The great vise: high-tech revolution between war drones and imaginary worlds

Today’s high-tech revolution wears two perfectly complementary faces. On one side, Palmer Luckey in flip-flops transforms virtual world dreams into autonomous drones for the Marines. On the other, Burberry invests eleven million in non-existent armored knights. These aren’t separate phenomena but two jaws of the same vise crushing our freedoms.

The mechanism operates with ruthless efficiency. While military technocracy marches forward, marketing magicians build parallel universes to distract us from reality. A planetary sleight of hand: the right hand brandishes the drone, the left waves the designer trench coat.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution: A Totalizing Metamorphosis

Klaus Schwab, World Economic Forum founder, defines it bluntly: “We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another.” Not evolution—a programmed cataclysm fusing physical, digital, and biological boundaries.

This “Fourth Industrial Revolution” isn’t merely an extension of previous digitalization but a quantum leap characterized by exponential velocity, unlimited scope, and systemic impact. What the WEF presents as inevitable progress toward prosperity is actually a meticulous design for irreversibly transforming social foundations.

While they distract us with narratives of efficiency and potential prosperity, they’re building infrastructure for unprecedented control. Schwab’s sugar-coated rhetoric betrays the true agenda: we aren’t the beneficiaries of this high-tech revolution but raw material to be reshaped.

The Human as Obsolete Substrate: Toward the Final Fusion

Behind apparent technical neutrality lurks a more radical project: the progressive dissolution of the human as an autonomous category. The transhuman is merely the presentable mask of the posthuman, the acceptable antechamber to a world where human-machine hybridization becomes a categorical imperative.

Biological-digital fusion technologies aren’t born in civilian laboratories to improve our existence. They emerge in military bunkers, classified DARPA programs, and inaccessible facilities where augmented soldiers test exoskeletons, neural implants, and brain-computer interfaces. Only afterward are these technologies “democratized,” made appealing, transformed into desirable gadgets.

A soldier with neural implants controlling a drone swarm becomes the model for the teenager with VR headset exploring commercial metaverses. The subcutaneous chip monitoring military vital parameters becomes the fashionable fitness tracker. The neural interface piloting combat vehicles morphs into controllers for immersive video games. The war laboratory has always been the incubator of civilian high-tech revolution, but never has the boundary between these worlds been so permeable and deceptive.

From Science Fiction to Military Arsenal

Palmer Luckey perfectly represents the first face of the coin. Starting as a young technological dreamer, creator of Oculus Rift and immersive virtual worlds, he transforms into the founder of Anduril Industries. His company is now worth $14 billion and produces autonomous warfare systems for the Pentagon. Utopian science fiction becomes dystopian reality. The flip-flops now walk under military uniforms.

Luckey’s metamorphosis perfectly embodies what Schwab calls “impact on national and international security.” The WEF celebrates the inevitable fusion between technology and military arsenals, where the distinction between peace and war, combatant and civilian, violence and non-violence dissolves into an “uncomfortable blur.” This isn’t a risk—it’s a precise design.

The Architects of High-Tech Revolution’s Fictitious Worlds

Simultaneously, global brands develop increasingly sophisticated strategies to capture our attention and neutralize critical thinking. They no longer want to be our friends. They want to be our creators, architects of the worlds we inhabit. Saint Laurent produces films with Almodóvar and Cronenberg. Miu Miu finances arthouse short films. Jacquemus launches giant bags running through streets, generating three hundred thousand likes from nothing.

The obsession with “romantasy” and medieval aesthetics is no coincidence. While Anduril builds “Arsenal 1” in Ohio to produce military drones, Burberry invests millions in imaginary knights. The strategies feed each other: technology militarization creates an increasingly frightening world from which we want to escape, and brands promptly offer the escape route—at a price.

The WEF admits this shamelessly when discussing business impact: “Physical products and services can now be enhanced with digital capabilities that increase their value.” Translation: reality isn’t enough anymore; it must be “augmented” to extract more profit. “Customer experiences” become the frontier of a capitalism no longer content with selling objects but wanting to colonize consciousness entirely.

The Double Face of Escapism

Escapism has two faces. One saves you; the other enslaves you. When you decide when to enter and exit fantasy, you’re free. When the brand decides, you’re property. Constructive escapism is under your control. Induced avoidance controls you.

Techniques grow increasingly refined. Finery generates campaigns entirely through AI: 2.2 million interactions, thirty-two million impressions. Algorithms speaking to algorithms while we watch hypnotized. Perfumehead creates an “Osmocosm” selling not perfumes but prepackaged identities. “It weaves narratives so deep you desire the fragrance before smelling it.” Translation: it manipulates you before you can defend yourself.

Schwab candidly admits this when discussing impact on people: “The Fourth Industrial Revolution will change not only what we do but also who we are.” Not an offer but an imposed destiny. The WEF predicts transformation of our identity, privacy, sense of ownership, consumption patterns, careers, relationships. Technological integration into our lives is presented as inevitable while acknowledging it might “diminish some of our essential human capacities, such as compassion and cooperation.”

Flesh Suspended Between Algorithms and Metal

Human-machine hybridization advances on two complementary fronts. The military front creates enhanced superhumans, soldiers with augmented capabilities, bodies fused with technology. The commercial front normalizes this fusion, makes it desirable through gadgets, “smart” prosthetics, “lifestyle” implants.

It’s no coincidence that Elon Musk’s Neuralink promises neural interfaces to cure diseases while simultaneously preparing humanity to “keep pace with artificial intelligence.” The message is clear: either merge with the machine or become obsolete. The rhetoric of enhancement, upgrade, transcending biological limits seduces as much as it terrifies.

While human flesh is reconfigured in military laboratories, digital avatars proliferate in commercial metaverses. The physical body increasingly becomes an encumbrance to overcome, a biological substrate to transcend. The posthuman horizon appears not as traumatic rupture but as gentle sliding toward increasingly profound and irreversible hybridization.

The High-Tech Revolution’s Vise Tightens

The great vise tightens. On one side, technoutopians turned military technocrats build increasingly pervasive systems of control and military power. On the other, brands create increasingly seductive fictitious universes to distract us from surrounding reality. The former dominate physical space; the latter colonize our imagination.

In between are we, trapped between anvil and hammer. But the blacksmith remains the same: a power system using technology both to dominate militarily and control culturally.

Schwab warns that “governments will gain new technological powers to increase their control over populations, based on pervasive surveillance systems and the ability to control digital infrastructure.” Not a possibility but a certainty. While they distract us with narratives about “civic participation” and citizen involvement, they’re building perfect infrastructure for digital totalitarian control.

The Weapon of Strategic Awareness

How to resist? Through strategic awareness. Every time a brand offers you an alternative world, ask: “Who benefits from this fantasy?” Every time you feel transported, ask yourself: “Who’s driving?” Every time you desire a product you haven’t touched, ask yourself: “Who planted this desire?”

Simultaneously, observe lucidly the metamorphosis of technoutopians into military suppliers. Understand that the high-tech revolution of pixels has failed, replaced by a much more concrete and militarized revolution. Digital dreamers have realized the only way to fulfill their dreams is abandoning idealism to embrace the reality of power.

The WEF speaks of “inequality” as “the greatest social concern” linked to the Fourth Industrial Revolution while celebrating a future where “talent, more than capital, will represent the critical factor of production.” A labor market segregated between “low-skill/low-pay” and “high-skill/high-pay” segments. This isn’t a prediction—it’s a project they’re implementing.

Flesh Against Silicon: The Last Resistance

Resistance to forced hybridization becomes the last radical political act. Defending biological body boundaries, refusing constant upgrade imperatives, preserving autonomy from neural interfaces: actions that once would have seemed trivial become acts of existential rebellion.

Militarized posthumanism advances disguised as inevitable progress, necessary evolution. But the fundamental question remains suspended: evolution toward what? Toward whom? For whom? The human might be the only technology already perfect for being human. Everything else is a domination project masked as transcendence.

Critical Thinking’s Counterattack in the High-Tech Revolution Era

The vise can tighten but cannot close completely as long as we maintain our critical capacity. You don’t have to reject everything. You must understand everything. When the brand says “enter our world,” you respond: “Under what conditions?” When advertising implores “let’s dream together,” you ask: “Who wakes up richer?”

Palmer Luckey and his autonomous drones aren’t separate from Burberry’s armored knights. They’re faces of the same coin, complementary strategies of the same system. Technocracy advances while peoples dream imaginary worlds. But whoever controls both controls everything.

Schwab concludes his manifesto stating, “We must shape a future that works for all of us by putting people first.” Empty words while architecting a world where technology isn’t “an exogenous force over which humans have no control” but a perfectly controlled tool—not by us but by them. The WEF invites us to choose between a “pessimistic, dehumanized” version that “robotizes” humanity and one that “elevates humanity into a new collective and moral consciousness.” But the option to refuse both is never mentioned.

The next time you feel attracted to a virtual world created by a brand, remember somewhere there’s a Palmer Luckey transforming the same technology into real domination tools. And always ask: who profits from my sleep? Who benefits from my awakening? Who gains from dissolving the boundaries of your body?