Futurologist Sergey Pereslegin: "Following the global pandemic, a change of civilization will come"

The winners will be IT people, doctors, financiers and bureaucrats, but the price will have to be paid by abandoning democracy and the appearance of billions of unemployed. But those who design the new world are not at all afraid of this.

Why a disaster is necessary to change the technological order

...Since 2008, and some even earlier, we all started talking about the crisis of globalization. It is clear that the first stage is the crisis of 2008, then 2014. But the coronavirus was the last and decisive stage in this process. There is already a consensus that the globalization crisis will necessarily result in a change in the technological order, which always leads to a big war. But a number of forecasters pointed out that a big war in this case will not solve the problem: it will either be very big, and then it will not be up to the new technological order, or it will be insufficient to solve the corresponding group of problems.

...The technological structure is the mode of production adopted in a given society at a given time. For example, the 3rd order is predominantly agricultural, the 4th is industrial. The world is now at the end of the fifth technological order - in the economy of consumption, economy of services and financial technologies. Now there is a transition to the sixth order, in which there will again be a producing economy, where artificial intelligence dominates in industry, additive technologies are widespread, the decline in trade is obvious and, as a result, closed cycles in production dominate. The transition has already been going on for several years, somewhere it has gone further, somewhere it is marking time or striving to fall into the 4th, engineering, order of the USSR.

Any change in technological structures is a redistribution of property, a struggle between new capital, which is based on new technologies, and old capital, which is absolutely not ready to part with profits. The transition to the fourth industrial order was preceded by two world wars, the transition to the fifth - the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR.

The transition is always done at someone's expense, and the sixth order is no exception. The trade war between the US and China is part of this transition. But in this case, it was decided to carry out the operation not at the expense of any particular country. I don’t know how to express myself here ...does the expression “world proletariat” suit you? That is, the transition is carried out at the expense of all of us.

A huge number of people have already lost their jobs and lost their money. The economic impact of the coronavirus crisis ranges from hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars.

I believe more in the second figure, because the transition between the structures requires trillions of transformations of funds. Naturally, this money will be lost by someone, while someone will buy up the assets of bankrupt entrepreneurs at a low price.

On the goals and objectives of the coronavirus crisis

…My respect for humanity is largely based on the fact that both the King of Sweden and the President of Belarus were still able to withstand the colossal general pressure. I am very sorry that the Russian leadership did not join them.

I am ashamed that the Victory Parade was not held on May 9. The people who once created this Victory were probably surprised to learn that with such an extremely insignificant risk, we could cancel this celebration.

By the way, this is a blow not only to those who fought - there are very few of them left - it is a blow to the cultural code of the entire country. But France, Germany and all the others showed themselves no better - in conditions of strong pressure, they did what they were prompted to do.

... It was initially clear that there was another wave of "flu" from Asia, which happens about once every 20 years. To predict the development of an epidemic, you need to know the reproduction rate, that is, how many people on average infect a sick person, and virulence - what percentage of sick people die.

Very small changes in these two values give a very strong forecast change.

There is a feeling that when the epidemic began to spread, someone quite deliberately changed some of the constants in the mathematical model. And at once several large centers in London and Italy received a critically dangerous model of the spread of the epidemic. Where did these models come from, which gave a colossal increase in morbidity and mortality, no one knows.

Officially, these calculations are completely disavowed. But the people who received the numbers raised the alarm, after which tremendous pressure began to be exerted on governments.

If there were people among the elites who have some kind of integral picture of the world, they would rather quickly understand: what kind of quarantine we can talk about if we do not let people into restaurants, but let people go to stores if some of the people have to stay at home because they have to, while the rest of the people have to work.

Because if housing and communal services and a couple of other critical services do not come to work, there will be such a catastrophe that no epidemic will come close. As a result, it turns out that most of the people still work, walk around the city, travel outside of it.

All this has no effect on the real spread of the virus. Calling it quarantine was really funny.

We had a smallpox leak during the Soviet era, the KGB caught everyone who had contact with patient 0 in a short time, everyone was quickly sent to a closed isolated hospital, but the outbreak was stopped right at the root.

From this I conclude that, in fact, the fight against the virus was not set as a task. It was not possible to defeat the epidemic, but the fight against medium and small businesses is going well.

Whether governments want to make the transition faster

... The West, being rich, can now introduce, for example, an unconditional income, but this will not save small business, but only gives people some rent, which, by the way, can be canceled at any time.

It's like giving bread to the plebs in ancient Rome.

But there is only one way to truly help a small business, and that is to let it work because it lives off turnover.

In the West, there is an illusion of state aid, we have no such illusion. Our state is more arrogant and more honest.

... If covid is a flu-like virus, of course, it mutates regularly. This leads to the fact that the accumulated immunity is useless, including that obtained through vaccination.

But if you decide to vaccinate everyone, this means that we need billions of doses, multiply by the cost of the vaccine, and you will understand how much money will be siphoned out of the population in favor of pharmaceutical companies.

Now we have a medico-pharmacological complex, which will do exactly the same thing that the military-industrial complex has always done: the military shouted "horror is a nightmare, a war is about to come, and we are not armed enough", and these will shout "horror is a nightmare , the epidemic is about to happen, and we don't have enough funds to fight it".

As a result, a very strong flow of funds into medico-pharmacology will begin.

The West has already stated: "We cannot oblige people to get vaccinated, but we can make the life of all who do not get vaccinated unbearable".

But if pressure begins on people, it is quite possible that at some point in time the system may simply explode.

About the main beneficiaries of the coronacrisis

... The first beneficiary is the IT people. Academic conferences went online, church services went online, education went online. And this means the use of certain software, certain techniques. The sixth technological order is artificial intelligence in manufacturing. And this means that you need to remove people, which is done in two stages: transfer to a remote location, and only then dismiss.

In second place is the medical and pharmaceutical cluster. It forms the safety zone of a brave new world. If some resentment against the special services is still possible, then how can you resent the doctors? Back in the 1980s, two fantastic stories about sports fascism and medical fascism were written in the United States, which showed how it really might look.

Thirdly, there is a strong restriction on cash - not because they allow money to be laundered, but because they transmit viruses. The creation of the digital ruble, digital dollar and other cryptocurrencies can safely devalue the existing cash assets in people's hands. That is, the third beneficiary is financial centers.

The fourth beneficiary is the state and the elite. Under the new conditions, the state has the ability to dramatically reduce social spending, including pension benefits, and guarantee itself irremovability in management and control over the masses through IT. It was not by chance that I began our conversation with the fact that democratic forms of government were instantly sacrificed to infodemia. We will have a regime that is most often called solidarity - so as not to call it fascism. But this is the Mussolini regime in Italy, this is the Perron regime in Argentina, this is the Pinochet regime in Chile. These are quite different regimes, but what they have in common is the absence of real democracy and the rather rigid irremovability of power.

On whether countries use coronavirus as an excuse not to open borders and lower the Iron Curtain 2.0

Almost all countries, except for a small number, benefit from doing this.

If a country is closed, the elite controls it entirely, including control over assets and capital. If the country is not closed, capital, brains and specific people can flow away.

In fact, the closed world began not with the coronavirus, but with the arrest of Julian Assange, who showed that you cannot go anywhere, you will still be found and, despite the fact that it is absolutely illegal, they will be extradited.

On the transition to virtual reality

...This also corresponds to the sixth technological order, a significant part of which is Wirth - a virtual world, where it will be possible to create jobs, and conduct communication, and do educational courses.

Of course, modern technology for Wirth is still insufficient, but it will be sufficient soon enough.

In this regard, the coronavirus turned out to be a catalyst for the processes: we stretched them for about 20 years, and so they will practically fit in two years.

...Both cyberpunk and biopunk are described in many places.

Judging by what they are doing now with medium and small businesses, those who design our world are not at all frightened by the billions of unemployed.

This is, of course, The Matrix. Or "The letter Y Minus" by Herbert Franchi.

About digital collars

We already have digital collars - these are our mobile phones, they can track the location. What difference does it make whether you will be tracked by a mobile phone, a chip, or simply by DNA? This is a matter of a technical solution. And the fact that the covid has already clearly demonstrated to us that any of us can be controlled both at the location and by the words spoken - this has already happened, this is not tomorrow, this is yesterday.

Why people agreed so easily to part with their usual way of life

If the government puts the strongest pressure on the people, if they are pressured by social networks, then they are not yet bad enough to go to the uprising. But I want to remind you that before the coronavirus there was almost 30 years of the Bologna education system, which prepared millions of young people in the world with higher education and no picture of the world at all.

The experience of the epidemic has shown that they are absolutely not critical of any official information. That is, they, for example, cannot divide 1.7 million by 7 billion and understand that the chances of dying from covid are about as much as from a brick that fell on their head.

I'm not worried about what's going on anymore. To a certain extent, it's all over. Russia, as usual, is trying to find in all this troubled time an opportunity to dodge a little and improve its situation somewhat - maybe it will even find it.

But for a civilization that rightly claimed historical greatness, everything is over.

This is not the end of everything - civilizations come and go; when Rome collapsed, it also seemed like the end of the world, but a much brighter civilization appeared in its place.

And the next one will appear in our place. So we are no longer playing in front of the audience who surrounds us, but in front of those who will look at us from the height of, say, the next millennium, as we now look at the "Justinian plague" or at the events of the XIV century.

They will judge us from completely different positions, and it is rather unpleasant for me to think how they will characterize our behavior - not only of the elites, but also of ordinary people. Here is such a good question: how will it be described in the Earth History Textbook, according to which in the XXIX century someone will take credit at the Extragalactic University?"

Read the full interview here.