Tag Archives: social control

Sandy Hook and the Murder of the First Amendment

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By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Another Day in the Empire

Let me begin by saying I have no idea what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012.

However, since 9/11, I have questioned the veracity of many news reports and claims issued by officialdom about terrorism and mass shootings. The government and its media have been caught hundreds of times lying about or twisting news stories, so I believe skepticism is entirely warranted.

That said, I am now convinced the First Amendment is a dead letter. I have felt that way for some time. Recent events put a capstone on my previous arguments that much of the Bill of Rights is dead. This was recently underscored by the persecution of activist and author Jim Fetzer for writing a book that claims the massacre at Sandy Hook never happened.

On Thursday, Rolling Stone reported:

A Wisconsin jury has ruled that James Fetzer, a retired professor from the University of Minnesota Duluth, must pay [Leonard] Pozner $450,000 for accusing him of forging his son Noah’s death certificate. Fetzer is the coauthor of Nobody Died at Sandy Hook, which alleges that Pozner faked his son’s birth certificate and that the Obama administration staged the shooting in an effort to pass legislation on gun control.

The ruling and “award” granted to the plaintiff will undoubtedly drive Fetzer to financial ruin if it is not overturned on appeal—and I predict it will stand. This court case is a pivotal moment for those who work to eradicate free speech, a right granted to those who make controversial statements or write books some people find objectionable.

From Digital Media Law:

The right to speak guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution includes the right to voice opinions, criticize others, and comment on matters of public interest. It also protects the use of hyperbole and extreme statements when it is clear these are rhetorical ploys. Accordingly, you can safely state your opinion that others are inept, stupid, jerks, failures, etc. even though these statements might hurt the subject’s feelings or diminish their reputations. Such terms represent what is called “pure opinions” because they can’t be proven true or false. As a result, they cannot form the basis for a defamation claim.

It is Fetzer’s opinion Pozner lied about the death of his son and falsified his death certificate. The incident has a number of unanswered questions, including Facebook posts about the shooting that appeared the day before the event. The corporate media narrative on the shooting was changed several times. Military experts claimed it would have been impossible for a skinny 19-year old Adam Lanza to have shot so many people in such a short period of time.

If the government really wanted to put the entire case to rest and dispel what it calls malicious conspiracy theories, it would explain why, as Dr. Wayne Carver, the medical examiner overseeing the case, said during a news conference parents were not allowed to identify their murdered children. They were shown photographs instead. This is highly unusual and suspicious.

I’m not saying Lanza isn’t responsible. I’m saying there are numerous unanswered questions swept neatly into the memory hole by the government and its media. In short, the government is responsible for engendering conspiracy theories by not resolving key issues in this case and many others.

Getting to the bottom of Sandy Hook, however, is not the point here. The point is: as a citizen born with inalienable natural rights including speech, you will not be permitted to propose theories on certain topics the state has demarcated as off-limits and punishable if a “tinfoil hate conspiracy theorist” deviates from official narratives, many which are lies designed to emotionally manipulate people and gain consensus under false pretense to further degrade your right to speak and write on crucial issues.

The Fetzer trial is a big win for the ruling elite. For years now, it has worked tirelessly to characterize investigative journalism outside limits imposed by the government as criminal—and now, according to the FBI, as terrorism.

Jim Fetzer and Alex Jones are the first to be subjected to Soviet-like show trials for the crime of disagreeing with the state. More will follow in due course.

What happened to individual empowerment in the internet age?

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By Kurt Cobb

Source: Resilience

Apple Computer’s 1984 Superbowl commercial—one of the most iconic television commercials ever made—announced two things: the introduction of the Macintosh computer and that this computer could in some fashion allow each of us to escape a future of tyranny and social control prophesied in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.

The computer age and the coming of the internet have certainly moved more power into the hands of the individual, giving him and her access to social and professional connections around the world, information on every conceivable topic, and awareness of events in real-time or near real-time across the globe. The possibilities of the combined computational power of the modern computer and the connectivity of those computers across the globe are still being explored and expanded every day.

So, how is individual empowerment faring? Not so well. It turns out that practically every device, piece of software and internet platform not only holds the promise of enhancing the individual’s power but also can be weaponized to undermine it.

We somehow forget that for every thing and every person we can look up on the internet, those things and people can look back. Naturally, we can try to protect ourselves with antivirus programs and firewalls. But as with any arms race, there is a never-ending back-and-forth struggle to create better tools and strategies for snooping on and disrupting computers and their networks and simultaneously to build defenses against the newest methods of attack and surveillance.

But I am less concerned with this battle than I am with the voluntary things we do that undermine all the individual empowerment that was supposed to come our way.

The single most important power humans have is their ability to pay attention. It’s our focus that allows us to do not only our daily tasks but also to perform progressively better at tasks we choose. Now the most important thing to know about our attention is that it is a limited resource. There are only so many hours in a day and only so many of those when we are not sleeping and only so many of those when we can pay attention to something outside our basic needs of eating, getting a livelihood, staying safe.

I have noticed a distinct generational divide between those who have grown up with cellphones and computers and those who purchased their first cellphone and personal computer after age 30 when their daily habits and outlook were already well-cemented. Those who joined the computer, internet and cellphone age as adults tend to see these devices and networks as tools for accomplishing certain tasks they had previously accomplished some other way such as keeping a calendar, holding meetings and writing and sharing documents.

Those who grew up in the age of the computer, cellphone and internet view these technologies as portals to experience. The most important things that are happening in their lives, social, cultural, and economic, are happening online and via cellphone. Experiences mediated through electronic means have become primary and more important than direct immediate experience.

I am most struck by this when I walk the streets and see person after person listening to something coming from their cellphones as they walk, run or bicycle. People can listen to whatever they like as far as I’m concerned. But it occurs to me that they cannot simultaneously pay careful attention to the world right in front of them AND to whatever they are listening to.

It reminds me of the quote attributed to then California gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan about the cutting of the state’s redwood forest: “If you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all.” That’s not exactly what he said, but his opponent captured Reagan’s view all too well.

In any case, we now have a segment of the population which apparently believes that there is little to notice in any environment and for whom the physical world is just a concept and not at all the endlessly complex, differentiated, nuanced and ever-changing place that I experience.

Today, we have virtual reality to entertain us, complete with virtual reality goggles. Does it not occur to those putting on the goggles that they are limiting their reality rather than expanding it? That they are limiting it to what the creators of that particular virtual reality wish to convey? And, all this is undertaken when the reality that is right in front of them in their homes, workplaces, and outdoors has barely been explored or understood.

Every modern communications device, cellphone, computer and virtual reality machine gives us a highly edited version of the world, one designed especially to meet the goals of those who created the devices. The primary goals are making money and controlling our behavior in order to get us to pay more attention (so our attention can be sold to advertisers) and/or to get us to make additional purchases.

The addictive quality of these technologies has been well-documented. But it is in the nature of the addict to believe that he or she is being nourished by the very things to which he or she is addicted. And, that is the most devilish trick of modern networks: the idea that our futures and very well-being will be enhanced—when, in fact, our autonomy is simply being dissipated as we give our attention to things which sap our own power and health and enslave us to marketing and programming executives who themselves are caught up in a system that does not value individual autonomy in the least.

There are, of course, the myriad ways in which individual empowerment has backfired and put us into far more danger than ever before. The ability of a small group of hackers to tap into critical networks which service power generating stations and water and sewer plants is a rising concern. Especially concerning are nuclear power plants.

Miniaturization technology is making it possible to put more and more destructive power in smaller and smaller packages. Combine that with the ready availability of drones and you get a lethal combination.

The rise of designer viruses, though not yet open to those without sophisticated laboratories, threatens an unstoppable epidemic.

Empowering the individual sounds great when you say it. But it helps to be specific about what kind of power you want the individual to have and how that power might be used in nefarious ways or simply dissipated by absorbing a person’s attention in ways that undermine that empowerment.

The centers of official power—economic and political elites, corporations, and the government security apparatus of police, intelligence agencies, militaries—are all petrified at the vast destructive power flowing to the hands of individuals and small groups. And, they are equally petrified at the individual economic, political and social empowerment available to the individual through the very technologies these elites have unleashed.

The first threat they use as an excuse for blanket surveillance, preventive detention and secret prisons. The second threat they hope will be dissipated by the myriad distractions that the commercial interests which now largely control the internet provide to the public.

Tulsi Gabbard vs Google Goliath

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By Rick Sterling

Source: Dissident Voice

Introduction

The Tulsi Gabbard presidential campaign has filed a major law suit against Google.  This article outlines the main points of the law suit and evidence the the social media giant Google has quietly acquired enormous influence on public perceptions and has been actively censoring alternative viewpoints.

Tulsi Now vs Google

Tulsi Now, Inc vs Google, LLC was filed on July 25 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. The attorneys demand a jury trial and seek compensation and punitive damages of “no less than $50 million”. Major points and allegations in the 36 page complaint include:

* Google has monopolistic control of online searches and related advertising.

“Google creates, operates, and controls its platform and services, including but not limited to Google Search, Google Ads, and Gmail as a public forum or its functional equivalent by intentionally and openly dedicating its platform for public use and public benefit, inviting the public to utilize Google as a forum for free speech. Google serves as a state actor by performing an exclusively and traditionally public function by regulating free speech within a public forum and helping to run elections.” (p. 22)

“Google has used its control over online political speech to silence Tulsi Gabbard, a candidate millions of Americans want to hear from. With this lawsuit, Tulsi seeks to stop Google from further intermeddling in the 2020 United States Presidential Election….. Google plays favorites, with no warning, no transparency – and no accountability (until now).” (p. 2)

* At a critical moment Google undercut the Tulsi Gabbard campaign.

“On June 28, 2019 – at the height of Gabbard’s popularity among internet researchers in the immediate hours after the debate ended, and in the thick of the critical post-debate period… Google suspended Tulsi’s Google Ads account without warning.” (p. 3)

* Google has failed to provide a credible explanation.

The Tulsi campaign quickly sought to restore the account but “In response, the Campaign got opacity and an inconsistent series of answers from Google… To this day, Google has not provided a straight answer – let alone a credible one – as to why Tulsi’s political speech was silence right when millions of people wanted to hear from her.” (p. 4)

Google started by falsely claiming “problems with billing”.  Later, as reported in the NY Times story  a Google spokesperson claimed, “Google has automated systems that flag unusual activity on advertiser accounts – including large spending changes – to prevent fraud….In this case, ‘our system triggered a suspension.’ ”

* Google has a corporate profit motive to oppose Tulsi Gabbard.

“Google has sought to silence Tulsi Gabbard, a presidential candidate who has vocally called for greater regulation and oversight of (you guessed it) Google.” (p. 5)

“During her career in Congress, Gabbard has moved to limit the powers of big tech companies like Google and has fought to keep the internet open and available to all. Gabbard has co-sponsored legislation that prohibits multi-tiered pricing agreements for the privileged few, and she has spoken in favor of reinstating and expanding net neutrality to apply to Internet firms like Google.” (p. 8)

* Google’s Actions have caused significant harm to the Gabbard campaign and violate the U.S. and California constitutions and California business law.

“Through its illegal actions targeting Tulsi Gabbard, Google has caused the Campaign significant harm, both monetary (including potentially millions of dollars in forgone donations) and nonmonetary (the ability to provide Tulsi’s important message with Americans looking to hear it).” (p. 6)

“Google engages in a pattern and practice of intentional discrimination in the provision of its services, including discriminating and censoring the Campaign’s speech based not on the content of the censored speech but on the Campaign’s political identity and viewpoint.” (p. 27)

* The public has an interest in this case.

“Unless the court issues an appropriate injunction, Google’s illegal and unconstitutional behavior will continue, harming both the Campaign and the general public, which has an overwhelming interest in a fair, unmanipulated 2020 United States Election cycle. (p. 34)

Google Explanation is Not Credible

The Tulsi Gabbard Google Ads account was abruptly suspended at a crucial time. The question is why. Was it the result of “unusual activity” triggering an “automatic suspension” as claimed by Google? Or was it because someone at Google changed the software or otherwise intervened to undermine the Tulsi campaign?

Google’s explanation of an “automatic suspension” from “unusual activity” is dubious. First, the timing does not make sense. The sudden rise in searches on “Tulsi Gabbard” began the day before the suspension. Gabbard participated in the first debate, on June 26. Her presence and performance sparked interest among many viewers. Next morning, June 27, media reported that, “Tulsi Gabbard was the most searched candidate on Google after the Democratic debate in Miami“. The second debate took place in the evening of June 27. With discussion of the Democratic candidates continuing, Tulsi Gabbard continued to attract much interest. Around 9:30 pm (ET) on June 27 the Google Ads account was suddenly suspended. If the cause was “unusual activity”, the “automatic trigger” should have occurred long before.

Second, Google was fully aware of the “unusual activity”. In fact, Google was the source of the news reports on the morning of June 27.  Reports said:

According to Google Trends, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren was the most searched candidate heading into the debate… After the debate, Gabbard vaulted into first.

Third, it is hard to believe that Google does not have any human or more sophisticated review before suspending a major Ads account on a politically intense night.  It should have been obvious that the cause of increased interest in Gabbard was the nationally televised Democratic candidates debate and media coverage.

Fourth, the changing explanation for the sudden suspension, starting with a false claim that there were “problems with billing”, raises questions about the integrity of Google’s response.

Google Secretly Manipulates  Public Opinion

Unknown to most of the public, there is compelling evidence that Google has been secretly manipulating search results to steer public perception and election voting for years.

Dr. Robert Epstein, former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, has been studying and reporting on this for the past six years. Recently, on June 16, 2019 he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the Constitution. His testimony is titled “Why Google Poses a Serious Threat to Democracy, and How to End That Threat”.

Epstein has published 15 books and over 300 scientific and mainstream media articles on artificial intelligence and related topics. “Since 2012, some of my research and writings have focused on Google LLC, specifically on the company’s power to suppress content – the censorship problem, if you will – as well as on the massive surveillance the company conducts, and also on the company’s unprecedented ability to manipulate the thoughts and behavior of more than 2.5 billion people worldwide.”

As shown by Dr. Epstein, Google uses several techniques to manipulate public opinion. The results of an online search are biased. Search “suggestions” are skewed. Messages such as “Go Vote” are sent to some people but not to others.

Epstein’s written testimony to Congress includes links to over sixty articles documenting his research published in sites ranging from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences to Huffington Post. Epstein’s testimony describes “disturbing findings” including:

“In 2016, biased search results generated by Google’s search algorithm likely impacted undecided voters in a way that gave at least 2.6 million votes to Hillary Clinton”. (Epstein notes that he supported Clinton.)

“On Election Day in 2018, the ‘Go Vote’ reminder Google displayed on its home page gave one political party between 800,000 and 4.6 million more votes than it gave the other party.”

“My recent research demonstrates that Google’s ‘autocomplete’ search suggestions can turn a 50/50 split among undecided voters into a 90/10 split without people’s awareness.”

“Google has likely been determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the national elections worldwide since at least 2015. This is because many races are very close and because Google’s persuasive technologies are very powerful.”

Google is Censoring Alternative Media  

In August 2017 TruePublica reported their experience and predictions in an article titled “The Truth War is Being Lost to a Global Censorship Apparatus Called Google“. The article says:

60 percent of people now get their news from search engines, not traditional human editors in the media. It is here where the new information war takes place – the algorithm. Google now takes 81.2 percent of all search engine market share globally…. Google has the ability to drive demand and set the narrative, create bias and swing opinion.

In 2017, the World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org) reported that:

In April, under the guise of combating ‘fake news’, Google introduced new procedures that give extraordinary powers to unnamed ‘evaluators’ to demote web pages and websites. These procedures have been used to exclude the WSWS and other anti-war and oppositional sites. Over the past three months, traffic originating from Google to the WSWS  has fallen by approximately 70%…. In key searches relevant to a wide range of topics the WSWS regularly covers – including the U.S. military operations and the threat of war, social conditions, inequality and even socialism – the number of search impressions …has fallen dramatically.

In essence, Google has “de-ranked” and is screening searchers from seeing alternative and progressive websites such as truepublica, globalresearch, consortiumnews, commondreams, Wikileaks, truth-out and many more. WSWS reported numerous specific examples such as this one: “Searches for the term ‘Korean war’ produced 20,932 impressions in May. In July, searches using the same words produced zero WSWS impressions.”

“The policy guiding these actions is made absolutely clear in the April 25, 2017 blog post by Google’s Vice President for Engineering, Ben Gomes, and the updated ‘Search Quality Rater Guidelines’ published at the same time. The post refers to the need to flag and demote ‘unexpected offensive results, hoaxes and conspiracy theories’ – broad and amorphous language used to exclude any oppositional content…. “The ‘lowest’ rating is also to be given to a website that ‘presents unsubstantiated conspiracy theories or hoaxes as if the information were factual.’”

Tulsi Gabbard has not only called for much stricter regulations on high tech and social media giants. She has also challenged the Democratic Party and foreign policy establishment.  In late February 2016 she resigned as vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee to support candidate Bernie Sanders against the establishment favorite, Hillary Clinton. Gabbard has issued sharp criticisms of US foreign policy.  Recently she said:

We hear a lot of politicians say the same argument that we’ve got to stay engaged in the world otherwise we’ll be isolationists as though the only way the United States can engage with other countries is by blowing them up or strangling them with economic sanctions by smashing them and trying to overthrow their governments. This is exactly what’s wrong with this whole premise and the whole view in which too many politicians, too many leaders in this country are viewing the United States role in the world.

Conclusion

Did Google take the next step from silently censoring websites the corporation does not like to undercutting a presidential candidate the corporation does not like?

This is a David vs Goliath story. Google/Alphabet is the 37th largest corporation in the world with enormous political influence in Washington. Whether or not the law suit succeeds, it may serve the public interest by exposing Google’s immense monopolistic power and illustrate the need for much more regulation, transparency and accountability.  It may also generate more interest in Gabbard’s message and campaign in the face of efforts to silence her.

 

Rick Sterling is an investigative journalist who grew up in Canada but currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. He can be reached at rsterling1@gmail.com. Read other articles by Rick.

People Who Support Internet Censorship Are Infantile Narcissists

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

As of this writing, journalist Ford Fischer is still completely demonetized on YouTube as the result of a new set of rules that were put in place because of some doofy Twitter drama between some unfunny asshole named Steven Crowder and some infantile narcissist who thinks the world revolves around his opinions named Carlos Maza. It remains an unknown if Fischer will ever be restored to an important source of income around which he has built his livelihood.

Fischer often covers white supremacist rallies and counter-protests, and his channel was demonetized within minutes of YouTube’s new rules against hate speech going into effect because some of his content, as you’d expect, includes white supremacists saying and doing white supremacist things. Maza, a Vox reporter who launched a viral Twitter campaign to have Crowder removed from YouTube for making homophobic and bigoted comments about him on his channel, expressed concern over Fischer’s financial censorship.

“What’s happening to Ford is fucking awful,” Maza tweeted yesterday. “He’s a good journalist doing important work. I don’t understand how YouTube is still so bad at this. How can they not differentiate between white supremacist content and good faith reporting on white supremacy?”

https://twitter.com/gaywonk/status/1136425011970019329

I say that Maza is an infantile narcissist who thinks the world revolves around his opinions because it genuinely seems to have surprised him that good people would get harmed in the crossfire of his censorship campaign.

I mean, what did he think was going to happen? Did he think some soulless, multibillion-dollar Silicon Valley corporation was going to display company-wide wisdom and woke insightfulness while implementing his agenda to censor obnoxious voices? Did he imagine that YouTube executives were going to sit down with him over a cup of coffee and go down a list with him to get his personal opinion of who should and should not be censored?

Think about it. How narcissistic do you have to be to assume that a vast corporation is going to use your exact personal perceptual filters while determining who should and should not be censored for oafish behavior? How incapable of understanding the existence of other points of view must you be to believe it’s reasonable to expect that a giant, sweeping censorship campaign will exercise surgical precision which aligns perfectly with your own exact personal values system? How arrogant and self-centered must you be to demand pro-censorship reforms throughout an enormous Google-owned platform, then whine that they’re not implementing your censorship desires correctly?

This is the same staggering degree of cloistered, dim-eyed narcissism that leads people to support Julian Assange’s persecution on the grounds that he’s “not a journalist”. These egocentric dolts sincerely seem to believe that the US government is going to prosecute Assange for unauthorized publications about US war crimes, then when it comes time to imprison the next Assange the US Attorney General is going to show up on their doorstep to ask them for their opinion as to whether the next target is or is not a real journalist. Obviously the power-serving agenda that you are helping to manufacture consent for is not going to be guided by your personal set of opinions, you fucking moron.

The fact that other people aren’t going to see and interpret information the same way as you do is something Carlos Maza and the thousands of people who’ve supported his pro-censorship campaign should have learned as small children. Understanding that the world doesn’t revolve around you and your wants and desires is a basic stage in childhood development. People who believe Silicon Valley tech giants can implement censorship in a way that is wise and beneficent are still basically toddlers in this respect. One wonders if they still interrupt their mother’s important conversations with demands for attention and apple juice.

Ford Fischer was not the first good guy to get caught in the crossfire of internet censorship, and he will not be the last. In addition to the way unexpected interpretations of what constitutes hate speech can lead to important voices losing their platforms or being unable to make a living doing what they do, the new rules appear to contain a troubling new escalation that could see skeptics of legitimate military false flags completely censored.

“Finally, we will remove content denying that well-documented violent events, like the Holocaust or the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, took place,” reads a single sentence in the official YouTube blog about its new rules.

The sentence appears almost as an aside, without any elaboration or further information added, and at first glance it reads innocuously enough. No Holocaust deniers or Sandy Hook false flag videos? Okay, got it. I personally am not a denier of either of those events, so this couldn’t possibly affect me personally, right?

Wrong. YouTube does not say that it will just be censoring Holocaust deniers and Sandy Hook shooting deniers, it says it will “remove content denying that well-documented violent events, like the Holocaust or the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, took place.”

So what does this mean? Where exactly is the line drawn? If you are not an infantilized narcissist, you will not assume that YouTube intends to implement this guideline in the same way you would. It is very possible that it will include skeptics of violent events which the entire political/media class agrees were perpetrated by enemies of the US-centralized power alliance, which just so happen to manufacture support for increased aggressions against those nations.

Would the new rules end up forbidding, for example, this excellent YouTube video animation explaining how a leaked OPCW report disputes the official narrative about an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria last year? If you are not making the assumption that YouTube will be implementing its censorship using your own personal values system, there is no reason to assume it wouldn’t. After all, the official narrative that dozens of civilians were killed by the Assad government dropping chlorine cylinders through rooftops is the mainstream consensus narrative maintained by all respected US officials and “authoritative” news outlets.

This is a perfect example of a very real possibility that could be a disastrous consequence of increased internet censorship. It is a known fact that the US government has an extensive history of using false flags to manufacture consent for war, from the USS Liberty to the Gulf of Tonkin to the false Nayirah testimony about removing babies from incubators to the WMD narrative in Iraq. These new rules could easily serve as a narrative control device preventing critical discussions about suspicious acts of violence which have already happened, and which happen in the future.

Consider the fact that Google, which owns YouTube, has had ties to the CIA and the NSA from its very inception, is known to have a cozy relationship with the NSA, and has served US intelligence community narrative control agendas by tweaking its algorithms to deliberately hide dissenting alternative media outlets. Consider this, then ask yourself this question: do you trust this company to make wise and beneficent distinctions when it comes to censoring public conversations?

In a corporatist system of government which draws no meaningful distinction between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship. Only someone who believes that giant Silicon Valley corporations would implement censorship according to their own personal values system could ever support giving these oligarchic establishments that kind of power. And if you believe that, it’s because you never really grew up.

Social Media and the Society of the Spectacle

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By Kenn Orphan

Source: CounterPunch

“The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender “lonely crowds.”

― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.”

― Edward Bernays, Propaganda

“We think we’re searching Google; Google is actually searching us. We think that these companies have privacy policies; those policies are actually surveillance policies. We’re told that if we have nothing to hide, then we have nothing to fear. The fact is, what they don’t tell us and what we are forgetting, that if you have nothing to hide, then you are nothing, because everything about us that makes us our unique identities, that gives us our individual spirit, our personality, our sense of freedom of will, freedom of action, our sense of our right to our own futures, that’s what comes from within. Those are our inner resources. That’s our private realm. And it’s intended to be private for a reason, because that is how it grows and flourishes and turns us into people who assert moral autonomy—an essential element of a flourishing, democratic society.”

― Shoshana Zuboff, author of Master or Slave: The Fight for the Soul of Our Information Civilization 

“Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively are less free.”

― Edward Snowden

Recently I was rereading some of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle. I was reminded of how essential this work by the late French Marxist philosopher is to today’s age of social media. Debord’s understanding of how the forces of capital shape our collective experiences and thoughts speaks to our time where algorithms dominate the trajectory of the psyche against a craven backdrop of what political philosopher Sheldon Wolin has described as “inverted totalitarianism.”

Every day we are bombarded with the imagery of empire and capital. It is relentless. Our minds have become both a marketplace and a commodity to be traded. And it is a lucrative industry with Facebook and Google as prime examples. Their data collection and surveillance typify a conjoining of the state and capitalist economy; and they have carved out insidious new spaces in the human brain to coerce self-imposed censorship and conformity to the prevailing consumerist global order.

This social conditioning is a process which requires mass compliance. The infamous propagandist for industry and vaunted “father of public relations” Edward Bernays understood that. It takes time to manipulate the multilayered strata of the human psyche, especially in regard to large populations of people. But history is replete with tragic examples of its successful implementation by powerful interests. Today those interests lie squarely with capital and empire; but the effects are the same, distraction, censorship, alienation, coerced, compliance with the norms of the status quo and the numbing of the critical mind.

Debord said, “Such a perfect democracy constructs its own inconceivable foe, terrorism. Its wish is to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results. The story of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive. The spectating populations must certainly never know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else seems rather acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic.” This profound observation is even more important today. The state, via mass media, informs us of the villains and phantoms they believe we should fear. Other, far more destructive, deadly and oppressive threats such as the continued proliferation of nuclear arms, catastrophic climate change, collapse of ecosystems, dangers to public health from industrial pollutants, vastly unequal, racist and brutal economic and legal systems, militarism or plutocratic tyranny can then be relegated as non-issues, or at least lesser ones.

Most people on the planet will not suffer or die from a terrorist attack, but they are very likely to be severely affected by the other issues mentioned above. Imagery on portable screens that virtually everyone in the West and around the world has access to communicates messages that may speak to some of these dire or existential problems, but they do so in an abstract manner that divorces the observer from the subject.

As Debord observed, this kind of culture of spectacle informs our personal relationships as well. Whether one is “present” on social media or not has become a sort of litmus test of ones presence in life itself. “Likes” or emojis have replaced and truncated language to such an extent that now older forms of communication are often looked at with novelty, suspicion, or even disgust. What’s more is that emojis in social media, particularly Facebook, have been employed all too often as tools of ridicule or even harassment of weak or vulnerable people. But what is perhaps the most striking about the current social media age is its repetitive narrative of self-aggrandizement. One so repetitive and hypnotic that it almost appears invisible. The “selfie” and “status update” are examples of the unending drive of social media to create a false sense of self to present to the world. Of course this self must conform and be well adjusted to consumerist society in one form or another lest it be tagged for “mental health issues,” subversive thought or behavior, or simply be rendered unnoticed or unimportant by society in general.

Indeed, I am certain Debord would be horrified at the age of social media. At no other time in human history has there been a greater confluence of authoritarian dominance or social control implemented in such an intimate and ubiquitous manner. Unlike Debord’s time, social media provides a new medium to not only socially condition the masses but for the corporate state to gather what was once private information about those masses via their personally owned devices and apps.

That it masquerades as a form of democracy is equally disturbing, especially since at its core it represents the policing of thought and dampening of dissent. He wrote as if penning a prophecy: “The spectator’s consciousness, imprisoned in a flattened universe, bound by the screen of the spectacle behind which his life has been deported, knows only the fictional speakers who unilaterally surround him with their commodities and the politics of their commodities. The spectacle, in its entirety, is his “mirror image.””

This spectacle reigns supreme in today’s social media culture. It is essential to its formulation and operating guidelines. Under such a paradigm history must be sterilized of analysis and ultimately atomized into unrelated instances to make an eternal present, divorced from any transformative potential. Therefore corporations and industries which have long records of polluting the environment or lying to the public about the safety of their products can continue to expand and even be celebrated by the corporate owned media. Religious institutions with long histories of abuse, patriarchy and repression can maintain their status as trusted institutions. The military can repeat the lie over and over that it is noble despite a history drenched in the blood of well documented atrocities and ongoing crimes. The United States and many other nations can keep calling themselves democracies despite quite obvious facts that strongly refute that designation. The mere notion of revolution then is made to be farcical or even dangerous. After all, how could revolution ever be seen as necessary within a democracy?

Social media does not necessarily signal the death of democratic freedom, but in its current form and under the aegis of capital it is certainly a nail in its coffin. This is because under such circumstances it is incapable of being anything other than a means for capital accumulation for the corporate state and a platform for its narrative, and it will do this through ever more invasive, censorial and repressive means. As Edward Snowden pointed out, people are less free when they feel that they are being observed. This is especially so when the observer is the state. Several studies have indicated that there is a sharp decline in certain online searches among the general public following any indication that government agencies are logging those searches, even if those citizens have not committed any crime. And the chilling effect is not unfounded. One incident involved an innocent couple who were visited by counter-terrorism police after searching Google for pressure cookers and backpacks. Since the internet has become the world’s public library, the implications for democracy are as dire as they are clear.

Unplugging from any of this isn’t easy, nor is it necessarily virtuous, but there are ways to divest from its social control personally and collectively. There are also ways to use it which defy its dominant algorithms. Détournement, which merely means rerouting or hijacking in French, is one of those ways. This involves inverting the imagery or messages of capital and empire to illustrate and even amplify their mendacity. It has a long history of effective use in bending the dominant narrative to one which reflects reality.

All of this is not to say that technology or social media are inherently bad, but to recognize that much of it has become a vehicle for a rather pernicious authoritarianism. And its danger lies in the fallacy of its benign appearance. Whether it be Google maps or one of countless other “helpful” apps one uses on a daily basis, surveillance capital becomes a means of controlling behavior, transactions, choices, as well as determining which members of society present a threat to the order. In other words, conformity is strongly reinforced while any form of dissent is rendered dangerously subversive. But although the algorithmic maps to our collective psyche are being endlessly drawn by programmers and their corporate and state masters, we still have the agency to navigate these landscapes with our eyes open. And indeed, the best tool we possess will always be that critically informed dissent the powerful so fear the most.

Surgical Totalitarianism

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By Dan Corjescu

Source: Dissident Voice

You don’t have to control everything to be in total control.

In the modern world this seeming paradox is a systemic reality.

In the past, classic totalitarian governments sought to literally control every aspect of biopower.

As it turned out, this was a very inefficient and self-defeating way to maintain and increase scientific knowledge and technology, capital accumulation, and total effective power over the long term.

Modern totalitarian arrangements are far more culturally efficacious, superficially unobtrusive, stylistically democratic, and, most importantly, surgically precise.

In addition, modern totalitarian elites not only demand de facto control over society as such, but they also desire, as part of their inner ideological ethos, the exercise of that power to reproduce itself under maximum conditions of ease, pleasure, and comfort. Thus, the creation and maintenance of a consumerist society both materially and ideologically aids in the reproduction of neo-totalitarian power.

A consumerist society is to a large extent a self regulating mechanism for the constant pursuit of public spectacle and private stimulation. The senses and general life instincts are caught in a web of the pursuance of small pleasures. In this way, pleasure itself becomes an insidiously saccharine form of domination. Yet, from time to time, consumerist relations must be guided, reinforced, and given new goals and reflationary impetus from above.

The political structure in modern, surgical totalitarianism is set up in such a way as to give the appearance of active participation, psychological inclusion, and periodic mass mobilization. However, all consequential decision-making takes place behind this fraudulent structure and represents the true “commanding heights” of power. The political superstructure serves, at best, as perennial decoy and public delusion.

The modern “commanding heights” of power require massive amounts of data. It is through the acquisition, manipulation, and active forward interpretation of information that surgical totalitarianism is able to pick and choose its battles. At its most extreme, new “realities” are creatively and cynically constructed from its daily catch of strategic knowledge. The goal is always the same: distract, delude, deflate any possible challenge to the system through active suppression, co-optation (the preferred method), and, or, complete elimination.

In this way, any possible threats can be foreseen relatively far in advance and organizational strategies can be conceived for either their containment and/or elimination. The surgical nature of these methods allows for the relative negative freedom of civil society to generally evolve and reproduce itself in partial self-awareness in so far as it continues to demonstrate no substantive subversive tendencies to liquidate either the material reality and/or ideological superstructure of its own dependency on neo-totalitarian forms of power.

In the end, the system presents itself as perversely elegant, efficient, self-perpetuating, and, even, on a physical level, pleasant.

All bodily pleasures are on offer. Entertainment becomes incarceration. All is seemingly permitted while nothing is truly allowed. Power is diaphanous as it is all consuming. Critical dissent is tolerated because the mechanisms of mass blindness are secure.

It would be and has been a crucial mistake for Marxists of all kinds to think that capitalism is the root cause of the modern day pursuit of total power. On the contrary, surgical totalitarianism utilizes capitalism as just another source of power but not its ultimate ground. Power precedes capitalism. Hierarchy encodes the means and forces of production no matter what they are just as hierarchy projects a self-sustaining superstructure to deceive and deflect its potential challengers. Capitalism is but a modern day tool of hierarchical power. The real enemy is not capital but surreptitious hierarchy.

The true source of this state of affairs is the lust for control under any societal forms. Its origins are without doubt evolutionary. Aristotle famously defined human beings as “Zoon Politikon” or “social animal”. Yes, we are indeed social. But the “Zoon” or animal part of that equation warps that sociality into the insatiable desire to control and to dominate others. Ultimately, the Hobbesian origins of mankind from an age long state of “nastiness and brutishness” is, in part, to blame that man persists in being as a wolf to other men: Homo homini lupus est.

The Alt-Media Has Way More Fun than the Mainstream Media

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

The corporate-state media lives in terror that the truth will somehow leak out of the corporate-Imperial fortress, imperiling their jobs and perks.

It’s not exactly news that the Alternative Media is under assault: skeptical inquiry and dissenting narratives are smeared as “fake news,” and new suspiciously corporate entities (NewsGuard et al.) claim to be “protecting” consumers from “fake news” as cover for their real agenda, which is limiting public exposure to skeptical, dissenting independent analysis.

Social Media and Search corporations are also censoring non-corporate, non-state media, again under the purported guise of stripping out “fake news.”

Despite this semi-official censorship, we in the Alt-Media are having way more fun that the anxiety-ridden serfs in the Mainstream Media. There are many hard-working, honest journalists slaving away in the Mainstream (more accurately, the corporate-state) Media, but there’s the neofeudal reality of their employment: If what they report undermines the ruling elites, they’re not allowed to do their job.

MSM journalists have no agency: they report what they’re told to report. They also have no control over what gets by their employers’ editorial / corporate filters: question a big advertiser and your report will quietly be buried. Question the approved narrative and conclusion, and you’ll be shunned, blacklisted, etc. If you make a fuss, you’ll be let go in the next round of lay-offs.

Everyone who labors in the corporate-state media lives in fear of the truth getting out: hence the full-spectrum freak-out whenever an insider turns leaker / whistleblower: oops, the happy-story cover is blown and the ugly truth is now revealed, including the collusion of the corporate-state media. (In the U.S. PBS / NPR is the quasi-state media, analogous to Japan’s NHK, Britain’s BBC or France’s France24.)

The corporate-state media lives in terror that the truth will somehow leak out of the corporate-Imperial fortress, imperiling their jobs and perks. Their job isn’t to report any truth that lays waste to the self-serving interests of the ruling elites; their job is to protect the ruling elites by “reporting” politically-correct narratives and playing up culturally divisive incidents to distract the masses from any awareness of their political invisibility and lack of financial independence or agency.

The MSM’s other job is to scrub any mass dissent from their “news.” So for example, U.S. corporate-state media coverage of the yellow vest movement in France is near zero. This is not random; it is all part of skewing the “news” to meaningless controversies and fawning politically correct / approved narratives stories.

A working-class rebellion against political and financial invisibility is anathema to America’s ruling elites and their corporate allies in the MSM and hence the minimal coverage. You basically have to understand French to follow on-the-ground Alt-Media coverage in France of the yellow vest protesters.

The American MSM dutifully regurgitates the bogus narrative being pushed by France’s elitist corporate-state media, that the yellow vest protesters are violent and thus need to be crushed by overwhelming paramilitary force. That the protesters are being beaten and provoked to respond to state-ordered violence is left unreported.

We in Alt-Media are confident the truth will eventually come out despite the efforts of the ruling elites and their MSM / social media corporate minions. It’s a lot more fun being on the side of skeptical inquiry and dissent than being behind the leaky dike, anxiously trying to stop the actual facts of the matter from entering the public awareness.

It’s more fun being on the side of free inquiry and meaningful analysis than being on the side of censorship, fear-mongering, propagandistic sowing of discord and the promotion of the corporate-state party line.

You won’t find any MSM reporting on the neofeudal structure of America’s economy and society:

How To Tell If Someone Is Controlled Opposition

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

Every day in my article comments and social media I get people warning me that this or that journalist, activist or politician is “controlled opposition”, meaning someone who pretends to oppose the establishment while covertly serving it. These warnings usually come after I’ve shared or written about something a dissident figure has said or done, and are usually accompanied by an admonishment not to ever do so again lest I spread their malign influence. If you’ve been involved in any kind of anti-establishment activism for any length of time, you’ve probably encountered this yourself.

Paranoia pervades dissident circles of all sorts, and it’s not entirely without merit, since establishment infiltration of political movements is the norm, not the exception. This article by Truthout documents multiple instances in which movements like the 1968 Chicago DNC protest and Peter Camejo’s 1976 anti-establishment presidential campaign were so heavily infiltrated by opaque government agencies that one out of every six people involved in them were secretly working for the feds. This trend of infiltration is known to have continued into the current day with movements like Occupy and Black Lives Matter, and we’d be ignorant not to assume that this has been at least as rampant in online circles where people organize and disseminate ideas and information.

So it’s understandable that people are extremely vigilant about prominent figures in dissident circles, and it’s understandable that people feel paranoid. Over and over again we see shining anti-establishment movements fizzle or rendered impotent, often seemingly with the help of people we once trusted, and it’s hard not to get frustrated and become suspicious of anyone who starts shining bright in antiwar, leftist, or other dissident circles.

The trouble with this paranoia and suspicion is that it doesn’t seem to function with any kind of intelligence. I have received such “controlled opposition” warnings about pretty much every prominent dissident figure in the English-speaking world at one time or another, and if I believed them all there’d be no one in the world whose words I could share or write about, including my own. I myself have been accused at different times of being a “plant” for the CIA, the Russians, Assad, the Chinese Communist Party, the Iranian mullahs, the alt-right, Trump, Pyongyang, and the Palestinians, which if all true would make me a very busy girl indeed. Since I know I’m not a plant for anybody, I know for myself that such accusations don’t come from a place of insight with any degree of reliability, and I’ve therefore had to find my own way to navigate this confusing landscape.

So since I know that infiltration and manipulation happens, but I don’t find other people’s whisperings about “controlled opposition” useful, how do I figure out who’s trustworthy and who isn’t? How do I figure out who it’s safe to cite in my work and who to avoid? How do I separate the fool’s gold from the genuine article? The shit from the Shinola?

Here is my answer: I don’t.

I spend no mental energy whatsoever concerning myself with who may or may not be a secret pro-establishment influencer, and for good reason. There’s no way to know for sure if an individual is secretly scheming to sheep dog the populace into support for the status quo, and as long as government agencies remain opaque and unaccountable there will never be a way to know who might be secretly working for them. What I can know is (A) what I’ve learned about the world, (B) the ways the political/media class is lying about what I know about the world, and (C) when someone says something which highlights those lies. I therefore pay attention solely to the message, and no attention to what may or may not be the hidden underlying agenda of the messenger.

In other words, if someone says something which disrupts establishment narratives, I help elevate what they’re saying in that specific instance. I do this not because I know that the speaker is legit and uncorrupted, but because their message in that moment is worthy of elevation. You can navigate the entire political/media landscape in this way.

Since society is made of narrative and power ultimately rests in the hands of those who are able to control those narratives, it makes no sense to fixate on individuals and it makes perfect sense to focus on narrative. What narratives are being pushed by those in power? How are those narratives being disrupted, undermined and debunked by things that are being said by dissident voices? This is the most effective lens through which to view the battle against the unelected power establishment which is crushing us all to death, not some childish fixation on who should or shouldn’t be our hero.

Have no heroes. Trust nobody but your own inner sense-maker. If someone says something that disrupts establishment narratives based on what you understand those narratives to be, go ahead and help throw what they’re saying into the gears of the machine. Don’t make a religion out of it, don’t get attached to it, just use it as a weapon to attack the narrative matrix.

This by the way is also a useful lens to look through in spiritual development, if you’re into that sort of thing. When you enter spiritual circles concerned with enlightenment, you’ll see all sorts of debates about what teachers are really enlightened and which ones are just pretending, and these conversations mimic precisely the exact kinds of debates you’ll see in marginalized political circles about who’s the real deal and who’s controlled opposition. But the truth is there’s no way to know with certainty what’s going on in someone else’s head, and the best thing to do is to stop concerning yourself with who has and has not attained some special realization or whatever and just focus on what they’re saying. If a spiritual teacher says something which helps you notice something you’d never noticed before about consciousness or perception, then use what they said and maybe stick around to see if they have anything else useful to say. If not, move on.

There’s no reason to worry about what journalists, activists and politicians are coming from a place of authenticity if you know yourself to be coming from a place of authenticity. As you learn more about the world and get better at distinguishing fact from narrative, you will get better and better at seeing the narrative matrix clearly, and you’ll come to see all the things that are being said about what’s going on in the world as weapons in the battle of narrative control. Pick up whatever weapons seem useful to you and use them in whatever ways they’ll be useful, without wasting energy concerning yourself with the individuals who created them. Call the bullshit what it is and use the truth for what it is.

Or maybe I’m fulla shit! Maybe I myself am being paid to say these things by some powerful influencer; you can’t know for sure. All you can know is what’s useful for you. If you really find it useful to try and organize individual dissident figures into “hero” and “controlled opposition” boxes, if that genuinely helps you take apart the system that’s hurting us all, you’d know that better than I would. But if you find what I’m saying here useful, pick it up and add it to your toolbox.