A new craze has swept the world - an app for mobile phones called Pokemon Go. The essence of this program is to "catch" the so-called Pokemon - fabulous animals with superpowers. The game caused a huge resonance in the West, where tens of millions of users downloaded it in the first week after its release. It would seem, what could be bad in an ordinary game for children and for those who do not want to part with their childhood? However, digging deeper, you can find completely childish details of what this application was actually created for.
As already mentioned, the application offers users to "catch Pokemon". To do this, the user turns on the camera of his smartphone and goes to the place that the game indicated as the location of the Pokemon. The location can be any - the user's apartment, street, park, shops, government agencies, etc. The application itself uses a technology called superimposed (or augmented) reality. When the user gets to the right place, the game overlays the animation of the desired Pokemon on the image in the smartphone's camera.
The popularity of the new game in the West is evidenced by at least a recent case in Central Park in New York, when application users abandoned their cars with their engines running and rushed to catch a "rare Pokemon". And despite the fact that the application was officially released in Russia only on July 18, we started playing Pokemon a couple of weeks before that date.
Even the banking sector has picked up the new trend. So, the largest credit institution in Russia - "Sberbank" announced the creation of a special insurance program for players in Pokemon Go. The insurance will cover those who are injured through carelessness while playing the app.
In general, the game caused a fairly wide public response in Russia. Some said that the application is very useful, because it not only allows a person to spend their free time with interest, but also promotes communication between people and even encourages a person to be more physically active, since in search of the right Pokemon, a person sometimes has to cover considerable distances. Another part of citizens, mostly people with more conservative positions, declared another unhealthy insanity. Some even suggested drastic measures - to ban Pokemon Go in Russia.
However, the problem is much deeper than the usual "burning" of life by application users. The fact is that Polemon Go is a real spy program that gains access to all the player's data, and with his own consent. So, when registering a new user account, the game, or rather the application developer, Niantic Labs, requires the newbie to provide full access to his Google account: mail, personal correspondence, disk, as well as navigation data. Thus, in addition to accessing the user's private data, the developer company receives full information about the player's location and all his movements.
The amazing discoveries in the "Pokemon world" do not end there. The fact is that not the deepest search on the Internet gives us very interesting information about the developer company - Niantic Labs. It turns out that the company was founded back in 2010 as an internal startup of the well-known international corporation Google, which was repeatedly accused of close ties with American special services and intelligence agencies. At the same time, the founder of the company is John Hank, who at one time was directly involved in the creation of another Google project - Keyhole Inc, which was engaged in surface mapping for the notorious Google Maps and Google Earth applications. However, the most interesting thing here is that Keyhole Inc was sponsored by the In-Q-Tel venture fund (a venture fund is an investment fund,sponsoring innovative initiatives and startups. - ed.), Which officially belongs to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
It was by order of the American special services that the mapping of areas of our planet and the shooting of city streets were carried out. Cars with special photographic devices photographed the streets of not only American and European cities, but also all more or less large Russian settlements.
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This, apparently, was not enough. Now the American special services want to infiltrate the homes of citizens, infrastructure facilities, barracks, government agencies. For this, Pokemon Go is just great. Unsuspecting users involved in "catching Pokemon" themselves drop the program pictures of their homes and workplaces. At the same time, the application can easily place a Pokemon, for example, in the Kremlin. Or in the building of the State Duma.
Unfortunately, not all of our people's deputies are engaged in real work within the walls of parliament. Someone is simply imitating the hectic activity. And someone does not bother with this, right in front of their colleagues and journalists, leaving for the fascinating and, undoubtedly, much more interesting than the Duma meetings, the world of their smartphones. Where is the guarantee that there will be no Pokemon lovers among parliamentarians or their attendants, from assistants to cleaners, who will be told by the application to catch a rare animal somewhere within the walls of the Duma? Why not a gift to the American special services, for which unlucky players in search of Pokemon can take pictures of everything, even the most secluded corners of the building?
It turns out that in addition to the streets of our cities, the American special services, with the help of unsuspecting players, gain access to our homes, and can also potentially gain access in the form of photographs to secret and specially protected objects. It turns out that the user, whose movements, I would like to remind, are closely recorded by the application, plays the role of a spy, doing for the CIA and other Western intelligence structures the work that the staff of these bodies could not do. Is it profitable for Washington and Brussels? Undoubtedly.
Thus, under the sauce of an innocent toy about funny animals, the world got a real spy monster, whose capabilities will give odds to any, even the most "sophisticated" Western intelligence. Unfortunately, millions of people around the world, including in Russia, have plunged headlong into this game, not thinking about the consequences to which it can lead, as well as what goals its developers are pursuing.
"Big Brother is watching you" - this cult phrase from the dystopian novel "1984" by science fiction writer George Orwell is becoming more and more relevant in the modern world.
The only difference is that the surveillance cameras for citizens stuck in "1984" in the houses of residents, on the streets and in various institutions have been replaced in our real world with games that are very difficult to suspect of such manipulations. It remains only to be surprised at the genius of the person who came up with such an elegant way of total control. The notorious "Yarovaya Law" in comparison with Pokemon Go looks in this case quite modest.
However, it was a saying, and a fairy tale was ahead. And it is this: all this hysteria is nothing more than another social experiment on the topic of how to replace real priorities and the real picture of the world in a person's head with virtual ones, to make him not in virtual, but in real life, follow other people's instructions.
Roughly speaking, how to make a manageable human unit. Google has been working on this for ten years now, and it looks like it's already pretty close to success.
Recently, a lot of efforts have been made to replace the real system of values and behavioral assessments, which is laid down in childhood and operates all life, with virtual rules of the game that can be arbitrarily changed. It all started with the massive distribution of computer games, where for each genre (and sometimes for a separate game) there was its own set of rules for the functioning of the virtual game world and behavior in it, as well as a number of general rules (for example, that there is no death, but there is a system recovered ).
Players united in communities of fans of certain genres or games, and in them they gradually began to follow the rules of their familiar virtual world, and the unique rules of the community, as always happens, took priority over the general rules of life in the big world. For example, within the framework of these rules, one must always be ready to meet a dragon - although where does a dragon come from in our world? In general, the first direction is virtual worlds with their simplified sets of rules, which gradually spill out into the real world.
At the same time, the opposite process was going on - the creation of game systems and virtual sets of rules directly within the real world. Here flash mobs and quests come to mind first, creating their own virtual worlds and their own simplified set of virtual rules that must be followed in the real world. In principle, the good old sects also represent a set of other rules, but there we are talking about life values that are uniform, universal and last a lifetime.
In the virtual world, this does not happen: a quest or a flash mob introduces its own rules only for the duration, after its end the magic disappears and you need to return to a boring ordinary life. The same is with computer games, where the player, when moving from one game to another, is forced to completely rebuild his model of behavior - i.e. he gets used to the fact that there are many worlds, and his behavior can and should be arbitrarily rebuilt. It is not known when this process was noticed and transferred to a controlled phase, but now it is in it. Pokemon Go is a new stage in which a virtual system with its own rules of behavior spilled out into the real world, and these rules were given priority over the rules of the real world.
People staring at smartphones are run over by cars and cause accidents, because virtual rules are of higher priority for them. The already well-known joke about how the gopniks created a point in a quiet corner and robbed those who came up to it - from the same opera. Fascinated by virtual rules, a person begins to ignore the rules of the real world, including those that could protect him from danger. Pokemon hunters roam parks and dumpsters, try to break into other people's homes and even police stations. Because in the virtual world it is possible, and its rules take precedence over the rules of the real world. And it's not funny.
Everyone is chasing Pokémon. Someone was kicked out of the museum, someone was so carried away by the search behind the wheel that they crashed into a tree, someone too immersed themselves in a smartphone and he was hit by a car - well, when else were manifestations of idiocy in public considered normal behavior? The creators of the game present its main advantages as lying in the real world: physical activity due to the fact that you have to chase Pokémon with your feet, the possibility of physical communication at the "collection points", etc. In reality, this argument looks like this: "There is nothing terrible, virtual nonsense is even useful for you in the real world, you see!" The victory of virtual values over realities aggravates the problem, which the author was surprised to first notice in quite offline quests in the real world. In the quest, everyone runs around the monument marked as "point 6",but no one cares what the monument is. It is just a point on the map with no symbolic meaning. Found a point, took a picture, went on. Therefore, now the remarks that "this is actually a cemetery, and this is a church, these are important things in people's lives" cause sincere surprise to Pokemon hunters: how are they important? The important thing is that the Pokemon is there, under the chandelier. And the cemetery - well, the cemetery, so what? Real values, landmarks and bonds (Skrepa is when all members of society know what a cemetery is, what is there and why people are sad there. And they sympathize with each other.) Were first discredited, but now they are simply ignored. Which Abraham Lincoln? Yesterday we had a portal to Ingress, today a Pokémon exchange point. And one and the same person will not even remember not even that there is a monument to the dead, for example, but also that there was a portal here. The rules have changed, the brains have been cleared and reloaded for a new game.
Flash mobs, quests, geotargeting, Google, mixed reality … what's in common? The common thing, as already mentioned above, is that time after time people are honing technology: how to introduce a virtual (and easily replaceable) value system into their heads, and then force them to perform certain actions in the real world. People are told from some command center that "it would be nice to go over there and do this." Pokemon Go in this regard is a new step, because they greatly simplify the process. Flash mobs had to be arranged in advance and spent a lot of effort, coming up with and implementing motivation in the head in each specific case. Quest rules are generally set in advance. Now there is a whole platform that allows you to catch up a herd of orcs in the right place many, many times within the same set of game rules.
In this regard, it is absolutely unimportant what will happen next with Pokemon Go. Technologies have been successfully tested, methods of influencing the brain have been tested, technical means have been tested, control and coordination schemes have been set. Who knows, maybe if the Kiev Maidan happened a year later, the dots “Yanukovych is here! Surround him, don't let him go!”And the protesters ran from point to point with a cheerful whoop, instantly forming a large crowd in the right place. And then - everywhere. A harmless game can be turned into a platform for anything at any time. But the main beauty of Pokemon Go is that it's all there at the same time. It can be a silly game, a system of monetizing virtual figures with real money, or a platform for civil disobedience actions.and a crowd behavior management system with the implementation of virtual game rules for real action.
In conclusion, I would like to get away from states, global conspiracy theories and methods of manipulating human behavior. And return to the individual and the threats that all these innovations pose for him personally. Pokémon, virtual communities and virtual life have already led to a terrible demographic disaster in Japan. And this is just the beginning.
In the Strugatskys' book "Predatory Things of the Century" there is such a drug - fell ill. This is a neurostimulator, the essence of which is that it spurs the imagination, allowing a person to create a bright, juicy inner world inside himself, full of great adventures, interesting events and amazing feelings. The world is so bright that living in the real world was just boring. This was the danger for humanity: a person lost all interest in external life and dreamed of only one thing: how to quickly plunge back into the bright virtual world of his dreams and fantasies.
With a natural ending: death from exhaustion, since the virtual world is not able to satisfy the real physical needs of the body, and the person became bored to satisfy them - he didn’t want to waste time on food or sleep. Well, in the days of the Strugatskys, there were no augmented reality smartphones, so they believed that the only virtual reality came from within. Now we see that it can come from the outside in the form of a world already prepared and built by professionals. As for the rest, they formulated the danger and the possible consequences terribly correctly.