“A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. . . . American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. . . . This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. . . .Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

And here’s Thomas Pynchon, somehow even more prophetic, breaking that into terms that have become disturbingly easy to comprehend:

“As well-known President and unintentional Luddite D. D. Eisenhower prophesied when he left office, there is now a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO's, up against whom us average poor bastards are completely outclassed, although Ike didn't put it quite that way. We are all supposed to keep tranquil and allow it to go on[…]If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come - you heard it here first - when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed.”

The curves have converged. But the biggest of brass are as fleet-footed as they are technically savvy. A century of military-funded cybernetic control has created a populace with a literal vested financial interest in the predictability of a grey goo world. Drones drop payloads onto villages when mouth-breathing GameStop conscripts press X or pull a trigger on an  Xbox controller. Soldiers have been cyborged into Operators. They prowl through infrared nights for days at a time, in wild-eyed hazes of modafinil and dextroamphetamine, nerves frayed like a speaker screen that’s about to blow out from the feedback. On deployment they cull the fields to barren wastes inhospitable to any but the most depraved narcotics. At home they take opioids patented and sold by companies that source those narcotics with DARPA grants. When their prescriptions run out they buy from soldiers who have come home to continue to sell here what they sold over there.

In this McKinsey consulting-shaped world, dissent is eliminated efficiently—silently in the night and with extreme prejudice. The machinery is lubricated and calibrated by a small handful of trained operators, walking alone through dark production plants, a microcosm of the world watching itself and inspecting the flows of capital and murder for any kinks in the hoses. They are there to increase shareholder value and provide channels through which automation can proliferate. They are the genetic blueprint, self-replicating and expanding outward with no oversight. Their methods are impossibly invasive and their jurisdiction is as vast as the autonomous network of machines that they operate, chattering back and forth between each other in the pitch black mechanical night.