On Frankenstein, the Technocracy, and the Internet

Here is, for instance, a banger of a quote from brilliant Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman in 1998:

The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s law”—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.

(As a side note, was he shamed into an early retirement? Of course not! But consistent failure as a virtue in Washington is a story for another day.)

Many such cases from the 1990s predicting the non-impact of the internet on society and economy are archived, ironically, on the internet.

Related: Chinese Communist Party Literally Names Its Domestic Surveillance Program 'Skynet' 

Paul Krugman is obviously an overeducated moron, a dumb person’s idea of a smart man — but the real technocrats who work quietly behind the scenes, constructing a dystopian technologically-facilitated police state, are not.

Krugman’s predictive inability aside, someone in the Washington technocracy — given that government agencies were the ones that largely developed it (not Al Gore) — must have foreseen that the internet would revolutionize every facet of life.

Via Internet Society (emphasis added):

In 1973, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated a research program to investigate techniques and technologies for interlinking packet networks of various kinds. The objective was to develop communication protocols which would allow networked computers to communicate transparently across multiple, linked packet networks. This was called the Internetting project and the system of networks which emerged from the research was known as the “Internet.” The system of protocols which was developed over the course of this research effort became known as the TCP/IP Protocol Suite, after the two initial protocols developed: Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP).

In 1986, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) initiated the development of the NSFNET which, today, provides a major backbone communication service for the Internet. With its 45 megabit per second facilities, the NSFNET carries on the order of 12 billion packets per month between the networks it links. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the U.S. Department of Energy contributed additional backbone facilities in the form of the NSINET and ESNET respectively…

A great deal of support for the Internet community has come from the U.S. Federal Government, since the Internet was originally part of a federally-funded research program and, subsequently, has become a major part of the U.S. research infrastructure.

While perhaps not a perfect analogy — in that, whereas government is inescapably nefarious (a “necessary evil at best”) by nature, on the other hand, Dr. Frankenstein did not necessarily have nefarious intentions — the central lesson of the work is apropos: man’s creations often have massive unintended consequences, especially when second and third-order contingencies go unconsidered.

One of those second or third-order effects has been the almost total loss of narrative control by the power structure.

Here are a few examples, in no particular order of significance, of intelligence agency/legacy corporate media (one and the same since the advent of Operation Mockingbird) narrative wars that they’ve either already lost or are in the process of losing to independent and social media over the last several years:

• COVID-19 origins
• 9/11
• Russiagate
• Biden’s dementia
• The 2020 election (see: Quantitative Analysis Shows Google Steered 6 Million Votes to Biden in 2020)
• BLM/DEI
• Monkeypox
• The Epstein files
• Vaccine safety
• Replacement migration
• Child transgenderism
• Bird flu
• The 2016 GOP primary
• The 2016 Democrat primary
• #MeToo
• Fed involvement in January 6

If any of the above hoaxes/disinformation campaigns/propaganda campaigns had been perpetrated on the American public prior to the universality of the internet and the information liberation that it facilitated, it’s very possible that the vast majority of the marks (the public at large) would have swallowed the official story and they would all succeeded.

(Lest anyone doubt the embedded premise that the government has a very exuberant interest in censoring information it doesn’t approve of, I point you to the unprecedented censorship campaigns of the last decade.)

Ahead of this week’s Davos gathering of the aspirationally totalitarian global elite, Klaus Schwab lamented the loss of “truth and trust” in global discourse, without which “we will not be able to solve the big global issues we face at this moment”:

We are missing in our society two fundamental pillars: its truth and its trust. And without restoring those pillars, we will not be able to solve the big global issues we face at this moment. It’s the keyword of dialogue, of listening each to another and in such a way to see the different aspects and dimensions of a problem. And that's fundamental… to create solutions…

I think it's the capability, in view of the fast and disruptive technological change, to remain human beings. As human beings, we have to exercise empathy. We have to listen each to another. And, I think, we have to analyze issues not just with our brains, but also with our heart and with an understanding that ultimately we have to serve not ourselves, but society.

With emotional piano music in the background, Klaus Schwab bemoans the lost "truth and trust" in governing institutions pic.twitter.com/iKlXRSh2iU

— Ben Bartee (@BenBartee) January 22, 2026

Related: Elite Media Propagandist Cries at Davos: ‘We Owned the News’

So the question becomes: If, in fact, the internet has fully undermined the corporate state’s ability to effectively lie to the public, which is prizes, was that not an outcome the authorities could have predicted and plausibly done anything to mitigate?

And, if it was, why did they allow the free flow of information to set them so far back?