2024 in Forecast
2024 in Forecast
Don't stop thinking about tomorrow (can't stop, won't stop!)
Happy (Gregorian) new year! First to the followers of Radio Free Pizza, of course, and next to humanity in general. (Or, to Orthodox Christians in particular, merry Christmas Day.) For our first dispatch of 2024—seven days after the Gregorian calendar turned, eight days before we hit New Year’s Day on the Julian calendar, and thirty-four days before it appears on the Chinese one—let’s address any of the coming months’ predictable developments, any potential updates to those ongoing stories we covered the previous year, or anything else we might expect in the offing.
Electioneering
Surely the 2024 U.S. presidential elections will be the most reported story of the coming year: as Vice President Kamala Harris reminded us just last month, “this is the most election [sic] of our lifetime.”
If, indeed, this election will be more important than that of 2016 or 2020, then before it we can expect to hear even more concerns about its security and, after it, even louder voices to contest its integrity. Recalling the former concerns, I started seeding the idea last November of incorporating the definition of “social engineering” in the context of information technology into that used in the context of political science:
Here, social engineering occurs when the capital order (through its corporate apparatuses and its political emissaries) deploys official propaganda, digital censorship, and deceitful psychological techniques […] to manipulate public opinion, sway elections, or incite social discord.
The following month, I implied that the agenda of the World Economic Forum (WEF) for its Fourth Industrial Revolution demanded that incorporation—as the WEF seems to agree, if articles like November’s “AI is finding its voice and that's bad for democracy” are any indication.
But I haven’t yet touched on the inspiration for my efforts to incorporate the sense of “social engineering” as understood in cybersecurity, which we can trace to Dr. Robert Epstein’s appearance on The Jimmy Dore Show last September, on which he followed up with another appearance this past week.
In his first appearance, Dr. Epstein describes—with the benefit of more than 11 years studying tech company influence—Google’s ability to manipulate public opinion and elections. Since 2016, his team has developed systems to monitor and the capture ephemeral content that Google sends to real people. Controlled experiments demonstrate that search suggestions and result orderings—just two of a dozen strategies that Dr. Epstein’s team has identified—can shift undecided voters from 50-50 to over 90-10 without awareness of manipulation, and leaks from Google show internal discussions on using ephemeral experiences for manipulation.
Testifying before the U.S. Congress in 2019, Dr. Robert Epstein described the capacity of Google to engage in social engineering. Among the publications that Epstein submitted as references to his testimony appeared the transcript to “The Selfish Ledger” (2016), which the same document describes as “an 8-minute video about Google’s ability to reshape humankind.”
Google’s internal video begins by drawing parallels between early evolutionary theories and contemporary user data, staging the ledger of that data as a Lamarckian epigenome: a constantly evolving representation of an individual’s actions and characteristics theorized as a mechanism for transmitting acquired attributes to descendants. The discussion shifts to the concept of “selfish genetics” introduced by Bill Hamilton, emphasizing the role of genes over individuals in evolution, before situating the idea in the contemporary context of user data. In this framework, that data represents a “ledger” which Google proposes to shift the practice of user-centered design in favor of covertly engineering this ledger through the suggestions of ephemeral experiences, with the company holding itself “responsible for offering suitable targets” that “reflect Google’s values as an organization.”
As the video puts it, “Over time […] the user’s behavior may be modified, and the ledger moves closer to its target.” Soon enough they introduce concept of behavioral sequencing, allowing Google to propose a model where patterns in user behavior are targeted for modification, akin to gene sequencing in biology. According to this model, the video suggests that the “ledger could be given a focus, shifting it from a system which not only tracks our behavior but offers direction towards a desired result”—one that the company desires, that is.
(Funny to think that the WEF is worried about the threat that AI-generated audio poses for liberal democracies: do you think Big Tech will use it to continue undermining personal autonomy and intellectual sovereignty?)
As the kids say, Dr. Epstein has the receipts: in the 2020 election, his team’s monitoring system preserved over 1.5 million ephemeral experiences—from 1,735 registered voters’ computers across four swing states—that demonstrated Google’s pro-Biden bias, shifting (according to the aforementioned experiments) more than six million votes to the candidate. Today, the team is working to expand its monitoring system into a permanent 50-state monitoring system with 12,000 field agents, allowing them to expose manipulation and improve Google’s accountability to regulators. Once Big Tech’s manipulations are visible and the ephemeral data is preserved, Dr. Epstein argues, lawsuits and boycotts can pressure companies to stop influencing elections.
Dr. Epstein’s second appearance this past week offers further details on how Google and big tech companies manipulate search results, videos, and other online content to influence user opinions and behaviors at scale, as the collected evidence of partisan bias in search suggestions and reminders to vote during elections demonstrates. America’s Digital Shield continues monitoring ephemeral experiences on millions of devices, with his team at the Tech Watch Project also studying how social media algorithms target children with inappropriate violent and sexual content.
I’m supportive, of course, but skeptical. I already imagine politicians as scammers who deceive their constituent victims—exploiting their trust while reneging on the duties of their representative offices—into supporting policies that work against their constituents’ own interests, and which instead serve corporations like Google. For those corporations themselves to socially engineer support for their preferred candidate just seems typical of politics in a capitalist republic.
Of course, that just means Radio Free Pizza will likely find cause to revisit the complex interplay between power, ideology, and the media in shaping public perceptions and behaviors within the confines of a consumer-driven society. In fact, given the presidential election that the U.S. will suffer through once again in November this year, I’m sure of it.
False Flags Ripple in Cyberspace
Last November, independent journalist Whitney Webb appeared on Redacted to discuss the WEF and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s joint report from November 2020 (“International Strategy to Better Protect the Financial System Against Cyber Threats”) warning of an imminent cyberattack hitting critical infrastructure before 2025, causing widespread disruption and potentially leading to the systemic collapse of the global financial system.
As Webb first reported in April 2021, the WEF’s 2020 report suggested that the merging of Wall Street banks, regulators, and intelligence agencies as a necessary step to confront this alleged threat. The document emphasizes the vulnerability of the financial system to cyberattacks, citing the increasing use of cyber capabilities by malicious actors, including criminals, states, and state-sponsored attackers.
The report predicts that it’s not a matter of if a major cyber incident will occur, but of when. Accordingly, it calls for unprecedented interaction between the financial sector, law enforcement, and national security agencies, recommending the fusion of the financial industry with the national-security apparatus, and presenting this as a model for similar cybersecurity efforts in other industries.
Critics, of course, express concern that the predicted cyberattack could serve as a catalyst for the desired shift to digital currency and increased global governance, aligning with the WEF’s previous simulations and initiatives.
Expanding on that earlier reporting, Webb and Morris discuss the WEF’s simulations around cyberattacks, the public-private partnerships that the organization has arranged with major banks, tech companies, and intelligence agencies, and the organization’s push for increased surveillance and control over the internet under the guise of security.
Webb’s interview highlights the increasing risk of a false-flag cyberattack, conducted by intelligence agencies to blame innocent nation-states with technologies like the “Marble Framework” used to frame foreign actors, as revealed in the Vault 7 files that WikiLeaks published in 2017. For this reason Webb critiques Michael Shellenberger's recent reporting on the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL), since in it he fails to mention that the League’s access to U.S. critical infrastructure effectively means granting the same access to Israeli intelligence operatives with the motive to use technologies like the Marble Framework.
Altogether, Webb suggests that the WEF’s warning outlines how the official response to such a cyberattack will increase surveillance and control. She and Morris go on to discuss the chance that this cyberattack might become the justification for war with Iran, with Webb arguing that the end-goal of a false flag cyberattack might be drawing the U.S. into conflict with Iran to achieve longstanding regime change objectives against the Islamic Republic.
So, you know what you gotta do now, right? That’s right: you gotta upgrade your subscription to Radio Free Pizza immediately, because in 2024, they’re gonna say you can’t do it anymore and blame it on Iran.
Ukraine Cries “Uncle”
Surely all rational observers know by now that Ukraine can’t go on fighting the Russian Federation—however much the NATO vassal’s neo-Nazis might prefer otherwise—and that it only lasted so long with unprecedented aid propping it up as a NATO proxy. If The Washington Post removing the “War in Ukraine” tab from its website’s header (as Kit Klarenberg noticed on 20 Dec) gives us any indication, even the mainstream consumer of U.S. establishment propaganda will soon start saying that collapse has always been inevitable.
Of course, that should have been clear to everyone at least since the start of October, when Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) used Ukraine aid as a bargaining chip while negotiating a border security package. Hardly five months prior he’d called the U.S.’s military assistance “the best money we’ve ever spent”—paying their own military-industrial complex, that is—but Graham seems to have reconsidered since then whether the U.S. might have better ways to spend it. Regardless, Ukraine has started 2024 with no further U.S. funding yet authorized by Congress, which will return to session tomorrow.
So, after as many as 300,000 battlefield casualties, what does Ukraine look like once it signs a treaty? (Presumably one similar to that which the UK’s Boris Johnson flew to prevent Ukraine from signing in Spring 2022, minus the Donbas following that region’s September 2022 referendum.) Among other things, the more than 6.3 million Ukrainian refugees in Europe would return—some of them, anyway—to a country where the newfangled digital ID and state-services app, Diia (launched in 2020 and already legally equivalent to a physical passport by 2021) now does quite a lot more than help people file their taxes, as Mykhailo Fedorov (deputy prime minister (and minister for digital transformation in Ukraine) and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) administrator Samantha Power told Kara Swisher last May.
Fedorov explained how, as the conflict with Russia unfolded, Diia evolved to include features like a chatbot for citizens to report on Russian troop movements, TV and radio services, quick payments for evacuation subsidies, and a service to register damages caused by airstrikes. USAID’s Power also noted that the digital trail created by Diia facilitates transparency in the distribution of financial aid, contributing to anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the distribution of financial aid will also change in other ways—though not for citizens, but rather, for the state. The wealth management firm BlackRock—the CEO of which Ukraine’s President Zelensky met during his U.S. visit in September 2023—began consulting with Ukraine in November 2022, before JPMorgan Chase joined them in February 2023 to help set up the Ukraine Development Fund after hostilities end and reconstruction begins. The aforementioned fund will coordinate (some of) an estimated $411 billion required over the next ten years for reconstruction and economic recovery, which some in the U.S., in the UK, and in the G7 seem to plan on funding with the $300 billion in Russian assets frozen in the West since the 2022 invasion, as the Council on Foreign Relations has outlined. For its own part, Russia already has a list of targets for retaliation in kind.
Given what we know about BlackRock—which is (limiting ourselves just to information from old slices of Radio Free Pizza) that its executive recruiters can confidently estimate the cost of a congressional representative’s vote, and that its CEO serves on the board of the WEF, an organization with a vision for the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” that probably approves of Ukraine’s Diia app—it will be interesting to observe the activities of the Ukraine Development Fund, whenever it can launch. Who knows, of course, if that will be this year, but without more U.S. funding, it seems more likely than not. If so, then we might see the capital order pivot, and start investing in the proxy’s renewal.
Time Bomb Taiwan
Just a week ago, in his New Year’s address, Xi Jinping described the reunification of China and the island of Taiwan as inevitable.
For a while now, people have forecasted an eventual clash between the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China over the island: enough that, when I learned in November that Vanguard Group is shuttering its Shanghai offices and quitting its joint venture with Jack Ma’s Ant Financial, I wondered if that wouldn’t put U.S.-China provocations on hold until they finish up.
But Xi Jinping’s visit to San Francisco later that month coincided with a fresh provocation. Or, a pair of them: first, we learned that President Biden believes that Xi Jinping is “a dictator in the sense that he […] runs […] a communist country that’s based on a form of government totally different than ours”; then, the next month, we learned that Biden’s comments came after Xi told him that China intends to reunify with Taiwan, and asked him to deliver a public statement supporting peaceful reunification and rejecting Taiwanese independence—a request that the Biden Administration declined.
So, Biden declined Xi’s request for a goodwill statement, then called him a dictator. No wonder Antony Blinken looked so worried when Biden called him that.
Of course, this isn’t what we’d call evidence: in other words, we shouldn’t forecast any military conflict over Taiwan just because Xi told Biden he wants reunification two weeks after an article appeared in front of me about Vanguard pulling up stakes in Shanghai. The company remains open to considering future business in China—though (given rising tensions) that will presumably mean pivoting away from the Chinese defense industry, in which Vanguard owns shares of subsidiaries facing sanctions both Trump and Biden imposed, and of which its flagship emerging markets index fund features more than 60 Chinese defense subsidiaries.
Personally, I’m thinking that someone at Vanguard must have taken a look at what BlackRock’s doing with the Ukraine Development Fund and started saying around the water-cooler, “Y’know how a couple years ago the Shanghai office put all that money into weapons? ’Cause I’m thinking, with all the damage they’re gonna do, that’s gonna be a big bill for reconstruction—someone’s gonna have to finance that.”
Home Front (The Imperial Core)
Y’all hear about that Civil War later on this year?
Sure, “civil war” rises now and then to the surface of the American consciousness. More frequently in recent years: for example, in the hours after the FBI’s August 2022 search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, the term appeared in Twitter posts almost 3000% more frequently, and polls at the time recorded that 40% of Americans believed civil war will likely erupt within a decade. But in 2024, we’ve got a movie coming out to show us all what a second American civil war could look like.
An election year sounds like a risky one for some degree of civil discord, assuming that Big Tech’s social engineering (described above) can’t or won’t shift public perception enough to unite the American populace. Meanwhile, after the recent ruling (on which the U.S. Supreme Court will now weigh in) of the Colorado State Supreme Court to remove Trump from state ballots in 2024 for inciting the supposed insurrection of January 2021—covered on Radio Free Pizza last October as a likely example of state intelligence agencies orchestrating events justifying the response of the national security apparatus—it’s easy to imagine (and easy to understand why) Trump supporters might assume a hostile posture.
Previously, some in traditionalist-reactionary circles (including the San Diego office for U.S. Customs and Border Patrol) had warned of Hamas or Hezbollah executing a terrorist attack on U.S. soil. But maybe they should take a closer look at some of their colleagues as the profile of potential terrorists—or rather, of those whom the U.S. will label terrorists. James Corbett of The Corbett Report and James Evan Pilato of Media Monarchy proposed a similar idea last month (at ~26:16) on the “New World Next Year 2024” episode of their New World Next Week podcast.
“My trend prediction for 2024: fake Rights turn to riot,” Pilato says (at ~26:16). “I mean, it’s only fair, correct? Democrats burned down cities in 2020, dozens killed, and, ‘It’s all good: RIP Fentanyl Floyd.’ I guess I’m predicting a flip of the dichotomy. But what could the catalyst be? I guess really that’s the success of ‘the silent majority’: they don’t usually have to scream and cry and break stuff because stuff’s usually going their way.”
Maybe! As James Corbett proposes (at ~35:33), perhaps the debut of the Civil War movie this year may foreshadow tensions in the domestic population erupting into militant conservative unrest.
(Or maybe that just erupts of its own accord.)
RFK Jr. Would Make a Fine Antichrist
In recent years, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has risen to renewed public prominence, first during the pandemic for his activism against the pharmaceutical industry, and later for the Democratic primary campaign into which Kennedy leveraged that aforementioned prominence, though he has since decided to run as an independent.
Some (like me) were initially supporters of—or, at least, lip-service donors to—Kennedy’s campaign, for his opposition to vaccine mandates and to the punitive de-banking imposed on Canadian truckers for protesting travel restrictions related to said mandates. But due to our shared positions on those issues, it felt all the more heartbreaking to watch RFK Jr. rabidly defending Israel’s occupation of Palestine long before the start of the uprising on 7 October last year. Two months into the vicious extermination campaign with which Israel responded that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, RFK Jr. referred to Palestinians as the “most pampered people by international aid organizations in the history of the world”—something only an asshole says about people suffering such a siege. (Jared Kushner made a similar claim in 2019, determined false then for neglecting to mention Israelis.)
But toeing the Washington establishment’s line on Palestine doesn’t seem to have been enough to put him in its good graces: after an armed man impersonating a U.S. Marshal was arrested trying to enter a Kennedy campaign event, and after an intruder twice attempted breaking in to Kennedy’s home while the candidate was inside, RFK Jr. still doesn’t have Secret Service protection.
Speaking of attempted assassinations: you know the New Testament? In it, Revelation 13:3 and 13:14 describe how, during the apocalypse of the Christian tradition, one of the heads of the Beast takes a fatal wound, but the head heals and the Beast revives, to the amazement of the world. Given how his uncle died, I think it would be fitting—if the Book of Revelation describes some events that will take in place in 2024—for RFK Jr. to receive and miraculously recover from the aforementioned head wound.
This, of course, is not a prediction at all, let alone one on the order of “civil unrest will break out in the U.S.,” “Ukraine will surrender to Russia,” “the militaries of China and the U.S. will clash,” “Western intelligence agencies will execute a false flag cyberattack,” or “the U.S. presidential election will be manipulated.”
Really, it’s just a statement of fact: truly, RFK Jr. would make a fine Antichrist. If I were a movie director adapting the Book of Revelation, I’d totally cast him in it. But—since this is a forecast, after all—I’ll just predict that in 2024 he’ll say something else to merit my distaste.
Returning Orbits
On 4 December 2023, yours truly appeared again on The Hrvoje Morić Show on TNT Radio. (You can catch my first appearance in our final slice of last year.) My own interview begins at ~17:53, from which point I’ve clipped the audio (including the program’s news-headline intermissions from that evening) to which I’ve added dashes of Radio Free Pizza branding (“a product of Diaphora Co.”?) while assembling it for you in the video just below.
Hrvoje and I first discuss the crime rate in the U.S., and speculate on how it might compare to crimes related to the protests in Panama over the Cobre Panama mine concession (covered here last year) and to the crime rate in the Soviet Union. Hrvoje suspects that Russia saw a spike in the 1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed.
From Panama, our discussion moves to Latin America more broadly, and the economic competition there between the U.S. and China over resources and trade influence. As an example of Chinese economic interests in the region, Hrvoje mentions lithium concessions that Mexico recently cancelled. Comparing the motives behind that decision to the issues Panama now faces—the Cobre Panama contract being ruled unconstitutional could leave the country liable for billions in a trade lawsuit—suggests the merits of nationalizing natural resources.
Next we discuss the perception of accelerated wealth extraction resulting from George Floyd protests. I describe the effect of these on Minneapolis as accelerating the COVID wealth transfer project, playing into several agendas related to neo-feudalism, which I parodied in Local Interest Pulp. We also cover the November stabbing of Derek Chauvin in federal prison, which Hrvoje proposes may have been a coverup, given the assailant’s history as a FBI informant.
I find it plausible: after all, I express suspicions about a clandestine federal presence among groups like the Blood Tribe group that we covered last year, and which marched again (this time in Wisconsin) soon before my interview with Hrvoje. For comparison, I mention how the reporting of Trevor Aaronson goes a long way to demonstrating the federal infiltration of contemporary progressive groups with the intent of entrapping activists, which liberals today seem to under-appreciate. Having seen the national security apparatus incessantly infiltrating both extremist and activist groups, neither Hrvoje nor I feel entirely confident that the 2024 American presidential election will transpire peacefully—though, given its inherent meaninglessness, it would be hard to get excited about it anyway.
From there Hrvoje and I discuss how woke editorial inserts have caused the downfall of mainstream comics, and how that relates to social engineering agendas executed in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, manufacturing the cultural austerity which mutes any discourse in arts and entertainment that addresses working-class concerns.
That cultural austerity, of course, comes paired with the increasingly precarious economic position of the American public. Hrvoje highlighted how wages are not keeping up with inflation anymore, while Bitcoin has slingshotted returns for some elites, such as Michael Saylor, who touts BTC as an escape route out of monetary collapse. Concerned as I am about the risks of programmable CBDCs, I describe feeling skeptical about Bitcoin’s decentralized future, though I wish the best outcome for El Salvador’s 2021 adoption of Bitcoin as a national currency.
Our conversation concludes with a brief discussion of media seemingly predicting events like 9/11, such as in The X-Files spinoff The Lone Gunmen depicting a clandestine plot to crash an airliner into the World Trade Center six months before the events in fact transpired, as examples of predictive programming. This underscores the need to examine the narratives presented in mass media—such as with the debut of Civil War (2024), mentioned above.
Like last time, it seems appropriate now (in the spirit of Better Futures) to derive a few action items from my conversation with Hrvoje:
Research crime rates in the U.S. compared to those of the Soviet Union and of the Russian Federation in the ’90s
Investigate the ongoing economic battle between the U.S. and China in Latin America and the fight over resources
Explore potential connections between the George Floyd protests, wealth extraction, and neo-feudalism
Follow reporting on both political sides prepping for chaos or staged events around the 2024 election
Pay attention to how the adoption of CBDCs plays out in comparison to countries like El Salvador where Bitcoins are legal tender
Next Exit
As a final note: I’m amused that Hrvoje asked my favorite pizza style. Of course he asked because I’ve maintained the @zacharonipizza username across platforms, and that—in concert with the name of this newsletter—gives people the impression that I have an intense affinity for pizza. Certainly I play into that: I forget why, or if I ever had a reason.
But I have not forgotten my username’s origins! In fact, metadata allows me to date it to November 2015. At the time I was in the final semester of my bachelor’s degree. Often exhausted, I passed time on bus rides home exchanging nonsense-captioned photos with the poet Mary Rosen, one of the original collaborators in Diaphora Co.
That’s when it hit me:
I wonder if I saw a highway sign for a pizza place. Remembering those bus trips, I doubt I saw anything at all. Still, knowing my habits, I was looking as far ahead as I could while remaining only a passenger: for better or worse, I think I’m still at it. But whatever jumps out at me next, you’ll be sure to find out. Stay tuned!