safe and I think there are probably—the black community—there are many people who just know it’s not safe. There are no guarantees of safety in the United States. That said I’m not trying to be cavalier about all these things but really trying to look at the data and I think what we’re seeing rolling out with the fourth industrial revolution is data driven. Everything is data driven. Government is data driven. Society is data driven. It’s all driven on data. But data can be used to different ends depending on what data you use, how you collect the data or don’t collect the data, how data is compromised or not compromised.

  I think it’s highlighting all of these issues around data analytics and the power that data analytics have over society both in very specific policy ways but also just even on our mental states. Because two people can look at the same thing and interpret it very differently. That’s where I’m at. I’m not—we don’t know. There are many aspects of this that we don’t know but at the same time what I would say is under these conditions of extreme hardship that are advancing the fourth industrial revolution and further consolidating power in ways I think are going to have long-term negative consequences, we have to look out the other end and say when are we gonna say it’s okay to come out? Because I think from a mental health standpoint, an economic standpoint, there’s tremendous trauma that’s happening that can’t be discounted.

  From hearing them talk about it, it sounds like the plan is waves on waves of this, that this is the new normal, is facing pandemic and whenever things get out of hand that’s the card that can be played. Whether it’s a pandemic in actuality, whether it’s a natural situation, or whether it’s something that is engineered by a political entity to a certain end. That’s just how it is and it’s kind of awful to have to think about it.

  Jason Bosch: I think a lot people have a hard time thinking of their leaders or thinking of politicians or business people or philanthropists as having any ulterior motive. They can imagine some foreign leader being this horrible person but they can’t imagine someone of their own color or their own nationality or whatever, I don’t know. It’s very bizarre to me that people can’t grasp that there’s something else going on.

  Well, I mean, there’s a huge mythology of America, right? For some people. I mean, about, just what we are and what America represents. When you start to peel back it’s not all rosy. If you look at the money, for me money and power, they’re the same thing. You just follow the money. This is where the fourth industrial revolution and Davos is so key, is that I think, you always hear the two wings of the same bird kind of narrative. But truthfully these programs are being advanced by powerful interests who have enough money to buy both sides. And they’ll brand things and frame things differently. But they bought both sides. Google has bought both sides. Jeff Bezos has bought both sides. And I’m not a psychologist but you know I do sense that there are ways in which people who are within that apparatus justify things to themselves and compartmentalize things.

  I’ve found in terms of people who won’t take meetings with me, they would prefer to have plausible deniability about what’s actually happening. If no one comes and tells them, then they can say they didn’t know when when the time comes of what was really going on. That’s why I feel like my little job is to run around with my half sheets of paper and say I know what you’re doing. It’s bad. Don’t do this thing. I may not be able to stop it but I can at least eliminate the plausible deniability piece because I say, listen I showed up to testify to tell you that this is what’s happening Poverty Committee: Goldman Sachs wants to turn the poor into data commodities with pay for success finance and digital identity systems.

  [Wrench In The Gears: No One Should Be A Commodity To Profit Goldman Sachs: Testimony Opposing Pay For Success Finance For Housing, 29 Nov 2019]

  The national NAACP has issued a resolution saying That is a bad idea to link digital identity blockchain to digitize public benefits. Not just me—the NAACP. So there you go, let me add that to the record so you all know you’re on notice that when this comes that someone said it was not okay.

  At this point it’s very hard. I’m mostly a sole operator with the exception of a couple dozen other moms because we don’t fit any mold. We can’t go reform Party A or Party B. The Davos people are the ones, the Trilateral Commission, they’re the ones who are pulling the strings and you can’t get to them. I’m not saying we shouldn’t resist but they’re not touchable by an electoral process. Getting one or two more city council people who you think are going to be on your side doesn’t really—that level of reform doesn’t touch Davos.

  What we’re up against now is this brutal progression of bio-capitalism that’s coming on with drone robots yelling at you about social distancing and the robot police dogs in Massachusetts. Who is stopping that? Nobody’s stopping that at this point.

  [Wrench In The Gears: Vaccines, Blockchain and Bio-capitalism, 19 Apr 2020]

  So it’s going to have to be people organizing outside of existing parties, I think. It’s not going to be an election. If you’re running around knocking doors for an election, I got to tell you, if it was going to be fixed it would already been fixed.

  Human Capital Data Markets

  Just as a background around the human capital markets: this idea of wealth being concentrated in a small number of people and then you have lots of poor people and it’s almost like a plumbing problem. Capital has to circulate in order for the system to keep going, for growth. For people that continue to make money, capital has to flow. If it gets locked up the whole system falls apart. That’s why even after the last 2008 crash everyone’s like, still spend money because if you stop spending money the whole system falls apart.

  To keep the money flowing that’s why we have to turn the poor into commodities. The data structure for that—and this is to channel transnational global capital—so these are the 2,000 of the world’s largest asset holders—Blackrock, Blackstone, UBS Bank, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs—all of these players—Vatican Bank, Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund—all of this money is locked up and it needs a place to flow. And we are reaching a point in which the general population did not have liquidity or buying power to keep that going. So that’s why this shift has to happen in terms of turning people into these gambling commodities so then the rich are playing amongst themselves this gambling game over who gets the more money.

  That structure rolls through the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals which may seem to make not much sense. How does the UN connect to impact investing? It connects very directly. Two-thirds of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals are about poverty. There are a few that are about water and carbon and climate but it’s only four or five of them. The rest are about public-private partnerships and about education and health and smart cities and justice and all of these things about managing populations.

  

  Those were passed in 2015. The Global Impact Investment Network was set up right around the 2008 crash. That was getting everybody on board for impact metrics for social impact. They’re connected. That’s 2009, Judith Rodin and the Rockefeller Foundation.

  [Wrench in the Gears from Minding Our Health: The Nudge, Part Two, 13 Jul 2018:

  The July/August 2018 issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette, the alumni magazine for the University of Pennsylvania, features Blockchain as its cover story, “Blockchain Fever.” The extensive article outlines use cases being considered for Blockchain deployment, including plans by a recent Wharton graduate to develop an application that would certify interactions between healthcare agencies and Medicare/Medicaid recipients for reimbursement. The University of Pennsylvania Health System is deep into innovative technologies. David Asch, director of Penn’s Center for Health Innovation, testified at the October 2017 hearing. The Penn Medicine integrated health system was created in 2001 by former UPenn president Judith Rodin in collaboration with Comcast Executive David Cohen. Rodin went on to head the Rockefeller Foundation, and in the years that followed the foundation spearheaded the creation of the Global Impact Investment Network. GIIN fostered growth of the social impact investing sector, at the same time healthcare began to transition away from a pay-for-service reimbursement towards a value-based model predicated on outcomes met.

  ]

  With the B Lab they got everybody set up with the metrics now to play their game.

  [Wrench in the Gears: Social Impact Investors Eye Public Education Market in Philadelphia, 25 Jan 2018:

  I have come to realize that Benefit Corporations are going to be inextricably linked to social impact investing. I found it really strange that the B Lab that was charged with setting up the GIIRS metrics was based in suburban Philadelphia rather than in Silicon Valley, Boston, NYC, etc.
  There is some interesting background on B Lab: bcorporation.net’s A New Corporation for a New Economy (2009)
  And on Investors’ Circle: https://investorscircle.net/about/history/
  “As IC brought together thought leaders, new initiatives were conceived and incubated, including sector leaders B Lab, Slow Money, and the Patient Capital Collaborative. IC introduced hundreds of MBAs to impact investing through its MBA Venture Fellows program, and in 2009 members in Philadelphia launched IC’s flagship local network. Since its inception in the Midwest, IC first moved east to Boston and then west to San Francisco. In 2011, upon the governance merger with SJF Institute, its headquarters moved to Durham, NC.”
  See reference to 2009 above. That was the year Rockfeller/Rodin officially launched GIIN and IRIS: https://thegiin.org/assets/GIIN%20Launch%202009.pdf

  ]

  In 2015 everybody signed up the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. We’re thinking climate but really it’s a little bit of climate and a lot of poverty. Then there’s something called the Impact Management Project which are these 2,000 largest asset holders that are going to channel their capital into fixing the climate and solving poverty because that’s the apparatus that is the plumbing to keep the capital moving when the poor can’t buy anything. That’s the new model, the new economic model and this is largely backed by Open Society and Soros. It’s called the Institute for New Economic Thinking and he’s bought thousands of economists all over the world at like fifty thousand dollars a pop. Open society has to set this new economic system up so it’s all tied to the UN SDGs. Number three is health and number four is education.

  “I believe many of UN SDG indicators are not bad ideas. I like riding my bike. I like walk-able communities. I don’t want people to be hit by car. I believe women should have access to healthcare, and all children deserve a humane education. I oppose cash bail and want justice to be served. But policies must be grounded in communities, not governed by some uber-manager in the cloud who serves Ronald Cohen’s interests.”

  —Alison McDowell, Human Capital Markets, Digital Identity,
  & the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

  They have said to make the impact markets work it all has to be mediated digitally through ICT—Individual Communication Technology—so that’s phones and tablets. All of the UN SDGs ironically are supposed to be channeled through digital devices. Why? Because they need the data for the impact investors. If you teach a kid something but it’s not on a dashboard does it count? It’s not going to account for UBS Bank so it all has to be on the dashboard.

  [Wrench In The Gears: Mind the Gap: The Violence Of Pandemic Dashboards, 13 Apr 2020]

  What we’re seeing in terms of the shift to everything digital is to capture that data, to justify it for these—and it may not be fully online yet, but it’s normalizing it. The way in which you have playlist education, it’s not because that’s a better education, it’s because it’s a better data collection for these impact markets.

  [Wrench In The Gears began in 2016; search on playlist education for more:

  • Badges Find Their Way to San Jose, 11 May 2018
  • Digital curriculum, an answer to equity? An Open Letter to Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, 31 Aug 2019
  • Vanquishing the Windigo: Standing Up to Marc Tucker and Digital Capitalism, 7 Oct 2019

  ]

  I know much more about the education side because I was tracking ed-tech for a long time. But health care is the other huge piece. The nodes of data collection on people are education and training (skill building), health care—and health care also includes mental health and also includes addiction treatment in that, and then supportive housing. That’s like housing for people and services around their housing for people who are unhoused.

  Those are the three main areas of data collection. What we’ve seen with this lockdown situation now is all of a sudden at least two of these major industries that are connected, health and education, are all platformed. Everything is online. School is closed. No more school. Probably never more anymore school unless we wear hats with pool noodles on the top or something. I mean it’s ridiculous. As I was studying this for the last five years, this model is called the Learning Ecosystem and it’s supposedly I guess when we go out that you don’t have brick and mortar schools anymore. You just—it’s like Pokemon Go Education: you bump around and earn skill badges, like the Girl Scouts or the Boy Scouts and it goes into your learning locker that later you can be—the AI can profile you for a job. But you learn through projects in work-based learning settings and you go to the rock gym and earn a badge. You go places in your community but it’s all under surveillance and you do this instead of school and then most of it is online. For high school kids you would just have a cheap chromebook. And again it’s all consumption, it’s not creation, you can’t really make much on a chromebook. You can just consume and be consumed. And then the little kids would be in these alternative settings like the YMCA and the Boys and Girls Club.

  This has all been set up for at least last 15 years, this infrastructure, as after school programming and summer school programming. I was always thinking—they call it Learning Eco-System, it’s out of Knowledge Works in Cincinnati—and I was thinking, How are they going to close all the schools? I was telling people, This is coming, This is coming and they’re like, We can’t see it and I’m like, How are they going to close all the schools? Who would ever do that? My husband, he’s like, No one’s going to close all the schools. Well, yep didn’t see pandemic coming. And so now we’ve closed all the schools and then the conditions under which in some places their reopening schools are so horrific it’s like a prison so people don’t want to send their kid back to school, One, either because they don’t feel safe because of health concerns or, Two, they just think it’s brutally awful.

  Following the money, Alison McDowell understood years ago the groundwork was being laid to close schools The 4-Minute Version-Ed Reform 2.0 The End Game, 6 Jan 2017 (4:09) This is a distillation of McDowell’s January 3, 2017 1 hour talk, Ed Reform 2.0 - “Personalized’ Learning in Orwellian Times: The push for conditioning and compliance will continue as we finalize the transition to an education system where surveillance is branded as data-driven “personalization” and devices monitor our children’s classrooms continuously. It’s difficult to organize and fight such a nebulous foe. In this hour-long talk I hope to convey the reality of the reformers’ true end game- a future of automated teaching, virtual schooling, and community-based badging programs where workforce skills trump knowledge and critical thinking in the human capital game. A future where parents and students must cobble together dozens of credentialed online and offline educational opportunities for their e-portfolios, feebly attempting to pay for them from meager virtual wallets/Educational Savings accounts. Watch it with the accompanying slide-share open. Many slides have links to resources you can investigate. Please share this post after watching, so we start to understand exactly what we’re up against and begin to organize effective resistance at a national level.

  So there you go—that’s the education piece. It’s pandemic leveraged, essentially the Learning Eco-System rollout once we’re allowed out with our QR codes to check in at all the places. This is tied in with blockchain vouchers, education vouchers, which will be these ESA savings accounts.

  [Wrench In The Gears began in 2016; search on learning eco-system for more:

  • Badges Find Their Way to San Jose, 11 May 2018
  • Trade you a backpack of badges for a caring teacher & well-resourced school, 10 Oct 2016
  • Navigating Whiteness: Could “Anywhere, Anytime” Learning Endanger Black and Brown Students?, 24 Apr 2018
  • Will “smart” cities lead to surveilled education and social control?, 7 Oct 2019
  • Page 19 - Author Archives, Wrench in the Gears, 2016-17

  ]

  The other thing that we’ve seen too is telemedicine which is not—I’m not as deeply immersed in the medical side as the education side but clearly the same situations were being set up in medicine with electronic health records and the Affordable Care Act and standardizing medical care, standardizing all the health care codes, normalizing telemedicine. That has all been in the works for some time. IBM and Google working on AI analytics around medicine in other places, places with socialized medicine that they could get the big data sets. That’s already—now you can hardly see a doctor. You have to be screened through the telemedicine protocols.

  The other piece on the supportive housing is that there are many people that despite restrictions put on evicting people now and postponements, there’s a very clear sense that a lot of people are going to probably be dispossessed out of their current living situations, like in the next year. While there’s a lot of organizing going on around immediate, like don’t evict these people today, and that’s what I was trying to convey within the past year with the Tenants Union and more socialist housing organizations, is that it’s not just about the people—we need to understand this pay for success infrastructure within supportive housing. Because eventually that’s the next frontier. It’s not just keeping people in affordable housing situations. It’s that we have to take on this affordable pay for success housing.

  A lot of these supportive housing programs are run through religious groups. Essentially, the Vatican Bank is very deep into a lot of this. In Philadelphia Project Home is the lead person with pay for success finance. So then the question becomes if all of a sudden large percentages of people have to access housing through pay for success deals that are connected ostensibly through faith-based entities, god forbid you get associated with one that isn’t aligned with your belief system. what does that mean, like in order to not be on a street and you probably won’t be able to be on the street because the drones are after you—like you have to comply with the belief system that may not even be yours? And then someone is getting kickbacks because this is the new human capital commodity scenario.

  There’s huge ethical questions that we should be asking. The other piece of this, there’s a model, Santa Clara County, California is the incubator for a number of these early phase pilot programs. There’s a pre-K one called Strong Start, an early literacy one, there’s one for mental health, and there’s one for housing.

  The housing social impact bond is called Welcome Home. The Welcome Home Social Impact Bond—these deals, these Pay For Success deals are overseen by a third party that assesses its success or not according to the terms of the contract. The Welcome Home Social Impact Bond, the third party assessing the data is Palantir. Palantir is Peter Thiel’s company that maintains contracts with ICE, Department of Homeland Security and predicted policing contracts. So you’re unhoused in Santa Clara—maybe you have someone in your extended family who’s undocumented—and now all of a sudden your access to housing—your data is run through Palantir? Because someone structured it as a global financial market? And even in that, one of the investors in that deal was The Reinvestment Fund which is based in Philadelphia.

  So you’re essentially turning people’s basic human needs into global investment markets and conditioning that on a level of surveillance that’s tied into a very clear predatory police state apparatus. And very few people are talking about that yet but that’s going to be the aftermath of this Covid situation.

  What happens when your housing is predicated on a health status? And you leave for the day and somehow, somebody that you were in touch with two weeks ago changes your QR code you can’t get back in your housing. These are all things that are probably very technically possible now. They’re not perhaps scalable or socially acceptable and that’s what I keep saying. There are these pilots that are in place that should they become normalized, should they become scalable, will have profound implications for humanity. Silicon Valley are not our benevolent overlords, they’re just not.

  Jason Bosch: About Digital ID, did you want to talk a little bit about that? Is that something you delved into?

  The whole concept of human capital data commodities depends on—and also smart cities and internet of things—is that essentially there’s one portal that aggregates all of the data on how you interact through technologies in real time. These items are connected on, it’s called a self-sovereign identity system or decentralized identity system. [See: Blockchain, Self-Sovereign Identity, and Selling Off Humanity, WitG, 15 Jul 2018] Often, people are looking at blockchain as the mechanism although I don’t think it necessarily has to be on blockchain. This premise [is] that you accumulate assets and these are assets that are maybe outside of currency. A digital asset could be your birth certificate, your marriage certificate, the property you own, your certifications, your credentials academic or otherwise, your health status, your voting records, your health records. All of this data accrues in one place. What they will say, what the the privacy people and the data commodity—You have control over your data. You can use it however you [want]. You can unlock whatever part of data that you want. But MIT has developed something called Enigma which allows querying on encrypted data. So it may not be personal, PII, like Personally Identifiable Information, but in aggregate they can use and tap into that information for their impact deals.

  Digital identity systems have been prototyped through, again, Global Aid. There’s something called ID 2020 that is connected to the United Nations. I believe it’s Microsoft and Accenture [that] are the enablers. The Rockefeller Foundation is part of it as well. I know a lot of folks on the conservative side of things point fingers and say The Globalists, watch the Globalists. I’m, like, we’re the globalist, mostly. The globalists are Microsoft and Accenture and Deloitte and KPMG. There are many globalists that are embedded within the United States. Not exclusively. We have to understand that when we’re looking at the United Nations. They’re not a benevolent entity at this point. They’ve had long-standing ties to the Rockefeller Family for years and years and the Trilateral Commission. So they’re this apparatus.

  But ID 2020 is one of the systems that was used to track refugee populations. They will pitch it by saying, ‘You need to run out of your house in the middle of night and you don’t have your papers. Don’t worry. Once your retinal scan is on file you just take it wherever you go. Literally what they’re setting up is, when i talk about programmable money, they’re doing their refugee benefits tied to retinal scans biometrics in places like in Scandinavia—the Syrian refugee population—they pay for their groceries with a retinal scan. Well how convenient, until you get labeled a dissident.

  Then, once they have that biometric data there are whole issues about it being hacked or encrypted like if it becomes misused. You don’t get that back. That’s not just a password you can change. You can’t change your biometrics so these systems that have been refined through aid packages are now finding their way back into the United States.

  Michael Bloomberg is a key player in smart cities and smart policing and impact investing through Bloomberg Philanthropies. He has underwritten and he’s donated significant monies to thousands of mayors of mid and sized cities around the country and the EU and India to get on board with data-driven government.

  They backed a project in Austin where they were assigning blockchain identities to unhoused people, again ostensibly so that they could keep their medical records on a QR code. But that opens them up to become these impact commodities. And now there’s a lot of blockchain work going on in Austin. That project evolved into something called Mypass which is connected to the Roberts Woods Johnson Foundation. It turns out that QDX Health, which is based outside of Austin (it’s between Austin and San Antonio), that company has developed blockchain health passports. I haven’t made a direct link between the Austin homeless blockchain program and QDX Health but very clearly once you have a digital identity program set up on blockchain having a health component plugged right in, seems the next logical conclusion.

  These these systems are underway and I had mentioned Amply, the Pre-K identity app. The state of Illinois, not a surprise because Chicago is the futures market, human capital futures exchange really is what we’re talking about. That’s why Pritzker, that’s why University of Chicago, Chicago Boys, this is based in Chicago, the state of Illinois, they have a Blockchain Task Force where they’ve looked at all of the options around blockchain.

  

  There’s a report that you can look up online, the Illinois Blockchain [And Distributed Ledger] Task Force project [January 31, 2018] where they had a number of thought experiments about how they would use—and this is the programmable money, that’s useful to think about. This hadn’t been implemented but what they did was they were theorizing in a diagram [about] SNAP, money to buy food on blockchain and what that would look like. You would have an individual with a digital identity. You would have a digital wallet that would have a certain amount of access put into that wallet. Then when you used that money for food and it would probably only be programmed for food—your SNAP versus your housing or health care—if you made the right choice, the “healthy choice”, it would put money back into your wallet as like a subsidy. But if you made the wrong choice it would just be full price.

  So they had an apple and a hamburger and so they would say, Well if you bought the apple we’ll ding you back a quarter because we love that choice. That’s a really good choice that you just made there. The problem—and a lot of people [would think], That sounds great because people should just be making the good choices. But if there’s no structural analysis—because what that is not seeing is that this person may live in a food desert where they can’t get the apple. This person may work two jobs in some side gigs, side hustles and they can’t get to the grocery store with the produce when it’s open. This person may live in a squat and not have access to cooking opportunities.

  There are many reasons by which the right choice is not the possible choice. Then people say well it’s just a plus. But the thing is eventually then they will cut it back and then the SNAP amount allocated into that system will only suffice through the month if you always make the right choice.

  Jason Bosch: Or if they decide that baby formula—there are things that are corporate health versus a community garden type thing—they could declare that this vitamin enhanced processed food, we’ve declared this to be healthy.

  Right. Who gets to say what’s the good choice and what’s not the good choice. And then if you look at this diagram, it’s very simple if your premise is there’s the preferred choice and the unpreferred choice, you can apply that to anything. Correct? You could apply that to a medical treatment. What’s the “evidence-based” choice? That’s going to be the preferred choice. And who’s benefiting from that being the good choice?

  School curriculum: what’s the preferred choice? What curriculum module? Do you have to pay a surcharge for the Black Panthers curriculum module? [laughs] Literally, or somebody who has a different ideology, if you have something outside the non-corporate state you’re going to pay for it and maybe you’re not going to be able to because we’ll just put it out of your price range.

  What if it’s a therapy? Well we hear that this evidence-based virtual reality therapy, CBT therapy is just the best. You want talk therapy? We don’t really do that anymore. I’m sorry.

  When we talk about programming money and controlling people and then in the post lockdown economic crash scenario way more people are going to be put in positions of being controlled ostensibly by the “decentralized wonderful blockchain liberation” but in reality it is, in my sense, it feels very fascist.
  Ends at 47:00

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• Part 3: Human Capital Bonds Human Capital Financial System
  video, 59:36, mp3
  Partial transcript

  I want to offer a little bit more clarity around these human capital bonds and the financial structures because I think that is a central concept people need to understand and they change up the terms for it sometimes so it makes it hard to pin down because they’ll say, It’s not a Social Impact Bond (SIB), it’s Pay For Success. Or, It’s not Pay For Success, it’s a Social Impact Partnership. Or they’ll continue to change the words. But essentially the premise of this human capital financial system that’s moving forward is that there are equations that are used to cost out negative externalities and academic institutions often will be brought in to create these equations, these think tanks to determine your return on investment.

  So they cost out What does it cost if you’re incarcerated? And in many respects growing the levels of incarceration and documenting the cost of incarceration are really going to feed into these impact markets because that’s going to be a giant cost offset. What is the cost of providing special education? What is the cost of someone having depression and not being able to work?

  Everything, all of these human elements or social or policy programs are going to have money attached to them and then the premise is that if you can preemptively fix someone—and this may be that the person hasn’t even ended up in that situation, they may have never been incarcerated, they may have never actually been diagnosed with depression, they may never have been identified as needing special education. But if you profile them into their potentiality of that it’s almost like a pre-crime scenario. You can preemptively fix them from something that may have never happened and generate a cost offset because you would say, It’s going to cost us X thousands of dollars to fix you if you’ve been broken. It’ll cost us only a fraction of that to fix you preemptively so that doesn’t happen and the space in between, we’ll negotiate our profit. And that’s the profit that will be taken by these investment entities.

  I want to make it clear that the history of this structure goes back much farther than I initially thought. I had originally thought that this started with social impact bonds which came out of the United Kingdom. Sir Ronald Cohen developed them, I think about 2010. The first one was the Peterborough Social Impact Bond which was a prison bond and that was early on. Then several years later, I think in 2012, that concept was brought over from the U.K. to the U.S. The first Social Impact Bond here was Rikers Island which was another prison—social impact bond to ostensibly provide services so that people wouldn’t end up back in prison. Again, even within that concept, you have to understand that’s not looking at the structural nature of incarceration; that being incarcerated is essentially something that is the problem of the person as a problem opposed to a problem of a social system.

  So I had thought it started with Social Impact Bonds in this 2010 era. I found out later that actually the government performance contracting system was much earlier and actually started in the mid 1990s. This happened in the Twin Cities area which wasn’t any place. There’s a geography to this. There’s this idea of New York as hedge funds and DC as policy and Silicon Valley as tech and entertainment Chicago as futures markets and Boston is venture capital.

  

  These different cities have different [centers]. Twin Cities was not on my radar at all. But it turns out that the Twin Cities is also where charter schools started and it was right around the same time at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve there was an economist there, his name is Arthur Rolnick. Arthur Rolnick and a gentleman by the name of Stephen Rothschild, who was a former executive at General Mills who had started a work ready program for at-risk adult men in that area, got together and created in the mid-1990s a prototype for performance-based contracting for the government and for Minnesota. That was the very earliest structure upon which all of these pay for success contracts now have been layered on top of.

  That’s important to understand, that it goes back to the Federal Reserve research early on and that Stephen Rothschild was connected with Clayton Christensen. This idea of disruptive innovation, it goes back to this early stage and it’s important because one of the major players in this space in the development and use of philanthropy to catalyze social impact finance and human capital data analytics is coming out of Silicon Valley. The Silicon Valley Community Foundation is the largest community foundation in the country, if not the world, definitely in the United States. It cycles lots of tech money and a lot of that is actually also in cryptocurrency so it’s a huge behemoth. It’s sort of a slush fund, the money goes in and it mixes around and then it can come out and it makes it harder to track what money is coming from whom and undertaking which programs. But that is a central feature and it was created by combining two large pre-existing foundations in the Bay Area to make this community foundation.

  [WitG Series on Silicon Valley Community Foundation, 4 Jan 2019:

  • Introduction: Toxic Philanthropy Part Three: The Silicon Valley Community Foundation
  • Part One: Silicon Valley’s Social Impact Deal Maker
  • Part Two: To Serve Man: It’s A Cook Book!
  • Part Three: Philanthrophy’s Lesser Known Weapons: PRIs, MRIs and DAFs
  • Part Four: Charter, Public Health and Catholic Charity Interests Help Launch “Disruptive” Pay for Success Program
  • Part Five: When Community Foundations Go Global (Or Coastal)

  ]

  The first director, his name was Emmett Carson and he came out of the Minneapolis area to come and run it. Then in 2012 in this Santa Clara area, which is a pilot for a lot of pay for success, they actually brought in Stephen Rothschild to talk about this model of performance-based contracting.

  Within the geography of how these innovative systems of finance work it’s important to understand the role of Art Rolnick and Minneapolis because Art Rolnick later ended up partnering with several important individuals on something called the Invest In Kids Working Group If you’re going to create a human capital market you want to maximize—it’s based on human capital data—you want to maximize the amount of data you collect. So their framework is that they would emphasize on early childhood education because that’s starting early. Actually at this point they’re backing up into prenatal and home visits for pregnant mothers. So that’s about as early as you can get in terms of conception to get the data so it’s backed up even further but there’s a profound focus.