Facebook Insider Confesses All

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Posted on July 5, 2019 by Reid Mukai

The Zuckerberg Dossier

Mark Zuckerberg is a Fraud Used by the CIA

The following anonymous document claims to be written by a Facebook insider who was Mark Zuckerberg’s lover from their freshman year at Harvard. Mark’s continuing indiscretions with his ongoing government contract keep getting him in trouble to this day. Mark was supposed to simply be the fake “boy genius” of Larry Summers’ (Harvard’s president) social media project funded by DARPA/In-Q-Tel (CIA)/IBM and the secretive international “public-private” group called The Highlands Group organized with the DoD Office of Net Assessment.

It was Summers and a group of government officials who fabricated, produced and directed Mark throughout the entire fraudulent creation of the Facebook propaganda story at Harvard. These claims are explosive and allege that the entire fraudulent social media network called Facebook was always controlled by the government through the people who were at Harvard directing Mark. The anonymous author of the letter below, who we will call “John”, also points out why Facebook was created, how Mark was controlled by Eric Schmidt, James Beyer, Larry Summers, Sheryl Sandberg and the evil intellectual property thief Professor James Chandler.

Admittedly, this Zuckerberg “Dossier” has enough information in it to put Mark Zuckerberg behind bars, and therefore would not be touched by the Main Stream Media – according to the person who hand-delivered this letter to a member of the Anonymous Patriot’s Conclave a few days ago.

American Intelligence Media has been able to quickly verify that many of the claims insinuated in this “Zuckerberg Dossier” are true and this leads us to conclude that the document is authentic and exactly what it appears to be. The true authorship of this Zuckerberg Dossier is evident to members of the Conclave, but that supposition is speculation and the Conclave does not deal in speculation. Though, if one were to listen carefully to the admission of guilt by Sean Parker (a long-time executive of Facebook) which he made repeatedly before the press, you will hear that Sean knew all about the true creation of the social media giant and its evil intents and fingers the culprits.

Therefore, it is not hard at all to figure out who may have written this expose on Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook evil. You can even see the true motivation for writing this “tell all” about Zuckerberg at this time in history, just as Facebook is facing all kinds of charges, including anti-trust violations.

Any person well-educated on the continuing scandals surrounding the creation of Facebook might have been able to piece together the many divergent claimants to the authorship of the source programming code used to make social media “scalable” – which was the universal problem of all of the major tech companies at the time, including the NSA’s “LifeLog” project. Somehow, genius Mark Zuckerberg “solved” the problem that no one else in the world could. Oh yes, and Mark did it “between a week and two weeks or so” while studying for finals and hosting a beer “kegger” for his friends. [1]

The author of this expose offers a quite different story and for the first time tells of the involvement of high-level government players who made a fortune off of the sky-rocketing overnight growth of Facebook stock on NASDAQ. The players mentioned by “John” (anonymous author) check out to be the people who made enormous amounts of money from Facebook stock. These insider traders then took their Facebook winnings and started other social media companies that, coincidentally, sky-rocketed beyond most companies in history.

Hmmm…do you own any Facebook stock? Might be cash-out time!

American Intelligence Media does not claim that the Zuckerberg Dossier is 100% correct, but we can state with absolute confidence that the source is real. We also believe that their may be other installments of what we are calling the Zuckerberg Dossier and will probably not be the last time we hear from this source as the trouble that Mark is having in the news keeps mounting.

The most convincing aspect of this “scorned lover tell-all” is found in what the author outlines as Mark’s true nature and what he believes is happening to Facebook right now in America. It was shocking to read these remarks and we found them to be, after much reflection, probably true and certainly not what we might have imagined to be the reality with the U. S. government’s threat to act against Facebook.

Also, interesting is the major British intervention in Facebook through the former Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Sir Nick Clegg, taking over the “face” of Facebook which Baron Richard Allen (another UK agent) had failed to do properly.

At this point, Facebook seems to be “dead in the water” unless the British Crown Agents, Clegg and Allen, can save Mark from his horrible mis-management.

Again, we do not claim that this anonymous “confession” and “indictment” is true in all its parts. But certainly, any intelligent reader will acknowledge that this version of Mark Zuckerberg’s rise to fame and fortune is much more likely that the nonsense stories we have been told by Mark since the early 2000’s when he first popped up Larry Summers’ Harvard.

Please circulate this wide and far. We need to turn the weapon that Zuckerberg is aiming at us – social media … back on him.

[1] Tr. 41:7, Mark Zuckerberg Deposition, April 25, 2006, ConnectU LLC v. Zuckerberg et al, 1:04-cv-11923-DPW (D. Mass. 2004).

Mark’s diary where he proclaims “let the hacking begin” was also provided to us and is available in the link below as a PDF. We did not convert it to a Word file for obvious reasons. Also note that we formatted the author’s letter below in a way that you can easily read it, instead of how it was sent with tiny font and packed paragraphs. We did not correct grammar or spelling.

Zuckerberg-Let-Hacking_Begin-28-Oct-2003

To Every Facebook User,

Mark Zuckerberg, and all of us who were there from the beginning, are lying to you and using your personal life as a government-controlled experiment in brain-washing and mind-control – basically a weaponized system of the military (CIA especially) that got out of control. At this point, Mark Zuckerberg has lost control of a company that he never really owned or operated. Truly, anyone who has ever worked with Mark knows that his mind is a blank and that he is nothing more than a parrot for the government handlers who created him. Mark is incapable of running a McDonald’s, let alone one of the most powerful companies in the world. Not even his name is real and his identity has always been covered up. Mark was chosen as child for a CIA training program because his relatives were some of the people creating the program.

I am not making excuses for Mark, but his choices have not been his own. Yes, he has become an evil sociopath who once believed in his heart-of-heart that if he decided he wanted to be president, all he had to do is say he wanted the job and “Facebook” would deliver the election to him. This is the level of brain-washing Mark is at – he is not in contact with reality.

You might think that a madman who could think he could become president – because he “said so” – would be discovered and accused as a fraud. Well, that has happened repeatedly with the other three teams that were working at Harvard, under Harvard president Larry Summers, to create what DARPA and In-Q-Tel wanted the most – a cyber-weapon that could control the minds of anyone that could be lured into it. Facebook was always a military weapon – just like Eric Schmidt’s Google which was incubated in the same fashion that Facebook was. Mark was a patsy, but a ruthless, heartless, cold-blooded non-human patsy. He became this way through the brain-washing he received in his High School years by a DARPA program called TIA that needed a “boy-genius” to be the front man. This scam would make Mark into a global model of the young, cool, irreverent computer geniuses that “rule the world” and lead everyone to a cyber-god of artificial intelligence. Mark was just an unwitting puppet at first – I felt sorry for him.

I remember when I first became room-mates with Mark in our sophomore year at Harvard. We were in Kirkland House, on JFK Street and had to endure Dustin and Andrew. Mark hated them because they prevented us from sleeping together, even though we were in the same room. It was frustrating and kept our relationship secret. Little did I know that the thing that drew me to Mark, a certain openness for listening to anyone, also made him extremely promiscuous with both sexes.

Mark had no morals, conscience, or shame. He also chased women on Craig’s List and would sometimes just disappear to rendezvous with them. He was like a blank slate that simply echoes whatever was happening in his environment. I loved and hated this aspect of his personality but later found out that he, and his brother and cousin, were all the same way due to the brain-washing programs they were subjected to during high school. If certain people spoke to Mark in person or on the phone, he would drop everything and do whatever they told him to do. Certain people had more power and effect over him. I eventually found out, from Mark breaking down and crying, that the brain-washing was permanent and was all part of the “position” these people had promised to create for Mark. He didn’t even know what this “position” was or entailed.

But one thing Mark was sure of, he was only “placed” at Harvard “for a while” until his “position” became available to him. Mark was certain that this promise of a position included a great deal of money and power—aphrodisiacs to an incurable narcissist

I must admit that I came under the power of Mark’s surety that he didn’t need Harvard, a degree, or good grades. Mark eventually dropped out of Harvard at the end of our sophomore year and did become filthy rich and more powerful than he could have imagined. I also admit that I road on Mark’s success to become quite wealthy myself. All four of the members of the club Mark eventually named – “The Fellowship” – became wealthy by no means of our own – we simply knew Mark’s secrets.

You see, Mark could never be faithful to anyone but he loved men more than women. He actually used to hate all women. So, Mark cheated and would want to bring the new “boy” home to me to join in. I was never into that like Mark was. He was abusive but would never admit it, especially to young boys. Eventually, there were three of us that remained lovers with Mark.

Mark always had panic attacks and would break down frequently due to the brain-washing – according to Mark. He would cry about his mother and the “torture” she let “them” do to him. At those times, Mark’s mouth ran on open and he would tell his bed-partners about all the pain and horrible plans these “evil people” did to him. Early on, his doubts and fears almost consumed him at night and he could hardly sleep due to nightmares. Once Mark became filthy rich, he simply used drugs to mask these fears. But if you get him upset by asking about the creation of Facebook, Mark will freak out and have a panic attack because he always messes up the story and looks like an idiot. He can’t stand questions about “how he made Facebook” – because he didn’t. I had to laugh as one of his stupid answers: “I saw that Harvard didn’t have a Facebook, so I made one”, or something close to that. The journalist let him get away with that lie, like they always have.

Mark Greenberg (Zuckerberg) did not write one single line of programming source code for Facebook. Those are lies and propaganda generated by his government, military handlers. Everyone knows that the Winkelvoss twins (Aaron and Cameron) won a $65 million dollar lawsuit settlement against Mark because they knew that their little HarvardConnection (HC) piece was just adjunct code attached to the original stolen source code – which was given to Mark by Professor James Chandler and IBM. That $65 million bit of dirty knowledge was pretty profitable for a couple of cute Harvard Crew rower jocks with no interest in me.

Mark simply had others adjust the code into what was a government-sponsored military weaponization of a cyber-warfare project directed by the President of Harvard, Larry Summers. Even Summer’s himself had his own budding student and staff directory being developed by the Harvard computer staff called “Facebook.” Mark didn’t even create the name!

The Winkelvoss twins had developed their own version in the competition for the government contract, HC, that they changed to ConnectU. Aaron Greenspan was developing HOUSE System, and Paul Ceglia was working with Mark to modify his StreetFax software into a Facebook too. Mark developed nothing. Absolutely nothing. Even the famous “hacking” of the Harvard systems was not done by Mark himself. Mark was the middleman for those who were the overseers of the “big project”, as it was called.

From the president of Harvard, to the “PayPal Mafia”, National Venture Capital Association, In-Q-Tel, DARPA, NSA, CIA, DIA, to the worst patent thieves in America: James Chandler, Hillary Clinton, David Kappos, Robert Mueller and the rest of the Big-Tech group. Mark is just like the other fake front-men chosen to represent the numerous other social media companies.

Eric Schmidt was the poster child for the Silicon Valley geniuses who ran corporations that are basically exempt from prosecution as the facade for military-weaponized companies that are always funded by the same evil bankers—Fidelity Investment, Vanguard, T. Rowe Price, BlackRock, JPMorgan, HSBC, Accel Partners, Kleiner Perkins and the rest of the Silicon Valley venture capitalist who always make a killing from companies who get no-bid government contracts. These companies, like Facebook, are just an excuse for black-ops experiments to control the enemy – and Mark doesn’t know who the enemy is. Mark’s lack of a moral compass made him the perfect patsy for the new “military experiments on U. S. citizens.”

I believe now, since Mark was well-aware of the evil intentions of the government, that he has committed crimes of many types with the clear, pre-meditated intention of harming every user of Facebook. That is why Mark let Facebook be used to manipulate elections, he has no moral core. I personally saw the “template” that Hillary ordered that uses Facebook to manipulate voters to win elections for her. Given the amount of election interference by Big-Tech in 2016, I became a reluctant believer in miracles.

I have seen the truth concerning the supposed “Russian Interference” and can tell you that it was all made up and, in fact, was the exact opposite of what the media reported. I have seen so many illegal actions of Facebook that I am indeed complicit with the crimes. That is one of the reasons I must remain anonymous. But I assure you, if I testified, Mark and I would be locked up along with the other members of the Fellowship as well as many, many other Facebook employees.

It is due to the truth that is currently coming out in the media that I feel I can reveal what I witnessed so that Mark and the “U. S. and British military controlled” Facebook can be charged with criminal activity instead of simply being hit with anti-trust charges that will only split Facebook into many subsidiaries – which would simply make Mark even more rich.

Then, the poor suckers who believed in Facebook will be left holding the bag – an empty bag of a gutted Facebook worth little or nothing. Mark will simply rebrand and go on with multiple companies that will be just as big as Facebook. He will escape unscathed, protected again by his military handlers who, by the way, were insider traders from the beginning of Facebook and will be allowed to buy into the new companies from the beginning also.

Once again, the use of taxpayer dollars goes to private corporations run by stooges and controlled by non-Americans. Yes, I just called Mark a stooge because he actually has no clue what he is doing – at all. Just ask him to write a simple program in any code he would like – he can’t, he is a fraud and always was.

Though I will not tell you who the members of Mark Zuckerberg’s “Fellowship” group were, I can point out that all of the original members of Facebook knew from the beginning that it was a military project for cyber warfare mind-control. Everything done from the beginning was an experiment to see just how far a social media platform could go to “conquer the enemy” through behavioral manipulation with electronic warfare. The idea that Mark wanted to connect all college students in America was a novel idea that was far from the true intention of mind-control of every user in the world.

Free platforms like Google, Gmail, Facebook, and the rest were confidence tricks to get users to experiment on. My old buddy, Sean Parker, an early member of Facebook has “confessed all” to the media and specifically told the truth that Facebook was meant as a cyber-drug to create and control addicts – digital addicts. As Sean said, we knew from the beginning it was harming every user and that is why we never let our friends or our children use these systems – it harms them tremendously and was the original intent of the media. Mark and I were told by representatives of DARPA that that was the intent of Facebook from its inception.

The U. S. Patriot Act allows the military to consider every American a possible terrorist or enemy warfighter until proven otherwise. Every person on the Internet, which was also created by DARPA, is considered a cyber-terrorist and the military sees it as their job to create systems to surveil, target, disarm, and aggressively remote control the user. I hated the idea from the first time I heard of it. Personally, I have never used Facebook and don’t let anyone I love use it.

Mark would use patriot arguments, like the ones mentioned above, to justify his participation in this black-ops CIA operation to the Fellowship. We argued with him, but to no avail. Mark basically believed anything his “controllers” told him. We would sometimes convince him that the project was “dead wrong”, but all it took was one phone call from “above” and Mark went back to his scheming. It was truly pathetic to see that Mark had no freedom but was told what to do. He was also so poorly organized and such a muddled thinker that he couldn’t get anything done: homework, schoolwork, project work, nothing. So, there was always clean up to be done after Mark, especially when the company got big. Clean-up would include stupid stuff like paying others millions for “stealing” their code, making stupid statements every time he opened his mouth, or the lack of attention he gave to the running of the company.

Mark was always a mess and the Fellowship, as well as Larry Summers’ squeeze Sheryl Sandberg—those soul-less megalomaniacs deserve each other—helped the handlers control Mark, were always picking up the broken pieces and trying to glue them back together. But this time, Facebook and Mark cannot be fixed.

Many of the original Facebook players and the Fellowship have been paid off in huge bribes to keep us quiet. CIA secrecy agreements grow on every plant at Facebook, but the Facebook insiders are turning against Mark anyway for many good reasons. The board of directors wants him fired. Mark’s British controllers sent Baron Richard Allen to rein Mark in, but he failed miserably. Even Sir Nick Clegg, x-deputy prime minister of Britain was sent to shut Mark up, but to no avail. Even the second-in-charge of Britain couldn’t stop Mark and his non-stop stupidity. Mark opens his mouth, it cost the company billions. Mark testifies, and everyone finds out that he doesn’t know a single thing about “his” company.

Mark knows nothing because he doesn’t do anything and hasn’t really shown up for work since the beginning. Mark seems to be allergic to work and can’t stand meetings unless he is “announcing” something. He is the worse manager in history, and everyone will tell you the same if asked. We all “play” like Mark runs the company, but that is not true. Mark can’t run himself effectively, let alone Facebook. That is why he was failing at Harvard and was going to be kicked out for bad grades, even after I did much of his work for him.

I can honestly say that, at this point, there are no “insiders” who have any faith in Mark to run the company, or to even speak in public. We believe that even after Larry Summers, the father of Facebook, who planted Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook to shut Mark up and stop revealing that Facebook is the tool of the Democrat agenda for globalism, cannot fix the company. This is one of the points I am most angry about. Mark has become, over the years, no friend of America. In fact, he hates America and rants on about how proud he is to avoid U. S. taxes and to cheat the American people – whom he considers to be animals.

Mark believes he is a higher being – above human beings. He now believes it was all his work that made Facebook. He is completely deluded by his own propaganda, which is nothing but lies. It is because Mark is now a danger to himself and the world that I must tell the true story of how Facebook and social media have become the enemies of Americans and the world.

Mark was shocked when he received an acceptance letter from Harvard, before he had applied. No test scores, interviews, or pre-requisites were required. His government “programming” had made his acceptance a given. Harvard wanted Mark, and Mark did what he was told. So, when the president of Harvard, Larry Summers, called Mark into his office early in his freshman year, Mark was not so surprised. He knew he would have to pay the piper. Summers asked Mark to start a group to work on the social media project – a supposed competition among teachers and students to win a government contract.

The ostensible goal was to create a social directory and Harvard where people could share in small groups. The real intent was to create a social network to manipulate the world. Mark liked the idea but was too lazy to do anything about it. He stuck his nose into the others’ camps to see what they were doing, but he himself just talked about it with good programmers and made them promises—thus, numerous lawsuits ensued from those promises.

Larry Summers continued to call Mark into his office for updates, so Mark just lied. Occasionally, others would be in the office with Larry Summers, but one person stood out and showed up at many more meetings in the future. This man was obviously the person in charge of this project. His name was a former Harvard Law Professor James Chandler. He boasted that he was one of the top idea people for DARPA and that he had actually developed lower level programming languages for the Army. He pretended to be interested in me, but I could tell that was a political act. Guys like me can just sense these things.

Over time, it came out that Summers and Chandler had much bigger plans for the social media project and had some outside sources of help to complete the project. Mark found it odd that Summers, Chandler, and eventually Sheryl Sandberg did not put much pressure on Mark to produce but were interested in everything Mark was learning from spying on the other groups for almost two years.

One day, Mark was called to Summers office in Massachusetts Hall to meet a most unusual man. His name was Andrew Marshall and he was the head of the Naval Intelligence Net Assessment Office. Mark was terrified of Marshall from the beginning. Marshall had Mark sign a government secrecy agreement, and other security agreements before he told Mark the ultimate military nature of what the Harvard Facebook project entailed. Mark, and Harvard, were simply being used as incubation think tanks as a cover for a military project that needed a corporate face. Professor Chandler said he had discovered the source code that would accomplish the seemingly impossible task of making a social directory “scalable” to billions of people.

Chandler droned on as Harvard professors like to do about how Harvard academic elites were the best choices to do the early testing because of their superior intellects. He explained that this scalability dilemma was not being solved by the military’s usual Microsoft, IBM and Oracle go-to military intelligence suppliers for reasons that were over my head. He said they had found a company who had solved the problem but was not willing to be used by the military as a black-ops project against Americans and the rest of the world.

Chandler and Summers had selected Mark as their front-man to lie and claim that he had written the source code for scalability. Chandler explained that the government had seized the source code from an inventor and his company for use in the DARPA Harvard Facebook project. He explained in very flowery intellectual property theft language that Mark may get sued by the inventor, but that DARPA would shield him. Mark told them he was willing to take that chance.

Mark knew full-well that the people who had brain-washed him had a big plan and his part was simply to do as they told him to do. But now, Mark was getting scarred because James Chandler was a member of the president’s National Security Team, a top national security and patent lawyer, and a truly mean, ugly and frightening black man who could easily turn on you like a pit bull.

Larry Summers had those same elitist bully traits, and was the president of Harvard and an economic world leader. Mark felt he was being groomed and protected by some very powerful people. But it was Andrew Marshall, the one they called “Yoda”, who scared the pants off Mark. After Mark had been “read into” the plan by Summers and Chandler, their boss wanted to meet Mark to make sure that he could be trusted to be part of this overarching evil plan to manipulate all of cyber space as if it were a war arena.

Andrew Marshall did not like Mark at all. I witnessed it myself when I was asked to attend one of Andrew Marshall’s Highland Group forums as a major executive for Facebook, along with Mark. Every time Mark opened his mouth, Marshall would stare at him until Mark would shut up. Marshall indicated in this meeting that Mark himself was the biggest problem with the Facebook operation. Mark was so happy when Andrew Marshall died not long ago. Mark now takes his orders from Marshall understudies Dick O’Neil and James Baker who run Highlands Group. Chandler also worked for Highlands Group and directed numerous operations working directly with Andrew Marshall and James Baker.

The Facebook operation also coordinated their activities with Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the group that gathered around Hillary Clinton’s patent thefts. Every Facebook insider, who was there from the beginning, know these things to be true but would never speak of it for fear of retaliation and possible death. We are speaking about a theft of literally many trillions of dollars in intellectual property, trade secrets, patents, designs and stolen programming source code.

Mark bragged for two years about being able to write the source code for the Facebook platform, but he did not produce a single line of code. For two years, all the Fellowship heard were promises of a break-through at any moment. We heard one excuse right after the other. We learned later it was because the inventor had run into some R&D roadblocks that needed sorted out first. Mark continued to spy on the other groups working on the Harvard Facebook student and staff directories, made many promises to everyone involved, but did not follow through. Mark kept promising he was going to just “sit down and write the code”, as if it was no big deal.

His meetings with Summers, Chandler, Marshall and others continued and Mark always came back encouraged. Then, one day Mark got terribly excited about hacking a fellow student at Harvard because he had some part of the Facebook program. The particular student was an upper classman named Max McKibben who lived next door in Winthrop House, literally 100 feet from our Kirkland House front door. Mark got the best hacker to come to our room and use a special “school” computer to hack into McKibben’s personal Harvard email account to steal several white papers on an invention just like the one Chandler had described. This white paper described EXACTLY what Mark had been talking about for two years and now a Harvard student had a full description of a program that could do the same thing.

It was on October 28, 2003 that Mark returned from Summers’ office and announced: “Let the hacking begin.” That hacking stole the white paper that had been sent to the son of Michael McKibben, the owner of Leader Technologies and the real inventor of scalable social media. Michael had sent his son Max the white papers written to describe the new invention. When Mark learned that Chandler was Michael’s patent attorney, the theft finally put a name to the target Chandler had talked about in vague terms.

Chandler had requested that Michael write up a detailed explanation of the system and how it worked. Once Mark showed the stolen white papers to Chandler, Chandler confessed that he already had a complete evaluation copy of the source code as Michael’s patent attorney, that he was using a spy tactic called “strategic deception” in pretending to help Michael and Leader Technologies file patents, while he was secretly providing Michael’s invention code to DARPA’s IBM Eclipse Foundation cyber-warfare partners.

Chandler told Mark that IBM Eclipse was preparing Michael’s program, as they spoke, to give to Mark for the Facebook launch at EclipseCON ’04 in San Fancisco right after the Harvard January Reading Period. He said the plan was to transfer all of the NSA’s LifeLog data as soon as possible to the Facebook platform as well. He also told Mark that he would be moving to Silicon Valley after the term was over, and that the next phase of the plan for him would happen in California. Dustin and I went with him that summer, but I decided to return to Boston and graduate. That was a sad separation, but I was happy he got rid of his Craig’s List girls. The few that I actually saw looked like sad street urchins.

Chandler had not seen Michael’s white papers yet and was eager to have them. Mark sent him the hacked copies. Chandler said with the inventor’s first-ever public write-up, and the source code, the Highlands Group and the IBM Eclipse Foundation now had what they needed to prepare the platform for Mark to launch thefacebook, later shortened to Facebook, at EclipseCON ‘04 in February.

I now realize that Chandler took the stolen source code from Michael McKibben and Leader Technologies and gave it to the IBM Eclipse Foundation who turned around gave it out as “open source”, the most lucrative intellectual property in history, to all of the social media giants as open source code without charging a penny.

What I am telling you now is a composite understanding of what I knew early on in the Fellowship group of Mark Zuckerberg and what I have learned up to this time as a core insider of Facebook to this very day. It is not only Mark who needs to pay for his crimes, but many others also. IBM Eclipse Foundation plays like they are moral, honest, and philanthropically gave away intellectual property to other companies who essentially became monopolies with the stolen programming source code. This is laughable and I told Mark when he was being told this information by his handlers that the plan would never work because anyone can see through such stupidity. But to this day, beside Facebook insiders and the Fellowship group, no one has ever told me that they suspected the IBM Eclipse Foundation or the Highlands Forum are corrupt.

The bigger the lie, the easier it is to get people to believe it.

Mark Greenberg (Zuckerberg) did not create Facebook. Facebook is a governmental monopoly doing the most advanced virtual behavioral modification on the planet with stolen and modified patents, intellectual property (IP), and trade secrets from inventors who were not remunerated for their inventions. I personally knew this, even when it was happening. I felt sick about the whole thing and this led to many, many arguments between Mark and me. The other members of the Fellowship felt the same way I did. Eventually, Mark had to buy all of us off with large sums of money over the years.

We have not spoken up before now, but I personally cannot hold my silence any longer. I must speak out openly about the criminal surveillance Mark does through Facebook because it gets worse every day. Mark’s handlers tell him to allow more surveillance even though security breaches, selling customer data, allowing for spying by CIA, NSA, DIA, GCHQ, MI6, Five Eyes, lying to Congress, meddling in elections, allowing everyone access to Facebook data, censoring conservatives, being a platform for the Democrat party, and many other charges have been brought against Facebook in other countries and America. Mark will not listen to me or anyone else about stopping the insanity. I believe he is unstable and not fit to run Facebook.

When I saw the $1.5 billion from George Soros and the Atlantic Council bring in the AI system (some built by the Cambridge Digital Forensic Research Laboratory) used in Europe to stop free speech, I had had enough. It was then that I knew Mark was truly being used by evil forces and that even he couldn’t stop it. He seemed to have a death wish to destroy Facebook and reveal some of its evil intent. This was ruining the company I was trying to help run. There were no other avenues that I could take the company down that would deter Mark from the total destruction of Facebook. Mark had been told to win the country for Hillary, or kill the company trying. He was making astounding mistakes that showed the truth of the evil foundations of Facebook.

Our secrets were gushing out like blood from a slaughtered pig. I kept talking to Mark, trying to change his mind, but he became more insane and impossible to talk to. Mark gave up control of the company to a crowd stumbling over themselves to take personal credit for Facebook’s “turnaround”, including Highlands Group, DHS, DoD, Naval Intelligence, SERCO, Crown Agents, IBM Eclipse Foundation, Clinton Foundation, Open Society Foundation, Google, Alphabet, Schmidt, Sandberg, Thiel, Hoffman, Breyer, Louie, Ketterson, Goldman Sachs, Blankfein, Dimon, Microsoft, Gates, Allen, Thompson, Balmer, Ozzi, Nadella, Milner, Obama, Pritzker, Hillary, Kutcher, Bono, Soros, Lamont, the Queen’s men Richard Allan and Nick Clegg, and the rest of the gang who are eager to clean up Mark’s messes. I could see that Facebook was on its last leg but I couldn’t understand why Mark would kill the company.

Then, one day I realized what Mark was doing with the obvious crash-landing of Facebook. He was being told that he would get a “deal” with the government charges against the company and would not have to pay billions in fines. The deal would be like the government’s deal with Standard Oil when they were charged with anti-trust, monopoly issues. They were made to break up into seven different companies – all of which became as big or bigger than Standard Oil itself. Splitting up the monopoly made the owners seven times richer.

That is what Mark is doing. He wants Facebook to be broken up instead of answer to the crimes it has willingly committed. Corporations can simply go bankrupt, dissolve, crash and burn, or do what Google did when it created a new company called Alphabet who is now called the Mother of Google and is worth even more. How a child becomes the parent is a new one for me. Eric Schmidt showed Mark exactly what to do and please remember that Eric Schmidt was also Mark’s mentor and the first person to invest hundreds of millions in Facebook before it went public. Eric Schmidt made billions off of his insider trader knowledge from the Highlands Forum investment in Facebook. Britain’s offshore banks feed them all with endless money laundering and “deal flow” as long as the Queen gets her cut. All us insiders know this global money game is totally rigged to perpetuate this evil power. I don’t want to go to my grave knowing that I didn’t do something to atone for my sins in perpetuating these lies.

I believe that Mark is doing everything in his power to get President Donald Trump deposed, just as he did everything he could to try to help get Hillary elected. If Trump continues, the globalist lose. Mark is a true globalist; he is not an American anymore. Mark essentially does not have a plan for Facebook, he simply does what he is told and always has. Mark has made no decisions on his own – not one. This current decision to destroy Facebook from the inside out is nothing more than Mark’s handlers using Mark in their last hours of power. Trump will win 2020 and Facebook will die. The only question left is whether Trump will charge Mark Fakerberg with the crimes he committed.

I, for one, want Mark in jail along with his handlers. I have personally been threatened and intimidated by these Big-Tech monsters since I met Mark Zuckerberg (Greenberg) – a person who truly does not even know his own name or who he is and yet is one of the richest people on earth. Mark did not earn nor deserve a single penny he has been given. Mark is a card-board cut-out who has lost his way and is completely delusional at this point.

As a Facebook insider I demand Mark be fired and all assets taken from him due to his non-stop lying to stockholders and Facebook users. The Board of Directors, underwriters and institutional investors all know about the secret government contracts that have been propping up the company since the beginning, but most average shareholders do not. It is a government-owned and operated military psy-ops weapon that has gotten out of control and been used for treasonous purposes and for seditious actions against the American people.

After she got sick of the lies, Mark’s former speech writer Katherine Losse described in her 2004 book The Boy Kings that Facebook has stolen personal data and sold it, created a “dark” profile on every user and sold it to everyone who would pay the price, created secret files of compromising photos, allowed all government agencies to access all user data, breached every user agreement, lied continuously to all users, built in back-doors and zero-day programs for the military, and many other unethical, immoral and illegal activities. Did Mark Zuckerberg (Greenberg) willing and with intent allow these criminal activities to go on unchecked on Facebook? – You bet he did. And he is still doing it and getting worse every day. Like other Facebook insiders, I want no part of this squelching of free speech or illegal surveillance activities or the purposeful experimentation on users to develop new and better means to electronically control, manipulate, and imprison people.

I have stood against Mark’s immoral and evil actions since our freshman year at Harvard. Nothing has changed, except that Mark has gotten worse and his handlers have become so demanding that they are condemning Facebook to the trash heap and creating the circumstances for Mark to become even richer and more insane. His next projects include a system much like what Eric Schmidt has created for China, a social credit system that controls the freedom of every American.

When Facebook is broken up, the new companies will have the Eric Schmidt “Dragonfly” social credit system built in. Mark wants to be like Eric and control the world from a digital Ivory Tower and oversee the depopulation of the earth. These maniacs believe they are “above the human race” and are actually higher beings sent to the earth to control the masses. From my experience, these attitudes are extremely prevalent with Silicon Valley tech giants — and they make me sick.

The time has come to simply end the fake social media experiments and call them governmental black-ops projects. I personally know most of these cyber tech-lords and I can testify that they do not possess the tech skills they claim founded their companies. They are simply tech thieves, like Mark Zuckerberg, who need to pay back those they stole from and be put in jail for their crimes. I personally am willing to testify without immunity and suffer whatever consequences I deserve for knowing these things and never bringing them forth until now. I know that the corruption is so great in Washington D. C. that I would not stand a chance of bringing forth this information without being squelched, killed, or silenced like I have seen done to others.

I suggest that the new Attorney General simply read this letter, investigate and then ask Mark Greensberg to program a single line of coherent code. When he cannot, lock him up.

People Who Support Internet Censorship Are Infantile Narcissists

Posted on June 20, 2019 by Reid Mukai

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.

Youtube's new censorship escalation could easily see them removing videos which question the legitimacy of possible legit false flags, like the Douma incident in Syria, or any other attempt to manufacture consent for military interventionism.https://t.co/KrvscxKiS4 pic.twitter.com/EzDPfnSO8A

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) June 5, 2019

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.

The Omnipresent Surveillance State: Orwell’s 1984 Is No Longer Fiction

Posted on June 19, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”—George Orwell, 1984

Tread cautiously: the fiction of George Orwell has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.

It’s been 70 years since Orwell—dying, beset by fever and bloody coughing fits, and driven to warn against the rise of a society in which rampant abuse of power and mass manipulation are the norm—depicted the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism in 1984.

Who could have predicted that 70 years after Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel, “He loved Big Brother,” we would fail to heed his warning and come to love Big Brother.

“To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!”—George Orwell

1984 portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. People are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”

We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by not only Orwell but also such fiction writers as Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”―George Orwell

Much like Orwell’s Big Brother in 1984, the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move. Much like Huxley’s A Brave New World, we are churning out a society of watchers who “have their liberties taken away from them, but … rather enjoy it, because they [are] distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing.” Much like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the populace is now taught to “know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that they will accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away.”

And in keeping with Philip K. Dick’s darkly prophetic vision of a dystopian police state—which became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s futuristic thriller Minority Report—we are now trapped in a world in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams and pre-crime units will crack a few skulls to bring the populace under control.

What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.

Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, the dystopian visions of past writers is fast becoming our reality.

Our world is characterized by widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, fusion centers, driverless cars, voice-controlled homes, facial recognition systems, cybugs and drones, and predictive policing (pre-crime) aimed at capturing would-be criminals before they can do any damage.

Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Government agents listen in on our telephone calls and read our emails. Political correctness—a philosophy that discourages diversity—has become a guiding principle of modern society.

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”―George Orwell

The courts have shredded the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. In fact, SWAT teams battering down doors without search warrants and FBI agents acting as a secret police that investigate dissenting citizens are common occurrences in contemporary America. And bodily privacy and integrity have been utterly eviscerated by a prevailing view that Americans have no rights over what happens to their bodies during an encounter with government officials, who are allowed to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.

“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.”―George Orwell, Animal Farm

We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the police state.

What many fail to realize is that the government is not operating alone. It cannot. The government requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of the massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental overreach.

In fact, Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother, and we are now ruled by the Corporate Elite whose tentacles have spread worldwide. For example, USA Today reports that five years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the homeland security business was booming to such an extent that it eclipsed mature enterprises like movie-making and the music industry in annual revenue. This security spending to private corporations such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others is forecast to exceed $1 trillion in the near future.

The government now has at its disposal technological arsenals so sophisticated and invasive as to render any constitutional protections null and void. Spearheaded by the NSA, which has shown itself to care little to nothing for constitutional limits or privacy, the “security/industrial complex”—a marriage of government, military and corporate interests aimed at keeping Americans under constant surveillance—has come to dominate the government and our lives. At three times the size of the CIA, constituting one third of the intelligence budget and with its own global spy network to boot, the NSA has a long history of spying on Americans, whether or not it has always had the authorization to do so.

Money, power, control. There is no shortage of motives fueling the convergence of mega-corporations and government. But who is paying the price? The American people, of course.

Orwell understood what many Americans, caught up in their partisan flag-waving, are still struggling to come to terms with: that there is no such thing as a government organized for the good of the people. Even the best intentions among those in government inevitably give way to the desire to maintain power and control over the citizenry at all costs. As Orwell explains:

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.

“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.” ― George Orwell

How do you change the way people think? You start by changing the words they use.

In totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used. In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind.

Dystopian literature shows what happens when the populace is transformed into mindless automatons. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, reading is banned and books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled.

In Huxley’s Brave New World, serious literature, scientific thinking and experimentation are banned as subversive, while critical thinking is discouraged through the use of conditioning, social taboos and inferior education. Likewise, expressions of individuality, independence and morality are viewed as vulgar and abnormal.

And in Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.” In this dystopian vision of the future, the Thought Police serve as the eyes and ears of Big Brother, while the Ministry of Peace deals with war and defense, the Ministry of Plenty deals with economic affairs (rationing and starvation), the Ministry of Love deals with law and order (torture and brainwashing), and the Ministry of Truth deals with news, entertainment, education and art (propaganda). The mottos of Oceania: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

All three—Bradbury, Huxley and Orwell—had an uncanny knack for realizing the future, yet it is Orwell who best understood the power of language to manipulate the masses. Orwell’s Big Brother relied on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary. To give a single example, as psychologist Erich Fromm illustrates in his afterword to 1984:

The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as “This dog is free from lice” or “This field is free from weeds.” It could not be used in its old sense of “politically free” or “intellectually free,” since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed as concepts….

Where we stand now is at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted). The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.

This is the final link in the police state chain.

“Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”—George Orwell

Americans have been conditioned to accept routine incursions on their privacy rights. In fact, the addiction to screen devices—especially cell phones—has created a hive effect where the populace not only watched but is controlled by AI bots. However, at one time, the idea of a total surveillance state tracking one’s every move would have been abhorrent to most Americans. That all changed with the 9/11 attacks. As professor Jeffrey Rosen observes, “Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.”

Having been reduced to a cowering citizenry—mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all—we have nowhere left to go.

We have, so to speak, gone from being a nation where privacy is king to one where nothing is safe from the prying eyes of government. In search of so-called terrorists and extremists hiding amongst us—the proverbial “needle in a haystack,” as one official termed it—the Corporate State has taken to monitoring all aspects of our lives, from cell phone calls and emails to Internet activity and credit card transactions. Much of this data is being fed through fusion centersacross the country, which work with the Department of Homeland Security to make threat assessments on every citizen, including school children. These are state and regional intelligence centers that collect data on you.

“Big Brother is Watching You.”―George Orwell

Wherever you go and whatever you do, you are now being watched, especially if you leave behind an electronic footprint. When you use your cell phone, you leave a record of when the call was placed, who you called, how long it lasted and even where you were at the time. When you use your ATM card, you leave a record of where and when you used the card. There is even a video camera at most locations equipped with facial recognition software. When you use a cell phone or drive a car enabled with GPS, you can be tracked by satellite. Such information is shared with government agents, including local police. And all of this once-private information about your consumer habits, your whereabouts and your activities is now being fed to the U.S. government.

The government has nearly inexhaustible resources when it comes to tracking our movements, from electronic wiretapping devices, traffic cameras and biometrics to radio-frequency identification cards, satellites and Internet surveillance.

Speech recognition technology now makes it possible for the government to carry out massive eavesdropping by way of sophisticated computer systems. Phone calls can be monitored, the audio converted to text files and stored in computer databases indefinitely. And if any “threatening” words are detected—no matter how inane or silly—the record can be flagged and assigned to a government agent for further investigation. Federal and state governments, again working with private corporations, monitor your Internet content. Users are profiled and tracked in order to identify, target and even prosecute them.

In such a climate, everyone is a suspect. And you’re guilty until you can prove yourself innocent. To underscore this shift in how the government now views its citizens, the FBI uses its wide-ranging authority to investigate individuals or groups, regardless of whether they are suspected of criminal activity.

“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.” ― George Orwell

Here’s what a lot of people fail to understand, however: it’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted. We’ve already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime legislation that cracks down on so-called “hateful” thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on various subject matter.

Say hello to the new Thought Police.

Total Internet surveillance by the Corporate State, as omnipresent as God, is used by the government to predict and, more importantly, control the populace, and it’s not as far-fetched as you might think. For example, the NSA is now designing an artificial intelligence system that is designed to anticipate your every move. In a nutshell, the NSA will feed vast amounts of the information it collects to a computer system known as Aquaint (the acronym stands for Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence), which the computer can then use to detect patterns and predict behavior.

No information is sacred or spared.

Everything from cell phone recordings and logs, to emails, to text messages, to personal information posted on social networking sites, to credit card statements, to library circulation records, to credit card histories, etc., is collected by the NSA and shared freely with its agents in crime: the CIA, FBI and DHS. One NSA researcher actually quit the Aquaint program, “citing concerns over the dangers in placing such a powerful weapon in the hands of a top-secret agency with little accountability.”

Thus, what we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised of the watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers (government bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations).

Clearly, the age of privacy in America is at an end.

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”—Orwell

So where does that leave us?

We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers. This is the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction lesson that is being pounded into us on a daily basis.

It won’t be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.

To be an individual today, to not conform, to have even a shred of privacy, and to live beyond the reach of the government’s roaming eyes and technological spies, one must not only be a rebel but rebel.

Even when you rebel and take your stand, there is rarely a happy ending awaiting you. You are rendered an outlaw.

So how do you survive in the American surveillance state?

We’re running out of options.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we’ll soon have to choose between self-indulgence (the bread-and-circus distractions offered up by the news media, politicians, sports conglomerates, entertainment industry, etc.) and self-preservation in the form of renewed vigilance about threats to our freedoms and active engagement in self-governance.

Yet as Aldous Huxley acknowledged in Brave New World Revisited: “Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it.”

The Trust Project: Big Media and Silicon Valley’s Weaponized Algorithms Silence Dissent

Posted on June 18, 2019 by Reid Mukai

Sally Lehrman discusses the Trust Project at 2018 WordCamp For Publishers

Given the Trust Project’s rich-get-richer impact on the online news landscape, it is not surprising to find that it is funded by a confluence of tech oligarchs and powerful forces with a clear stake in controlling the flow of news.

By Whitney Webb

Source: Mintpress News

After the failure of Newsguard — the news rating system backed by a cadre of prominent neoconservative personalities — to gain traction among American tech and social media companies, another organization has quietly stepped in to direct the news algorithms of tech giants such as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.

Though different from Newsguard, this group, known as “The Trust Project,” has a similar goal of restoring “trust” in corporate, mainstream media outlets, relative to independent alternatives, by applying “trust indicators” to social-media news algorithms in a decidedly untransparent way. The funding of “The Trust Project” — coming largely from big tech companies like Google; government-connected tech oligarchs like Pierre Omidyar; and the Knight Foundation, a key Newsguard investor — suggests that an ulterior motive in its tireless promotion of “traditional” mainstream media outlets is to limit the success of dissenting alternatives.

Of particular importance is the fact that the Trust Project’s “trust indicators” are already being used to control what news is promoted and suppressed by top search engines like Google and Bing and massive social-media networks like Facebook. Though the descriptions of these “trust indicators” — eight of which are currently in use — are publicly available, the way they are being used by major tech and social media companies is not.

The Trust Project’s goal is to increase public trust in the very same traditional media outlets that Newsguard favored and to use HTML-embedded codes in favored news articles to promote their content at the expense of independent alternatives. Even if its effort to promote “trust” in establishment media fail, its embedded-code hidden within participating news sites allow those establishment outlets to skirt the same algorithms currently targeting their independent competition, making such issues of “trust” largely irrelevant as it moves to homogenize the online media landscape in favor of mainstream media.

The Trust Project’s director, Sally Lehrman, made it clear that, in her view, the lack of public trust in mainstream media and its declining readership is the result of unwanted “competition by principle-free enterprises [that] further undermines its [journalism’s] very role and purpose as an engine for democracy.”

Getting to know the Trust Project

The Trust Project describes itself as “a consortium of top news companies” involved in developing “transparency standards that help you easily assess the quality and credibility of journalism.” It has done this by creating what it calls “Trust Indicators,” which the project’s website describes as “a digital standard that meets people’s needs.” However, far from meeting “people’s needs,” the Trust Indicators seem aimed at manipulating search engine and social-media news algorithms to the benefit of the project’s media partners, rather than to the benefit of the general public.

The origins of the Trust Project date back to a 2012 “roundtable” hosted by the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, a center funded by former Apple CEO Mike Markkula. That roundtable became known as the Roundtable on Digital Journalism Ethics and was created by journalist Sally Lehrman, then working at the Markkula Center, in connection with the New Media Executive Roundtable and Online Credibility Watch of the Society of Professional Journalists. Lehrman has explicitly stated that the Trust Project is open only to “news organizations that adhere to traditional standards.”

The specific idea that spurred the creation of the Trust Project itself was born at a 2014 meeting of that roundtable, when Lehrman “asked a specialist in machine learning at Twitter, and Richard Gingras, head of Google News, if algorithms could be used to support ethics instead of hurting them, and they said yes. Gingras agreed to collaborate.” In other words, the idea behind the Trust Project, from the start, was aimed at gaming search-engine and social-media algorithms in collusion with major tech companies like Google and Twitter.

As the Trust Project itself notes, the means of altering algorithms were developed in tandem with tech-giant executives like Gingras and “top editors in the industry from 80 news outlets and institutions,” all of which are corporate, mainstream media outlets. Notably, the Trust Project’s media partners, involved in creating these new “standards” for news algorithms, include major publications owned by wealthy oligarchs: the Washington Post, owned by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos; the Economist, directed by the wealthy Rothschild family; and the Globe and Mail, owned by Canada’s richest family, the Thomsons, who also own Thomson Reuters. Other Trust Project partners include The New York Times, Mic, Hearst Television, the BBC and the USA Today network.

Other major outlets are represented on the News Leadership Council of the Markkula Center, including the Financial Times, Gizmodo Media, and The Wall Street Journal. That council — which also includes Gingras and Andrew Anker, Facebook’s Director of Product Management — “guides the Trust Project on our Trust Indicators.”

These “Trust Indicators” are the core of the Trust Project’s activities and reveal one of the key mechanisms through which Google, Twitter and Facebook have been altering their algorithms to favor outlets with good “Trust Indicator” scores. Trust Indicators, on their face, are aimed at making news publications “more transparent” as a means of generating increased trust with the public. Though a total of 37 have been developed, it appears only eight of them are currently being used.

These eight indicators are listed and described by the Trust Project as follows:

Best Practices: What are the news outlet’s standards? Who funds it? What is the outlet’s mission? Plus commitments to ethics, diverse voices, accuracy, making corrections and other standards.
Author/Reporter Expertise: Who made this? Details about the journalist, including their expertise and other stories they have worked on.
Type of Work: What is this? Labels to distinguish opinion, analysis and advertiser (or sponsored) content from news reports.
Citations and References: What’s the source? For investigative or in-depth stories, access to the sources behind the facts and assertions.
Methods: How was it built? Also for in-depth stories, information about why reporters chose to pursue a story and how they went about the process.
Locally Sourced? Was the reporting done on the scene, with deep knowledge about the local situation or community? Lets you know when the story has local origin or expertise.
Diverse Voices: What are the newsroom’s efforts and commitments to bringing in diverse perspectives? Readers noticed when certain voices, ethnicities, or political persuasions were missing.
Actionable Feedback: Can we participate? A newsroom’s efforts to engage the public’s help in setting coverage priorities, contributing to the reporting process, ensuring accuracy and other areas. Readers want to participate and provide feedback that might alter or expand a story.

How the Trust Project makes these indicators available to the public can be seen in its new project, the Newsroom Transparency Tracker, where it provides a table of “transparency” for participating media outlets. Notably, that table conflates actual transparency practices with simply providing the Trust Project with outlet policies and guidelines related to the above indicators.

For example, The Economist gets a perfect transparency “score” for having provided the Trust Project links to its ethics policy, mission statement and other information requested by the project. However, the fact that those policies exist and are provided to the Trust Project does not mean that the publication’s policies are, in fact, transparent or ethical in terms of their content or in practice. The fact that The Economist provided links to its policies does not make the publication more transparent, but — in the context of the Newsroom Transparency Tracker’s table — it provides the appearance of transparency, though such policy disclosures by The Economist are unlikely to translate into any changes to its well-known biases and slanted reporting towards certain issues.

Trust Indicators manipulate big tech algorithms

The true power of the Trust Indicators comes in a form that is not visible to the general public. These Trust Indicators, while occasionally displayed on partner websites, are also coupled with “machine-readable signals” embedded in the HTML code of participating websites and articles used by Facebook, Google, Bing and Twitter. As Lehrman noted in a 2017 article, the Trust Project was then “already working with these four companies, all of which have said they want to use our indicators to prioritize honest, well-reported news over fakery and falsehood.” Gingras of Google News also noted that the Trust Indicators are used by Google as “cues to help search engines better understand and rank results … [and] to help the myriad algorithmic systems that mold our media lives.”

A press release from the Trust Project last year further underscores the importance of the embedded “indicators” to alter social-media and search-engine algorithms:

While each Indicator is visible to users on the pages of the Project’s news partners, it is also embedded in the article and site code for machines to read — providing the first, standardized technical language that offers contextual information about news sites’ commitments to transparency.”

Despite claiming to increase public knowledge of “news sites’ commitments to transparency,” the way that major tech companies like Google and Facebook are using these indicators is anything but transparent. Indeed, it is largely unknown how these indicators are used, though there are a few clues.

For instance, CBS News cited Craig Newmark — the billionaire founder of Craigslist, who provided the Trust Project’s seed funding — as suggesting that “Google’s search algorithm could rank trusted sources above others in search results” by using the project’s Trust Indicators.

Last year, the Trust Project stated that Bing used “the ‘Type of Work’ Trust Indicator to display whether an article is news, opinion or analysis.” It also stated that “when Facebook launched its process to index news Pages, they worked with the Trust Project to make it easy for any publisher to add optional information about their Page.” In Google’s case, Gingras was quoted as saying that Google News uses the indicators “to assess the relative authoritativeness of news organizations and authors. We’re looking forward to developing new ways to use the indicators.”

Notably, the machine-readable version of these Trust Indicators is available only to participating institutions, which are currently corporate, mainstream publications. Though WordPress and Drupal plug-ins are being developed to make those embedded signals to search engines and social media available to smaller publishers, it will be made available only to “qualified publishers,” a determination that will presumably be made by the Trust Project and its associates.

Richard Gingras, in a statement made in 2017, noted that “the indicators can help our algorithms better understand authoritative journalism — and help us to better surface it to consumers.” Thus, it is abundantly clear that these indicators, which are embedded only into “qualified” and “authoritative” news websites, will be used to slant search-engine and social-media news algorithms in favor of establishment news websites.

The bottom line is that these embedded and exclusive indicators allow certain news outlets to avoid the crushing effects of recent algorithm changes that have seen traffic to many news websites, including MintPress, plummet in recent years. This is leading towards a homogenization of the online news landscape by starving independent competitors of web traffic while Trust Project-approved outlets are given an escape valve through algorithm manipulation.

The tech billionaires behind the Trust Project

Given the Trust Project’s rich-get-richer impact on the online news landscape, it is not surprising to find that it is funded by rich and powerfl figures and forces with a clear stake in controlling the flow of news and information online.

According to its website, the Trust Project currently receives funding from Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Google, Facebook, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation (often abbreviated as the Knight Foundation), and the Markkula Foundation. Its website also states that Google was “an early financial supporter” and that it had originally been funded by Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist. As previously mentioned, the Trust Project’s co-founder is Richard Gingras, current Google vice president of News. The Trust Project’s website described Gingras’s current role with the organization as “a powerful evangelist” who “can always be counted upon for expert advice and encouragement.” Newmark’s current role at the Trust Project is described as that of a “funder and valued connector.”

Newmark, through Craig Newmark Philanthropies, who provided the initial funding for the Trust Project, and has also funded other related initiatives like the News Integrity Initiative at the City University of New York, which shares many of the same financiers as the Trust Project, including Facebook, Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, and the Knight Foundation. The Trust Project is listed as a collaborator of the News Integrity Initiative. Newmark is also very active in several news-related NGOs with similar overlap. For instance, he sits on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a longtime recipient of massive grants from the Omidyar Network, and Politifact.com, which is funded in part by Omidyar’s Democracy Fund.

Newmark is currently working with Vivian Schiller as his “strategic adviser” in his media investments. Schiller is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, former head of news at Twitter, and a veteran of well-known mainstream outlets like NPR, CNN, The New York Times and NBC News. She is also a director of the Scott Trust, which owns The Guardian.

The Markkula Foundation, one of the key funders of the Trust Project, exercises considerable influence over the organization through the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, which originally incubated the organization and whose News Leadership Council plays an important role at the Trust Project. That council’s membership includes representatives of Facebook, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Financial Times and Google, and “guides the Trust Project on our Trust Indicators and advises on core issues related to information literacy and rebuilding trust in journalism within a fractious, so-called post-fact environment.”

Both the Markkula Foundation and the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics were founded by A. M. “Mike” Markkula, former CEO of Apple. The Markkula Center’s Journalism Ethics program is currently headed by Subramaniam Vincent, a former software engineer and consultant for Intel and Cisco Systems who has worked to bring together big data with local journalism and is an advocate for the use of “ethical-AI [artificial intelligence] to ingest, sort, and classify news.”

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is another interesting funder of the Trust Project, given that this same foundation is also a key investor in Newsguard, the controversial, biased news rating system with deep connections to government insiders and self-described government propagandists. There is considerable overlap between Newsguard and the Trust Project, with the latter citing Newsguard as a partner and also stating that Newsguard’s demonstrably biased ratings use the project’s “trust indicators” in its full-length reviews of news websites, which Newsguard calls “nutrition labels.” In addition, becoming a Trust Project participant is a factor that “supports a positive evaluation” from Newsguard, according to a press release from last year.

Notably, Sally Lehrman, who leads the Trust Project, described the project’s trust indicators for news as ”along the lines of a nutrition label on a package of food” when the Trust Project was created nearly a year before Newsguard launched, suggesting some intellectual overlap.

A previous MintPress exposé revealed Newsguard’s numerous conflicts of interest and a ratings system strongly biased in favor of well-known, traditional media outlets — even when those outlets have a dubious track record of promoting so-called “fake news.” It should come as no surprise that the Trust Project’s goal is to increase public trust in the very same traditional media outlets that Newsguard favored and to use HTML-embedded codes in news articles to promote their content at the expense of independent alternatives.

A familiar face in the war against independent media

The Democracy Fund, another top funder of the Trust Project and a bipartisan foundation that was established by eBay founder and PayPal owner Omidyar in 2011 “out of deep respect for the U.S. Constitution and our nation’s core democratic values.” It is a spin-off of the Omidyar Network and, after splitting off as an independent company in 2014, became a member of the Omidyar Group. The fund’s National Advisory Committee includes former Bush and Obama administration officials and representatives of Facebook, Microsoft, NBC News, ABC News and Gizmodo Media group.

The Democracy Fund’s involvement in the Trust Project is notable because of the other media projects it funds, such as the new media empire of arch-neoconservative Bill Kristol, who has a long history of creating and disseminating falsehoods that have been used to justify the U.S. war in Iraq and other hawkish foreign policy stances. As a recent MintPress series revealed, Omidyar’s Democracy Fund provides financial support to Kristol’s Defending Democracy Together initiative and also supports Kristol’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, a project of the German Marshall Fund think tank that is best known for its cryptic Hamilton68 “Russian bot” dashboard. Omidyar’s Democracy Fund has also donated to the German Marshall Fund’s Defending Digital Democracy project and directly to the German Marshall Fund itself. In addition, Charles Sykes, a co-founder and editor-at-large of Kristol’s new publication The Bulwark, is on the Democracy Fund’s National Advisory Committee.

An acolyte of Kristol’s who works at the German Marshall Fund, Jamie Fly, stated last Octoberthat the coordinated social-media purges of independent media pages known for their criticisms of U.S. empire and U.S. police violence was “just the beginning” and hinted that the German Marshall Fund had a hand in past social media purges and, presumably, a role in future purges. Thus, the Democracy Fund’s links to neoconservatives who promote the censoring of independent media sites that are critical of militaristic U.S. foreign policy jibe with the fund’s underlying interest in the Trust Project.

Omidyar’s involvement with the Trust Project is interesting for another reason, namely that Omidyar is the main backer behind the efforts of the controversial Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to become a key driver of which outlets are censored by Silicon Valley tech giants. The ADL was initially founded to “stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all” but critics say that over the years it has begun labeling critics of Israel’s government as “anti-Semites.”

For example, content that characterizes Israeli policies towards Palestinians as “racist” or “apartheid-like” is considered “hate speech” by the ADL, as is accusing Israel of war crimes or attempted ethnic cleansing. The ADL has even described explicitly Jewish organizations that are critical of Israel’s government as being “anti-Semitic.”

In March 2017, the Omidyar Network provided the “critical seed capital” need to launch the ADL’s “new Silicon Valley center aimed at tackling this rising wave of intolerance and to collaborate more closely with technology companies to promote democracy and social justice.” That Omidyar-funded ADL center allowed the ADL to team up with Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft — all of whom also collaborate with the Trust Project — to create a Cyberhate Problem-Solving Lab. Since then, these companies and their subsidiaries, including Google’s YouTube, have relied on the ADL to flag “controversial” content.

Given the fact that the Trust Project shares with the ADL a key funder (Pierre Omidyar) and several external tech partners, it remains to be seen whether there is overlap between how major tech companies like Google and Facebook use the Trust Indicators in its algorithms and the influence of the ADL on those very same algorithms.

What is clear however is that there exists an undeniable overlap given the fact that Craig Newmark, who provided the seed funding for the Trust Project and continues to fund it, is also a key donor and advisor to the ADL. In 2017, Newmark gave $100,000 to the ADL’s Incident Response Center and is a member of the group’s tech advisory board.

Outsourcing censorship

Of course, the most interesting and troubling donors of the Trust Project are Google and Facebook, both of which are using the very project they fund as a “third party” to justify their manipulation of newsfeed and search-engine algorithms. Google’s intimate involvement from the very inception of the Trust Project tags it as an extension of Google that has since been marketed as an “independent” organization tasked with justifying algorithm changes that favor certain news outlets over others.

Facebook, similarly, funds the Trust Project and also employs the “trust indicators” it funds to alter its newsfeed algorithm. Facebook’s other partners in altering this algorithm include the Atlantic Council — funded by the U.S. government, NATO, and weapons manufacturers, among others — and Facebook has also directly teamed up with foreign governments, such as the government of Israel, to suppress accurate yet dissenting information that the government in question wanted removed from the social-media platform.

The murkiness between “private” censorship, censorship by tech oligarchs, and censorship by government is particularly marked in the Trust Project. The private financiers of the Trust Project that also use its product to promote certain news content over others — namely Google and Facebook — have ties to the U.S. government, with Google being a government contractorand Facebook sporting a growing body of former-government officials in top company positions, including a co-author of the controversial Patriot Act as the company’s general counsel.

A similar tangle surrounds Pierre Omidyar, funder of the Trust Project through the Democracy Fund, who is extremely well-connected to the U.S. government, especially the military-industrial complex and intelligence communities. And partnering with media outlets like the Washington Post, whose owner is Jeff Bezos, spawns more conflicts of interests, given that Bezos’ company, Amazon, is also a major U.S. government contractor.

This growing nexus binding Silicon Valley companies and oligarchs, mainstream media outlets and the government suggests that these entities have increasingly similar and complementary interests, among which is the censorship of independent watchdog journalists and news outlets that seek to challenge their power and narratives.

The Trust Project was created as a way of outsourcing censorship of independent news sites while attempting to salvage the tattered reputation of mainstream media outlets and return the U.S. and international media landscape to years past when such outlets were able to dominate the narrative.

While it seems unlikely that’s its initiatives will succeed in restoring trust to mainstream media given the many recent and continuing examples of those same “traditional” media outlets circulating fake news and failing to cover crucial aspects of events, the Trust Project’s development of hidden algorithm-altering codes in participating websites shows that its real goal is not about improving public trust but about providing a facade of independence to Silicon Valley censorship of independent media outlets that speak truth to power.

Editor’s note | This article was updated to include Craig Newmark’s connections to the Anti-Defamation League.

Bezos Reveals His Ugly Vision For The World He’s Trying To Rule

Posted on June 9, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

“Guess what the best planet is in this solar system?” asked Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos at a recent media event on his Blue Origin space program.

“It’s easy to know the answer to that question,” he continued. “We’ve sent robotic probes like this one to all of the planets in our solar system. Now, some of them have been fly-bys, but we’ve examined them all. Earth is the best planet. It is not close. This one is really good.”

Bezos then went on to discuss his plan to ship humans off of the best planet in the solar system and send them to live in floating cylinders in space.

Bezos claimed that the growing human population and growing energy consumption will force us to make a choice between “stasis and rationing” and “dynamism and growth”, and claimed that the latter item in his dichotomy is possible only by moving humans off the planet.

“If we’re out in the solar system, we can have a trillion humans in the solar system, which means we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins,” Bezos said. “This would be an incredible civilization. What would this future look like? Where would a trillion humans live? Well it’s very interesting, someone named Gerry O’Neill, a physics professor, looked at this question very carefully and he asked a very precise question that nobody had ever asked before, and it was, ‘Is a planetary surface the best place for humans to expand into the solar system?’ And he and his students set to work on answering that question, and they came to a very surprising–for them–counterintuitive answer: No.”

Bezos went on to describe how the limited surface areas, distance, and gravitational forces of the other planets in our solar system make settling on those planets impractical and cost-prohibitive, while constructing giant space cylinders closer to Earth which can hold a million people is far more practical. These cylinders would spin to replicate Earth’s gravitational pull with centrifugal force.

Here are some illustrations Bezos used in his presentation to show us what these “O’Neill colonies” might look like:

“These are really pleasant places to live,” Bezos said. “Some of these O’Neill colonies might choose to replicate Earth cities. They might pick historical cities and mimic them in some way. There’d be whole new types of architecture. These are ideal climates. These are short-sleeve environments. This is Maui on its best day, no rain, no storms, no earthquakes.”

No rain? No weather? Just big, spinning cylinders floating monotonously in space? A trillion divided by a million is one million, which means that the best idea the richest man in the world can come up with for the future of our species is to fill our solar system with a million of these floating homogenized space malls.

“If we build this vision, these O’Neill colonies, where does it take us? What does it mean for Earth?” Bezos asked. “Earth ends up zoned, residential, and light industry. It’ll be a beautiful place to live, it’ll be a beautiful place to visit, it’ll be a beautiful place to go to college, and to do some light industry. But heavy industry, polluting industry, all the things that are damaging our planet, those will be done off Earth. We get to have both. We get to keep this unique gem of a planet, which is completely irreplaceable–there is no Plan B. We have to save this planet. And we shouldn’t give up a future of our grandchildren’s grandchildren of dynamism and growth. We can have both.”

Now, if you look at the behavior of Jeff Bezos, who exploits his employees and destroys his competitors, and who some experts say is trying to take over the underlying infrastructure of our entire economy, you can feel reasonably confident that this man has no intention of leaving “this unique gem of a planet”, nor of having the heirs to his empire leave either. When you see this Pentagon advisory board member and CIA contractor planning to ship humans off the Earth’s surface so the planet can thrive, you may be certain that he’s talking about other humans. The unworthy ones. The ones who weren’t sociopathic enough to climb the capitalist ladder by stepping on the backs of everyone else.

And make no mistake, when Bezos talks about saving the planet for “our grandchildren’s grandchildren”, he’s not just talking about his heirs, he’s talking about himself. Bezos has invested large amounts of wealth in biotech aimed at reversing the aging process and cracking the secret of immortality.

This is the sort of guiding wisdom that is controlling the fate of our species, everyone. The world’s most ambitious plutocrat envisions a world in which, rather than evolving beyond our destructive tendencies and learning to live in collaboration with each other and our environment, we are simply shipped off into space so that he can stretch out and enjoy our beautiful planet. That’s his best idea.

Our plutocratic overlords aren’t just sociopaths. They’re morons.

Bezos’ incredibly shallow vision for humanity reminds me of something Julian Assange said at a 2017 London festival via video link about the way Silicon Valley plutocrats are trying to become immortal by finding a way to upload their brains onto computers.

“I know from our sources deep inside those Silicon Valley institutions, they genuinely believe that they are going to produce artificial intelligences that are so powerful, relatively soon, that people will have their brains digitized, uploaded on these artificial intelligences, and live forever in a simulation, therefore will have eternal life,” Assange said. “It’s a religion for atheists. They’ll have eternal life, and given that you’re in a simulation, why not program the simulation to have endless drug and sex orgy parties all around you. It’s like the 72 virgins, but it’s like the Silicon Valley equivalent.”

I mean, damn. First of all, how stupid do you have to be to overlook the fact that science has virtually no understanding of consciousness and doesn’t even really know what it is? Even if these idiots find a way to upload their neurological patternings onto some AI’s virtual simulation, it’s not like they’d be there to experience it. It would just be a bunch of data running in a computer somewhere, mimicking the personality of a dead person and experienced by no one. People who believe that all there is to them is their dopey mental patterns have not spent any time whatsoever exploring what they are, and have no idea what it is to be human. The fact that anyone would think they could become immortal by digitizing their churning, repetitive personality patterns is crazy, and the fact that they’d want to is even crazier.

People who think this way should shut up and learn about life, not rule the world in a plutocratic system where money translates directly to political influence. People who think that humans can be happily unplugged from the ecosystemic context in which they evolved, the ecosystemic context of which they are an inseparable part, and people who think they can become immortal by uploading their wanky personalities onto a computer should shut the fuck up, spend some time alone with themselves, maybe try some psilocybin mushrooms, and learn a bit about what it means to be human. They certainly shouldn’t be calling the shots.

Earth is our home. It’s what we’re made for. The earth went through a lot to give you life. Sparks had to catch, oceans had to freeze, billions of cells had to survive endless disease, all of these amazing things had to happen just right to give you life. You belong here. You are as much a creation of the earth as the air you breathe. You may feel like a singular organism but you’re actually as much a singular organism as one of the many billions of organisms that make up your body. You and earth are one. And because you evolved on earth, you are perfectly adapted to earth and it is perfectly adapted to you. It yearns for your breath as you yearn for its breeze on your face.

We absolutely have the ability to transcend our unhealthy tendencies as a species which, when you really look at them, are merely creations of a mind that feels alone and separate and like it is in a constant fight for its life. If we just put down our mental swords for a hot second and learned to channel our creativity into the thriving of our society and our ecosystem instead of into killing and out-competing one another then we will be okay. The way out of this is the way towards health. For example, once women have been given back even the most basic rights of sexual sovereignty such as birth control and access to terminations as they have in most western countries, birth rates fall below replication levels. Women’s own internal bodily wisdom makes the problem of overpopulation moot if given half a chance just to make decisions on behalf of her own body.

Another example. People lament the lack of jobs due to AI and automation but we actually desperately need people to do less. We need a whole lot of people doing nothing, not using the roads every morning and evening, not producing widgets that no one needs and creating advertising campaigns to brainwash people into buying them anyway, just to have them end up in the ocean or leaching heavy metals into the earth. Having a whole lot of people doing nothing for more of their week would take the strain off of our health systems as the single biggest factor in disease is stress. Studies show that stress also shrinks your brain and lessens your creativity and innovation too, so all the punitive-minded libertarians out there who are worried that we won’t progress as a species if we start sharing resources around to people who aren’t doing things that traditionally made money because we’ll be too relaxed can chill too. We don’t need to crack the whip to get people to make beautiful innovations. Humans are at their best when feeling playful and relaxed. Nearly all the technological advances of the past came from people who had a lot of leisure time due to their privileged status. Releasing humans from 9 to 5 slavery would be the fastest way to slow our resource consumption and take pressure off of all our systems and would have the added benefit of making us smarter, funnier, more creative and more innovative too.

And for that matter, having every idea and innovation be required to make money is also killing us. We need the ability to fund things that will not make profit. How many times have you been in a conversation and someone’s come up with an idea that will solve a major environmental, energy or health problem and no one’s got excited because it will never get off the ground because it will never make money? Fully disappearing a problem never made anyone any money. Healthy people, for example, never spend a dime at the doctors. The way out of this is detaching human innovation from money and allowing solutions to flourish without the imposition of also having to turn a profit.

These are merely three things I can think of that will dramatically improve our collective ability to reverse this extinction event and all we have to do is get saner, stop punishing each other, start sharing and start collaborating. The only issue we have as humans is that a handful of highly competitive, highly sociopathic and yet incredibly mediocre people have all the power to build our future for us with virtually no input from anyone else. Because all the power in the form of all the money has been allowed to pool into the hands of those most willing to do whatever it takes to get it, we have just a few ruthless yet surprisingly dumb individuals calling the shots on the future of all living beings. The competitive mindset that gave rise to Jeff Bezos is the exact opposite of the kind of collaborative, harmonious mindset we’ll need if we’re going to overcome the challenges we face on the horizon.

Zuck’s New Scam

Posted on June 7, 2019 by Reid Mukai

Don’t buy into Facebook’s pivot to privacy

By Lizzie O’Shea

Source: The Baffler

THE RHETORIC AT FACEBOOK—the largest social media platform in the world—is changing. In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg claimed that privacy was no longer a “social norm.” Today, the same man is asserting that “the future is private.” This was the buzz phrase at the company’s developer conference last month, F8, as the platform reoriented away from the newsfeed toward private chats, groups, and stories. Has Mark Zuckerberg been occupied by a parasitic fungus and become a zombie?

There is something stunning about this cultural shift in a corporation that holds such significant global power. It shows that when people speak up and agitate around privacy and data mining it can have a material effect. The idea that people don’t care about privacy, that they are willing to give it all away for the convenience of free services, has been debunked. Facebook specifically has been unable to ignore the waves of criticism it has experienced of late. The capitalist behemoths of the digital age often seem untouchable, and it is easy to forget that they operate in a social context. Like any powerful actor in society, Facebook is subject to the influence of organized people who will not shut up.

Nonetheless, it’s also important to be wary: savvy marketing is not the same as progress. The company is still fundamentally motivated by growth and profit. The presentations at F8 were focused on getting people onto Facebook-owned apps (including Instagram and WhatsApp) and building a sticky web around this engagement so they need never leave. You will shortly be able to buy things, find a date, even apply for a job—all directly through Facebook. Throughout these processes, Facebook will be able to grow its library of behavioral surplus, and in doing so, continue to expand its core business as the most effective and sophisticated supplier of advertising space in human history.

This context can help us better understand Zuckerberg’s privacy turn. Lest you feel uncomfortable about living more of your digital life through Facebook, they want to remind you that they are sufficiently forward thinking and benevolent to respect your privacy. As your adherence to the platform inches toward total, you can be sure the Facebook team is creating “a place where you are safe and supported.”

Well, sorry, Mark, your idea of privacy isn’t the same as mine. Privacy is too often framed in these discussions in highly superficial terms. It is about tinkering with the ways users engage with a platform as a matter of consumer choice. Mark wants you to be able to easily exclude people from seeing your messages and stories—unless that person happens to be him. This vision of privacy doesn’t hold any power because it does not challenge the definitive power framework for users of social media.

Privacy has necessarily become an expansive concept in the digital age, given the myriad ways in which technology occupies more of our personal spaces. To that end: the right to privacy includes the right to exist outside of the market. It is the right to enjoy spaces without feeling as though your presence is being used by marketers to predict your future.

In her recent book, Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, writes about how these platform collect data and feed it into sophisticated algorithms, to be fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, next, and later. Our participation becomes fodder for the “behavioral futures market,” and in turn, this has an influence on our psychology and sense of self. Private groups on Facebook might be slightly more comforting cyber spaces, but the essential topography remains the same. The fancy developer conferences and user products continue to be funded in a specific way. The logic of surveillance capitalism cannot be circumnavigated via a new company slogan. If anything, Zuckerberg’s privacy talk is an endorsement of this model. As Bernard Harcourt points out, “the watching works best not when it is internalized, but when it is absentmindedly forgotten.”

It need not be so: we can expropriate this moment. A better understanding of privacy will not be limited to design concepts generated by highly profitable social media platforms. It needs to encompass how privacy is an essential component of our agency as human beings. Agency, to be explored and expressed fully, requires that we have space outside the influence of capitalism—to have freedom from market forces seeking to manipulate our unconscious. Privacy demands that human emotions like shame, joy, guilt, and desire be explored without someone seeking to profit from the process without us noticing.

The unconscious exists as “neither individual nor collective,” writes the philosopher Mladen Dolar, but rather “precisely between the two, in the very establishment of the ties between an individual (becoming a subject) and a group to which s/he would belong.” In other words, there is a dialectic process at play between the social forces that shape us and our own personality. The baron capitalists of the data era seek to monetize this space—the right to privacy is the theoretical foundation for resistance. We need to elevate privacy to its full rhetorical potential, and recognize how it is both paradoxically individual and collective, and is defined not by consumer choice but agency. And privacy is therefore something that Facebook cannot offer—unless the company is prepared to change their entire business model.

Surveillance Capitalism

Posted on May 19, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By John Bucher

Source: Adbusters

The alarm beside your bed rings, triggered by an event in your calendar. The smart thermostat in your bedroom senses your motion and turns on the hot water, reporting your movements to a central database at the same time.

News and social updates ping your phone, with your decision whether to click them carefully monitored (and parameters adjusted accordingly). How far and where your morning run takes you, the conditions of your commute, the contents of your text messages, the words your smart speaker overhears, the actions you make under all-seeing cameras, your impulse purchases, your online searches (and selections) of dates and mates – all recorded, rendered as data, uploaded to the cloud, processed, and analyzed. This happens so often and so extensively that we become numb, forgetting that this is not some dystopian imagining of the future. It’s the present.

Welcome to surveillance capitalism.

Google and Facebook might not call to mind the belching smoke stacks and child labourers of the Industrial Revolution, but their leaders have revealed themselves to be as ruthless and profit-seeking as any Gilded Age tycoon. Instead of mining the natural landscape, however, surveillance capitalists extract their raw material from human experience.

“Google is a shape-shifter, but each shape manifests the same aim: to hunt and capture raw material.

Baby, wonʼt you ride my car? Talk to my phone? Wear my shirt? Use my app?”

Fortunately for them, the surveillance matrix of present-day capitalism provides plenty of inputs to work with. It should; they built it. We are the source of what technologists call “data exhaust” — the informational by-products of our every connected movement and decision. As it happens, very little of the data is interesting or important on its own. So why are surveillance capitalists vacuuming it up from every corner of our lives? Because at scale, it furnishes a startlingly accurate picture of human behaviour. Behaviour modification is a numbers game, and the prediction algorithms are hungry for ever more of your data.

You know the old saw that if the service is free, the product is you? Turns out it isn’t true.

To the Googles and Facebooks of the world, people are neither customer nor product. We are more like the elephant, that most majestic mammal—or, at least, part of one. What surveillance capitalists are really interested in is our behaviour, our preferences—our ivory. And when, like poachers, they get it, are they inclined to worry about what happens to the rest of the elephant?

No, to the Googles and Facebooks of the world, we aren’t even the product. We are the abandoned carcass.

Stick to the Plan

Posted on May 8, 2019 by Reid Mukai

Illustration by Mike Faille

Reclaiming central planning from the clutches of corporations

By Brendan James

Source: The Baffler

What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state—Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.

–CCA Chairman Arthur Jensen, Network

WHAT DO JEFF BEZOS AND JOSEPH STALIN have in common? A certain supervillain chic. Cold-blooded austerity. Iron discipline. A penchant for back-breaking output targets. A healthy appetite for terror.

Yet perhaps their most surprising overlap is that the General Secretary and the chairman of Amazon, Inc. built two of history’s largest centrally planned economies. Then again, maybe it’s not so surprising: What embodies the trademark Bezos-ethos of “Get Big Fast” better than the Five-Year Plan? Thanks to its cutting-edge logistics and coordinated supply chains, Amazon last year clocked a GDP of $230 billion[*]. To Jared Kushner’s recent demand that “the government should be run like a great American company,” let all communists raise a fist of solidarity!

In fact, write Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski in The People’s Republic of Walmart, Amazon is just one of thousands of firms, big and small, that centrally plan their inputs and outputs. Of the top hundred global economies, around sixty-nine of them are businesses, not countries; most, if not all, are internally planned. (Sears, which over the last decade broke its firm into an “internal market” of competing units thanks to CEO and Ayn Rand-devotee Eddie Lampert, is conspicuously absent from this list.) Despite the collapse of the USSR and the global gospel of markets that spread in its wake, it seems planning is still working all around us.

The problem is that planning is not working for most of us. Yes, automation and “Big Data” have conjured cheaper goods for consumers—unfortunately, most consumers are also laborers who remain ruthlessly exploited. As the promise of new technology expands each day, workers sleep while standing or collapse from heat exhaustion. Planning, once a revolutionary tool meant to reduce labor time and eliminate exploitation, has become just another vulgar mechanism for maximizing the profits of unelected, authoritarian, union-busting, planet-cooking, superrich vampires. The People’s Republic of Walmart makes the case that the left should reclaim the radical demand for a democratically planned economy and repurpose this corporate apparatus for the flourishing of all. Far from a dry pamphlet on logistics theory, the book raises crucial questions about justice, technology, and our capacity to build a new world in the face of economic and climate catastrophe.

The planned economy was supposed to have gone extinct three decades ago. The Soviet Union gasped its last breath, American capitalism sprayed a bottle of Cristal, European social democracy ordered another latte, and China pressed a big button labeled “Market Socialism.” But if you really put the time in, you could probably get a wonk from the Hoover Institution to grudgingly accept that government planning still beats the market in the realm of certain public services, such as health care or fire departments. The knives come out, though, when this approach is proposed for things like housing, pharmaceuticals, energy, or, heaven forbid, consumer goods in general.

What may surprise newcomers, however, is that many self-described Marxists are wary of planning, too. Despite being thanked in Phillips and Rozworski’s acknowledgements, Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of the left-wing magazine Jacobin, identifies as a market socialist. In a 2013 essay sketching an agenda for the left, Jacobin’s executive editor Seth Ackerman conceded that markets are necessary, so perhaps we’d best just find a way to socialize them. Vivek Chibber, professor of sociology and, along with Sunkara, one of several co-authors of The ABCs of Socialism, dismisses planning as a dead-end: “We can want planning to work, but we have no evidence that it can.” One of the left’s “worst legacies” has been to “identify socialism with central planning.” Market socialism, we’re told, is communism for grown-ups.

Everyone from the market socialist to the Austrian economist has taken one side of an incredibly sexy academic exchange known as the “socialist calculation debate.” The argument should be familiar: market transactions provide producers with essential information about what consumers and other producers need, and therefore how much to make. To try and calculate (that is, plan) this galaxy of interdependent inputs and outputs is impossible in a fluid economy. It’s a matter of information, you fool. And like it or not, market prices are the best way to collect the information we need to map out supply and demand.

A rich tradition of heterodox economics, mathematics, and computer science has materialized to answer this problem of calculation. But it is modern processing power, dwarfing the bandwidth available in the twentieth century, that truly rebukes the argument above. Consider computer scientist and economist Paul Cockshott who, in about two minutes, using only university equipment, claims to have run models that were able to optimize an economy “roughly the size of Sweden.” You get the feeling that the mammoth data centers at Amazon, Ford, or Foxconn might be capable of even more impressive calculations. And besides, to insist communist theory prove some perfect equation is either disingenuous or missing the point. The question is not whether planning is mathematically pristine, but whether it can allocate better than the market.

The answer, to return to the material world, is yes it can. It’s true that under capitalism firms plan internally but compete with each other, a dance that keeps companies innovating new ways to capture surplus and, sometimes, inadvertently benefit regular people. This dynamic would not occur naturally in a planned economy; one cannot just seize Amazon or Walmart, socialize it, and call it a day. Phillips and Rozworski apparently recognize this (there is an entire chapter in The People’s Republic of Walmart titled “Nationalization Is Not Enough”) and point to an interesting line of thought from economist J. W. Mason: Banks tend to operate as a privatized Gosplan, where the slush fund of finance capital flows to whichever firm a group of Brooks Brothers-clad planners decide deserves investment, regardless of profitability. Market competition, in other words, is hardly the divine engine of innovation if so many firms are, as Mason writes, “born new each day by the grace of those financing it.”

Even so, could planning replicate the market’s capacity to innovate? Ford’s former CEO Mark Fields certainly seemed to think so, declaring in 2016 that his company would soon “be able to use analytics to anticipate people’s needs, as opposed to people trying to tell us what they want.” And to the perennial taunt of the lizard-brained conservative—“I love seeing idiot millennials protest capitalism on their Apple-made IPHONES”—one may point out it was largely the market-immune Pentagon and Department of Energy, not Apple, that developed the batteries, algorithms, touch screens, and microprocessors our right-wing friend uses to tweet about the Muslim Caravan. Once again, none of this is to celebrate the actual decisions or practitioners of planning as it exists under capitalism, but to recognize its power and how else it might be put to use.

So much for feasibility. Still, the left has good reason to harbor deeper techno-skepticism. When most of us hear the phrase “data collection,” we think not so much of social justice but of Facebook selling our personal information, NSA surveillance, and racist models of “predictive” policing. In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks catalogs state policies that placed welfare applications, housing allocation, and child welfare investigations under algorithmic control. The results have been catastrophic for the poor and working class, of every race and gender. Algorithms, after all, are written by humans, and prejudices operate just as easily in digital form as they do in twentieth century analog—perhaps even more so. Phillips and Rozworski acknowledge this reality and rightfully urge vigilance. If planning is to make use of such technology, we must make sure not to bake this poison into the cake.

But hope lies in the very recognition that technology is a political construct, rather than some transcendental, neutral force. If we can program the reinforcement of hierarchies, we can certainly work to program their destruction. (There’s already encouraging research as to how to account for problems such as “disparate impact.”) As Eubanks writes, “if there is to be an alternative, we must build it on purpose, brick by brick and byte by byte.”

Beyond algorithmic justice, the real specter haunting socialism is, naturally, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, whose record in planning was less than exemplary. While capital-C Communism brought about modern industry, literacy, and social security, Phillips and Rozworski don’t deny the ultimate failure of the Soviet experiment. The October Revolution was contorted and compromised by a world war, a civil war, imperialist invasion, economic backwardness, another world war, and a half-century of military competition with the United States. For the sake of the revolution, democracy was indefinitely postponed. Even if Soviet and East German firms were just as or more efficient than their Western counterparts, this arrangement still resulted in workers resisting work and managers lying about output, i.e., bad information. (In a particularly cruel irony, Gosplan bureaucrats even took to sabotaging new computerized approaches to planning, lest they personally lose their political clout. Their unlikely co-conspirators were “reform” minded crypto-capitalists who worried the algorithms would actually succeed, leaving planning in place forever!)

For Phillips and Rozworski, it wasn’t communist planning that led to authoritarianism and disaster, but authoritarianism and disaster that led to bad planning. “Democracy,” they write, “is not some abstract ideal tacked on to all this, but essential to the process.”

A few years ago. Francis Spufford’s novel Red Plenty cast the very idea of Soviet planning as its hero, wherein it falls from grace, as all tragic heroes do. There’s no need to understate that tragedy, but it ispossible to overstate it. Let’s not forget what happened after the victorious arrival of the market in the former USSR: production of consumer goods, industrial output, and human life expectancy all cratered. A new class of homeless citizens emerged, frozen to death in streets, alleyways, and parks. We often discuss the millions of deaths in the Stalinist 1930s. We don’t discuss the millions of deaths in the post-Communist 1990s. Unsurprisingly, recent polling revealed that a majority of those surveyed in Russia still regret the collapse of the USSR and its planned economy. (In 1996 they nearly voted in Communist presidential candidate Gennady Zyuganov until—get this—right-wing hucksters colluded with a hostile foreign government to help install a widely unpopular and corrupt buffoon through a media campaign that peddled rank propaganda.) The Soviet experience was a lesson, all right, but not quite the one many smug market fetishists would have us believe.

And if all that can happen to a superpower, imagine what faced Chile, the would-be socialist alternative to Soviet technocracy: in 1970, buoyed by the support of the working class, Marxist president Salvador Allende was elected and set about building a nation-wide, participatory planning network. This novel approach was predictably stymied by a U.S. economic blockade and finally snuffed out by a CIA-backed military coup in 1973. Still, the pioneering spirit of this moment was poignantly captured by Eden Medina in her wonderful study Cybernetic Revolutionaries. What happened next is a depressing cliché: Chileans were placed under the rule of a distinctly not-left-wing dictatorship and enrolled as fresh test subjects in the mad laboratory of the market.

How will that same market treat the workers of tomorrow who fall victim to imminent waves of automation? Is the market really compatible long-term with progressive policy goals like universal basic income, or full employment? Will the market really permit the end of mass incarceration? Then there’s the C-word: last month we learned that potentially catastrophic climate change is now beyond prevention, and that even if we swore off carbon tomorrow, by 2099 the Arctic will still be 5°C hotter. The expression “glacial pace” doesn’t quite mean what it used to. In light of this, The Atlantic, official mouthpiece for the death god Nyarlathotep, predictably suggests that “any realistic plan to decarbonize the U.S. economy will almost surely require the sort of commercial technological breakthroughs that tend to come from private entrepreneurs.” Not to be outdone, the New York Times last month published an op-ed titled—no shit—“Can Exxon Mobil Protect Mozambique From Climate Change?”

It doesn’t have to be this way. Converting industries to renewable energy, Phillips and Rozworski argue, is wholly within the power of America, India, and China. But, wouldn’t you know it, the principles of commerce just aren’t incentivizing them fast enough! Carbon-free agriculture is a trickier feat, but certainly less tricky as a state-sponsored venture freed from market meddling, à la Sputnik or the Manhattan Project. Climate reporter Kate Aronoff suggests: “If you create a successful drive to nationalize [the fossil fuel industry] or rapidly scale back their power that will create a real precedent for other industries . . . then you can nationalize Monsanto. Have that be the crux of a populist demand of a climate movement.” There are different schools on the left when it comes to ecology (Phillips, science writer by day, has been criticized for consumerist, growth-happy “ecomodernism”), but one hopes we can all agree that smashing the existing energy market is a necessary step.

More than any other crisis of capitalism, ecological calamity is the most self-evident reason to abandon the dumb, short-sighted, animal logic of the market for a rational and humane plan. It has been, to quote the superior critique of capital, Gremlins 2, “a complete failure of management.” And if the history of capitalist crises is any guide, the odds are that climate change will produce a bigger, bulkier, more controlling state no matter what. Before things really start to crack up, we may want to pick whether that state runs on egalitarian principles or the fascist death drive. Does anyone who doesn’t own a yacht called Fountainhead truly want to cede that decision to the invisible hand of the market?

To their credit, Phillips and Rozworksi return throughout the book to the necessity of mass mobilization. Planning is not One Weird Trick to Achieve Socialism. Unless we simply want state-capitalist profit optimization, the real thing will require continuous and brutal class struggle. It will require experimentation, failure and, as Marv Alpert once said, tenacious defense. Any hope of success lies in a rejuvenated, robust and, yes, global people’s movement to shatter the political, legal and physical barricades put up by governments and capital. But planning must be part of the agenda.

Here the cybernetic concept of feedback is useful: the very idea of a plan, of giving everyone control of their own lives, is just the kind of revolutionary notion that can energize, inspire, and keep such a movement alive. The final line of Spufford’s Red Plenty need not be read as the end of a dream, but the real beginning of history: “Can it be, can it be, can it ever be otherwise?”

Hope for the best, of course. And plan for the worst.

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After the Crash

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