Marco Rubio, the American politician, attorney and former Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives once said; “Every nation on the Earth that embraces market economics and the free enterprise system is pulling millions of its people out of poverty. The free enterprise system creates prosperity, not denies it.”
Statements such as these are common amongst politicians, especially wealthy ones who hold wealth driven values. But one man’s prosperity is another man’s misery in a world blighted by an economic model that demands eternal growth.
The only one constant that sits well with this model is that world population continues to increase, but even that is tailing off. Global population currently sits at 7.5 billion and rising at a rate of 80 million per year. The rate of population increase was 2.19 percent at its peak in 1963, which has now halved.
Concerns of the Fourth Industrial Revolution fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, and impacting all disciplines, economies and industries emanate from the corporations who now see their future declining revenue potential being rescued through reduced reliance on human labour.
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To keep prosperity on a perpetual upward trajectory in the backdrop of a continually shrinking and less well off consumer base, the most politically influential now work in concert with the corporate behemoths – the new rulers of the world.
The strategies adopted to keep the ball rolling over the last few decades centre around a financial architecture that requires drastic anti-democratic political support. As Noam Chomsky warns “The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy.”
One does not have to look far to see these principles at work. Trillions of desperately needed taxes to support a decaying system of civil society are illegally offshored by household named corporations and individuals. Unfortunately, this form of extreme neoliberalism still isn’t enough to keep the ball rolling.
Naomi Klein’s 2007 book ‘Shock Doctrine, the rise of Disaster Capitalism’ exploded the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Klein highlights how the “puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades is the real story of how America’s “free market” policies came to dominate the world, through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.”
Then, one year later, Klein’s prognosis saw the 2008 financial crisis offering up more disaster shocked peoples at the global level as neoliberalism wriggled free from the remnants of regulation to reach a new pinnacle for the few and a created an even greater crisis of daily life for the hundreds of millions left behind.
This erroneous ideology delivered little more than world economic stagnation, crippling austerity, peak inequality, a global environmental crisis, the slowest economic recovery in history and monumental debt of every country it infected. This was no mistake, no unforeseen event, that we were told stunned our leaders and their captains.
The problem always existed that extreme wealth was never going to come from a global post-war peace through globalisation – so a ‘strategy of tension’, an Anglo/American innovation, was invented to keep the exploitation model alive.
The actual definition of this strategy is that “Western governments during the Cold War used tactics that aimed to divide, manipulate and control public opinion using fear, propaganda, disinformation, psychological warfare, agents provocateurs, and terrorist actions in order to achieve their strategic aims.”
Amongst many, one of those aims was financial domination.
During the closing days of the Cold War, the UK, US and other western governments along with the secret services colluded to engineer terrorist attacks inside Western Europe, to be blamed on Russia. This is now so well documented it needs no elaboration here (1).
However, the objective was always clear. By mobilising public opinion against left-wing parties (and their policies) and legitimising war, capitalism was to be forever invigorated. Ultimately though, this required the denying of national independence movements, mainly in the third world, to fund new forms of Western wealth.
The Cold War, stoked and fuelled by a deliberate strategy of tension gave us ‘Red Russia’ and the potential for nuclear Armageddon. When that ran its course, imaginary foes such as Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi were invented. The war on terror was used as a means to an end. Today, Red Russia is back on the agenda once again.
Dr Nafeez Ahmed, the award winning investigative journalist wrote about this Strategy of Tension:
“The immense fear and chaos generated by the impact of this phenomenon throughout Western Europe was instrumental in legitimising the interventionist policies of the Anglo-American alliance throughout the Cold War period. The number of people killed across the third world as a consequence of this militarisation process is shocking, its implications genuinely difficult to absorb.” (2)
Ahmed goes on to say that 12 to 15 million people since WW2 have been sacrificed for this strategy with many millions more suffering as their economies were destroyed and denied the right to restructure whilst Western corporations made fortunes at their ultimate expense.
Dr Daniele Ganser, a Swiss historian who specialises in contemporary history, international politics, covert warfare, resource wars and geo-strategy confirms that this strategy is very much alive and in use to this day.
“What you may have, if you translate our experience from the Cold War to the current day situation, is that a strategy of tension is still being implemented, but this time against Muslims,” Ganser says. “We all know that the west is dependent upon oil, and a pretext is needed to develop more operations in Iran, Iraq etc. We can’t just go there and invade them, so we have to have this idea that they’re trying to kill us, then it’s possible, or at least imaginable that a strategy of tension in which the Muslims are playing the role that the communists played in the Cold War, is happening.”
The result is that the world is facing a new desperate multi-faceted game of thrones – as it morphs into something even more destructive.
Conflict and change is now the new norm. Global peace and domestic security is fading as the world order spirals out of control. This engineered spiral is going to prove to be a disaster for everyone, in what looks a lot like a coming global collapse on every front.
Civil society is now shrouded in a cycle of fear, terrorism, surveillance and experiencing a perpetual loss of rights and liberties as the world order disintegrates.
Today, we are now unable to make reasonable predictions of our near future as war, lawlessness, terrorism and now threats of nuclear annihilation become ever more real.
Even hope is diminishing. People of the West are now so afraid they want to stop perceived threats from foreigners, they want them expelled. Manufactured geo-political tensions have created a migration of people in the 21st century even greater than mankind’s greatest tragedy – the last world war. This is no mistake, no unforeseen event either.
China was once the greatest economic power on earth, followed by India, Britain and then America. Not once has the continent of Africa produced a global GDP exceeding 5% in its history, with 16% of the world’s population.
Having deprived this entire continent any possible chance of progression, a migrant surge is now destabilising the very regions responsible for pillaging it.
Alongside all of these pressures, environmental collapse seems inevitable when extreme capitalism sees natural catastrophic events such as the oil industry viewing melting ice caps as nothing more than an investment opportunity.
America is still fighting wars in the Middle East, threatening China, Iran, Korea, India, and even the European Union. The EU is breaking down into four distinct regions as the fifty-year unity project is visibly disintegrating. Is this just a fight for dwindling resources or something else?
Total global debt is now $227 trillion – or 327 percent of global GDP and something like 45 percent higher than the 2008 apex of the financial meltdown.
The Bank of International Settlements urged just two months ago that policymakers need to press on with rate rises notwithstanding the financial market turbulence it will cause.
The world’s six largest pension saving systems – the US, UK, Japan, Netherlands, Canada and Australia – are expected to reach a $224 trillion gap by 2050, a new study by the World Economic Forum shows. Implosion is its only obvious trajectory as there is nowhere near than amount of money anywhere in the world to plug such a gap as that (3).
Total US household debt surged by $460 billion last year, the sharpest one-year rise ever, with an eye-watering $13 trillion outstanding (4). Britain’s household debt is rising at 10 percent per year, five times the rate of earnings growth and has just surpassed the 2008 level of debt as households struggle to keep afloat (5).
The World Economic Forum has also determined that unemployment, an energy price shock, fiscal crisis, failure of national governance and profound social instability makes up the top five global risks to economic performance (6).
To rid the world of its debt’s, kick-start the world economy and take advantage of the shifting global chess board, some believe conflict is the only consequential route left. NATO’s threats to Russia supported by mass media hysteria only adds to the WEF global risks list.
We have a lot to be fearful of. The fact that any combination of the risk list could happen at the same time in today’s world is no longer the conspiratorial thinking of doom-mongers but the architecture of a strategy that the world has seen before.
Public intellectual Tariq Ali wrote a warning in his 2010 book “The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad:
“This is the permanent tension that lies at the heart of a capitalist democracy and is exacerbated in times of crisis. In order to ensure the survival of the richest, it is democracy that has to be heavily regulated rather than capitalism.”
Seven years after Ali’s book we are experiencing a never-ending relay of crisis after crisis; democracy under threat, capitalism out of control and the very real threat of facing another human catastrophe.
In his sobering analysis, Professor Ugo Bardi, a professor in Physical Chemistry at the University of Florence and president of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO), dissects historical statistics on war to unpick the patterns of the violence of the past. He warns that statistical data suggests we are on the brink of heading into another round of major wars resulting, potentially, in mass deaths on a scale that could rival what we have seen in the early 20th century. This is confirmation indeed that a ‘Strategy of Tension’, controlled or not, is heading towards its ultimate apogee. At this juncture, it is reasonable to conclude we are all in trouble.
A few years ago I read somewhere about a trend in the “gig economy” in which people who had been reduced to living in their cars or RVs roamed the country by the thousands; homeless, nomadic workers driving from one temporary job to another. It painted a tragic picture; underpaid, overworked, often lacking health insurance, men and women, many of whom ought to be enjoying retirement but were working in warehouses filling orders for Amazon (“Camperforce”) or stocking shelves in a big-box store.
It sharply reminded me of the Great Depression, another time when mobile workers moved from place to place across the country in search of work. Thinking about this I realized that what we were seeing was the return of the migrant worker apart from the seasonal farm worker, i.e., the Hobo. Also called Tramps, Bums and other less charitable names, these men were the displaced detritus of the Great Depression who wandered the country looking for any jobs that would help them survive and, if there was any left over, to send home to their families. It was a dangerous life; travelling by hopping freight trains or hitchhiking on the highways wasn’t the safest way to get around. Many hobos were maimed or killed in accidents travelling this way, or were victims of violence. Loren Eisley’s wonderful memoir All the Strange Hours recalls his days as a young hobo with all of the dangers and troubles that went with being a hobo. They also faced hostility from towns naturally suspicious of outsiders, especially if there wasn’t any work even for the locals.
But the hobos also became a part of American folklore. The music of Woody Guthrie, who spent quite a bit of time on freight trains himself, helped to make the plight of these unemployed workers known to the rest of the country. Government programs found ways to harness this pool of labor and skill, pouring it into vast projects, many of which continue to contribute to national economy today.
There was, however, another side to hobo life. It became a sort of counter-culture, a rebellion of sorts against a social order that had unfairly cast aside decent, hard-working people for the sake of profit. Hobo life in some cases became a form of dropout culture, mainly, I suspect, as a way of embracing what apparently could not be avoided. An old professor of mine, who spent some of his youth as a tramp, recalled how some of his tramping companions actually knew more about science and literature than his college professors, but preferred tramping as a better way to enjoy God’s creations. Dropouts indeed.
I have been fascinated by American dropout culture as a response to moments when society becomes economically, intellectually, morally, and spiritually intolerable and so, like a few Biblical figures, one leaves, going out of bondage, but into the wilderness for whatever it may bring one. Historically, I’ve noticed that from Roanoke to the 1960’s and 70’s, the dropouts generally seemed to have a point, even if it wasn’t clear at the time. Sometimes the dropouts used their unique viewpoint to inform changes for the better, or became part of grander projects as happened with the government work projects of the New Deal.
So it is with some bemusement that I have noticed an interesting trend when it comes to the mobile temp workers, hobos with RVs or living out of their cars. Over the last seven or so years a small body of literature has emerged celebrating the homeless, wandering worker. Getting out of debt is a common reason for ditching less settled living, and as a rejection of consumerism (Ironic, given how many of these mobile temp jobs are serving precisely that consumer economy). The whole thing has a Small is Beautiful/Voluntary Simplicity vibe to it. Three of the six or so book titles of the last few years even reference “living in a van down by the river” in homage to a classic SNL skit.
So which is it? Is the new hobo a national tragedy in slow-motion, or rebellion against consumer culture, a new manifestation of the All-American dropout? I think it’s too early to tell. This may be nothing more or less than trying to make the best of a bad situation. I hope it’s more than that.
Famed American author and philosopher Eric Hoffer, himself a long-time migrant worker, had some remarkable insights into the responsibility of a nation to do right by such men and women. In his essay, “The Role of the Undesirables”, based on his own experience in government work camps in the early 1930’s. He draws some interesting and telling comparisons between the “human junk pile” that made up the bulk of his fellow workers and the early American pioneers–themselves undesirables from Europe–who built the nation. He points out that these pioneers craved change, much like the RV hobos of today. Hoffer writes: “…the quality and destiny of a nation are determined to a considerable extent by the nature and potentialities of its inferior elements.” He further argues that the quality of a nation is likewise manifest by how those at the bottom rise to the top. And that, I submit, is the problem. Is there an endgame to the RV hobo life that involves a chance to settle back down, to enjoy some of the fruits of one’s labor in security and dignity? Certainly a life on the road can be exciting. I find the idea compelling myself. But the other kind of mobility–upward mobility–has all but ceased to exist in this country. I cannot yet say whether these economic rebels of the road are truly making a new way of living, or accepting the unacceptable.
I’m going to talk about some things that many people take for granted and that most writers not will write about. I’m going to throw a lot of information and figures out in this article and I really hope that people start to think about what these facts and figures really mean.
I want to preface this that I am not a mathematician nor am I an economist. I am however, someone who can read and the figures on going to give you come directly from the government. I didn’t make these numbers up.
Many people have read some of my articles know that I detest the fact that 55% of our national budget is comprised of our so-called “defense budget”. Many Americans have written and talked about the fact that this nation is involved “in endless war”. What most people don’t realize is how much of our national treasure is devoted to our military.
Let me start by telling how much this nation spends on our so-called “defense budget”. This money that we spend isn’t to defend people of the United States, these funds go to enrich the defense contractors and the people who fund our politicians in Congress.
This is the part where I throw the amounts that fund our so-called “defense budget”:
$2,988,083.00 is the total amount for the US budget. Out of this almost $3 trillion, $582 billion dollars go to the Department of Defense. This doesn’t include all the money that goes to the defense investigative agency the DIA, or to the CIA, or to the NSA, or to the FBI or any other intelligence agencies.
The number of people in the United States in 2017 is 326,474,083. If Congress cut the defense budget for 25% by closing overseas bases and cutting the number military that serve in our endless war machine, we would save $145 billion dollars. If you divide that number by the number of people living in the United States, every man woman and child, it would come out to almost $485,260,952. If Congress only returned 5% of that money “as a dividend” to the American people that would mean a windfall of almost $25,000. A family of four would receive hundred thousand dollars.
I’m not supposing that the government would do anything of the sort, I’m just throwing some numbers around to make people think. We always hear the United States is the richest nation on earth, and this just illustrates where all our wealth is going. Many people explain that the defense industry and shore up our economy and we stop producing arms and having a large military it would hurt the United States economically. What I’m saying is that if we cut the military spending by 25% we would not only give a windfall to the American people, but we could also rebuild our infrastructure and pay down our national debt.
If people honestly looked at those numbers, it should make them angry. How many aircraft carriers do we need to defend the people of the United States? How many cruise missiles do we need to protect the people of the United States? How many spy agencies do we need to protect us from our so-called enemies? We have an ocean on each side of the United States. We have enemies across the world that we ourselves have created. One only must look at the demonization of Russia to understand how United States makes an enemy. The United States needs an enemy to justify the amount of money spent on the military. We are all being sold a giant bill of goods that is unjustifiable and really is criminal when you look at how much money we spend.
I am not isolationist nor my pacifist, I’m just someone who holds citizenship in a country that has lost its perspective.
I would also like to point out that the recent fires in California should be looked at by every citizen in the United States. There are anomalies about these fires vaporizing brick, melting glass and vaporizing steel. There also anomalies where houses were demolished by this fire, yet trees next to these houses were not touched by fire. There also videos on YouTube that showed a tree burning from the inside out. What disturbs me is that many of the videos I looked at looked much like the anomalies that happened at the World Trade Center. I’m not explaining the fires, but I would like people to look at these videos and judge for yourself. I wasn’t going to write about this, but I felt an obligation to at least mention it.
Instead of just accepting the way America puts its money into our war Department, we should demand accountability and justification for all that they do. As a retired servicemember with over 20 years in the United States Army I feel that the military is out of control. Never in my lifetime have I seen military spending on the scale with no discernible enemy creeping up on our shores. As citizens I believe that every American should hold count Congress accountable for this wasteful military spending that should really go to rebuilding United States infrastructure and creating an economy that consumes things instead of just treading water to stay alive. “As the richest nation on earth” we should be helping our citizens instead of interfering in the affairs of other nations. As an American citizen I am angry as hell and I believe that every citizen should feel the same anger that I feel.
Tim Gatto is Ret. US Army and has been writing against the Duopoly for the last decade. He has two books on Amazon, “Kimchee Days, or Stoned-Cold Warriors” and “Complicity to Contempt”.
The grand experiment with western democracy, badly listing thanks to broadsides from profiteering oligarchs, may finally run ashore on the rocks of thought crime. In the uneven Steven Spielberg project Minority Report, starring excitable scientologist Tom Cruise, Cruise plays a futuristic policeman who investigates pre-crimes and stops them before they happen. The police owe their ability to see the criminal plots developing to characters called pre-cognitives, or pre-cogs, kind of autistic prophets who see the future and lie sleeping in sterile pools of water inside the police department. Of course, it turns out that precogs can pre-visualize different futures, a hastily hidden flaw that threatens to jeopardize the profits of the pre-crime project. Here is the crux of the story: thought control is driven by a profit motive at bottom. As it turns out, just like real life.
Now, the British government has decided to prosecute pre-crime but has done away with the clunky plot device of the pre-cogs, opting rather to rely on a hazy sense of higher probability to justify surveilling, nabbing, convicting, and imprisoning British citizens. The crime? Looking at radical content on the Internet. What is considered radical will naturally be defined by the state police who will doubtless be personally incentivized by pre-crime quotas, and institutionally shaped to criminalize trains of thought that threaten to destabilize a criminal status quo. You know, the unregulated monopoly capitalist regime that cuts wages, costs, and all other forms of overhead with psychopathic glee. Even a Grenfell Towers disaster is regarded more as a question of how to remove the story from public consciousness than rectify its wrongs.
The Triple Evils
Martin Luther King, Jr. famously, or infamously, depending on whether you are a penthouse mandarin or garden-variety prole, linked the triple evils of poverty, racism, and militarism. These evils are as yet unaddressed in our society, as we are daily shown on the media mouthpieces of imperial capitalism. Wars must be waged. Victims of social injustice must be incarcerated. Society itself must be made poor to ensure higher profits.
Yet there is another set of evils that are primarily used to mask the original trifecta outlined by King. In fact, the connection between propaganda, surveillance, and censorship is clear and inseparable. Take as your initial premise that imperial capitalists want to control the world. Not an unjustified claim. As an imperial capitalist, you are part of a privileged minority whose objective is to further exploit the disenfranchised whose only recourse is the resources you are pillaging. War, be it with bombs or sanctions or special forces or proxies, is immensely profitable to the capitalists. Arms makers make money. Chemical companies make money. Energy companies make money. Media companies make money. Presidents not only make money, they also make history. But the workers, the poor, and the downtrodden pay the price. That’s why they won’t be happy to hear of your plans. Therefore, they must be lied to, lied to so convincingly and comprehensively that they accept, without a second thought, the plans you have laid out before them.
This convincing requires three decisive actions: propaganda, surveillance, and censorship. The first is the official lie you craft to convince them to believe you. The second is the dragnet of digital observation by which you assess whether or not they do believe you. The third is the coercive methods by which you punish those that don’t believe you (justified by the imperial tale you first wove).
The official interpretation of reality is already in place: western civilization is beset on all sides by maniacs that want to take away our freedoms. The surveillance is already in place through programs like the Five Eyes alliance and ECHELON, PRISM, Boundless Informant, FISA, Stellar Wind, and many others. What remains is to tighten the noose of censorship around the neck of our open western societies.
Idiots Abroad
To that end, British Home Secretary Amber Rudd recently announced that citizens that view too much extremist material online could face up to 15 years in jail. Rudd related,
“I want to make sure those who view despicable terrorist content online, including jihadi websites, far-right propaganda and bomb-making instructions, face the full force of the law.”
This flaxen cipher of totalitarian control opened by tabulating some 67,000 tweets by ISIS, along with 44,000 links to ISIS propaganda, had been generated in the last year. Already, Section 58 of the Terrorist Act 2000 criminalized the possession of information that might be useful to a terrorist. But this is not enough for 10 Downing Street. Rudd is taking that law of possession and expanding it into a law of perception. It is now enough to simply watch extremist content. You needn’t download it, distribute it, or otherwise act on it. You need only see it more than once. At that point, by Rudd’s surely flawlessly calculated probabilities, you have become an existential threat to the state, or rather, to national security. You are more likely to commit acts of terror than those who have not seen the extremist content. Pre-crime without the pre-cogs.
But Rudd’s was another step in a long line of encroachments peddled by fascist-minded western governments. Theresa May, the reviled Thatcherite epigone, wants to play a paternal role in preventing citizens from even having the chance to view extremist content. The Tory manifesto tells us, “Some people say that it is not for government to regulate when it comes to technology and the internet. We disagree.” Britain plans, quite proudly it seems, to become the “global leader” in the regulation of the Internet. Just before these announcements were made, Britain had passed the Investigatory Powers Act, which lets the government sweep up user browsing histories. So the surveillance data authorities would use to implement Rudd’s plan is already there. Want to read that eloquent jeremiad against the Tories? Sorry, that was just labeled hate speech. Want to visit your favorite leftist forum? Apologies, mate, but that was deemed a “safe space” for extremist speech and shut down. Want to watch some attractive young people copulate? No problem. Just submit a request to your local minister outlining your precise reasons for wanting access to such nominally proscribed content. Otherwise, forget it.
The Germans aren’t far behind. The so-called Network Enforcement Act is said to create a framework for managing Internet activity, particularly in social media. The act is part of the country’s fake fight against fake news and hate speech, or rather its quite real fight against progressive, leftist, or communist thought and expression. This law demands, on pain of a fifty million euro penalty, that companies with two million or more web visitors must, on receipt of complaint, remove “unlawful content” from their sites. Facebook has opened a new data center in Germany to deal with removal requests, sure to be flooding in from the Bundestag. As the World Socialist Web Sitemakes clear, if your fake news promotes war (Iraq 2003), mischaracterizes coup d’états (Ukraine 2014), or spreads anti-immigrant hysteria (Cologne 2015), then you’ve got nothing to fear. Of course, it falls to the government itself to decide what is and what isn’t extremist content, no doubt a comforting thought for myriad Der Spiegel loyalists. And, of course, the erstwhile European Commission, destroyer of Greece and perpetrator of other ills, has published guidelines to help member states remove “illegal” content. Even the Russians have joined in, promoting legislation designed to curtail digital freedoms.
Stateside Schlemiels
None of this would be news to Barack Obama, whose own legacy of crumpled writs of habeas corpus, worthless privacy platitudes, and high-altitude wetwork, sits like a canker on the body politic. On his way out the door, through the turnstile of public weal into private gain, he provided the deep state with millions of dollars when he added the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act to the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which consecrates black budgets, cost overruns, price gouging, and all other manner of insecurity practiced by the Pentagon and its parasitic defense contractor community. The CDPA, if that’s how it will eventually be known, will effectively pay people to generate officially sanctioned narratives. The U.S. government is fighting fact by calling it propaganda and then producing its own propaganda and calling it fact.
Thanks in part to pressure from Congressional Senate Intelligence Committee that, and the indefatigable efforts of Democrats Adam Schiff and Mark Warner, major brands have been hopping on the clanging tumbrel of Russiagate, as it wheels unsteadily through the digital space, collecting the corpses of freethinkers. Facebook is now blocking “fake news” from its ads. YouTube has begun to fetter content producers with a more restrictive ad network and murky review policies. Google has tweaked its algorithm to keep “fake news” from surfacing high in Search Engine Results Pages, or SERPS. What precisely constitutes fake news is evidently up to the Zuckerbergs and Schmidts of the world. For Google, it has decidedly meant suppressing progressive and left-wing content, as plummeting traffic numbers have indicated. Of course, it won’t mean suppressing the fake news produced by the CIA or Mi5 or the standard state-fluffing smorgasbord of lies, deceits and hit jobs offered up by the so-called mainstream media.
The always sharp Glen Ford at Black Agenda Reportwrites that the FBI has created a fresh construct to deal with African-American unrest, called, “Black Identity Extremism,” already truncated into another mind-murdering acronym, BIE. (As though an acronym adds just the note of tenability required to pass off a fatuity on a mal-educated populace.) Foreign Policy, in an otherwise surprisingly liberal-minded story, suggests the construct risks reviving the racism the agency has worked so hard to overcome. Ford drily notes the overlooked matter of J. Edgar Hoover targeting blacks since the 1920s, not to mention COINTELPRO and attacks on the Black Panthers. Regardless, in the eyes of the FBI, blacks angry about police abuses, persistent economic inequalities, and the New Jim Crow, are little more than “identity extremists,” a danger to national security, notably the security of the white plutocracy which it serves.
(Fore) Closing Thoughts
Remember that much of this apparatus of thought control has been applied beneath the banner of the fake Russia hacking story. That story, created by the Clinton camp to distract from the DNC email revelations provided by WikiLeaks, at first blamed Russia for hacking into “our democracy”, then suggested Donald Trump had colluded with Russia to swing the election, and then emphasized that Russia had launched an “influence campaign” designed to swing the election, with the focus subtly shifting from hacking to collusion to influence. At each turn, the evidence proves paltry, the claims absurd, and the virtue signaling nauseating. The bar is being progressively lowered until it meets a threshold of credibility by which the Senate Intel Committee can prosecute Donald Trump or justify some sort of punitive measures against Russia.
The story is so transparently false, from the technical detail to the geopolitical motive, that it is only sustained by the permanent—or deep state—elements of the foreign policy community that need a means by which to control and direct the Trump administration. Russia collusion served as an ideal pretext to force Trump away from campaign-trail odes to conciliation and toward a continuation of the hostile foreign policies glibly enabled and advanced by Barack Obama. The comedy of it all is that Facebook found ‘incriminating’ ads that amounted to less than one percent of the Facebook total ad buys. Congress would like to ban RT, which has ratings that are 0.3 percent of Judge Judy’s. And the infamous hack has been shown to be a leak. What are we left with? A grandiose deceit based on a need to sustain a brutal ideology of oppression, austerity, and war.
But this is how the imperialists do it. They organize globally to oppress locally. That’s why they’ve been rightly rebranded as ‘the globalists’. The workers always trail behind, left to cope with recently discovered alliances of institutional powers collaborating to fence in the prospects for economic equality, social justice, and the fair distribution of a nation’s wealth. We find ourselves beneath the a pregnant cloud of metastasizing repression, conceived and constructed beneath our own gaze. In his recent novel Purity, one of author Jonathan Franzen’s characters, a famous East German exile and whistleblower extraordinaire (a more charismatic Assange), finds himself a global celebrity, the subject of countless interviews wherein,
“…he’d taken to dropping the word totalitarian. Younger interviewers, to whom the word meant total surveillance, total mind control, gray armies in parade with medium-range missiles, had understood him to be saying something unfair about the Internet. In fact, he simply meant a system that was impossible to opt out of.”
Whether it is too late for a world of working class people and the ubiquitous poor to opt out of the globalized imperium dreamed up by our post-war planners, is hard to say. But if you think there’s still time, be extremely careful, since the pre-crime police are nearly omnipresent, and they might overhear you quoting Marx or see you scrawling ideas about redistribution on the walls of some abandoned underpass. Just imagine some future advertisement for the pre-crime program, a glistening LCD ad floating between skyscrapers, a smiling family at play, a nation secure, and an omniscient narrator softly reminding you, “Don’t forget—it’s the thought that counts.”
Story artist for film and television, Lubomir Arsov, has just released his most recent creation titled In Shadow. It is a 13-minute animated short that is a powerful and sometimes grim look at the veil that modern society has placed upon nearly every epidemic that plagues the human condition. However, as the story progresses, the seeds are planted in the journey toward awakening and self-empowerment.
Written, Directed & Produced by Lubomir Arsov
Original Soundtrack “Age of Wake” by Starward Projections
Composited by Sheldon Lisoy
Additional Compositing by Hiram Gifford
Art Directed & Edited by Lubomir Arsov
As someone who grew up on the internet, I credit it as one of the most important influences on who I am today. I had a computer with internet access in my bedroom from the age of 13. It gave me access to a lot of things which were totally inappropriate for a young teenager, but it was OK. The culture, politics, and interpersonal relationships which I consider to be central to my identity were shaped by the internet, in ways that I have always considered to be beneficial to me personally. I have always been a critical proponent of the internet and everything it has brought, and broadly considered it to be emancipatory and beneficial. I state this at the outset because thinking through the implications of the problem I am going to describe troubles my own assumptions and prejudices in significant ways.
One of the thus-far hypothetical questions I ask myself frequently is how I would feel about my own children having the same kind of access to the internet today. And I find the question increasingly difficult to answer. I understand that this is a natural evolution of attitudes which happens with age, and at some point this question might be a lot less hypothetical. I don’t want to be a hypocrite about it. I would want my kids to have the same opportunities to explore and grow and express themselves as I did. I would like them to have that choice. And this belief broadens into attitudes about the role of the internet in public life as whole.
I’ve also been aware for some time of the increasingly symbiotic relationship between younger children and YouTube. I see kids engrossed in screens all the time, in pushchairs and in restaurants, and there’s always a bit of a Luddite twinge there, but I am not a parent, and I’m not making parental judgments for or on anyone else. I’ve seen family members and friend’s children plugged into Peppa Pig and nursery rhyme videos, and it makes them happy and gives everyone a break, so OK.
But I don’t even have kids and right now I just want to burn the whole thing down.
Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level. Much of what I am going to describe next has been covered elsewhere, although none of the mainstream coverage I’ve seen has really grasped the implications of what seems to be occurring.
To begin: Kid’s YouTube is definitely and markedly weird. I’ve been aware of its weirdness for some time. Last year, there were a number of articles posted about the Surprise Egg craze. Surprise Eggs videos depict, often at excruciating length, the process of unwrapping Kinder and other egg toys. That’s it, but kids are captivated by them. There are thousands and thousands of these videos and thousands and thousands, if not millions, of children watching them.
As I write this he has done a total of 4,426 videos and counting. With so many views — for comparison, Justin Bieber’s official channel has more than 10 billion views, while full-time YouTube celebrity PewDiePie has nearly 12 billion — it’s likely this man makes a living as a pair of gently murmuring hands that unwrap Kinder eggs. (Surprise-egg videos are all accompanied by pre-roll, and sometimes mid-video and ads.)
That should give you some idea of just how odd the world of kids online video is, and that list of video titles hints at the extraordinary range and complexity of this situation. We’ll get into the latter in a minute; for the moment know that it’s already very strange, if apparently pretty harmless, out there.
Another huge trope, especially the youngest children, is nursery rhyme videos.
Little Baby Bum, which made the above video, is the 7th most popular channel on YouTube. With just 515 videos, they have accrued 11.5 million subscribers and 13 billion views. Again, there are questions as to the accuracy of these numbers, which I’ll get into shortly, but the key point is that this is a huge, huge network and industry.
On-demand video is catnip to both parents and to children, and thus to content creators and advertisers. Small children are mesmerised by these videos, whether it’s familiar characters and songs, or simply bright colours and soothing sounds. The length of many of these videos — one common video tactic is to assemble many nursery rhyme or cartoon episodes into hour+ compilations —and the way that length is marketed as part of the video’s appeal, points to the amount of time some kids are spending with them.
YouTube broadcasters have thus developed a huge number of tactics to draw parents’ and childrens’ attention to their videos, and the advertising revenues that accompany them. The first of these tactics is simply to copy and pirate other content. A simple search for “Peppa Pig” on YouTube in my case yielded “About 10,400,000 results” and the front page is almost entirely from the verified “Peppa Pig Official Channel”, while one is from an unverified channel called Play Go Toys, which you really wouldn’t notice unless you were looking out for it:
Play Go Toys’ channel consists of (I guess?) pirated Peppa Pig and other cartoons, videos of toy unboxings (another kid magnet), and videos of, one supposes, the channel owner’s own children. I am not alleging anything bad about Play Go Toys; I am simply illustrating how the structure of YouTube facilitates the delamination of content and author, and how this impacts on our awareness and trust of its source.
As another blogger notes, one of the traditional roles of branded content is that it is a trusted source. Whether it’s Peppa Pig on children’s TV or a Disney movie, whatever one’s feelings about the industrial model of entertainment production, they are carefully produced and monitored so that kids are essentially safe watching them, and can be trusted as such. This no longer applies when brand and content are disassociated by the platform, and so known and trusted content provides a seamless gateway to unverified and potentially harmful content.
(Yes, this is the exact same process as the delamination of trusted news media on Facebook feeds and in Google results that is currently wreaking such havoc on our cognitive and political systems and I am not going to explicitly explore that relationship further here, but it is obviously deeply significant.)
A second way of increasing hits on videos is through keyword/hashtag association, which is a whole dark art unto itself. When some trend, such as Surprise Egg videos, reaches critical mass, content producers pile onto it, creating thousands and thousands more of these videos in every possible iteration. This is the origin of all the weird names in the list above: branded content and nursery rhyme titles and “surprise egg” all stuffed into the same word salad to capture search results, sidebar placement, and “up next” autoplay rankings.
Play Go Toys’ channel consists of (I guess?) pirated Peppa Pig and other cartoons, videos of toy unboxings (another kid magnet), and videos of, one supposes, the channel owner’s own children. I am not alleging anything bad about Play Go Toys; I am simply illustrating how the structure of YouTube facilitates the delamination of content and author, and how this impacts on our awareness and trust of its source.
As another blogger notes, one of the traditional roles of branded content is that it is a trusted source. Whether it’s Peppa Pig on children’s TV or a Disney movie, whatever one’s feelings about the industrial model of entertainment production, they are carefully produced and monitored so that kids are essentially safe watching them, and can be trusted as such. This no longer applies when brand and content are disassociated by the platform, and so known and trusted content provides a seamless gateway to unverified and potentially harmful content.
(Yes, this is the exact same process as the delamination of trusted news media on Facebook feeds and in Google results that is currently wreaking such havoc on our cognitive and political systems and I am not going to explicitly explore that relationship further here, but it is obviously deeply significant.)
A second way of increasing hits on videos is through keyword/hashtag association, which is a whole dark art unto itself. When some trend, such as Surprise Egg videos, reaches critical mass, content producers pile onto it, creating thousands and thousands more of these videos in every possible iteration. This is the origin of all the weird names in the list above: branded content and nursery rhyme titles and “surprise egg” all stuffed into the same word salad to capture search results, sidebar placement, and “up next” autoplay rankings.
A striking example of the weirdness is the Finger Family videos (harmless example embedded above). I have no idea where they came from or the origin of the children’s rhyme at the core of the trope, but there are at least 17 million versions of this currently on YouTube, and again they cover every possible genre, with billions and billions of aggregated views.
Once again, the view numbers of these videos must be taken under serious advisement. A huge number of these videos are essentially created by bots and viewed by bots, and even commented on by bots. That is a whole strange world in and of itself. But it shouldn’t obscure that there are also many actual children, plugged into iphones and tablets, watching these over and over again — in part accounting for the inflated view numbers — learning to type basic search terms into the browser, or simply mashing the sidebar to bring up another video.
What I find somewhat disturbing about the proliferation of even (relatively) normal kids videos is the impossibility of determining the degree of automation which is at work here; how to parse out the gap between human and machine. The example above, from a channel called Bounce Patrol Kids, with almost two million subscribers, show this effect in action. It posts professionally produced videos, with dedicated human actors, at the rate of about one per week. Once again, I am not alleging anything untoward about Bounce Patrol, which clearly follows in the footsteps of pre-digital kid sensations like their fellow Australians The Wiggles.
And yet, there is something weird about a group of people endlessly acting out the implications of a combination of algorithmically generated keywords: “Halloween Finger Family & more Halloween Songs for Children | Kids Halloween Songs Collection”, “Australian Animals Finger Family Song | Finger Family Nursery Rhymes”, “Farm Animals Finger Family and more Animals Songs | Finger Family Collection – Learn Animals Sounds”, “Safari Animals Finger Family Song | Elephant, Lion, Giraffe, Zebra & Hippo! Wild Animals for kids”, “Superheroes Finger Family and more Finger Family Songs! Superhero Finger Family Collection”, “Batman Finger Family Song — Superheroes and Villains! Batman, Joker, Riddler, Catwoman” and on and on and on. This is content production in the age of algorithmic discovery — even if you’re a human, you have to end up impersonating the machine.
Other channels do away with the human actors to create infinite reconfigurable versions of the same videos over and over again. What is occurring here is clearly automated. Stock animations, audio tracks, and lists of keywords being assembled in their thousands to produce an endless stream of videos. The above channel, Videogyan 3D Rhymes — Nursery Rhymes & Baby Songs, posts several videos a week, in increasingly byzantine combinations of keywords. They have almost five million subscribers — more than double Bounce Patrol — although once again it’s impossible to know who or what is actually racking up these millions and millions of views.
I’m trying not to turn this essay into an endless list of examples, but it’s important to grasp how vast this system is, and how indeterminate its actions, process, and audience. It’s also international: there are variations of Finger Family and Learn Colours videos for Tamil epics and Malaysian cartoons which are unlikely to pop up in any Anglophone search results. This very indeterminacy and reach is key to its existence, and its implications. Its dimensionality makes it difficult to grasp, or even to really think about.
We’ve encountered pretty clear examples of the disturbing outcomes of full automation before — some of which have been thankfully leavened with a dark kind of humour, others not so much. Much has been made of the algorithmic interbreeding of stock photo libraries and on-demand production of everything from tshirts to coffee mugs to infant onesies and cell phone covers. The above example, available until recently on Amazon, is one such case, and the story of how it came to occur is fascinating and weird but essentially comprehensible. Nobody set out to create phone cases with drugs and medical equipment on them, it was just a deeply weird mathematical/probabilistic outcome. The fact that it took a while to notice might ring some alarm bells however.
Likewise, the case of the “Keep Calm and Rape A Lot” tshirts (along with the “Keep Calm and Knife Her” and “Keep Calm and Hit Her” ones) is depressing and distressing but comprehensible. Nobody set out to create these shirts: they just paired an unchecked list of verbs and pronouns with an online image generator. It’s quite possible that none of these shirts ever physically existed, were ever purchased or worn, and thus that no harm was done. Once again though, the people creating this content failed to notice, and neither did the distributor. They literally had no idea what they were doing.
What I will argue, on the basis of these cases and of those I’m going to describe further, is that the scale and logic of the system is complicit in these outputs, and requires us to think through their implications.
(Also again: I’m not going to dig into the wider social implications of such processes outside the scope of what I am writing about here, but it’s clear that one can draw a clear line from examples such as these to pressing contemporary issues such as racial and gender bias in big data and machine intelligence-driven systems, which require urgent attention but in the same manner do not have anything resembling easy or even preferable solutions.)
Let’s look at just one video among the piles of kid videos, and try to parse out where it comes from. It’s important to stress that I didn’t set out to find this particular video: it appeared organically and highly ranked in a search for ‘finger family’ in an incognito browser window (i.e. it should not have been influenced by previous searches). This automation takes us to very, very strange places, and at this point the rabbithole is so deep that it’s impossible to know how such a thing came into being.
Once again, a content warning: this video is not inappropriate in any way, but it is decidedly off, and contains elements which might trouble anyone.It’s very mild on the scale of such things, but. I describe it below if you don’t want to watch it and head down that road. This warning will recur.
The above video is entitled Wrong Heads Disney Wrong Ears Wrong Legs Kids Learn Colors Finger Family 2017 Nursery Rhymes. The title alone confirms its automated provenance. I have no idea where the “Wrong Heads” trope originates, but I can imagine, as with the Finger Family Song, that somewhere there is a totally original and harmless version that made enough kids laugh that it started to climb the algorithmic rankings until it made it onto the word salad lists, combining with Learn Colors, Finger Family, and Nursery Rhymes, and all of these tropes — not merely as words but as images, processes, and actions — to be mixed into what we see here.
The video consists of a regular version of the Finger Family song played over an animation of character heads and bodies from Disney’s Aladdin swapping and intersecting. Again, this is weird but frankly no more than the Surprise Egg videos or anything else kids watch. I get how innocent it is. The offness creeps in with the appearance of a non-Aladdin character —Agnes, the little girl from Despicable Me. Agnes is the arbiter of the scene: when the heads don’t match up, she cries, when they do, she cheers.
The video’s creator, BABYFUN TV (screenshot above), has produced many similar videos. As many of the Wrong Heads videos as I could bear to watch all work in exactly the same way. The character Hope from Inside Out weeps through a Smurfs and Trolls head swap. It goes on and on. I get the game, but the constant overlaying and intermixing of different tropes starts to get inside you. BABYFUN TV only has 170 subscribers and very low view rates, but then there are thousands and thousands of channels like this. Numbers in the long tail aren’t significant in the abstract, but in their accumulation.
The question becomes: how did this come to be? The “Bad Baby” trope also present on BABYFUN TV features the same crying. While I find it disturbing, I can understand how it might provide some of the rhythm or cadence or relation to their own experience that actual babies are attracted to in this content, although it has been warped and stretched through algorithmic repetition and recombination in ways that I don’t think anyone actually wants to happen.
Toy Freaks is a hugely popular channel (68th on the platform) which features a father and his two daughters playing out — or in some cases perhaps originating — many of the tropes we’ve identified so far, including “Bad Baby”, above. As well as nursery rhymes and learning colours, Toy Freaks specialises in gross-out situations, as well as activities which many, many viewers feel border on abuse and exploitation, if not cross the line entirely, including videos of the children vomiting and in pain. Toy Freaks is a YouTube verified channel, whatever that means. (I think we know by now it means nothing useful.)
As with Bounce Patrol Kids, however you feel about the content of these videos, it feels impossible to know where the automation starts and ends, who is coming up with the ideas and who is roleplaying them. In turn, the amplification of tropes in popular, human-led channels such as Toy Freaks leads to them being endlessly repeated across the network in increasingly outlandish and distorted recombinations.
There’s a second level of what I’m characterising as human-led videos which are much more disturbing than the mostly distasteful activities of Toy Freaks and their kin. Here is a relatively mild, but still upsetting example:
A step beyond the simply pirated Peppa Pig videos mentioned previously are the knock-offs. These too seem to teem with violence. In the official Peppa Pig videos, Peppa does indeed go to the dentist, and the episode in which she does so seems to be popular — although, confusingly, what appears to be the real episode is only available on an unofficial channel. In the official timeline, Peppa is appropriately reassured by a kindly dentist. In the version above, she is basically tortured, before turning into a series of Iron Man robots and performing the Learn Colours dance. A search for “peppa pig dentist” returns the above video on the front page, and it only gets worse from here.
Disturbing Peppa Pig videos, which tend towards extreme violence and fear, with Peppa eating her father or drinking bleach, are, it turns out very widespread. They make up an entire YouTube subculture. Many are obviously parodies, or even satires of themselves, in the pretty common style of the internet’s outrageous, deliberately offensive kind. All the 4chan tropes are there, the trolls are out, we know this.
In the example above, the agency is less clear: the video starts with a trollish Peppa parody, but later syncs into the kind of automated repetition of tropes we’ve seen already. I don’t know which camp it belongs to. Maybe it’s just trolls. I kind of hope it is. But I don’t think so. Trolls don’t cover the intersection of human actors and more automated examples further down the line. They’re at play here, but they’re not the whole story.
I suppose it’s naive not to see the deliberate versions of this coming, but many are so close to the original, and so unsignposted — like the dentist example — that many, many kids are watching them. I understand that most of them are not trying to mess kids up, not really, even though they are.
I’m trying to understand why, as plainly and simply troubling as it is, this is not a simple matter of “won’t somebody think of the children” hand-wringing. Obviously this content is inappropriate, obviously there are bad actors out there, obviously some of these videos should be removed. Obviously too this raises questions of fair use, appropriation, free speech and so on. But reports which simply understand the problem through this lens fail to fully grasp the mechanisms being deployed, and thus are incapable of thinking its implications in totality, and responding accordingly.
The New York Times, headlining their article on a subset of this issue “On YouTube Kids, Startling Videos Slip Past Filters”, highlights the use of knock-off characters and nursery rhymes in disturbing content, and frames it as a problem of moderation and legislation. YouTube Kids, an official app which claims to be kid-safe but is quite obviously not, is the problem identified, because it wrongly engenders trust in users. An article in the British tabloid The Sun, “Kids left traumatised after sick YouTube clips showing Peppa Pig characters with knives and guns appear on app for children” takes the same line, with an added dose of right-wing technophobia and self-righteousness. But both stories take at face value YouTube’s assertions that these results are incredibly rare and quickly removed: assertions utterly refuted by the proliferation of the stories themselves, and the growing number of social media posts, largely by concerned parents, from which they arise.
But as with Toy Freaks, what is concerning to me about the Peppa videos is how the obvious parodies and even the shadier knock-offs interact with the legions of algorithmic content producers until it is completely impossible to know what is going on. (“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”)
Here’s what is basically a version of Toy Freaks produced in Asia (screenshot above). Here’s one from Russia. I don’t really want to use the term “human-led” any more about these videos, although they contain all the same tropes and actual people acting them out. I no longer have any idea what’s going on here and I really don’t want to and I’m starting to think that that is kind of the point. That’s part of why I’m starting to think about the deliberateness of this all. There is a lot of effort going into making these. More than spam revenue can generate — can it? Who’s writing these scripts, editing these videos? Once again, I want to stress: this is still really mild, even funny stuff compared to a lot of what is out there.
Here are a few things which are disturbing me:
The first is the level of horror and violence on display. Some of the times it’s troll-y gross-out stuff; most of the time it seems deeper, and more unconscious than that. The internet has a way of amplifying and enabling many of our latent desires; in fact, it’s what it seems to do best. I spend a lot of time arguing for this tendency, with regards to human sexual freedom, individual identity, and other issues. Here, and overwhelmingly it sometimes feels, that tendency is itself a violent and destructive one.
The second is the levels of exploitation, not of children because they are children but of children because they are powerless. Automated reward systems like YouTube algorithms necessitate exploitation in the same way that capitalism necessitates exploitation, and if you’re someone who bristles at the second half of that equation then maybe this should be what convinces you of its truth. Exploitation is encoded into the systems we are building, making it harder to see, harder to think and explain, harder to counter and defend against. Not in a future of AI overlords and robots in the factories, but right here, now, on your screen, in your living room and in your pocket.
Many of these latest examples confound any attempt to argue that nobody is actually watching these videos, that these are all bots. There are humans in the loop here, even if only on the production side, and I’m pretty worried about them too.
I’ve written enough, too much, but I feel like I actually need to justify all this raving about violence and abuse and automated systems with an example that sums it up. Maybe after everything I’ve said you won’t think it’s so bad. I don’t know what to think any more.
This video, BURIED ALIVE Outdoor Playground Finger Family Song Nursery Rhymes Animation Education Learning Video, contains all of the elements we’ve covered above, and takes them to another level. Familiar characters, nursery tropes, keyword salad, full automation, violence, and the very stuff of kids’ worst dreams. And of course there are vast, vast numbers of these videos. Channel after channel after channel of similar content, churned out at the rate of hundreds of new videos every week. Industrialised nightmare production.
For the final time: There is more violent and more sexual content like this available. I’m not going to link to it. I don’t believe in traumatising other people, but it’s necessary to keep stressing it, and not dismiss the psychological effect on children of things which aren’t overtly disturbing to adults, just incredibly dark and weird.
A friend who works in digital video described to me what it would take to make something like this: a small studio of people (half a dozen, maybe more) making high volumes of low quality content to reap ad revenue by tripping certain requirements of the system (length in particular seems to be a factor). According to my friend, online kids’ content is one of the few alternative ways of making money from 3D animation because the aesthetic standards are lower and independent production can profit through scale. It uses existing and easily available content (such as character models and motion-capture libraries) and it can be repeated and revised endlessly and mostly meaninglessly because the algorithms don’t discriminate — and neither do the kids.
These videos, wherever they are made, however they come to be made, and whatever their conscious intention (i.e. to accumulate ad revenue) are feeding upon a system which was consciously intended to show videos to children for profit. The unconsciously-generated, emergent outcomes of that are all over the place.
To expose children to this content is abuse. We’re not talking about the debatable but undoubtedly real effects of film or videogame violence on teenagers, or the effects of pornography or extreme images on young minds, which were alluded to in my opening description of my own teenage internet use. Those are important debates, but they’re not what is being discussed here. What we’re talking about is very young children, effectively from birth, being deliberately targeted with content which will traumatise and disturb them, via networks which are extremely vulnerable to exactly this form of abuse. It’s not about trolls, but about a kind of violence inherent in the combination of digital systems and capitalist incentives. It’s down to that level of the metal.
This, I think, is my point: The system is complicit in the abuse.
And right now, right here, YouTube and Google are complicit in that system. The architecture they have built to extract the maximum revenue from online video is being hacked by persons unknown to abuse children, perhaps not even deliberately, but at a massive scale. I believe they have an absolute responsibility to deal with this, just as they have a responsibility to deal with the radicalisation of (mostly) young (mostly) men via extremist videos — of any political persuasion. They have so far showed absolutely no inclination to do this, which is in itself despicable. However, a huge part of my troubled response to this issue is that I have no idea how they can respond without shutting down the service itself, and most systems which resemble it. We have built a world which operates at scale, where human oversight is simply impossible, and no manner of inhuman oversight will counter most of the examples I’ve used in this essay. The asides I’ve kept in parentheses throughout, if expanded upon, would allow one with minimal effort to rewrite everything I’ve said, with very little effort, to be not about child abuse, but about white nationalism, about violent religious ideologies, about fake news, about climate denialism, about 9/11 conspiracies.
This is a deeply dark time, in which the structures we have built to sustain ourselves are being used against us — all of us — in systematic and automated ways. It is hard to keep faith with the network when it produces horrors such as these. While it is tempting to dismiss the wilder examples as trolling, of which a significant number certainly are, that fails to account for the sheer volume of content weighted in a particularly grotesque direction. It presents many and complexly entangled dangers, including that, just as with the increasing focus on alleged Russian interference in social media, such events will be used as justification for increased control over the internet, increasing censorship, and so on. This is not what many of us want.
I’m going to stop here, saying only this:
What concerns me is not just the violence being done to children here, although that concerns me deeply. What concerns me is that this is just one aspect of a kind of infrastructural violence being done to all of us, all of the time, and we’re still struggling to find a way to even talk about it, to describe its mechanisms and its actions and its effects. As I said at the beginning of this essay: this is being done by people and by things and by a combination of things and people. Responsibility for its outcomes is impossible to assign but the damage is very, very real indeed.
My personal Facebook account, which has the maximum 5,000 friends and an additional 5,000+ followers, has been blocked from posting for three days. My page hasn’t been blocked yet, but we’ll see; I shared the article there, too.
The reason given for this ban by the little pop-up boxes when I logged on just now was that a couple months ago I had shared an article about admitted false flag operations perpetrated by governments around the world. I don’t know what happened that made Facebook’s system decide to crack down on me now all of a sudden, but I do know I’ve been a bit naughtier than usual in my last couple of articles.
The article I got the banhammer for sharing is titled For Those Who Don’t ‘Believe’ In ‘Conspiracies’ Here Are 58 Admitted False Flag Attacks. According to the site’s ticker it has 50,667 shares as of this writing. It’s laden with hyperlinks for further reading, and lists only instances of false flag operations that insiders are on the record as having admitted to themselves. It’s a good compilation of important information. People should be allowed to share it.
The notifications say I can be permanently banned if I continue posting that sort of material. I’ve had that account since 2007.
So. Who wants to see my Barbra Streisand impression?
(Image by Caitlin Johnstone)
(Image by Caitlin Johnstone)
In a corporatist system of government, corporate censorship is state censorship. When there’s no meaningful space between corporate power and government power, it doesn’t make much difference whether the guy silencing your dissent is Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Sessions. America most definitely has such a system.
If they’re going to get us locked down and propagandized into their vapid brain boxes, this will be how they’ll do it. Not by government censorship, but by corporate censorship. Government can’t make an overt attempt to stop a dissenting voice from speaking, but the corporations who own the venue of their speech can.
In a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, plutocrat-sponsored senators spoke with top legal and security officials for Facebook, Twitter and Google in a very disturbing way about the need to silence dissenting voices.
Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii demanded that the companies adopt a “mission statement” declaring their commitment “to prevent the fomenting of discord.”
A former FBI agent Clint Watts kicked it up even further, saying, “Civil wars don’t start with gunshots, they start with words. America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.”
“Stopping the false information artillery barrage landing on social media users comes only when those outlets distributing bogus stories are silenced”—“-silence the guns and the barrage will end,” he added.
This was on the Senate floor. Officials were speaking about the need to censor social media to prevent people from sharing dissenting ideas on the Senate floor.
World Socialist Web Site said of the hearing,
That such a statement could be made in a congressional hearing, entirely without objection, is an expression of the terminal decay of American democracy. There is no faction of the ruling class that maintains any commitment to basic democratic rights.
None of the Democrats in the committee raised any of the constitutional issues involved in asking massive technology companies to censor political speech on the Internet. Only one Republican raised concerns over censorship, but only to allege that Google had a liberal bias.
I’ll admit right now that this really scares me. Ever the optimist, I’ve been reassuring my readers that the corporatocracy would never risk taking off the black hole sun mask of corporate cheerfulness and move into regular, overt totalitarianism. I’ve contended that they must remain covert in order to keep successfully manufacture consent.
But, here we are. Through a studious application of psy-ops they have their censorship and they have their consent. Remember, in the book “Fahrenheit 451” the public wasn’t unhappy about the book burnings. They cheered them on, and that’s what we have now. The herd is mindlessly clapping their approval at censorship and even volunteering to report naughty behavior like good little hall monitors for the oligarchy. I’m sure that even some of my close friends and family will silently approve of my banning and will meet my distress with the pursed lips of a church lady secretly pleased at my comeuppance.
I tried joining Gab when I saw this coming, but it’s really alt-righty there and the energy there is just gross. Finding a new social media outlet might not even matter anyway, since these creeps just target any place people gather in large numbers.
I don’t know. I always freak out a bit when the eye of corporate censorship focuses on me. I’ve recently been told by a number of people that they’ve been banned for sharing my articles, and now it’s hitting me.
I’m babbling. This is weird. I just really, really don’t want humanity to become what these people are trying to turn it into, you know? Help me make some noise about this stuff, please. Manipulators can’t do their job when there’s a big spotlight pointed at them.
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In one of the most horrendous blows to press freedom since the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s, the U.S. Department of Justice has forced the news broadcaster RT America to file under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
The assault on RT America, on which I host the show “On Contact,” has nothing to do with the dissemination of Russian propaganda. It is driven by RT America’s decision to provide a platform to critics of American capitalism and imperialism, critics who lambast a system of government that can no longer be called democratic. And it is accompanied by the installation of algorithms by Google, Facebook and Twitter that divert readers away from left-wing, progressive and anti-war websites, including Truthdig. The World Socialist Web Site has seen its search traffic from Google fall by 74 percent since April. Google, in a further blow, this month removed RT from its list of “preferred” channels on YouTube. Twitter has blocked all advertising by the channel.
Put the censorship campaigns together and the message is clear: Left-wing critics, already marginalized by the state, must be silenced.
It would seem, given how we are locked out of the corporate media and public broadcasting, that the assault is overkill. But the ideology that sustains the corporate state, the “free market” and neoliberalism has lost all credibility. The corporate state has no counterargument to its critics. The nakedness of corporate greed, exploitation and repression is transparent across the political spectrum. The ideological fortress erected by corporate power and sustained by its courtiers in the press and academia has collapsed. All it has left is a crude censorship.
Complicit in this censorship is a bankrupt liberal class. The institutions tasked with defending press freedom—including the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, the Committee to Protect Journalists and PEN—along with major news outlets such as The New York Times, have served as the corporate state’s useful idiots. Only a handful of journalists, including Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer, grasp and decry the very real danger before us.
The charge that RT and these left-wing sites disseminate “foreign propaganda” is the beginning, not the end, of a broad campaign against press freedom. Once this precedent of state censorship is normalized, far more tepid and compliant media outlets will be targeted. Max Blumenthal wrote two good pieces on AlterNet about the puppet masters behind the censorship campaign. [Click here and here.]
The venom of the state toward its critics was displayed in a report by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections,” issued Jan. 6. In the report, seven pages were specifically directed at RT America, much of the language focused on the journalist Abby Martin. Martin became one of the best-known critics of the corporate state during the Occupy movement. Her show on RT, “Breaking the Set,” which had been off the air for nearly two years when the report was published—a glaring error for an intelligence community awash in budgets of tens of billions of dollars—was denounced as a disseminator of “radical discontent.” The report complained that RT gave airtime to third-party candidate debates. The document attacked RT hosts for asserting that the two-party system does not represent the views of at least one-third of the population and is a sham. It excoriated the network for covering Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street and fracking.
The report charged:
RT’s reports often characterize the United States as a “surveillance state” and allege widespread infringements of civil liberties, police brutality, and drone use.
RT has also focused on criticism of the US economic system, US currency policy, alleged Wall Street greed, and the US national debt. Some of RT’s hosts have compared the United States to Imperial Rome and have predicted that government corruption and “corporate greed” will lead to US financial collapse.
The “Alice in Wonderland” quality of the report would be laughable if it was not so ominous. The United States, in fact, is a surveillance state. Civil liberties have been eviscerated. Police brutality is endemic. Our drone wars have made us state terrorists. The economic structure serves the wealthiest corporations and oligarchs. Wall Street is run by a criminal class. Our debt is unsustainable, especially once the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, and like all decaying empires we are headed for collapse. The DNI report clarifies what the ruling elites fear—not fake news but the truth. And the truth is that the elites have destroyed the country and are traitors to democracy.
The DNI report was followed by a congressional hearing on “Extremist Content and Russian Disinformation Online,” held Oct. 31. Executives of Facebook, Twitter and Google were grilled about their roles in distributing fake news and extremist content that in the words of Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley included “spread[ing] stories about abuse of black Americans by law enforcement.” The executives promised to double down on their censorship, and they did so.
The ruling elites are desperately trying to shift the focus away from the cause of the political insurgencies on the left and the right: extreme social inequality. It is for this reason that critics who highlight and explore the roots and causes of social inequality must be discredited or silenced. If social inequality is accepted as the driving force behind the decay of the American state and the mounting rage of much of the population, then the structures that profit from this inequality will come under assault. All the elites have left is to paint their critics as “agents of a foreign power.”
The United States increasingly resembles a totalitarian state. Our anemic democracy is on life support. A reasoned debate about social inequality or the crimes and misjudgments of empire is becoming impossible. This presages a frightening future. There will be many “good” Americans who, when the history of this moment is recorded, will be responsible. And one day, to their surprise, they too will be victims.
After the Crash 