MARK ZUCKERBERG - The Illuminatus?

“Then it faced something not foreseen, the overwhelming power of a single human being, a Mutant. The creature known as the Illuminatus was born with the ability to mould men’s emotions and to shape their minds. His bitterest opponents were made into his devoted servants. Armies could not, would not fight him. Before him the First Foundation fell and Seldon’s schemes lay in ruins.”

Isaac Asimov, Second Foundation

         We sit closely packed, and this closeness contains a palpable confinement. I’m not a party animal. I hate large gatherings. Looking around, I see a whole panorama of empty faces; faces I know this man will rule. Some of them are watching footage on their mobile phones. There are others  surfing the net, talking, sexting, texting, googling, tweeting. But myself excepted, there wasn’t anyone left in the physical world. What I saw were all varieties of mutants – quants, dorks, geeks and plain nerds seeking not human contact but electronic guidance and the promise of machines that not only solve problems but control human beings.

            Up on stage the world’s most notorious deceiver argues for the truth of his deception. Very much the creature of an establishment he once affected to despise, Zuckerberg rises to the occasion with unsentimental emphasis.  In the long run, he says,  the network itself might reasonably be expected to evolve into the single most knowledgeable entity in the entire galaxy. His sense of propriety prevented him from saying anything very specific, he added, but he was prepared to concede that “Facebook might be this Planet’s way of evolving a collective, living brain.”  

"What’s Mark Zuckerberg’s tour of America all about?
A bid to be president – or eternal overlord of the human race?"
Josh Glancy in New York 

            I sat up! I had been expecting a geek – in that established, badly-dressed asexual sense. But unlike most of his peers, Zuck was of that exceptional strain, a geek with a dazzling replicant mind. Looking at him, he was unremarkable to the point of ordinariness. What I saw was an ordinary, almost anonymous man whose countenance was a blank, a man whose personality seemed indifferent, without charisma or appeal. But to me, he was also protean, shapeshifting, no less. I could see right through him. An eerie brain in a skull-like contraption attached to a poorly exercised body that did not cast a shadow.  

            As I watched this man I could hear myself think: this brain has  waged an invisible campaign of terror against some of the most vulnerable people in society, entrapped over 2 billion people

worldwide, victims that include children as young as 13,* on dopamine-dependent promises of instant friendships, social attachments and daily companionship. As Sean Parker, former president of Facebook famously observed, "God only knows what it is doing to out children's brains." 

            Was I missing something here?

            For a few moments I yield to an uncomprehending, grotesque illusion. The idea that exploded in my mind was too outrageous, too ludicrous to be taken seriously. It suggested that, run by a secretive collective of Morlocks and Mutants – also referred to as the “Illuminati”, Facebook was an aberration in the sequence of human evolution, a secret alien covenant to modify the human race. And few would doubt that from that moment on, the destiny and destination of this anthropoid species had passed out of human control.

            By no means the tallest person in the room,  he suddenly towered above the crowd, seeming to inhabit another body. I had an overpowering awareness of something anomalous, a strong sensation of a solitary megalomaniac ambition; the perception of a soulless robot in the outline of a man who attempts to create something that will astonish the universe, only to put in its place a time bomb of enormous destructiveness. I also knew that social dependency on Facebook would create an immense emotional void in the human psyche and that he intended to fill that void with the very system that had created and sustained this orchestrated emptiness.

            I could feel my heart miss a beat as I grasped the enormity of it all.  I had performed what was perhaps the most supremely invocative act of my life. I had given birth to an idea. For  what began taking shape in my mind was almost an absurdity. The lanky, hooded figure on stage was not Mark Zuckerberg - but a virtual extension of his own soulless self, a man-transcending exocreature. Indeed,

I was consumed by a precarious possibility, the prospect that MZ was a cosmic Replicant – an emissary from some galactic sleeper cell. A Mutant with the covert and cryptic power of controlling and manipulating human emotions, mopping up beings at a phenomenal rate so that they became, not simply members - the most spied-upon and databased individuals in the whole wide world - but gigantic economic forces amenable to rapacious, profitable treatment. And there he was, created for and by the Internet, looking down with a cold, penetrating gaze, his ferocious yellow eyes transfixing the audience below. They were enormously powerful and alert, his face without expression.

           Had the disease jumped species already, I wondered?

            Was the planet Earth being subverted by a shadowy conspiracy of shape-shifting inter-dimensional Illuminati, as the wildly speculative self-publicist David Icke suggested, leaving open the possibility that we were both converts with a mission. For neither I nor other experts who have seen and examined  the evidence have any idea what these creatures might be. So readers will make up their own minds whether the notion of a New World Order, a Secret Covenant, to dominate the globe, an idea more traditionally articulated by the far-Right and far-Left, is a probable explanation for the origins of Zuckerberg’s ideological triumph, or merely my own  intensely personal perception of the reality of evil?

            I got up, his eyes still locked on me – I was the last human there - I had to get out to escape!





* “The difference between Facebook’s terms and a normal contract for a standard consumer good is that while you need to be 18 to sight the latter, Facebook contracts are open to any child of 13 – no parental consent required.” Dominic Lawson, The Sunday Times 18.11.2016
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Pending  civil inquiries!