dailydeclaration.org.au
2025-05-03
My friends, let me introduce you to Yuval Noah Harari, a man chock full of big ideas. He explained during the covid crisis: "Covid is critical because this is what convinces people to accept, to legitimise, total biometric surveillance. If we want to stop this epidemic, we need not just to monitor people, we need to monitor what's happening under their skin." In a 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper, Harari repeated this idea: "What we have seen so far is corporations and governments collecting data about where we go, who we meet, what movies we watch. The next phase is the surveillance going under our skin." He likewise told India Today, when commenting on changes accepted by the population during covid:
We now see mass surveillance systems established even in democratic countries which previously rejected them, and we also see a change in the nature of surveillance. Previously, surveillance was mainly above the skin; now we want it under the skin... Governments want to know not just where we go or who we meet. They want to know what's happening under our skin: what is our body temperature; what is our blood pressure; what is our medical condition?
Harari is clearly a man who wants to... get under your skin. He just might succeed. Another recent interview finds him waxing philosophical: "Now humans are developing even bigger powers than ever before. We are really acquiring divine powers of creation and destruction. We are really upgrading humans into gods. We are acquiring, for instance, the power to re-engineer human life." As Kierkegaard once said of Hegel when he talks about the Absolute, when Harari talks about the future, he sounds like he's going up in a balloon.