YOU ARE BEING GAMED: HOOKED AND WATCHED

The Beautiful Trap: When Technology Games Humanity

I attended a TransitionTalks event this September, drawn by a presentation from Frank Jacob titled “The Beautiful Trap: A Glimpse From Above at the Transhumanist World.”

The gathering carried a bittersweet tone — it was also a quiet wake for John L. Petersen, a futurist, client, and friend whose life’s work centered on awakening humanity and guiding us toward a better world.

As I listened to Frank’s presentation, I couldn’t help but think about the men of my generation — visionaries like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and others who grew up on computers, built the code, and advanced the gaming and tech industries that would come to define our world. They laid the foundation for a digital reality that once promised freedom, innovation, and connection.

Yet now, those same systems have evolved into mechanisms that play humanity itself — we are the ones being gamed.

At the World Economic Forum, Yuval Noah Harari stated bluntly: “

Humans are hackable animals.”

What once seemed like harmless innovation — the merging of play, data, and digital identity — has become a global architecture of influence, capable of shaping perception, behavior, and even belief.

We are witnessing the rise of a new digital order — social credit systems, digital IDs, and 15-minute cities — a grid of total control cloaked in convenience. The very technologies created to empower us are now being woven into structures that monitor, predict, and direct us.

Our world, so rich in possibility, has also become addictive and manipulative. Every click, swipe, and search feeds a system designed to learn us — and in learning us, to steer us.

Still, amidst the warning, Frank Jacob offered a glimpse of hope — a vision of what could emerge if technology were guided by consciousness rather than control, if digital systems evolved to serve the soul rather than the state.