Putin’s New Chief Of Staff Unveils Device That ‘Taps Into Global Consciousness’
Putin has a new chief of staff named Anton Vaino, he claims to have invented a device that can tap into the global conscience. Very strange.
Vaino invented a device that connects to global conscience. It taps into humanity’s collective mind. He says it can predict future. Financial markets, like Selena and Bieber’s tumultuous, on-again, off-again romance, appear complicated, even chaotic to the casual observer. But beneath that apparent chaos lies a complex interplay of psychological, economic, and political forces. Gather enough data and feed it into a powerful enough predictive model and you can forecast how these forces will play out—at least that’s what advocates of big data and predictive analytics have been telling us for years.
Vladimir Putin’s new chief of staff, Anton Vaino, has unveiled a new device he claims is able to tap into the global consciousness.
An investigation by the BBC found that Mr. Vaino invented a mysterious device for the Russian government – enabling them to “better understand and control society.”
BBC News reports: In 2012 an article appeared in a specialist journal called Economics and Law written by an “AE Vaino” – widely believed to be one and the same person as Mr Putin’s new chief of staff.
It was titled “The capitalisation of the future”.
Levers of power
Written in a dense academic prose – which many Russian commentators this week said they found almost impossible to understand – and accompanied by even more complex charts and diagrams, the article outlines new ways of organising and understanding society.
Mr Vaino argues that the economy and society in general have become too complex to manage by traditional means. Governments need to seek new ways of regulating and controlling them.
The article describes a new device called a “nooscope” which, it says, can tap into global consciousness and “detect and register changes in the biosphere and in human activity”.
The “nooscope” bewildered many in Russia this week. Does the device really exist, they asked. What does it actually do? Is Mr Vaino really serious?
BBC Russian tracked down Viktor Sarayev, an award-winning economist and businessman who has co-authored a number of articles with Mr Vaino.
He described the nooscope as “a device that scans transactions between people, things and money”, and claimed it was an invention of parallel significance to the telescope and the microscope.
But he was less forthcoming about whether it actually existed, or was still under development.
‘Utopian idea’
Leading Russian academics meanwhile expressed deep scepticism about the theories and solutions propounded by Mr Vaino and his collaborators.
“There isn’t any science in this,” says Simon Kordonsky, a philosophy professor at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics.
He dismissed the article as indulging in “mythological” hypotheses about the future which, he said, contrasted with the genuinely progressive ideas explored by the first generation of Russian reforming economists in the early post-Soviet years.
“If we evaluate this article by its meaning, then without doubt it’s a cause for concern,” says another philosopher from the same institute, Prof Vitaly Kourennoy.
“It represents a utopian idea which has no connection to science. It’s propounding some kind of all-embracing system of government that has to be enforced by top officials.”
Viewed from this perspective however, Mr Vaino’s theories perhaps begin to make more sense.
They could actually be seen as part of a pattern that has emerged in Russian politics over the past decade, as President Putin has sought to reassert control after the chaos of the early 1990s.
Kremlin spin doctors
Some observers also draw parallels with the approach of one of Mr Vaino’s predecessors – former presidential adviser and deputy prime minister Vladislav Surkov.
Dubbed by one Russian politician as “a puppet master who privatised the political system”, Mr Surkov is credited with inventing the theory of “managed democracy”, through which President Putin now runs Russia unchallenged.
Widely seen as a master of political spin, Mr Surkov specialised in manipulating information in a way which often left his interlocutors unsure as to where the facts ended and the fiction began.
This also appears to be an approach used by Dmitry Kiselyov, the powerful head of the state-run Russia Today media network, and a man often referred to as “the Kremlin’s chief propagandist”.
Tasked with broadcasting the Kremlin’s point of view, both to Russians and the rest of the world, Mr Kiselyov told the BBC earlier this year that “the age of neutral journalism” had passed.
Blurred reality
In expounding his theories about the “nooscope” Anton Vaino seems to be echoing these more high-profile Kremlin colleagues.
There is no way to prove that the world “exists in reality and not in our imagination”, he writes in the Economics and Law article, explaining why the nooscope is needed to interpret and manage world events.
Prof Kordonsky feels he has heard it all before.
“It’s a state of mind,” he told BBC Russian. “It’s a rejection of the current realities. They want to change things but they don’t want to understand what things are really like. They have a perception of potential greatness […] and they’re suggesting a way of changing the country and building a better tomorrow.”
If AE Vaino the political scientist and Anton Vaino the new chief of staff really are the same person, as most Russians presume, then the coming months may show if the nooscope can really deliver a “better tomorrow”.
At the same time,
Putin: New World Order Using Internet To Control Humanity
Russian President Vladimir Putin says the New World Order has “corrupted” the “ideals of the internet“, turning it into a “global prison” with “surveillance eyes on everybody“, while announcing that Russia is launching a new ‘independent Internet’ that will be free from the shackles of the New World Order.
“What was once a tool of freedom for the individual [the Internet] has slowly been twisted into a tool of oppression and, in essence, a very modern form of slavery,” Putin said.
Putin and the Security Council are developing the new Internet initially for BRICS nations, which will be totally independent of global elite corporations and governments and will continue to work in the event of global internet outages.
The new initiative was brought forward at the October meeting of the Security Council, with Putin setting a deadline of August 1, 2018.
It is believed the new independent Internet will be free from censorship, with the likes of Google and Facebook barred from monopolising key functions such as search results and social media communications.
RT reports: While discussing the issue, members of the council noted that “the increased capabilities of western nations to conduct offensive operations in the informational space as well as the increased readiness to exercise these capabilities pose a serious threat to Russia’s security.”
They decided that the problem should be addressed by creating a separate backup system of Domain Name Servers (DNS), which would not be subject to control by international organizations. This system would be used by countries of the BRICS bloc – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
The issue of excessive dependency on global DNS has previously been addressed by Russia. In 2014, the Russian Communications Ministry conducted a major exercise in which it simulated the “switching off” of global internet services and used a Russian backup system to successfully support web operations inside the country.
However, when reporters asked Vladimir Putin’s Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov if the country’s authorities had been considering disconnecting from the global internet in 2014, Peskov dismissed
“Russia’s disconnection from the global internet is of course out of the question,” Peskov told the Interfax news agency.
However, the official also emphasized that “recently, a fair share of unpredictability is present in the actions of our partners both in the US and the EU, and we [Russia] must be prepared for any turn of events.”
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