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Category: Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Death by Algorithm: Israel’s AI War in Gaza

    Remorseless killing at the initiation of artificial intelligence has been the subject of nail-biting concern for various members of computer-digital cosmos.  Be wary of such machines in war and their displacing potential regarding human will and agency.  For all that, the advent of AI-driven, automated systems in war has already become a cold-blooded reality, deployed conventionally, and with utmost lethality by human operators.

    The teasing illusion here is the idea that autonomous systems will become so algorithmically attuned and trained as to render human agency redundant in a functional sense.  Provided the targeting is trained, informed, and surgical, a utopia of precision will dawn in modern warfare.  Civilian death tolls will be reduced; the mortality of combatants and undesirables will, conversely, increase with dramatic effect.

    The staining case study that has put paid to this idea is the pulverising campaign being waged by Israel in Gaza.  A report in the magazine +972 notes that the Israeli Defense Forces has indulgently availed itself of AI to identify targets and dispatch them accordingly.  The process, however, has been far from accurate or forensically educated.  As Brianna Rosen of Just Security accurately posits, “Rather than limiting harm to civilians, Israel’s use of AI bolsters its ability to identify, locate, and expand target sets which likely are not fully vetted to inflict maximum damage.”

    The investigation opens by recalling the bombastically titled The Human-Machine Team: How to Create Human and Artificial Intelligence That Will Revolutionize Our World, a 2021 publication available in English authored by one “Brigadier General Y.S.”, the current commander of the Israeli intelligence unit 8200.

    The author advances the case for a system capable of rapidly generating thousands of potential “targets” in the exigencies of conflict.  The sinister and morally arid goal of such a machine would resolve a “human bottleneck for both locating new targets and decision-making to approve the targets.”  Doing so not only dispenses with the human need to vet, check and verify the viability of the target but dispenses with the need to seek human approval for their termination.

    The joint investigation by +972 and Local Call identifies the advanced stage of development of such a system, known to the Israeli forces as Lavender.  In terms of its murderous purpose, this AI creation goes further than such lethal predecessors as “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which identifies purportedly relevant military buildings and structures used by militants.  Even that form of identification did little to keep the death rate moderate, generating what a former intelligence officer described as a “mass assassination factory.”

    Six Israeli intelligence officers, all having served during the current war in Gaza, reveal how Lavender “played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of the war.”  The effect of using the AI machine effectively subsumed the human element while giving the targeting results of the system a fictional human credibility.

    Within the first weeks of the war, the IDF placed extensive, even exclusive reliance on Lavender, with as many as 37,000 Palestinians being identified as potential Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad militants for possible airstrikes.  This reliance signalled a shift from the previous “human target” doctrine used by the IDF regarding senior military operatives.  In such cases, killing the individual in their private residence would only happen exceptionally, and only to the most senior identified individuals, all to keep in awkward step with principles of proportionality in international law.  The commencement of “Operation Swords of Iron” in response to the Hamas attacks of October 7 led to the adoption of a policy by which all Hamas operatives in its military wing irrespective of rank would be designated as human targets.

    Officers were given expansive latitude to accept the kill lists without demur or scrutiny, with as little as 20 seconds being given to each target before bombing authorisation was given.  Permission was also given despite awareness that errors in targeting arising in “approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.”

    The Lavender system was also supplemented by using the emetically named “Where’s Daddy?”, another automated platform which tracked the targeted individuals to their family residences which would then be flattened.  The result was mass slaughter, with “thousands of Palestinians – most of them women and children or people not involved in the fighting” killed by Israeli airstrikes in the initial stages of the conflict. As one of the interviewed intelligence officers stated with grim candour, killing Hamas operatives when in a military facility or while engaged in military activity was a matter of little interest.  “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home.  The system is built to look for them in these situations.”

    The use of the system entailed resorting to gruesome, and ultimately murderous calculi.  Two of the sources interviewed claimed that the IDF “also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians.” Were the targets Hamas officials of certain seniority, the deaths of up to 100 civilians were also authorised.

    In what is becoming its default position in the face of such revelations, the IDF continues to state, as reported in the Times of Israel, that appropriate conventions are being observed in the business of killing Palestinians.  It “does not use an artificial intelligence system that identifies terrorist operatives or tries to predict whether a person is a terrorist”.  The process, the claim goes, is far more discerning, involving the use of a “database whose purpose is to cross-reference intelligence sources… on the military operatives of terrorist organizations”.

    The UN Secretary General, António Guterres, stated how “deeply troubled” he was by reports that Israel’s bombing campaign had used “artificial intelligence as a tool in the identification of targets, particularly in densely populated residential areas, resulting in a high level of civilian casualties”.  It might be far better to see these matters as cases of willing, and reckless misidentification, with a conscious acceptance on the part of IDF military personnel that enormous civilian casualties are simply a matter of course.  To that end, we are no longer talking about a form of advanced, scientific war waged proportionately and with precision, but a technologically advanced form of mass murder.

    The post Death by Algorithm: Israel’s AI War in Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Tech bros need to realise deepfake porn ruins lives – and the law has to catch up

    Taylor Swift is just one of countless victims of deepfake videos. Firms feeding off this abuse should pay for the harm they cause

    Imagine finding that someone has taken a picture of you from the internet and superimposed it on a sexually explicit image available online. Or that a video appears showing you having sex with someone you have never met.

    Imagine worrying that your children, partner, parents or colleagues might see this and believe it is really you. And that your frantic attempts to take it off social media keep failing, and the fake “you” keeps reappearing and multiplying. Imagine realising that these images could remain online for ever and discovering that no laws exist to prosecute the people who created it.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Pedagogical Panopticon

    At my relatively old age or state of maturity there are many things about which to dream. As a youth much of this nocturnal secretion necessarily extends beyond conscious experience. Hence we can easily believe that dreams are fantasy, in the sense of words describing what we could not have witnessed or done, at the very least from the bed in which we lay. Since all that is accessible or assessable from what we call dreams are the words — if we have them — to describe, dreams might be called covert verbalization. The only detectable difference is that we attribute this activity to a prior state called sleep. Now I could extend my appreciation to a definition of sleep as a condition and for dreams. However my point here is to focus on the verbal activity, especially supposing a condition of dormancy, whether by day or night.

    Perhaps the dreams I have, that is those about which I can give an account, are extensive because I spend most of my waking hours in verbal activity, e.g. writing and talking (even to myself). It occurred to me that I have been doing both, using a pen and my tongue for nearly sixty years, since shortly after my father bought me my first desk at the age of four.

    Sometimes my dreams comprise conventional activities, doing things in my sleep that I could do awake. However in the past couple of years my sleep reports are debates and lectures I give as if I were still teaching. In fact my formal teaching career was short and frequently interrupted. I had never sought or obtained more than a temporary teaching license. The profession had only annoyed me until an advanced age and unemployment induced me to seek substitute teaching posts to pay my bills. At university it was said of those in the education college, formerly the normal school, that “those who can’t, teach”.

    In the course of my itinerant pedagogical practice I found that this is indeed true. However, like many generalizations, this truism requires qualification. The objection implied was easy enough to find. Many teachers I have met or whom I knew as colleagues would have been interchangeable with any clerk in the lower ranks of the civil or military service. The fact that they spent hours standing before pupils or students was indistinguishable from that of someone who had sat sorting file folders on his desk or marching platoons up and down the square. They were history teachers who knew nothing more than was in the textbooks their pupils had to read. They were science teachers devoid of curiosity or doubt. They were language teachers that neither read nor wrote more than a lesson plan.

    All that was testimony to the regrettable truth of young people addicted to school (especially its work calendar and benefits) but with no interest in learning. At the same time there was another kind of person, albeit rare in my experience. That was the person who through teaching overcame what he can’t do to become someone who can.

    I write this after waking from a dream discussing teaching and the relationship between teacher and taught. On one hand taught designates the substance a teacher is employed to instruct. On the other the term applies to those whose role is to respond to the teacher by learning. This invisible process has always been implicitly compared to the effect of what has only been available in the past three decades, namely local wireless transmission, e.g., WLAN. Naturally other metaphors or metaphysics were applied before humanity’s invasion by compulsive computation and the ludicrous comparison of humans with digital machines.

    My interest, at least as assessment of my nocturnal articulation, was the difference between the teacher who believes in the transmission of the taught to the taught and the teaching situation in which those who can’t become those who can. In the same era in which this question became very important to me any observer could detect the increasing frequency and intensity with which “competency” has dominated the rhetoric of all forms of pedagogy. Competency means the ability to do something properly. It also means the authority necessary to do something. For reasons that can be explained but are usually omitted or concealed, the “competency-based” learning widely propagated only addresses the ability to do something but not the authority. This intentional defect is inherent in the rhetoric of schooling as indoctrination- the main reason schools are run. Competency is a euphemism for the reduction of teaching and learning to mastery of test batteries. It is an insincere slogan for intensifying the brainwashing throughout with high density, depleted data. (The analogy to DU munitions made for atomic waste disposal is intentional.)

    In my dream the teacher was a person able to do many things. At the same time there were many things the teacher could not (yet) do. The controversy in my sleep was about the performance in the classroom. Does the teacher perform as the source from which the taught must drink? Do the taught have preference in defining what they will learn and hence the content and style of the teacher’s performance? I was bothered by this dichotomy especially because both questions really addressed the power of the classroom and not the pedagogical core questions at all.

    As I lay dreaming I argued that the power question must be faced in order to distinguish its exercise. The classroom or analogous space shapes the charges that are detonated within it. Inert materials can be used with explosive effect. However one must ask, should teaching and learning be approached as controlled demolition or the firing of armor-piercing projectiles into captured targets, regardless of the side pulling the trigger?

    As I lay sleeping I wandered between the rows and aisles of this classroom like many in which I had once worked. I remembered the lessons I had begun without knowing their ends. Then there was a class I assigned to memorize a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson- admitting that I was actually rather poor at memorizing. I also recalled being asked how I could teach something that was not in the book. To which I replied, the book tells a story, you can believe or not. But it can tell you no more than you find in print. I can tell you a story and if what I say is not clear or you want to know more than I said, well I am in front of you, you can ask me. Then came the retort. How do we know what you say is true?

    At this point an apparent paradox arises. The learner is confronted with an artifact and a live action. Which is true, that which I read or that which I see and hear with my own eyes? There is no way to resolve this in the classroom. Therefore the determination of truth cannot be the competency to which professional educators so often refer. On the contrary, the practice of being a pupil or student is to become in a sense “incompetent”. That is to learn how to abandon rigidly prescribed dogma or doctrine or ready assessments if sensual experience — if necessary to become capable as a human being endowed with intellectual authority. There is no standardized test to measure that. No certificate can guarantee that either has been achieved.

    Having said that I found myself arguing with a figure indistinct about the necessity of anarchy in education. Although that term was not used in my sleep, the opposition to whom I was speaking was defending the abolition of teacher authority in favor of some higher ethical concepts, like anti-racism, anti-isms of all sorts. My opponent insisted that if nothing else schools or education should assure diversity, inclusion and equity. Knowledge had to be imbued with such moral integrity that pupils and students could have no mistake about the right ways to behave.

    I replied without irony — sleep is a literal condition — that I knew of no time when knowledge was exclusively coincident with prevailing morals and therefore had reason to doubt that such an era lay before us. In that great theatrical prop of Western monotheism the beginning of mankind was when two human beings through divine deceit acquired what has been called the “knowledge of good and evil”. One has to ask what knowledge had they before their tragedy? This notion that knowledge- at least that of “good and evil” — was so crucial (also as in crucifixion) to the exclusion of any other faculty is peculiar. If there was no prior knowledge of this sort then what of importance was known “before the fall”? Perhaps this so-called knowledge was not of something “moral” but of life itself. Certainly the untold centuries or millennia since the alleged event have failed to exhibit much practical knowledge. Instead what one finds is “competency”: the ability to perform tests and the certification of such performance. Perhaps that was the seminal demonstration for the mystification of knowledge that continues in contemporary pedagogy.

    As I woke my discussion continued. I had my breakfast trying to bring it to a useful end. So I began to write that which I now conclude-for the waking moment. The teacher is a necessary role in the creation of real knowledge. The pupil role is just as important. In the classroom both roles are performed separately by people who are or at least try to be awake. The texts and other physical materials used are theatrical properties on this stage. While it is desirable that they be useful, it is not essential that they crystallize truth or morals. The world beyond the classroom is neither pure nor crystalline. The most important quality of the pedagogical performance its integrity derives from the skill and commitment with which both roles are played. For more than a millennia moral purity in the classroom has merely concealed the destructive power of those who would prevent a proper performance. The aggressive attacks on pedagogical stages throughout the West‘s educational institutions purport to purify history, arts and sciences. In fact they are heavily funded campaigns of spiritual terrorism directed at destroying knowledge and the capacity of teaching and learning people to produce it. By destroying the human pedagogical theaters, these fanatics are preparing the replacement of human intellectual and cultural production, that is natural human life itself, for those whose dreams comprise nothing — nothing but the destruction they euphemistically denote as “artificial.” Artificial suggests that it is something made, the product of artifice. However therein lies the term’s deceit. The dream of artificial intelligence is a dream without intelligence or knowledge. It is the dream of death by the killers who never sleep.

    The post Pedagogical Panopticon first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Digital Kill Switches: How Tyrannical Governments Stifle Political Dissent

    What’s to stop the U.S. government from throwing the kill switch and shutting down phone and internet communications in a time of so-called crisis?

    After all, it’s happening all over the world.

    Communications kill switches have become tyrannical tools of domination and oppression to stifle political dissent, shut down resistance, forestall election losses, reinforce military coups, and keep the populace isolated, disconnected and in the dark, literally and figuratively.

    In an internet-connected age, killing the internet is tantamount to bringing everything—communications, commerce, travel, the power grid—to a standstill.

    In Myanmar, for example, the internet shutdown came on the day a newly elected government was to have been sworn in. That’s when the military staged a digital coup and seized power. Under cover of a communications blackout that cut off the populace from the outside world and each other, the junta “carried out nightly raids, smashing down doors to drag out high-profile politicians, activists and celebrities.”

    These government-imposed communications shutdowns serve to not only isolate, terrorize and control the populace, but also underscore the citizenry’s lack of freedom in the face of the government’s limitless power.

    Yet as University of California Irvine law professor David Kaye explains, these kill switches are no longer exclusive to despotic regimes. They have “migrated into a toolbox for governments that actually do have the rule of law.”

    This is what digital authoritarianism looks like in a technological age.

    Digital authoritarianism, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies cautions, involves the use of information technology to surveil, repress, and manipulate the populace, endangering human rights and civil liberties, and co-opting and corrupting the foundational principles of democratic and open societies, “including freedom of movement, the right to speak freely and express political dissent, and the right to personal privacy, online and off.”

    For those who insist that it can’t happen here, it can and it has.

    In 2005, cell service was disabled in four major New York tunnels, reportedly to avert potential bomb detonations via cell phone.

    In 2009, those attending President Obama’s inauguration had their cell signals blocked—again, same rationale.

    And in 2011, San Francisco commuters had their cell phone signals shut down, this time, to thwart any possible protests over a police shooting of a homeless man.

    With shutdowns becoming harder to detect, who’s to say it’s not still happening?

    Although an internet kill switch is broadly understood to be a complete internet shutdown, it can also include a broad range of restrictions such as content blocking, throttling, filtering, complete shutdowns, and cable cutting.

    As Global Risk Intel explains:

    Content blocking is a relatively moderate method that blocks access to a list of selected websites or applications. When users access these sites and apps, they receive notifications that the server could not be found or that access was denied by the network administrator. A more subtle method is throttling. Authorities decrease the bandwidth to slow down the speed at which specific websites can be accessed. A slow internet connection discourages users to connect to certain websites and does not arouse immediate suspicion. Users may assume that connection service is slow but may not conclude that this circumstance was authorized by the government. Filtering is another tool to censor targeted content and erases specific messages and terms that the government does not approve of.

    How often do most people, experiencing server errors and slow internet speeds, chalk it up to poor service? Who would suspect the government of being behind server errors and slow internet speeds?

    Then again, this is the same government that has subjected us to all manner of encroachments on our freedoms (lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, over-criminalization, shadow banning, etc.) in order to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, preserve the integrity of elections, and combat disinformation.

    These tactics have become the tools of domination and oppression in an internet-dependent age.

    It really doesn’t matter what the justifications are for such lockdowns. No matter the rationale, the end result is the same: an expansion of government power in direct proportion to the government’s oppression of the citizenry.

    In this age of manufactured crises, emergency powers and technofascism, the government already has the know-how, the technology and the authority.

    Now all it needs is the “right” crisis to flip the kill switch.

    This particular kill switch can be traced back to the Communications Act of 1934. Signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Act empowers the president to suspend wireless radio and phone services “if he deems it necessary in the interest of national security or defense” during a time of “war or a threat of war, or a state of public peril or disaster or other national emergency, or in order to preserve the neutrality of the United States.”

    That national emergency can take any form, can be manipulated for any purpose and can be used to justify any end goal—all on the say so of the president.

    Given the government’s penchant for weaponizing one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers and justify all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security, it’s only a matter of time before this particular emergency power to shut down the internet is activated.

    Then again, an all-out communications blackout is just a more extreme version of the technocensorship that we’ve already been experiencing at the hands of the government and its corporate allies.

    In fact, these tactics are at the heart of several critical cases before the U.S. Supreme Court over who gets to control, regulate or remove what content is shared on the internet: the individual, corporate censors or the police state.

    Nothing good can come from techno-censorship.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, these censors are laying the groundwork to preempt any “dangerous” ideas that might challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

    Whatever powers you allow the government and its corporate operatives to claim now, whatever the reason might be, will at some point in the future be abused and used against you by tyrants of your own making.

    By the time you add AI technologies, social credit systems, and wall-to-wall surveillance into the mix, you don’t even have to be a critic of the government to get snared in the web of digital censorship.

    Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.

    The post Digital Kill Switches: How Tyrannical Governments Stifle Political Dissent first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Social Formation

    1. The overview

    If you often ask yourself “How can people believe those lies and deceptions?” when facts clearly indicate them to be untrue, you are not alone.  If you ask how so-called leaders can get away with a policy that guarantees disastrous, anti-human consequences, you are not alone either.

    In order to examine these questions, let us look at how our minds operate.  We have the conscious part of our minds and the unconscious part of our minds. Both operate together. They can be separated into an instinctual part, a daily operational part, and the part that guides us with set principles. Freud described these as id, ego and superego. As we live in our given social framework, all parts of our minds operate within the imperatives of the social formation. As our minds develop, our instincts are trained to fit what we perceive as reality. Reality, our social interactions, and the ideas and rules generated by society condition and shape our daily thoughts and routines.

    Our idealistic principles are ultimately formed according to the prevalent ideas of good and bad, how things should be and so on. This transfers a collective sense of ideal notions into the guiding principles of individual minds. This basic mechanism allows us to be social beings working together to achieve the goals and objectives of the society. We are individuals with our own ideas and interests, but we are also parts of an entity we perceive as our society. We are individual entities, but we also exist as a collective, as a species in a vast geological time frame.

    But what if our social relations are subservient to the values, norms, and beliefs of the ruling class? What if social institutions are dominated by wealthy and powerful people? What if our society is flooded by their propaganda?

    Our society is highly hierarchical based on financial power. It forms a caste-like system, with social mobility bound by conditions set by ruling class imperatives. No kingdoms in the past achieved the degree of accumulation of wealth we observe today.  Social media platforms are built to facilitate divisions and commodify collective power within the capitalist framework.  Digitalization allows corporate entities to cultivate certain public opinions while excluding others.  AI technology can effortlessly steal collective ideas while reinforcing prevalent ideas firmly within the acceptable range of the authority. The advent of the Internet, AI, and financialization of the economy have strengthened the ways to condition people according to the rules stipulated by the money dominated social institutions. All of these are manifesting in new ways to place our thoughts, our ideas, and our social relations within the acceptable range of the ruling class.

    The capitalist social formation has an inherent contradiction that leads to periodic crises: The capitalists– the ruling class– get too much money and the rest of the people stop having purchasing power, while unsold products pile up. This has been the primary cause of the major predicaments of our times.

    The ruling class shifts its mode of exploitation and subjugation in order to keep the basic structure intact, generating new ways to profit and maintain its dominance. The actual crisis of capitalism is constantly replaced with distorted and narrowly defined prepackaged “crises” which provide pretexts for the economic and social restructuring necessary to float the economy.

    For example:

    The deprived living conditions, poverty, and destruction of inner-city communities—all stemming from the crisis of capitalism—were portrayed as an emergence of inner-city criminal youth, “superpredators.” The demonization, along with the slogan “tough on crime,” exacerbated the momentum for gentrification, militarized police and school-to-prison pipeline, contributing to enriching associated industries.

    Muslim populations have been demonized as “terrorists” as their leaders are called dictators, allowing embargoes, economic blockade, proxy wars, and military assaults against them, ultimately resulting in western corporate powers restructuring their societies to accommodate western corporate interests.

    Legitimate environmental activism has been shaped to narrowly focus on CO2,  which has created a myriad of environmental issues of its own. This has destroyed the momentum for real environmental activism based on actual damages and accountabilities, while creating a momentum for “green capitalism” for profits.  The CO2 focus has also created the carbon trade pyramid scheme for the rich while punishing those developing countries without the capacity to invest in new technologies and infrastructures.

    We are flooded with crisis after crisis—“war on terror,” “global warming,” “pandemic,” “Russian threat,” and etc. And the pace of the cycle accelerates as the crisis of capitalism continues to be insolvable, and the western hegemony faces the economic as well as military powers of countries which have been defying the western colonial trajectory.

    Meanwhile, our minds, facing obvious manipulations and deceptions, struggle to maintain their integrity by keeping certain things conscious and others unconscious in order to exist within the given social formation. This has been facilitated by active propaganda, educational indoctrination, political rituals, and structural violence against the oppressed. We are given false narratives to swallow in exchange for keeping our positions in the social hierarchy while our livelihoods and well-beings are at gunpoint. This conscious/unconscious process of swallowing the status quo by omission of facts ties us to an invisible cage of the ruling class imperatives. Our minds are forced to employ various psychological defense mechanisms to further disassociate ourselves from the root of the problem.

    This has resulted in an enormous decrease of our abilities to perceive ourselves, our relationships to others and the social formation.  It has also been eliminating facts and our history from our minds. Our minds and bodies are conditioned to go along with the social imperatives, and the process diminishes our capacity to grow as human beings.

    This parallels the increased powers of those who profit from our collective labor and our collective knowledge. The acute concentration of wealth allows the rich and powerful to dominate social institutions.  This allows them to impose their agendas and policies through many layers of conditions and extortion regimes against those who are trapped in the social hierarchy.

    One might not keep his job or social position if he holds disagreeable opinions about the authority. Or those with disagreeable ideology could be excluded from various social networks.

    Let’s say that you hold a position in a community organization, and you are an anti-war activist. Your position can be taken away easily by a few wealthy donors with political motives. They effectively blackmail the organization, saying that so and so is on the side of the enemy country, advocating terrorism, and etc. They threaten to boycott the organization unless you are removed. The little organization, which you have been part of, has struggled so hard to serve the community with no resources of its own. The organization has no choice but to ask you to step down. And having struggled together with the organization for years, you can’t risk damaging the organization by making the event public. The anti-war activism suffers, and you are traumatized by the expulsion. In the process, the organization is shaped to stay within the imperial framework.

    Similar dynamics are at work against all individuals who hold views which are unacceptable to the authority. Under the current social formation, our individual productive activities can be exploited by profiteers who set the goals and the objectives, while those who engage in actual activities are deprived of access to the actual collective results. The pattern of domestication of ideas and social relations is not restricted to those who sign contracts with their employers. The fact that social institutions are dominated by the ruling class means that our social relations in general are under the guiding hands of the ruling class.

    For example:

    -Even though they might have good intentions, volunteers for NGOs can be guided to perform activities within the framework of the ruling class, since the NGOs rely on funding from the wealthy. Even if the NGOs survive co-option by the wealthy, their policies and agendas can always be limited by obstacles presented by capitalist dominated social institutions.

    -Grass roots activism can also be at any point co-oped by the interests of the ruling class or neutralized by corporate backed institutions.

    -If you happen to be good at anything and garner popularity among the people, sooner or later, your activities can also be forced to conform to the imperatives of corporate entities.  Or, you could be excluded from one social network or another as your world view collides with money dominated entities along the way, until you find it unsustainable to be in your field.

    This is basically the same mechanism observed by Robert Owen in the 19th century as noted by Frederic Engels in Utopian and Scientific. Owen noted “If this new wealth had not been created by machinery, imperfectly as it has been applied, the wars of Europe, in opposition to Napoleon, and to support the aristocratic principles of society, could not have been maintained. And yet this new power was the creation of the working class.”

    This fundamental dynamic of exploitation and subjugation and use of the collective power of the people to shift the course of society for the interests of the ruling class has evolved for the past two centuries, fully normalizing the hidden mechanism, while cultivating layers and layers of protective mechanisms to prop up the basic structure. Our social relations are filtered through so many layers, constantly being scrutinized to fit the current social formation. In exchange for contributing to the harvesting of the collective power, we receive money which can only be used within the economic markets which are dominated by the capital. We are deprived of our powers and in exchange we receive smaller powers which can be used to support the economic structure, which is controlled and manipulated by various institutions.  What suffers in the process are things we can’t buy with our tokens: love, friendship, community, culture, nature and etc.

    The strength of colonization through the economic structure can be observed as we see how a regional economy in the global south can lose its tradition, sustainable local economy, and communities with the introduction of Wall Street style economy. As the economy shifts to a winner-takes-all, profit oriented structure, social relations shift to conform to the interests of the rich. This goes along with importation of media, where entertainment commodities are geared toward imperial propaganda. Hollywood movies are filled with western-centric narratives. How many of the movies that we see have Russian villains and Muslim terrorists? Mainstream media outlets, now owned by a mere 6 corporate entities, have been serving the corporate and military interests of the west for generations. Western NGOs can also operate with western funding to spread narratives friendly to the west while demonizing the local authority, which defies the infiltration of western propaganda, cultural imperialism and economic restructuring favorable to western corporate interests.

    2. The Hierarchy 

    Here it should be strongly noted that there is a real sense of community, warmth of togetherness and potentially sustainable social relations among those who are engaging in building community momentum. No one can deny those feelings and the actual benefits. This is obvious when we see people finding the real sense of belongingness, pride, and meaning in the communities they build. This can even be said about institutions more obviously facilitated by the intentions of the ruling class —religious, political, military and so on. However, the point here is that our nature to be social and find collective goals to survive can be systemically and structurally co-opted by the structural arrangement of exploitation and subjugation. This should be noted throughout this text, especially as we discuss the inner workings of individuals. Accountability for inhumanity should be squarely placed against the system and its beneficiaries. The purpose of unfolding the mechanism here is not to blame the people who are victims of the domestication. Doing so would bring us to the cynical conclusion that it is human nature to be exploited and brutally attack each other. We must not equate the nature of humanity, however we term it, with the conditions created by the current social formation that allows the ruling class to domesticate the rest of us while depriving us of our humanity and causing devastating consequences to the environment.

    The difficult part, of course, is that we can say with certainly that slave owning landlords or those who appeared in lynching post cards smiling right next to black men hanging from a tree probably had happy families and friendships amongst themselves. But as soon as you stepped out of the stipulated boundaries of the community, the smiley faces of your fellow humans could turn into the faces of terrifying perpetrators of lynching. The happiness one gained by belonging to the community had dual functions: ensuring your livelihood and well-being while augmenting the then legitimate social institution of slavery. The enormous sacrifices paid by the enslaved people co-existed right next to the happy families of “good old times.”

    When the values, norms and beliefs of the collective are subservient to the ruling class imposed framework of the social hierarchy, it automatically normalizes the most brutal and inhumane discrimination and biases in institutionalized forms throughout the “democratic” sphere.  This is the true nature of the notion of “rule by the majority”– a prominent feature of western democracy today.

    This mechanism is at the core of US imperialism. When western corporate entities restructure a country with their neoliberal economic policies, it expands its “democratic” sphere, normalizing exclusion and discrimination, which, in turn, facilitates the exploitation and subjugation.

    In this regard, the age-old colonial view of “others” still dominates the underlining momentum of western colonialism.  The most important psychological element of colonizing is to define the subject population as inferior to the colonizers.  The sub-humans must be helped so that their lives can rise to the level of the colonizers, or more precisely, modified to serve the colonizers.

    The sense of mission allows the colonizers to do whatever necessary, regardless of the actual well-being of the subject population.  All sacrifices among the population are worth it in the end for their own good.

    A military action against them is always justified but the resistance against it is always denied as “inhumane”, “barbaric” and “brutal” because ultimately the counter action does not serve the subject population according to the colonizers. Countless lives of the subject population simply do not weigh the same as the lives of colonizers in the imperial minds.

    This sense of mission is also very useful in exploiting and subjugating oppressed people within the country engaging in the colonizing. The grievances and dissenting voices against the ruling class are set aside in order to instead fight the “barbaric people.” Those who oppose this would be defined as traitors, terrorist supporters and so on.

    In this broader overview, it is clear that the problem is not the “barbaric people who need help” or “terrorist supporters”.  The problem is clearly with the colonizers.

    The social hierarchy, with its very bottom tier, the very top and everything in between, is the clear manifestation of the social formation of exploitation and subjugation. The political institution of so-called western democracy manifests itself somewhere between social democracy and fascism. In either case, the political parties are backed by capitalists. Their policies and agendas stay within the interests of the owners of the political parties. The constant move between “left” and “right” within acceptable politics creates the sense of political struggle and progress, but in reality, all is restricted within the corporate interests.

    However, capitalist hierarchy as a whole doesn’t only shift itself between its fascist mode and social democracy mode in perpetuating itself. The class analysis of the social formation reveals the elements of fascism and socialism within the existing social formation.

    The effect of the corporate domination and measures implemented against the people can be felt severely among the most oppressed people while the benefits of state protection and favoritism are felt by the rich. The elements of fascism–authoritarianism, social hierarchy, suppression of opposition, censorship, militarism, and so on—are literally the reality among the oppressed without waiting for the fascist dictatorships to come along. For the rich the state functions tremendously to forward their interests. The political notion of fascism to describe political opponents by the “left” only appears when the interests of the privileged class are threatened, while the political notion of socialism to describe political opponents by the “right” only appears, again, when the interests of the privileged class are threatened. The true liberation of the people can only be possible if we grow out of the hierarchical social formation based on money and violence.

    Extreme suffering equivalent to suffering under a fascist dictatorship is inherently present for the oppressed population structurally at all times. The incarceration rate in the US is by far the highest globally. In particular, the rate of incarceration for black people has been higher than apartheid South Africa. Every major city in the US contains tent cities where people are subjected to life without basic human rights. One out of five children is facing hunger in the US. The number goes up twice as much for minority children. Without universal healthcare, the cost of major illnesses would easily bankrupt the average household. Three people are killed by police officers every day on average in the US. Meanwhile, the wealthy people often avoid jail time with their political connections, better lawyers, and ability to pay bail. The richest among the US population pay less tax than the average household. The overwhelming favoritism for the rich in the social layers has been institutionalized in various ways, allowing three people in the US to own more wealth than the bottom half of the US population. “Socialism” only for the wealthy is well functioning for the ruling class at all times.

    In order to fully perceive and appreciate life for the benefits for all,  we must recognize the overwhelming role of ruling class imperatives in the formation of collective values, beliefs and norms among us.  The class hierarchy and the process of “othering” based on the dominant world view play significant roles in determining our perceptions.

    3. The Minds

    Now, getting back to our minds, the fact that we internalize the authority as our guiding principle in order to form society creates an unintuitive phenomenon—our thoughts and behaviors follow the ruling class imperatives automatically. All commonly known psychological defense mechanisms are fully employed by individual minds to cling onto the existing social formation. Instead of recognizing the exploitive nature of the system as a whole, our minds are forced to blame “others” for not following unjust laws and ruling class-centric ideas. For example, economic insecurity and poverty due to austerity measures, job exports to overseas, lower wages and etc. would be blamed on immigrants, who are forced to migrate to the US due to the US imperial policies within their home countries. Inconvenient contradictions and world shattering facts stemming from the systemic exploitation are simply repressed as individuals face cognitive dissonance. Accountability for imperial war crimes, colonial policies, and brutal oppression by the authority are projected onto propagandized characters of “enemies.” Unsolvable contradictions lead to regression, resulting in violent behavior against others.

    The social structure is not forcefully activated by top-down coercion only. Each individual plays a significant role in helping to mobilize the entire structure. This is the secret of “western democracy” managing to reign as an imperial power in the name of “freedom,” “justice” and “humanity” and exploiting and subjugating the global south for so long. The collective power of the imperial mind acts like a power steering wheel, allowing a handful of the ruling class to set their goals and objectives in how to use the stolen collective power of the people.

    This is facilitated by the fact that the social formation, which doesn’t allow social relations based on one’s own interests, deprives one of the ability to perceive their surroundings correctly. Instead, “the reality” is projected onto the people as prepackaged corporate narratives through the media industrial complex, educational industrial complex, political industrial complex and so on. One is either forced to swallow a prepackaged social framework or one develops a personal world view based on one’s own position in the social hierarchy.  For those who embrace the prepackaged world view, dissenting opinions become threats to their very own existence—an attack against the authority literally is an attack against a part of their psyche, the internalized authority. For example, the dissident voices against the US proxy wars and the military actions against other countries would appear unpatriotic, “terrorist supporting” and so on in their minds.

    For those who develop personal world views based on their own position within the hierarchy, it also creates a desperate struggle to embrace that position, instead of offering to understand the view which derives from a different circumstance and work together to eliminate the root cause.  The legitimate grievances of minority groups to access job markets, social safety nets, equal rights and so on are seen as threats among the rest of the already struggling population. This results in divisions amongst the subject population and lack of understanding amongst the people, while augmenting the social hierarchy as a whole.

    Dissident groups often split or disappear as emerging crises reveal their narrow interests within class hierarchy, resulting in infighting. For example, some among those who have vehemently opposed measures forwarded by the medical industrial complex—forced “vaccination,” profit oriented Covid measures, the associated media censorship and etc.—have been quick to side with the establishment in Israel and its allies’ settler colonial violence after the 10/7/23 Palestinian military operation against Israel. Those who oppose losing their human rights within the imperial framework have failed to recognize over 75 years of colonial occupation, apartheid policies and genocide against Palestinian people by the US imperial project in the Middle East. This has resulted in devastating divisions among activists. The power which should be directed against the thieves of the collective power is directed toward one another, within the hierarchy.

    Quite often a social mobilization is expressed as “war”–war on drugs, war on crime, and so on. A state of war does not allow discussion, alternate views, or reconciliation on a personal basis or collective basis without the commander in chief saying so. Instantly, dissenting actions are deemed “treason.” The urgency and seriousness of “war” is orchestrated by media propaganda, educational indoctrination, political measures, legal restrictions, and so on. The internalized authority in people’s minds creates a massive storm of self-censorship, infighting amongst families, friends and communities under the notion of absolute allegiance to the authority.  A McCarthyism-like social atmosphere appears every time we are subjected to this sort of mobilization.

    Without understanding the structural mechanism as well as the psychological mechanism, one can also develop a warped abstract notion of a collective enemy—Jewish bankers, globalists, Illuminati, and so on. These prepackaged enemies can serve the system by preventing people from seeing the actual mechanism of exploitation and subjugation, while depriving them of the actual measures to dismantle the system.

    For many, these processes involving psychological defense mechanisms are unconscious, while the framework of the society where they belong is upheld unconditionally. The cage of capitalism stays invisible to the subject population. Also, the fact that we are deprived of access to facts and history due to the domination of social institutions by capital adds to the confusion while making the authority a single entity to obey.

    For those who manage to be conscious about the contradictions and unjust policies coming out of the authority, the situation is very difficult. Most of us do not wish to fight a systemic mafia enterprise operating in our neighborhood. If they demand a protection fee, many will simply pay instead of having their houses burned down at night.  In this case, we are talking about the entire system colluding with institutions to run its operation. It is unlikely that any legal system, any media outlets, and so on, will take your side. In most cases the idea gradually subsides into unconsciousness, turns into cynicism, or creates various sorts of mental dysfunctions amongst the subject population.

    Yet, conscious efforts to point out the problem of this social formation have been with us for centuries. Unfortunately, history is abundant with violent repression against dissidents with anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist views. The degree of the use of violence is unimaginable to ordinary people. The brutality and scope of the violence defines the  determination and criminality of the ruling class to perpetuate its dominance over the subject population. Assassinations, imprisonment, systemic eradication of dissident organizations by state violence, various war crimes committed by its military and so on have created an aspect of the authority as an invincible “mafia enterprise.” This notion lurks on the border between the unconscious and the conscious as we wonder about the legitimacy of the authority and the grave violence committed by it in the name of “democracy,” “freedom,” and “humanity,” as it quietly demands compliance by its threatening presence. This is far from how a “free country” is said to run its business.

    The internalization of the authority is a colonization of the mind in each and every one of us. Trauma creating events due to economic oppression, lack of social safety nets, destruction of communities and so on strengthen the presence of the internal authority, just like victims of domestic abuse cling onto the abusers. Pain and suffering are a firmly integral part of the social formation.

    The collective wounds of a trauma—racism, sexism and so on—can also be utilized to augment capitalist measures and imperial measures. These create opportunities for the same system which institutionalizes trauma-inducing discriminations to effectively enlist people of stigmatized identities who are willing to collaborate in exploitation and subjugation.  The first black President Barak Obama came in with a thundering popularity.  He managed to bomb seven countries, effectively working with corporate entities to install neoliberal restructuring regimes in many areas, while protecting the interests of the criminal banking system.  The legitimate criticisms against him were termed racist, while the actual deep seated racist sentiment amongst the population muddied the aim of the legitimate criticisms as well. A similar mechanism is at work in Israel’s brutal imperial settler colonialism.  The Israeli government, along with the western establishment, has been openly equating opposition to Israel’s apartheid policies and settler colonial violence against Palestinians with anti-semitism. This has created a vicious cycle of anti-imperial momentum advertised as “anti-semitism” through corporate media, adding to the escalating violence against Palestinians with impunity. This has allowed Israel to function as a military base for the US empire in the middle east and beyond for generations. The US financial aid to Israel surpasses the aid to any other country, amounting to over $317 billion since 1946. The vast majority of the aid goes to the military.

    Moreover, social activism for equality and justice has become strategized tokenism within the system instead of a struggle to eliminate class hierarchy and ruling class abuses. This trajectory has been openly supported by the establishment in the name of “diversity.” The corporate backed “diversity” firmly operates within the structural imperatives of the established order. Those with minority backgrounds who embrace corporate policies and imperial agendas are chosen for their diverse backgrounds; however, in reality, their corporate orientations and their subserviency toward imperialism reinforce the actual capitalist hierarchy and contribute in exacerbating actual sufferings of the oppressed.

    As we grow as humans, we grow in this mold, thinking and acting so that you won’t offend the authority and the internalized authority. Dissenting voices are structurally excluded, deprived of facts, of history and resources and constantly forced to make deals with the establishment to keep themselves alive.

    When we shift our attention to the mental states of agents of the ruling class — politicians, bureaucrats, establishment backed “experts,” and super rich individuals — one can’t avoid witnessing psychopathic qualities present in how the interests of the ruling class are blatantly forwarded at the expense of a vast suffering majority. We saw president Obama joking about killing people and joking about drone bombing. We saw Hilary Clinton laughing about assassinating Gaddafi. We heard Madeline Albright stating it’s worth killing half million Iraqi children. Some remarks by president Trump certainly belong to this category as well.

    The wealth driven social structure requires leaders who can ruthlessly forward the interests of the ruling class. Psychopathic characteristics are necessary parts of this social formation.

    In a society which operates based on the interests of the population in harmony with nature and life forms,  psychological repression is a defense mechanism that protects individuals from devastating traumas. Psychopathic behaviors are treated as unsuitable personal traits for responsible positions in society. However, defense mechanisms are an integral part of the dynamics of the collective mobilization and they are crucial in making the capitalist cage invisible in this social formation. The social formation also utilizes psychopathic individuals in forwarding inhumane exploitive measures.

    Suffering and pain create infighting amongst the oppressed, while hopelessness and cynicism turn into self-harm or random violence. The internalized authority in the subject population’s minds directs their attention to their fellow humans, to themselves, or forces them to regress into committing violent actions. These tendencies have been drastically augmented by the prevalent use of mind-altering pharmaceutical drugs in recent decades. Researchers have been noting the devastating consequences brought out by drugs with side effects such as suicidal ideation, psychopathy and so on. (Big pharma makes money, and again, suffering caused by the exploitive environment has created opportunities for industry.)

    Where is a formation like this heading in the geological time frame, let alone the development of a few centuries?

    4.  The Social Institutions

    Our social lives revolve around certain networks in our careers, our interests, our backgrounds and so on. This allows us to find livelihoods and meaning in our daily lives away from the structural issues devastating parts of our population. However, the measures and the policies of the ruling class are also imposed through those networks within the social formation as well. Social institutions, under the strict control of capital and backed by the internalized authority of individuals, quietly guide us to the imperial framework. In a functioning society, a social institution allows facts and history to accumulate in a given field, creating collective assets of knowledge and wisdom. This is a column supporting what we perceive as “civilization.” But what is the implication of it functioning as an element to divide people and impose draconian measures under the umbrella of the ruling class authority? What are the consequences of such oppression for those who are eager to protect the integrity of the institution? And how do we understand our surroundings, facts and history when those change according to the agendas? We lose our common ground to stand on. Our communities are destabilized and ultimately forced to stand on official narratives.

    Religious institutions, political institutions, science and etc. often play such a role.  For example, the political institution has been reduced to a machine to form and legitimize ruling class agendas in the name of “democracy” in which money dominated corporate parties meticulously choose and curate problems that will give opportunities for corporate entities. Narratives, slogans and talking points are provided to party members according to their affiliations. The parties, backed by corporate interests, encourage party members to engage in this controlled competition in which rules and objectives are set by corporate interests. This effectively eliminates an actual political process for the interests of the people while giving an illusion of “democracy.” Participation becomes a ritual in which the collective power of the people is stolen in the name of ensuring the betterment of the people.

    Just as the collectivity of indoctrinated individual minds acts as a power steering wheel for capitalist agendas, social institutions have become an integral part of the driving force of ruling class agendas.  In particular, corporate funded NGOs, think tanks, academic institutions, research institutions and so on, play a crucial role in formulating effective measures and policies for achieving lucrative goals at the expense of the exploited and subjugated population.

    5. Perpetual Now

    The depth of the colonization of minds is reflected by how we perceive major events of our time. For example, the people who desperately screamed “Stand with Ukraine” are nowhere to be seen as we are forced to swallow the new slogans on the Palestinian conflict. The 500,000 Ukrainian deaths resulting from the US proxy war do not appear anywhere.  We clearly remember the images of 9/11. But there is no accountability for the deaths of millions of innocent people in the Middle East. The non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction, “dead incubator babies,” “viagra supplied soldiers,” and other emotionally charged accusations against the “brutal dictators” do not find any reasoned connections to the actual events and their consequences at all. We are forced to consume incoherent segments of the broken dreams of the ruling class, with ample excuses and justifications, as if we are watching a series of rationalization dreams of the ruling class mind with our wide awake minds.  In this collective process, we are totally detached from history and material reality as we are forced to embrace the fictitious notion of “perpetual now.”  This colonization of our perception, with forced consumption of incoherent propaganda narratives, leads us, sleep walking, into colonial projects of war, colonialism, and neoliberal restructuring.

    Our lives count on the healthy functioning of social institutions and social relations based on our interests. We internalize the imperatives of the collective as guiding principles. We naturally build respect and trust for those who protect social institutions with their wisdom and knowledge. We build communities to build social relations based on our interests. Our internal sense of the collective manifests as tradition, myths, culture and so on. We learn to organize ourselves so that we can live harmoniously with ourselves, with each other, with other life forms and with nature. We create art to reflect who we are while also reflecting how things can be, reaching out to the vastness of the universe.

    The capitalist hierarchy and its beneficiaries replace these dynamics with imperatives that keep their order intact. Our psychological traits, our collective social mechanism, how we perceive, and the actual facts themselves and history are being manipulated, altered, and abused. They have been taken apart and put back together to form an invisible cage of caste-like social hierarchy which is constantly being shaped and maintained through the process of trauma and conditioning. Our species is being domesticated by the ruling class, which is harvesting our collective powers to pursue this destructive path.

    6. Growing Out of the Social Formation

    In this writing I have attempted to lay out the psychological aspect, as well as the structural mechanism, of collective mobilization of the people under capitalist domination.

    All these processes clearly indicate structural as well as active efforts by the ruling class to impose policies and agendas against the subject population. This particular social formation is extremely inefficient and unproductive in terms of realizing the potential of the collective power of humanity since the captured power has been largely used to concentrate the power of humanity in the hands of a few without regard to the ultimate trajectory of the species as well as our real potential to actualize our capabilities in harmony with our surroundings. The process diminishes our capability to perceive ourselves, each other, and our environment, while depriving us of our abilities to create and grow as human beings. We have yet to see the real potential of our species at this point. Continuation of this trajectory will deprive us of it.

    To end this writing, I must add one thing. I find many people in the US to be friendly, kind, and extremely sophisticated in their areas of specialization. I have seen so many of them displaying great ingenuity, relentlessness and creativity in what they achieve. As an artist, I do feel waves of corporate pressure against creative freedom and the structural impediments of co-optation. But I also do feel the resilience of artists quietly but surely spreading roots in examining what it is to live and what it is to be humans. The sense of freedom and optimism which has overcome slavery does shine through the spirits of the people. The progress we make for the betterment of all people must stem from the historical reality and the characteristics of the people. Yes, slavery has morphed into current forms of exploitation and subjugation. Yes, the accumulation of wealth and the disparity among haves and have-nots has been exacerbated.  We could see these facts as proving the strength and resilience of the capitalist formation. However, we could also see them as evidence proving the criminality of the social formation as a vast pyramid scheme imposed on the majority. As the list of criminal acts continues to expand, our yearning for life and nature also expands.

    It is very difficult to understand the mechanism of exploitation and subjugation which involves many layers of our social structure as well as that of our minds.  Our examination makes it clear that the social formation consists of many elements working together in highly complex ways. The ultimate solution cannot be narrowly defined by one magic bullet.   Although focused measures are necessary to counter immediate risks and impediments to well-being, a narrowly focused solution will ultimately allow the system to morph and absorb that measure into the existing system. The transformation of society from a ruling class-centric one to a people-centric one requires a fundamental shift of social power to the hands of the people.

    The discussion leads to new questions:

    The system cannot function without the help of the internalized authority in every one of us.  Our understanding of the system and our role in it helps us to do away with the spell put on us by the system, allowing us to have opportunities to refuse to act against our own interests which, in turn, can stop the momentum of the system.  How do we educate ourselves?

    The system attempts to commodify love, friendship, community, culture, nature and so on.  All of those have been shaped and defined by the capitalist society to be sold and bought, only to be seen less and less among us.  If we make right choices for ourselves and for others, not for the interests of the ruling class, we can cultivate truly meaningful social relations by valuing what really matters to us, which could lead us to building social institutions which function for us.  Social institutions which work for the interests of the people are the basis of a well-functioning social structure for the people.  How can we achieve that?

    We are social beings by nature.  We can achieve by working together what we cannot achieve by working alone.  This collective power belongs to us all. How do we ensure that our power serves the livelihoods and well-beings of us in harmony with nature and other life forms?

    Countless people in the US and across the globe have raised their voices against this social formation from various angles. We have much to learn from the successes and failures of people who live under the socialist form of government. We have a vast wealth of knowledge and wisdom going all the way back to the beginning of our species examining how to be as a collective and how to be as individuals. We are one with those people from the past, from now and from the future in our path to outgrow the current social formation.

    The post Social Formation first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Amoral Compass: Palantir and its Quest to Remake the World

    Finance analysts free of moral scruple can point to Palantir with relish and note that 2023 was a fairly rewarding year for it.  The company, which bills itself as a “category-leading software” builder “that empowers organizations to create and govern artificial intelligence”, launched its initial public offering in 2020.  But the milky confidence curdled, as with much else with tech assets, leading to the company stock falling by as much as 87% of value.  But this is the sort of language that delights the economy boffins no end, a bloodless exercise that ignores what Palantir really does.

    The surveillance company initially cut its teeth on agendas related to national security and law enforcement through Gotham.  A rather dry summation of its services is offered by Adrew Iliadis and Amelia Acker: “The company supplies information technology solutions for data integration and tracking to police and government agencies, humanitarian organizations, and corporations.”

    Founded in 2003 and unimaginatively named after the magical stones in The Lord of the Rings known as “Seeing Stones” or palantíri, its ambition was to remake the national security scape, a true fetishist project envisaging technology as deliverer and saviour.  While most of its work remains painfully clandestine, it does let the occasional salivating observer, such as Portugal’s former Secretary of State or European Affairs Bruno Maçães, into its citadel to receive the appropriate indoctrination.

    It’s impossible to take any commentary arising from these proselytised sorts seriously, but what follows can be intriguing.  “The target coordination cycle: find, track, target, and prosecute,” Maçães writes for Time, reflecting on the technology on show at the company’s London headquarters.  “As we enter the algorithmic age, time is compressed.  From the moment the algorithms set to work detecting their targets until these targets are prosecuted – a term of art in the field – no more than two or three minutes elapse.”  Such commentary takes the edge of the cruelty, the lethality, the sheer destruction of life that such prosecution entails.

    While its stable of government clients remain important, the company also sought to further expand its base with Foundry, the commercial version of the software. “Foundry helps businesses make better decisions and solve problems, and Forrester estimated Foundry delivers a 315% return on investment (ROI) for its users,” writes Will Healy, whose commentary is, given his association with Palantir, bound to be cherubically crawling while oddly flat.

    This tech beast is also claiming to march to a more moral tune, with Palantir Technologies UK Ltd announcing in April that it had formed a partnership with the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine (OPG) to “enable investigators on the ground and across Europe to share, integrate, and process all key data relating to more than 78,000 registered war crimes.”

    The company’s co-founder and chief executive officer, Alexander C. Karp, nails his colours to the mast with a schoolboy’s binary simplicity.  “The invasion of Ukraine represents one of the most significant challenges to the global balance of power.  To that end, the crimes that are being committed in Ukraine must be prosecuted.”

    Having picked the Ukrainian cause as a beneficial one, Palantir revealed that it was “already helping Ukraine militarily, and supporting the resettlement of refugees in the UK, Poland and in Lithuania.”  For Karp, “Software is a product of the legal and moral order in which it is created, and plays a role in defending it.”

    Such gnomic statements are best kept in the spittoon of history, mere meaningless splutter, but if they are taken seriously, Karp is in trouble.  He is one who has admitted with sissy’s glee that the “core mission of our company always was to make the West, especially America, the strongest in the world, the strongest it’s ever been, for the sake of global peace and prosperity”.  Typically, such money-minded megalomaniacs tend to confuse personal wealth and a robber baron’s acquisitiveness with the more collective goals of peace and security.  Murdering thieves can be most moral, even as they carry out their sordid tasks with silver tongs.

    When Google dropped Project Maven, the US Department of Defense program that riled employees within the company, Palantir was happy to offer its services.  It did not matter one jot that the project, known in Palantir circles as “Tron”, was designed to train AI to analyse aerial drone footage to enable the identification of objects and human beings (again bloodless, chilling, instrumental).  “It’s commonly known that our software is used in an operational context at war,” Karp is reported as saying.  “Do you really think a war fighter is going to trust a software company that pulls the plug because something becomes controversial with their life?  Currently, when you’re a war fighter your life depends on your software.”

    War is merely one context where Palantir dirties the terrain of policy.  In 2020, Amnesty International published a report outlining the various human rights risks arising from Palantir’s contracts with the US Department of Homeland Security.  Of particular concern were associated products and services stemming from its Homeland Security Investigations (HIS) division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.  Human rights groups such as Mijente, along with a number of investors, have also noted that such contracts enable ICE to prosecute such activities as surveillance, detentions, raids, de facto family separations and deportations.

    In 2023, protests by hundreds of UK health workers managed to shut down the central London headquarters of the tech behemoth. The workers in question were protesting the award of a £330 million contract to Palantir by the National Health Service (NHS) England.  Many felt particularly riled at the company, given its role in furnishing the Israeli government with such military and surveillance technology, including predictive policing services.  The latter are used to analyse social media posts by Palestinians that might reveal threats to public order or praise for “hostile” entities.

    As Gaza is being flattened and gradually exterminated by Israeli arms, Palantir remains loyal, even stubbornly so.  “We are one of the few companies in the world to stand and announce our support for Israel, which remains steadfast,” the company stated in a letter to shareholders.  With a record now well washed in blood, the company deserves a global protest movement that blocks its appeal and encourages a shareholder exodus.

    The post Amoral Compass: Palantir and its Quest to Remake the World first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • From News Deserts to Revitalization

    In 1995, early in the development of the global internet, sociologist Michael Schudson imagined how people might process information if journalism were to suddenly disappear. An expert on  the history of US news media, Schudson speculated in his book, The Power of News, that peoples’ need to identify the day’s most important and relevant news from the continuous torrent of available information would eventually lead to the reinvention of journalism

    Beyond daily gossip, practical advice, or mere information, Schudson contended, people desire what he called “public knowledge,” or news, the demand for which made it difficult to imagine a world without journalism.

    Nearly thirty years later, many Americans live in a version of the world remarkably close to the one Schudson pondered in 1995—because either they lack access to news or they choose to ignore journalism in favor of other, more sensational content.

    By exploring how journalism is increasingly absent from many Americans’ lives, we can identify false paths and promising routes to its reinvention.

    The Rise of News Deserts

    Many communities across the United States now suffer from limited access to credible, comprehensive local news. Northwestern University’s 2022 “State of Local News” report determined that more than half of the counties in the United States—some 1,630—are served by only one newspaper each, while another two hundred or more counties, the homes of some four million people, have no newspaper at all. Put another way, seventy million Americans—a fifth of the country’s population—live in “news deserts,” communities with very limited access to local news, or in counties just one newspaper closure away from becoming so.

    Not surprisingly, the study found that news deserts are most common in economically struggling communities, which also frequently lack affordable and reliable high-speed digital service—a form of inequality known as digital redlining. Members of such communities are doubly impacted: lacking local news sources, they are also cut off from online access to the country’s surviving regional and national newspapers.

    Noting that credible news “feeds grassroots democracy and builds a sense of belonging to a community,” Penny Abernathy, the report’s author, wrote that news deserts contribute to “the malignant spread of misinformation and disinformation, political polarization, eroding trust in media, and a yawning digital and economic divide among citizens.”

    Divided Attention and “News Snacking”

    While the rise of news deserts makes credible news a scarce resource for many Americans, others show no more than passing interest in news. A February 2022 Gallup/Knight Foundation poll found that only 33 percent of Americans reported paying “a great deal” of attention to national news, with even lower figures for local news (21 percent) and international news (12 percent).

    With the increasing prevalence of smartphone ownership and reliance on social media, news outlets now face ferocious competition for people’s attention. Following news is an incidental activity in the lives of many who engage in “news snacking.” As communications scholar Hektor Haarkötter described in a 2022 article, “Discarded News,” mobile internet use has altered patterns of news consumption: “News is no longer received consciously, but rather consumed incidentally like potato chips.”

    Instead of intentionally seeking news from sources dedicated to journalism, many people now assume the viral nature of social media will automatically alert them to any truly important events or issues, a belief that is especially prominent among younger media users, Haarkötter noted. A 2017 study determined that the prevalence of this “news-finds-me” perception is likely “to widen gaps in political knowledge” while promoting “a false sense of being informed.”

    Signs of Reinvention?

    With journalism inaccessible to the growing number of people who live in “news deserts,” or only a matter of passing interest to online “news snackers,” the disappearance of journalism that Schudson pondered hypothetically in 1995 is a reality for many people today. If journalism as we have known it is on the verge of disappearing, are there also—as Schudson predicted—signs of its reinvention? Examining the profession itself, the signs are not all that encouraging.

    Consider, for example, the pivot by many independent journalists to Substack, Patreon, and other digital platforms in order to reach their audiences directly. Reader-supported journalism may be a necessary survival reflex, but we are wary of pinning the future of journalism on tech platforms controlled by third parties not necessarily committed to principles of ethical journalism, as advocated by the Society of Professional Journalists.

    Media companies—including the tech websites CNET and BuzzFeed—have experimented with using artificial intelligence programs, including the infamous ChatGPT bot, to produce content. Noting that there would be “nothing surprising” about AI technology eventually threatening jobs in journalism, Hamilton Nolan of In These Times suggested that journalists have two key resources in the “looming fight” with AI, unions and “a widely accepted code of ethics that dictates how far standards can be pushed before something no longer counts as journalism.”

    News outlets, Nolan argued, do not simply publish stories, they can also explain, when necessary, how a story was produced. The credibility of journalists and news outlets hinges on that accountability. Artificial intelligence may be able to produce media “content”—it may even be of use to journalists in news gathering—but it cannot produce journalism.

    We also don’t anticipate a revival of journalism on the basis of the June 2022 memo from CNN’s Chris Licht, shortly after he became the network’s CEO, which directed staff to avoid overuse of its “breaking news” banner. “We are truth-tellers, focused on informing, not alarming our viewers,” Licht wrote in his memo. (In June 2023, CNN reported that the network’s chairman and CEO was “out after a brief and tumultuous tenure.”) But competitive pressures will continue to drive commercial news outlets to lure their audiences’ inconstant attention with sensational reporting and clickbait headlines.

    Toward a Public Option

    More promising bases for the reinvention of journalism will depend not on technological fixes or more profitable business models but on reinvesting in journalism as a public good.

    In a 2020 article for Jacobin, media scholar Victor Pickard argued that commercial media “can’t support the bare minimum levels of news media . . . that democracy requires.” Drawing on the late sociologist Erik Olin Wright’s model for constructing alternatives to capitalism, Pickard argued that the creation of a publicly-owned media system is the most direct way “to tame and erode commercial media.”

    The “public options” championed by Pickard and others—which include significant budgets to support nonprofit media institutions and municipal broadband networks—would do much to address the conditions that have exiled far too many Americans to news deserts.

    If the public option advocated by Pickard focuses on the production of better quality news, the reinvention of journalism will also depend on cultivating broader public interest in and support for top-notch journalism. Here, perhaps ironically, some of the human desires that social media have so effectively harnessed might be redirected in support of investigative journalism that exposes abuses of power and addresses social inequalities.

    Remembering a Golden Era of Muckraking

    Few living Americans recall Ida Mae Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Upton Sinclair, and other pioneering investigative journalists who worked in the aftermath of the Gilded Age—an era, comparable to ours, when a thin veneer of extravagant economic prosperity for a narrow elite helped camouflage underlying social disintegration. “Muckraker” journalists exposed political and economic corruption in ways that captivated the public’s attention and spurred societal reform.

    For instance, in a series of investigative reports published by McClure’s Magazine between October 1902 and November 1903, Steffens exposed local stories of collusion between corrupt politicians and businessmen in St. Louis, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and New York. Most significantly, though, Steffens’s “Shame of the Cities” series, published as a book in 1904, drew significant public attention to a national pattern of civic decay.

    Steffens’s reporting not only made him a household name, it also spurred rival publications to pursue their own muckraking investigations. As his biographer, Peter Hartshorn, wrote in I Have Seen the Future: A Life of Lincoln Steffens (2012), other publishers “quickly grasped what the public was demanding: articles that not only entertained and informed but also exposed. Americans were captivated by the muckrakers and their ability to provide names, dollar amounts, and other titillating specifics.”

    By alerting the public to systemic abuses of power, investigative journalism galvanized popular support for political reform and indirectly helped propel a wave of progressive legislation. As Carl Jensen related in Stories That Changed America, the muckrakers’ investigative reporting led to “a nation-wide public revolt against social evils” and “a decade of reforms in antitrust legislation, the electoral process, banking regulations, and a host of other social programs.” The golden age of muckraking came to an end when the United States entered World War I, diverting national attention from domestic issues to conflict overseas.

    Though largely forgotten, the muckraking journalists from the last century provide another model of how journalism might be renewed, if not reinvented. The muckrakers’ reporting was successful in part because it harnessed a public appetite for shame and scandal to the cause of political engagement. To paraphrase one of Schudson’s points about news as public knowledge, the muckrakers’ reporting served as a crucial resource for “people ready to take political action.”

    Reviving Public Hunger for News About “What’s Really Going On”

    Despite its imperiled status, journalism that serves the public good has not yet disappeared. There is no shortage of exemplary independent reporting on the injustices and inequalities that threaten to disintegrate today’s United States.

    That said, it is not simple to recognize such reporting or to find sources of it, amidst the clattering voices that compete for the public’s attention. Finding authentic news requires not only countering the spread of news deserts, but also cultivating the public’s taste for news that goes deeper than the latest TikTok trend, celebrity gossip, or talking head “hot takes.”

    A public option for journalism could help assure more widespread access to vital news and diverse perspectives; and a revival of the muckraking tradition, premised on journalism that informs the public by exposing abuses of authority, could reconnect people who have otherwise lost interest in news that distracts, sensationalizes, or—perhaps worse—polarizes us.

    Both the twentieth-century muckrakers and today’s advocates of journalism in the public interest provide lessons about how journalism can help recreate a shared sense of community—a value touted in Northwestern’s 2022 “State of Local News” report. The muckrakers appealed to a collective sense of outrage that wealthy tycoons and crooked politicians might deceive and fleece the public. That outrage brought people together to respond in common cause.

    As George Seldes—a torchbearer of the muckraking tradition, who founded In Fact, the nation’s first successful periodical of press criticism, in 1940—often noted, journalism is about telling people “what’s really going on” in society. At its most influential, journalism promotes public awareness that spurs civic engagement, real reform, and even radical change.

    Perhaps that is why it is so difficult, especially in these troubled times, to imagine a world without journalism. Our best hopes for the future, including the renewal of community and grassroots democracy, all hinge at least partly on what Schudson called “public knowledge,” which a robust free press protects and promotes.

    Note: The above material was excerpted from Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2024, edited by Andy Lee Roth and Mickey Huff (Fair Oaks, CA and New York: The Censored Press and Seven Stories Press, 2024).

    The post From News Deserts to Revitalization first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Intelligence

    The post Intelligence first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Foolish Exclusions: China and the Bletchley Declaration on AI

    At the conclusion of the Second World War, debates raged on how best to regulate the destructive power of the atom.  Splitting it had been used most savagely against the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, thereby ending, to date, the globe’s costliest war.  Visions also abounded on the promise and glory of harnessing such energy.  But the competitive element of pursuing nuclear power never abated, and attempts at international regulation were always going to be subordinate to Realpolitik.  Yet even at such a tense juncture in human relations, it would have been absurd, for instance, to have excluded such a major power as the Soviet Union from such discussions.

    Over the first few days of November, at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, we saw something akin to that parochial silliness take place regarding discussions on the safe development of artificial intelligence (AI).  While the People’s Republic of China was not entirely barred from attending proceedings at UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s widely advertised AI Safety Summit, it was given a shrunken role.

    The very fact that China has any role to play was enough to send Liz Truss, Britain’s stupendously disastrous, short-lived former Prime Minister, into a state of spluttering agitation.  In a failed effort to badger her successor via letter to rescind the initial invitation to Beijing, she revealed how “deeply disturbed” she was that representatives from the evil Oriental Empire would be participating.  “The regime in Beijing has a fundamentally different attitude to the West about AI, seeing it as a means of state control and a tool for national security.”

    Seeing the Middle Kingdom was uniquely disposed to technological manipulation – because liberal democratic governments apparently have no interest in using AI for reasons of controlling their subjects – she failed to see how any “reasonable person” could expect “China to abide by anything agreed at this kind of summit given their cavalier attitude to international law.”

    Sunak, to his credit, showed some mettle in parrying such suggestions.  In a speech delivered on October 26, he owned up to his belief that China needed to be invited.  “I know there are some who will say they should have been excluded.  But there can be no serious strategy for AI without at least trying to engage all of the world’s leading AI powers.”

    Despite this, Sunak was hardly going to give Beijing unfettered access to each and every event.  Some minor form of segregation would still be maintained.  As UK Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden stated with strained hospitality, “There are some sessions where we have like-minded countries working together, so it might not be appropriate for China to join.”  Largely because of that sentiment, Chinese delegates were, for the most part, excluded at public events for the second day of the summit.

    From within the summit itself, it was clear that limiting Beijing’s AI role would do little to advance the argument on the development of such technologies.  A number of Chinese delegates attending the summit had already endorsed a statement showing even greater concern for the “existential risk” posed by AI than either the Bletchley statement or President Joe Biden’s executive order on AI issued at the end of October.  According to the Financial Times, the group, distinguished by such figures as the computer scientist Andrew Yao, are calling for the establishment of “an international regulatory body, the mandatory registration and auditing of advanced AI systems, the inclusion of instant ‘shutdown’ procedures and for developers to spend 30 per cent of their research budget on AI safety.”

    For the Sinophobe lobby, one awkward fact presents itself: China has made giddy strides in the field, having made it a policy priority in its New Generation AI Development Plan in 2017.  The policy goes so far as to acknowledge, in many ways providing a foretaste of the Bletchley deliberations, the need to “[s]trengthen research on legal, ethical, and social issues related to AI, and establish laws, regulations and ethical frameworks to ensure the healthy development of AI.”  Some of this is bound to be aspirational in the way that other documents of this sort are, but there is at least some acknowledgment of the issue.

    Precisely for its progress in the field, China is being punished by that other contender for AI supremacy, the United States.  Despite some forced sense of bonhomie among the delegates, such fault lines were nigh impossible to paper over.  On October 17, the US Department of Commerce announced that further restrictions would be placed on advanced AI chips along with the imposition of additional licensing requirements for shipments to 40 countries to prevent resales to China.  One company, Nvidia, was told directly by the department that it had to immediately cease shipping A800 and H800 chips to the Chinese market without licensed authorisation from the US.

    The final Bletchley Declaration opens with the view that AI “presents enormous global opportunities: it has the potential to transform and enhance human wellbeing, and prosperity.”  With that in mind, the signatories affirmed “that, for the good of all, AI should be designed, developed, deployed, and used, in a manner that is safe, in such a way as to be human-centric, trustworthy and responsible.”  But the vision risks being irreparably fractured, contaminated by such fears so crudely expressed by Truss.  The view from the signatories present is that the AI frontier presents ecstatic opportunity and potential calamity.  But how that vision is duly realised will depend on what is decided upon and whether those rules will be observed.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Rishi Sunak’s AI Pitch: The Bletchley Declaration

    British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak looks as much a deep fake projection as a thin, superficial representation of reality.  His robotic, risible awkwardness makes a previous occupant of his office, Theresa May, look soppily human in comparison.  But at the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, the nervous system of code breaking during the Second World War dominated by such troubled geniuses as Alan Turing, delegates had gathered to chat about the implications of Artificial Intelligence.

    The guest list was characterised by a hot shot list of Big Tech and political panjandrums, part of an attempt by the UK to, as TechCrunch put it, “stake out a territory for itself on the AI map – both as a place to build AI businesses, but also as an authority in the overall field.”  They included Google, Meta, Microsoft and Salesforce, but excluded Apple and Amazon.  OpenAI and the perennially unpredictable Elon Musk, with his X AI, was present.

    The guest list in terms of country representatives was also curious: no Nordic presence; no Russia (but Ukraine – naturally).  Brazil, holding up the Latin American front; a few others doing the same for the Global South.  US President Joe Biden was not present, but had sent his Vice President, Kamala Harris, as emissary.  The administration had, only a few days prior, issued the first Executive Order on AI, boastfully claiming to establish “new standards for AI safety and security” while protecting privacy, advancing equity and civil rights, all alongside promoting the consumer and worker welfare, innovation and competition.  Doubters will be busy.

    China was invited to the event with the reluctance one affords an influential but undesirable guest.  Accordingly, its delegates were given what could only be regarded as a confined berth.  In that sense, the summit, as with virtually all tribal gatherings, had to find some menacing figure in the grand narrative of human striving.  Humankind is important, but so are select, targeted prejudices.  As UK Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden stated with strained hospitality, “There are some sessions where we have like-minded countries working together, so it might not be appropriate for China to join.”

    Sunak left it to the Minister for Technology, Michelle Donelan, to release the Bletchley Declaration, a document which claims to scrape and pull together some common ground about how the risks of AI are to be dealt with.  Further meetings are also planned as part of an effort to make this gig regular: Korea will host in six months; France six months afterwards.  But the British PM was adamant that hammering out a regulatory framework of rules and regulations at this point was premature: “Before you start mandating things and legislating for things… you need to know exactly what you’re legislating for.”  Musk must have been overjoyed.

    The declaration opens with the view that AI “presents enormous global opportunities: it has the potential to transform and enhance human wellbeing, and prosperity.”  With that rosy tinted view firmly in place, the statement goes on to state the goal: “To realise this, we affirm that, for the good of all, AI should be designed, developed, deployed, and used, in manner that is safe, in such a way as to be human-centric, trustworthy and responsible.”

    Concerns are floated, including the potential abuse arising from the platforms centred on language systems being developed by Google, Meta and OpenAI.  “Particular safety risks arise at the ‘frontier’ of AI, understood as being those highly capable general-purpose AI models, including foundation models, that could perform a wide variety of tasks – as well as relevant specific narrow AI that could exhibit capabilities that cause harm – which match or exceed the capabilities present in today’s most advanced models.”

    Recognition had to also be had regarding “the potential impact of AI systems in existing fora and other relevant initiatives, and the recognition that the protection of human rights, transparency and explainability, fairness, accountability, regulation, safety, appropriate human oversight, ethics, bias mitigation, privacy and data protection needs to be addressed.”

    For the sake of form, the statement is partly streaked by concern for the “potential intentional misuse or unintended issues of control relating to alignment with human intent.”  There was also “potential for serious, even catastrophic, harm, either deliberate or unintentional, stemming from the most significant capabilities of these AI models.”

    The declaration goes on to chirp about the virtues of civil society, though its creators and participants have done nothing to assure them that their role was that relevant.  In a letter sent to Sunak, signed by over 100 UK and international organisations, human rights groups, trade union confederations, civil society organisations, and experts, the signatories protested about the fact that “the Summit is a closed door event, overly focused on speculation about the remote ‘existential risks’ of ‘frontier’ AI systems – systems built by the very same corporations who now seek to change the rules.”

    It was revealing, given the theme of the conference, that “the communities and workers most affected by AI have been marginalised by the Summit.”  To also talk about AI in futuristic terms misrepresented the pressing, current realities of technological threat.  “For any millions of people in the UK and across the world, the risks and harms of AI are not distant – they are felt in the here and now.”

    Individuals could have their jobs terminated by algorithm.  Loan applicants could be disqualified on the basis of postcode or identity. Authoritarian regimes were using biometric surveillance while governments resorted to “discredited predictive policing.”  And the big tech sector had “smothered” innovation, squeezing out small businesses and artists.

    From within the summit itself, limiting China’s limited contribution may have revealing consequences.  A number of Chinese academics attending the summit had signed on to a statement showing even greater concern for the “existential risk” posed by AI than either the Bletchley statement or President Biden’s executive order on AI.  According to the Financial Times, the group, which is distinguished by such figures as the computer scientist Andrew Yao, are calling for the establishment of “an international regulatory body, the mandatory registration and auditing of advanced AI systems, the inclusion of instant ‘shutdown’ procedures and for developers to spend 30 per cent of their research budget on AI safety.”

    Humankind has shown itself to be able, on rare occasions, to band together in creating international frameworks to combat a threat.  Unfortunately, such structures – the United Nations being one notable example – can prove brittle and subject to manipulation.  How the approach to AI maintains an “ethnic of use” alongside the political and economic prerogatives of governments and Big Tech is a question that will continue to trouble critics well-nourished by scepticism.  Rules will no doubt be drafted, but by whom?

  • Policing and Policy

    To start with an anecdote of my personal intellectual history, I have to recall reading The Gulag Archipelago as a youth. There were two things that impressed me about this work although I later came to view much of the author’s assertions to be questionable and distorted. However, if one reads the entirety of Solzhenitsyn as literature there are still remarkable insights to be gleaned, even if the excessive attacks on the Soviet Union should be taken cum grano sale. The first point was formal— the use of footnotes in a literary text to comment on what had been written in the main narrative. The second observation, anticipating Foucault et al., was the function of ordinary criminals in a population of political prisoners.

    Footnotes can have the formal function of lending an otherwise weak or absent authority to a text full of unsubstantiated or anecdotal assertions. They can also permit the shift of reader attention from a story to the underlying or derivative aspects of that story. They can also instigate a dialogue with the text by showing the reader how to expose the covert reading of the shadow text.

    The role of ordinary crime in disciplining political prisoners was described in some detail in the hundreds of pages Solzhenitsyn devoted to his topic, what he called the archipelago of incarceration throughout the Soviet Union to which political prisoners under Soviet Union law could be sent. The form he chose was the literary version of the “docudrama“. Meanwhile less partisan authors and scholars have disputed the number of prisons and the actual number of prisoners suggested or claimed in Solzhenitsyn’s book. However, this does not invalidate one of his central observations, namely, the function of organized crime in the operation of an oppressive regime. To be clear about this, no matter what system creates and maintains prisons, prisons are instruments of oppression. Any discussion about theories of penitentiary organisation, correctional practice, punishment cannot erase this fundamental fact. Moreover any society that lacks oppressive/ repressive capacity cannot maintain stable commerce and social interaction. Therefore the question is not whether a society has oppressive or repressive instruments but what does any given society value and therefore support or repress in order to maintain such values?

    No later than what I have claimed in an earlier essay is the shift from surplus appropriation to scarcity management in economic theory, modern political economy has been taught through mass education as a new religion— a secular form of the grace and sin regime established by the Latin and Reformed clerical elite in the reorganisation of sparsely settled sedentary populations in the Western peninsula of Eurasia into fodder for nomadic barbarians who would extend their empire over two-thirds of the Earth’s surface. Until the political-economic apologists were faced with the abolition of slavery and the ascendency of an industrial proletariat, theory focused on how to allocate stolen wealth among the elite estates. With the abolition of slavery (around 1886), the principal occupation of political-economists and the school known now as Social Darwinism was to explain how to prevent the newly freed and the proletariat from claiming their share of the wealth their labour had generated over half a millennia. The explanation they developed was the theory of marginal utility and the redirection of economic management to administering newly discovered “scarcity.”

    Introduction of scarcity as the underlying condition of political economy — perversely at times when capitalist crises of overproduction were recurrent — was a sleight of hand. Fast forward to the end of the War against the Soviet Union and Communism: in the US a Canadian Stanford (amazingly) economist named Lorie Tarshis published a textbook, The Elements of Economics (1947) An Introduction to the Theory of Price and Employment, that was recognized as the first textbook in the US based on the theories of Maynard Keynes. This book was quickly banned after a vicious letter-writing campaign led in part by archconservative and reputed CIA asset, William F. Buckley. When I say “banned”, I mean banned. In more than twenty years it has been impossible for me to find even second-hand editions of this book. It is available only in a very difficult to use e-book version in Internet Archive. That is the condition more than fifty years after it was first published. In its place was the Economics: An Introductory Analysis (1948) by Paul Samuelson. It is to the best of my knowledge the only introductory economics textbook in use in the English-speaking world.

    Why is that important? What has that to do with Solzhenitsyn and organized crime in prisons, one might ask? Tarshis was far from being a communist as was insinuated at the time. Maynard Keynes was a liberal eugenics adherent and no friend of the working class or poor. However, Tarshis following Keynes included a very important chapter: on administered pricing and monopoly/ oligopoly. Samuelson’s contract as theoretical “hit man” was to expunge this critical element of political economy from the study and teaching of economics. He was also— thanks to the enormous academic-criminal enterprise of which many in his family have been a part, e.g. Lawrence Summers— able to reap accolades long before that ostensible bête noir of liberals, Milton Friedman, earned his fame as economic terrorist (especially as leading theorist of Chile’s economic destruction after 1973).

    What is administered pricing? According to the fairy tale still propagated by the Samuelson catechism, all prices are derived from scarcity equations settled in the market by a tendency of supply and demand to reach equilibrium. The deceit— not unlike that propagated by climate hysteriacs- is that there is such a thing as “equilibrium,” never mind economic equilibrium. Tarshis distinguished quite clearly between real economies of scarcity or surplus and oligarchic/ monopolistic economies. For Samuelson et al. oligarchy and monopoly are merely “imperfect competition”. This is akin to calling something ugly, less beautiful.

    According to the so-called “neo-classical synthesis”, only the horrible socialists try to set prices and make economic decisions according to plans. In the “free market” these decisions are the result of mathematical divination derived from the laws of economic nature.  However, administered pricing, like administered energy policy, constitutes planning by invisible, publicly unaccountable actors in the private sector using such key performance indicators as return on investment (ROI) or simply how much profit can be obtained at any given price. Since vertically integrated cartels can manipulate input/ factor prices, also with the help of rigged taxation and accounting rules, the question is not at what price will a certain demand level be satisfied but at what price a certain rate of profit can be obtained. This is why such strategies as cross-subsidization or transfer pricing mechanisms can be used to obtain profits despite obvious price inflexibility at the end of the chain— the consumer. To the extent that this is discussed at all in Samuelson and his derivatives it is a pure aberration or distortion. Political power exercised to benefit these actors is concealed by the euphemism “externalities.”

    How can a sane person say “distortion” when describing the impact of beneficial ownership of a media market where only five enterprises dominate the industry worldwide? When five oligarchical entities operate under such a regime that were there real, enforceable anti-trust law would be forbidden. Only ignorance or mendacity can call it an exception. It must be treated as the rule. That is point. Assuming that every single graduate that has passed through the Samuelson indoctrination continues either in academic or commercial economics, then we are talking about millions of people whose fundamental education ignores a central fact and operating principle of economics since the beginning of the 20th century. The anecdotal evidence of global ignorance/ mendacity ought to be sufficient to convince any sober thinking person that what we are told about the economy and the society it constitutes is at least twenty per cent nonsense. (I am being generous here.) The damage is actually much worse since the discipline is thus so detached from reality and bound by pseudo-scientific mathematical models that we cannot even begin to imagine another way of organizing resources. (Economist Michael Hudson has worked very hard to do this by returning to the original critical forms of political economic theory: Professor Hudson, who learned economics working in Business and not the Academy, also makes very clear that all modern economies are “planned,” Gosplan was responsible for the Soviet economy, while Wall Street—a closely held private financial cartel—plans the Western economy. See among others Hudson’s Superimperialism)

    What does all this have to do with policing?

    Since the declaration of the COVID-19 war in 2020 numerous business districts throughout the United States and other Western metropolises have experienced bizarre mass attacks mainly on the retail sector. These attacks often followed or were contemporaneous with mass demonstrations apparently organized and/ or supported by offshore NGOs like Black Lives Matter and Antifascist Action or groups demonstrably trained by the successor to OTPOR. The attacks included looting, vandalism, arson, and assault and battery. Millions of US dollars in property damage were recorded. Many businesses closed their doors or were forced to create expensive security barriers to customers. During this period policing was conspicuous by its absence.

    Before continuing the term “offshore” should be explained. The construction of astro-turf organizations requires funding. Organizations are needed to obtain and pay for facilities used whenever masses of people are brought together for any purpose. A daylong event of any sort, especially in countries like the US with a low density of public conveniences, needs provision for basic things like toilets and drinking water. These are key logistical elements of any sustained mass activity and they cost money. A friend of mine from Leipzig who grew up there during the GDR era remarked often about the Monday demonstrations there: who paid for all the toilet facilities during those demonstrations? There was a US TV sitcom, All in the Family (a variant of the 1965-75 British satire Till Death Us Do Part) that was initially quite scandalous not only because of fluid bigoted language but also because the protagonist explicitly talked about and went to the toilet in prime time television. Perhaps American culture is so sanitized that no one can even imagine the necessity of a toilet in public life. Offshore NGOs are these conduits for cash and organizational resources whose actual beneficial owners are screened from public view. The National Endowment for Democracy directs funds for such entities beyond US borders. Other government agencies facilitate these cash and resource flows in the West.

    Nevertheless it did not take long to find that massive amounts of money were funnelled to bank accounts of these AstroTurf agents, announced for use as bail bond, etc. At the same time banks on both sides of the great northern border were seizing donations for Canadian truckers protesting government policies. The spokespersons for these demonstrations claimed that they were being held to protest against police brutality and racism, ostensibly in official conduct and economic behaviour. These demonstrations received vast mass media and social media coverage. They were praised by public authorities at state and federal level and in rare instances also by local government officials. During these summers of discontent, much of the population was subject to house arrest; curfews and public assembly restrictions ordered in violation of all principles of due process under US law. In fact, demonstrations attempted to protest the violations of constitutional rights to free speech, due process and freedom of assembly were strictly suppressed by police at all levels while these peculiar demonstrations against police brutality and racism were unobstructed. It became clear that many demonstrators at these events had been bussed in from other locations around the country. Hence local residents were an insignificant part of the action.

    As argued in an earlier article, there is an ideology and a strategy at work here. The religious component is a missionary strategy based on and organized through a “purity” cult. However, the social transformation or re-engineering which is the long-term plan has a serious economic component, too. That economic component is rooted in the theories of eugenics and marginal utility or marginalism. Both of these theories arise with a fundamental ideological change that matured in the Manhattan Project.

    Prior to 1942, the prevailing – by that I mean also in popular culture—model of humans and nature was mechanical. Nature was a machine and humans, including their cerebral –corporeal interfaces, were mechanical. The culmination of this human model can be found in Frederick Taylor’s time-motion studies, explained in his Principles of Scientific Management (1911). There was a critique of this model among the Romantics but this minority was itself marginalized in favour of the apparently modern “systems” theories. Romantic criticism of the emerging industrial society was complex and contradictory since, unlike the Enlightenment, Romanticism was not a concept of social coherence but an attempt to deal with the inherent incoherence of society and human personality. In any event by 1942, the Romantic approaches to humanism were thoroughly marginalized (to use this metaphor again) in favour of systems theory together with an analogue and then digital-calculation model human nature. When the first artificial intelligence (AI) claims were being asserted at US research universities, one of the leading developers of the underlying programming, Joseph Weizenbaum, denounced the cause in Computer Power and Human Reason (1976). In a talk he gave in the late-1990s in his native Germany, he reiterated that the so-called Information Society was fraudulent. Compulsive computation, as he called it, not only erroneously equated data with information. It also substituted calculation for judgment.

    Thus it also followed that the mathematical, compulsive model of the world prevented the judgment that would have condemned the Manhattan Project as the quest for the world’s most nihilistic weapons. Today the computer model of man, the “hackable animal”, whose every act is described and defined on the basis of mathematical modelling, includes the negation of judgment (and of values). Instead this mathematical model of man, merely an aerobic program medium with disposable parts, forms the basis for re-engineering of a society that will be “sustainable and robust”. However, there is a grand deception in this language developed through the appropriation of opposition language in the 1970s and its propagation as reconstituted liberation product—political-economic Velveeta. If the economy is driven by calculation of utility and economic man is governed by this rule, then he—yes, he—must by nature be a calculator and governed by the “laws” of mathematics. From this follows the anti-humanism of Norbert Weiner (Cybernetics, 1948) and Yuval Noah Harari. It is crucial to recall that atomic weaponry and genetic engineering were developed contemporaneously and have continued parallel to this day as elements of a unified weapons suite.

    The so-called UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) ought to be judged first of all by their source. The source of all international policy from the United Nations and its agencies was and remains the executive suite of the world’s largest multinational corporations and the governments they own. The flowery language aside—and one must see it for what it is, marketing (propaganda)—this is the agenda of institutions that have all been sworn to the worldview for which the Manhattan Project stands—atomic domination or annihilation of humanity. From this standpoint the human computer and the digital economy are a continuous fabric with the ARPA Net, now called the Internet, which was designed as sustainable communications in the wake of the two atomic strikes the then US Strategic Air Command had planned to destroy the USSR. That is the immoral foundation of this still proprietary technology that billions have been persuaded is the public sphere and governed by liberal freedoms like speech and assembly.

    While there have been legal and commercial challenges to create some kind of public sphere out of this technological space—something akin to squatting and the doctrine of adverse possession—we have seen that the real owners of the Internet regularly assert their ownership, either through state agencies or corporate entities. We have yet to establish a doctrine that the electrical and communications grids upon which the theory of Internet liberty is premised can actually be articulated, let alone aggressively defended. Instead we are debating as to why private owners and their state agents do not respect archaic and naïve ideas about human liberty. Is this the fallacy of misplaced concreteness?

    There is no enforceable legal regime because there is also no comprehensive economic regime that includes the human as someone more than a computer or machine with legs. There is no biological or moral regime because the argument has been accepted that humans are not animals like the rest of life on the planet and hence no more enemies of Nature than rabbits, fish, birds or fruit trees. Instead the psychopaths of compulsive calculation swoop around the planet to gather, catalogue, patent, digitalize and synthesize everything that could enable their sustainability. Those who fanatically argue for population reduction never appear on the assisted-suicide rosters. Could it be that they don’t mean a reduction of all the population?

    Seemingly parallel—but actually at deniable arm’s length—the CIA sponsored World Economic Forum has not only taken the mantle sewn with SDGs, it has also turned them into the loincloth for the not yet unsustainable to wear called “Diversity – Inclusion – Equity”—DIE, for short. (Their marketing departments certainly advised a different order of wording to avoid the obvious connotation.) The principal sponsors of this exclusive club and cutout for the “sustainable class” coincides with those whose wealth derives from the exact opposite of those terms, if one understands them naively. In fact, the WEF and the wholly owned United Nations apparatus are all beneficiaries of the atomic extortion system created by the Manhattan Project. What D-I-E means is literally what Stanley Kubrick so effectively depicted in Doctor Strangelove. It is the world depicted in Soylent Green. It includes the Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Outbreak. This Hollywood propaganda product has been called “predictive”. It is part of creating the psychological conditions for re-engineering.

    So amid the Woke Crusade, the legally protected vandalism of vast majorities by “pure” fanatics, two phenomena have emerged to coincide with the worldwide counter-insurgency by force of arms (aka the War on Terror and now the war against Russia). These have been a) mass migration from the countries that the Anglo-American Empire and its vassals have been plundering and pillaging since 1975 almost without meaningful opposition at home or abroad and b) abject failure of even the most rudimentary public safety and policing mechanisms to function.

    The rampages since 2020 mainly in the US and the mass illegal migration, in the US and EU but also in countries unfortunate enough to border the imperial plunder and pillage operations everywhere except perhaps Russia and China, are destroying the economic order in which the vast majority of people live their lives. Officially this disruption is a struggle for social justice. However, justice is not a natural condition but one created within definable social contexts. Precisely these contexts, until now, defined by nation-state legal and moral regimes, are under universal attack. The assailants are not secret. The attack on definable social contexts in which local communities can establish and maintain social justice is being organized and conducted at the strategic level by those who own the United Nations and compose the World Economic Forum. The sustainable development goals they pursue are those which clearly permit them to sustain their position and power amidst the destruction of every other social structure that could in any way deviate from the digital-computational vision of life (let us not call it humanity) they have been raised to promote and impose.

    It is clear testimony to the effectiveness of the psychological weapons used that while so much has been scrubbed from the Internet (or blocked by available search engines), one can still find a notorious 60-Minutes interview in which George Schwartz (Soros) unabashedly admits that since the age of 14 (!) he has unrepentantly participated in the deportation of people (also to slavery or death) in order to profit from confiscation of their goods and property. This man has been able to promote himself as a philanthropist while enriching himself for some 79 years by the same methods. His Open Society foundations, in addition to acting as conduits for other government agencies, have served as cadre schools and organizational support to thousands whose business model is the destruction of the citizen framework that has historically guaranteed social justice or any kind of organized cultural and economic life—for power and profit. He is demonstrably one of the major funders of the AstroTurf NGOs that wage the war for “purity” (DIE) throughout the world. Mr Soros is just the most prominent and unabashed of the atomic war elite. The dissolution of the legal and social context for communities, historical nations or states, is being pursued to create a world of statelessness in which no institutions are available to protect human beings, especially from those who are like Soros.

    The removal of policing, whether of borders or city streets, is elemental to this policy. The destruction of the SME sector, one of the COVID-19 objectives, was accelerated by the armed propaganda tactics of the offshore AstroTurf NGOs. There is a complex of weaponry deployed and the US itself has finally become the target of the strategy its owners have pursued for decades in every corner of the empire. Mass migration will flood the labour market in a country already deindustrialised. It will replace furloughed and mRNA poisoned workers and their families with raw muscle from abroad. At the same time the US will be subjected to unique tactics.

    While the EU comprises populations long accustomed to national registration, social management and lack of lethal force among the citizens, the US is a society with a notoriously well-armed population. Moreover its most traditional elements include police, fire brigades, and military veterans indoctrinated with even more patriotism than the average person outside the US can imagine. This poses a threat—mirrored in the regime’s fanatical attempts to prevent Donald Trump from standing in the next POTUS election. The ruling oligarchy has surely been asking itself, especially after growing barracks unrest following the forced mRNA injections, whether its uniformed security forces are sufficiently loyal. Therefore it is very likely that among these “military-aged” illegal immigrant males there are cohorts of trained paramilitary infiltrated into the country, like in Libya or Syria. All this can lead to a major reorganization of the economy based on new forms of forced labour and political repression. Without the SME sector the US population becomes even more dependent upon the oligarchs that own corporations like Amazon. At the same time the barriers between licit and illicit economy are being dissolved/ demolished. When ordinary business has to pay protection only armies will be able to do business.

    The digital war, launched against humans and nature in 1945 with the obliteration of two Japanese cities, opened a new era, the era of global nihilism whose lingua franca is mathematics and whose form of reality is the mathematical model in which humans are mere computational factors. There are cultures on this planet still that resist this compulsive computation and its practice of natural and human degradation. They cannot be reduced to digits or some factor or marginal utility. They are not enemies of Nature but integral elements of Nature. It is necessary to remember that. Those who bombard us with lies about sustainability are only the descendants of the Strangeloves, the Tellers, von Neumanns, Oppenheimers and the psychopathic misanthropes who paid them for creating the means by which they may sustain themselves (they believe) at the expense of annihilating the rest of us. The Sustainable Development Goals and DIE are the immoral basis by which sustainable atomic, biological and chemical war can be waged against Nature and its human members.

  • Read related articles: “Missionary Strategy for Social Engineering” and “Poverty and Grace.”

    • This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Democratic Socialism Will Prevent the Catastrophes

    Capitalism gathered resources — land, labor, and capital to start an industrial revolution that brought prosperity and elevated standards of living to much of the earth’s inhabitants. Once in motion, it generated additional capital that gathered more labor and more resources in a perpetual cycle of increased production that constantly benefitted populations. The achievements did not occur smoothly, sputtering from periodic recessions that eventually solicited government policies to recharge the system.

    Soviet-style socialism did not patiently wait for capitalism to provide capital formation, industrial development, allocation of resources, and prosperity for its population. The Soviets struggled to house, clothe, and feed, in a short time, a deprived population that had barely survived World War II, which led to mismanagement, demotivation, shoddy construction, and misallocation of resources. By not following Karl Marx’s observations, which praised capitalist development and urged its necessity before socialist constructions, the Soviet system doomed itself to failure.

    Capitalism has neared a peak, mostly using capital to generate more capital, unable to comprehend the challenges faced by its actions, going as far as it can go without intensifying the major problems it has created. Slowly and inexorably, the socio-economic system refutes a counter-productive capitalism, that is taking more than it is giving, that is destroying more than it is creating, and that has become more irresponsible than responsible. In the coming decades, cooperation will be preferred to competition, sharing preferred to taking, responsibility to all preferred to irresponsibility to one, socialization preferred to capitalization.

    The anticipated changes do not arrive from ideological, economic, social, or political considerations; they arrive from the realization that the earth is on fire and only a strong-willed and collective community can dampen the conflagration. They come from realizing that private and civic initiatives cannot and will not resolve the forecasted problems, each will protect what they have and deny the challenges — greenhouse gas emissions that heat the atmosphere and petition a handover from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources; climate change that modifies coastlines and arable lands; robotics and artificial intelligence that change the factory floor, its administration, and the composition of the workforce; possibility of nuclear war in an atmosphere of intense international hostility and growing arms races; pandemics from new disease microbes that replicate quickly, defy conventional medicine, and spread beyond borders; security enhancements due to internal conflicts and external hostilities; political, economic and social polarizations that have stimulated populist movements; and population migrations that cause cultural conflicts and reassignment of resources.

    These challenges have subsidiary challenges that each creates – reallocation of food sources and possible shortages in food supply; economic upheavals due to bankruptcies of resource and transportation industries and nations dependent upon fossil fuels; re-orientation of the workforce to prevent severe unemployment; forced arms controls to prevent global wars; sharing of resources to lessen predicted large scale migrations; international supervision and collective research to prevent the spread of disease; and more equal distribution of income to assure all have basics for survival in a quickly changing economic landscape.

    Despite public awareness and concern for all the challenges, inertia is apparent. By default, escaping human extinction will require government intervention in all aspects of the socio-economic system.

    Greenhouse Gas Emissions

    The alarm has sounded. “Higher concentrations of greenhouse gases, and carbon dioxide (CO2) in particular, are causing extra heat to be trapped and average global temperatures to rise. For most of the past 800,000 years the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere was roughly between 200 and 280 parts per million.” In 2022, the global CO2 concentration was recorded at 417.2 ppm.

    Containing carbon emissions demands regulation of all energy sources and severe changes in the air, sea, and ground transportations that use the energy sources. The latter change can be partially fulfilled by a shift to electric vehicles, which, due to elevated costs, will require government subsidies. Substitutes for the engines that drive air and sea transportation are not easily available and these transportation systems may face restrictions. Severe reductions in international transport and other industries that use fossil fuels for locomotion may occur.

    Failure to limit carbon emissions leads to climate change.

    Climate Change

    NASA confirms climate change. “While Earth’s climate has changed throughout its history, the current warming is happening at a rate not seen in the past 10,000 years.” Predictions of heavier rainfall in some areas, droughts in other areas, loss of sea ice, melting glaciers and ice sheets, sea level rise, and more intense heat waves are already happening.

    Linked to addressing the effects of climate warming is the addressing of severe economic problems due to population, agriculture, and labor shifts, and a possible economic decline. The latter might result from lower and changing demand for products in companies engaged in fossil fuel extraction, petroleum refining, fossil energy transport, pipelines, and associated equipment manufacture. Fisheries, tourism, airlines, shipping, animal husbandry, recreation, investment, and plastics industries will also be affected. In directing investments so they factor climate change into their capital distribution, investment powerhouse, Black Rock, has already considered a makeover of the economic system.

    Earth and its inhabitants have proved adaptable, surviving catastrophes and climate changes in previous epochs. The predicted rapidity of this climate change and the scientific analysis that attributes it to carbon emissions make it unlikely that, without more centralized planning and regimentation, the earth will be sufficiently prepared to ameliorate the climate shifts.

    Food Supply

    A UN Report states that “In the next 30 years, food supply and food security will be severely threatened if little or no action is taken to address climate change and the food system’s vulnerability to climate change.” Shifts in arable lands, increases in desert lands, a dwindling fish supply, and possible limits to meat production, due to less grasslands and restrictions on methane gas release from herds, will re-orient the food supply. Warmer water temperatures will cause changes in habitat ranges of many fish and shellfish species. Unless food production and distribution are carefully monitored and controlled, famines will occur. Sustainable farming will become a rule.

    Water Resource

    The United Nations World Water Development Report 2018 concludes,

    The global demand for water has been increasing at a rate of about 1% per year over the past decades as a function of population growth, economic development and changing consumption patterns, among other factors, and it will continue to grow significantly over the foreseeable future….At the same time, the global water cycle is intensifying due to climate change, with wetter regions generally becoming wetter and drier regions becoming even drier. Other global changes (e.g., urbanization, de-forestation, intensification of agriculture) add to these challenges. At present, an estimated 3.6 billion people (nearly half the global population) live in areas that are potentially water-scarce at least one month per year, and this population could increase to some 4.8–5.7 billion by 2050.

    Will private industry be able to regulate and equitably distribute available water resources? Only governments, acting in concert with one another and with international agencies will determine who gets what, when, and where.

    Artificial Intelligence (AI) plus Robotics

    Robotics clears the factory floor of workers and AI, by replacing much administration, clears the offices of managers who solve problems, clarify work schedules, and prepare and manage budgets.

    New software and manufacturing industries will emerge, but will the tools of the new industrial age be used to satisfy the wants and needs of the populace or mainly the profits of entrepreneurs? Will the self-operating machines be able to generate income for all those who have left the factories; will there be sufficient income in the system to purchase all goods in the expanded market? Will supply exceed demand and profits become a mirage? Will AI and extensive Robotics be suitable companions to the workers of a new and less profit-oriented system, where wages can be coupons for a more equitably distributed national income? Arrangement between humans and the new machines reorders democracy and the social order; reorders society into Democratic Socialism.

    Population Migrations

    Already a major problem that has reached crisis proportions, a 2018 World Bank Group report has climate change enhancing the problem. The report “estimates that the impacts of climate change in three of the world’s most densely populated developing regions—sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America—could result in the displacement and internal migration of more than 140 million people before 2050.” A mass movement of that scale will need cooperative government actions and international agreements to prevent political and economic strife and enable continued development in the affected regions.

    Nuclear war

    Nations that rely on fossil fuel exports to maintain their economic system — Middle East, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and others — and nations destabilized by the effects of climate change — water scarcity, agriculture losses, food depletion — that cannot effectively compete and re-orient themselves in the changing world may become aggressive and seek opportunities by engaging in warfare, which could lead to use of weapons of mass destruction. A byproduct of the switch to renewable fuels and climate change — nations unable to compete or adapt in the new economic environment — behooves a means to accommodate those who might resort to military operations to survive. Arms controls and peaceful cooperation will replace arms races and aggressive behaviors.

    Disease and Pestilence

    The spread of the COVID-19 virus serves as a warning for future pandemics. Local actions can contain the pandemic but cannot prevent its spread. Centralized programs that mobilize agencies, institutions, and the public are necessary to coordinate activities and defeat the pandemic. National health plans, which enable every citizen to have adequate medical coverage, will ensure that everyone will be able to seek medical assistance quickly and halt the spread of diseases. Trends to increased isolation, remaining home, and ordering goods and foods online have changed lifestyles and affected commercial activities of retail stores, restaurants, entertainment, sports arenas, local transportation, and suburban malls. With more work from home, rather than from offices, rapid changes in urban environment, industry composition, and employment have appeared and necessitated government assistance to prevent business collapses and severe unemployment.

    The COVID-19 virus pandemic is only the first of other forecasted toxic leaps from animals to humans. The planet has responded well to lifestyle changes and the socio-economic effects induced by the pandemic. The next wave or waves may be more toxic and create more demands on the governing institutions to supply relief to trapped populations.

    Security Enhancements

    Upheavals, scarcities, and economic shifts create masses of marginal and alienated peoples. Those who are not empathetic to the plights of others become their enemies. Terrorism and mass shootings from those who are mentally ill, feel estranged from society, and have been coopted by extremists will grow. Tighter law enforcement, increased surveillance, and privacy invasions will follow. Protection of others will replace self-protection. The placating phrase, “Big brother is watching for you,” will replace the chilling phrase, “Big brother is watching every part of you.” This will be a positive rearrangement of the surveillance that Google and a myriad of Internet-based companies, who acquire vast information about the birth, life, and habits of American citizens, perform daily. Store cameras, street cameras, doorbell cameras, garage cameras, office-building cameras, and public place cameras will be replaced by one big camera, an eye for moral and social obedience.

    Political and Social Polarization

    Modern democracies have given people freedom and hope, more of the air to breathe. In the process, groups have taken advantage of the freedoms and increased their concentration of wealth and power, which has led to oligarchies. Those who feel dominated, unable to express their longings, and feel they have been unfairly sidetracked from prosperity have sought refuge by gathering together in nationalist organizations and populist politics. The coming socialization poses a solution by implementing workplace democracy in which workers have a stake in corporate management and are able to receive a more equitable share of income and wealth. Grassroots politics will take hold; governance from ground up, rather than from top down, will prevail.

    Conclusions

    Natural disaster problems have always sought government intervention. A study found that climate-related disasters in ancient Mesopotamia “forced greater cooperation and a more widespread distribution of power across social sectors.” The convergence of several perils at one time strikes a new chord in domestic and international relations — cooperation before competition, survival of all before the survival of the fittest, limited material wealth before unlimited natural catastrophes.

    From a constant badgering of the soul that associates socialism with central authority and mind control, a resistance to socialized governance has arisen. The words are internalized and their utterance brings a visceral response of scorn and doubt. Central authority? Isn’t the United States dollar the central and primary reserve authority for the global economy, which facilitates the United States borrowing money and arbitrarily imposing painful financial sanctions on Russia, Iran, and any adversary of the U.S. Don’t the U.S. and  Western nations control SWIFT, the centralized Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, “a secure financial messaging service used to execute international transactions among banks,” and gives the U.S. economic and political clout?  Mind control? Isn’t that what nationalist governments, such as the United States, do in their education system and the media giants do as purveyors of misinformation? Those caught in the grip of misinformation can choose between a path that may offend them but allows them to survive or a path that leads them to water up to their chins, figuratively and literally.

    The MAGA contingent, that exclaims “Better Dead than Red” needs to transpose to  “Better Pink than Sink,” the new slogan for the Democratic and Socialist communities, pushed to leadership in order to prevent Capitalism’s latest offering — human extinction.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro in China

    This week’s News on China.

    • Venezuela’s President Maduro in China
    • Tencent unveils AI model
    • Regulating product packaging
    • Small-town bookstores

  • 9/11: The Onslaught of an Endless War on Humanity

    Monday, September 11, 2023 marked the 22nd Anniversary of the NYC 9/11, a day of global mourning, the beginning, or activation, of a crime of biblical proportions like never before in history remembered. Activation stands for onslaught of a colossal War on Humanity. What the small supremacist elite calls War on Terror is nothing less than an endless war on mankind. A war waged by a death cult. The preparation for the war started decades or probably hundred-plus years before.

    Two planes hitting the twin towers of the NYC World Trade Center (WTC) on September 11, 2001 – probably remote-controlled – because most pilots admit this kind of close-curved maneuver necessary to hit the towers was impossible to carry out by a pilot.

    The world was told the perpetrators were a group of some 12 Saudi terrorists. An outright lie. One of the first ones – to be followed by countless others – all in the name of instilling fear to control mankind, to eventually upgrade the war to a killing machine – leading onto the infamous UN Agenda 2030, alias the Great Reset, and the all-digitizing, QR-code -crowned Fourth Industrial Revolution, what Klaus Schwab, WEF’s founder and CEO proudly claims as his brainchild.

    Who else could come up with a new world order based on linearism, digitalized transhumanism, 180-degrees opposite of what life, the universe is – an infinite multitude of dynamism – life in multiple dimensions, evolving naturally as a cog in the universe’s endless wheel?

    Right there on NYC’s 9/11, more than 3000 people were killed. Thousands more followed in the immediate aftermath.

    The third building that collapsed a day later – seemingly out of the blue – was apparently ripe with documented evidence of the crime. Almost silence by the media.

    And to this day, nobody knows what happened to the people on the plane that apparently crashed into an open field in Pennsylvania. No debris and no people were ever found. Here too, no media coverage, no investigation – just destined to be forgotten.

    What happened to the dozens of policemen and firefighters who were near the WTC towers and in their basements, reporting on hearing explosions underground and in the lower strata of the extremely solid constructions just before they collapsed in the well-known style of purposeful city demolition techniques? Most of them were never seen again. “Victims” of the accident?

    Overall, since the NYC-9/11 millions of people were killed in the aftermath of the trigger to the so-called war on terror, which, in fact, was meant to be — and is — a war on humanity.

    The onslaught of wars began. The US invasion of Afghanistan, barely a month after the suspected auto-coup of the 9/11 Twin Towers implosion. The pretext was Osama Bin Laden, an Al Qaeda CIA recruit, who, the George W. Bush Administration lied, having orchestrated the 9/11 attack from Afghanistan, had to be eliminated by invading the mountainous and resources-rich Afghanistan landlocked in the center of Asia.

    Al Qaeda was a CIA creation of the late 1980’s, already then as an instrument to justify the coming war on terror.

    True reasons for invading Afghanistan were several: The Turkmenistan–Afghanistan–Pakistan–India Gas Pipeline, also known as Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline, or TAPI Pipeline, was to bring natural gas from the world’s second largest gas fields in Galkynysh, Turkmenistan, discharging 33 billion cubic meters of gas per year to the Gulf of India. Washington wanted control over this largest gas transit, potentially disrupting US petrol giants market dominance.

    The ever-closer relations between Afghanistan and China were a thorn in the eyes for US political supremacy, and finally the extreme mineral riches especially rare earths, vital for production of electronics and chips used for military equipment as well as for multiple civilian uses.

    Afghanistan was the first “leg” on the endless “War on Terror”.

    The Afghanistan invasion was followed by the May 2003 Iraq invasion, one of the hydrocarbon richest countries in the Middle East, with a leader, Saddam Hussein, who was at the point of defying OPEC rules of trading hydrocarbons in US-dollars only. Saddam wanted to trade Iraq’s hydrocarbons in Euros. Iraq was also labeled an al Qaeda terrorist country.

    A “Shock and Awe” attack should eliminate the country’s leader and bring Iraq to her knees before the almighty US of A. By now we know that it did not exactly happen that way. It was probably also planned as an endless war.

    Iraq – another “War on Terror” – emanating from the 9/11 auto-attack.

    Syria. From 2011 forward Washington’s secret service created a “civil war” applying the principle of divide to conquer. In September 2014 the conflict culminated in the US intervening, siding with the [US-created] Syrian rebels, fighting the Islamic State, the so-called “Operation Inherent Resolve” in what was labeled international war against the Islamic State.

    In truth, Washington wanted to get rid of the highly popular and democratically elected Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad. Again, the interest was control over the large Syrian oil and mineral resources.

    Also, under the flag of “War on Terror”.

    Coincidentally – though, there are no coincidences – the Ukraine war also started in [February] 2014, by the US instigated coup against the democratically elected Viktor Yanukovych. Remember Victoria Nuland’s recorded phone conversation with the US Ambassador in Kiev – “f**k Europe”?  And the recent admission by NATO boss, Jens Stoltenberg, that the Ukraine War started already in 2014?

    Other US-initiated wars and conflicts followed.  In Sudan in 2006 / 2007 after the broken Darfur Peace Agreement; in Pakistan in 2011 under the pretext and on the heels of several targeted killings in Karachi, leaving hundreds of people dead. US presence never left the country, as Pakistan was attempting establishing closer relations with China.

    To the “war on terror” may also be counted the October 2011 US / French / NATO lynching of Libyan President, Muammar Gaddafi, leaving the country as of this day in a state of constant civil strife and mafia-like killings and enslavement of refugees. Gaddafi was about to introduce the Gold Dinar as a unified currency for Africa to liberate Africa from French and US/K currency exploitation.

    The NYC 9/11 was — and is — a war instrument that until this day has not been fully recognized as what it was supposed to be – a precursor to possibly the planned final phase for civilization as we know it, the UN Agenda 2030, alias The Great Reset, leading to the full digitization of humanity into transhumanism and simply a One World Order (OWO), run by full control via digitization of everything, complemented with Artificial Intelligence (AI).

    It is the plan. A scary plan, a plan with the purpose of instilling fear. Thus, it is hoped, making the population defenseless against a tyrannical take-over.

    This plan will not materialize.

    Lest we forget, it is important to point out that there was another 9/11 “event” 50 years back that took place in Chile. It also killed instantly hundreds of people, and over the following 16 years, until General Pinochet’s demise in March 1990, tens of thousands of people disappeared and were killed.

    The purpose of the US-instigated and Henry Kissinger executed military coup in Chile was to get rid of the “uncomfortable” democratically elected, socialist-leaning, President Salvador Allende so that the United States could implement and test a “Chicago Boys” designed neoliberal economic system to run an entire country. Later to be repeated throughout Latin America, a remedy to make sure Latin America would keep their US “Backyard” status, for a long time to come.

    The “Chicago Boys” were a group of Chilean and international economists, most of whom were educated in the 1970s and 1980s by arch-conservative Milton Friedman at the Department of Economics of the University of Chicago.

    Also, not to forget, the major coup planner and instigator, was the then Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, under Richard Nixon’s presidency. Kissinger later received the Nobel Peace Prize for his alleged peace efforts in the Vietnam war which he also “directed”, and following his ordered bombing of Cambodia and Laos to bloody rubble with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of deaths. Remember the infamous “Killing Fields” in Cambodia?  Well, that was also Henry Kissinger, arguably the most notorious war criminal still alive.

    Earlier this year, Henry Kissinger turned 100. This could be natural old age, or it could be old age enhanced by adrenochrome.

    Is it sheer coincidence that the Santiago Chile and the NYC Nine-Eleven massacres are exactly 50 years apart? A half a century.

    There are no coincidences. Just connecting the dots.

    As a reminder 911 is the emergency-call number in the United States. That is hardly a coincidence.

    Kissinger is a close buddy, ally and advisor of Klaus Schwab, CEO of the controversial World Economic Forum (WEF). As of this day, Kissinger’s advice is sought by leaders around the world.

    In July 2023, Kissinger was received by China’s President Xi Jinping, who apparently greeted Kissinger with a comment, “old friends” like him will never be forgotten. The irony is subtle. The US-initiated meeting was apparently meant to mend frayed ties between Washington and Beijing.

    A tremendous attribute for President Xi. He is always open for initiatives potentially leading to improved relations, harmony, and peace.

    Back to NYC-9/11

    What we, especially the western world’s humanity, currently are living is a colossal crime never seen and recorded before in known history.

    After 9/11 for many, and for a long time for most, flying has become a nightmare and a huge business for a few. The long security lines, the manual checking – often more reminiscent of groping – of passengers, who often for some medical reasons, have a hard time passing through the control machines without the red-light flashing.

    The first US Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge and associates, became insanely rich by launching the manufacturing of the airport security machines that were imposed worldwide, and which are being constantly upgraded.

    Backtracking 

    9/11 sparked “wars on terror” – alias on humanity — that may have had several phases of activation.

    The Club of Rome, first unofficially meeting in 1956 in Rome, was formally created in 1968 as an initiative of David Rockefeller with Aurelio Peccei, Alexander King and Dr. Mamphela Ramphele, founder and President of Africa’s Agang party, and others.

    The Club of Rome issued in 1972 the infamous report “Limits to Growth” (LTG), arguing against continued economic and population growth, setting the first marks for a massive eugenist agenda, a population reduction down to about 500 million people from today’s 8 billion-plus, a reduction of about 95%.

    Dennis Meadows, one of the main authors of the Club of Rome’s “The Limits of Growth”, is a member of the World Economic Forum. He propagates as of this day massive population reduction. See this.

    This eugenist plan is as of this day the blueprint for what we are living. It is the core for UN Agenda 2030, the Great Reset and All-digitization.

    From it was born covid, the worldwide coercive vaxx mandate, possibly more lab-made “viruses” to come, as well as the climate change hoax, justifying geoengineering of weather, causing droughts, floods, never-seen-before hurricanes and tornadoes, Directed Energy Weapons (DEW) caused forest and other fires, like the destruction of Lahaina on Maui, and others – all bringing about poverty, famine, misery, and death.

    Closing the circle with NYC’s 9/11 setting the stage 22 years ago.

    There is no waiting. We must resist with heart and soul and peaceful spirits. We shall never forget 9/11 and what it triggered, and we shall overcome.

  • We the Targeted: How the Government Weaponizes Surveillance to Silence Its Critics

    Ever since Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his groundbreaking “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, the Deep State has been hard at work turning King’s dream into a living nightmare.

    The end result of the government’s efforts over the past 60 years is a country where nothing ever really changes, and everyone lives in fear.

    Race wars are still being stoked by both the Right and the Left; the military-industrial complex is still waging profit-driven wars at taxpayer expense; the oligarchy is still calling the shots in the seats of government power; and the government is still weaponizing surveillance in order to muzzle anti-government sentiment, harass activists, and terrorize Americans into compliance.

    This last point is particularly disturbing.

    Starting in the 1950s, the government relied on COINTELPRO, its domestic intelligence program, to neutralize domestic political dissidents. Those targeted by the FBI under COINTELPRO for its intimidation, surveillance and smear campaigns included: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, the Black Panther Party, John Lennon, Billie Holiday, Emma Goldman, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Felix Frankfurter, and hundreds more.

    In more recent decades, the powers-that-be have expanded their reach to target anyone who opposes the police state, regardless of their political leanings.

    Advances in technology have enabled the government to deploy a veritable arsenal of surveillance weapons in order to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” perceived threats to the government’s power.

    What this adds up to is a world in which, on any given day, the average person is now monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

    Consider just a small sampling of the ways in which the government is weaponizing its 360 degree surveillance technologies to flag you as a threat to national security, whether or not you’ve done anything wrong.

    Flagging you as a danger based on your feelings. Customs and Border Protection is reportedly using an artificial intelligence surveillance program that can detect “sentiment and emotion” in social media posts in order to identify travelers who may be “a threat to public safety, national security, or lawful trade and travel.”

    Flagging you as a danger based on your phone and movements. Cell phones have become de facto snitches, offering up a steady stream of digital location data on users’ movements and travels.

    Flagging you as a danger based on your DNA. By accessing your DNA, the government will soon know everything else about you that they don’t already know: your family chart, your ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to follow orders or chart your own course, etc.

    Flagging you as a danger based on your face. Facial recognition software aims to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business.

    Flagging you as a danger based on your behavior. Rapid advances in behavioral surveillance are not only making it possible for individuals to be monitored and tracked based on their patterns of movement or behavior, including gait recognition (the way one walks), but have given rise to whole industries that revolve around predicting one’s behavior based on data and surveillance patterns and are also shaping the behaviors of whole populations.

    Flagging you as a danger based on your spending and consumer activities. With every dollar we spend, we’re helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money, and how we spend our time.

    Flagging you as a danger based on your public activities. Private corporations in conjunction with police agencies throughout the country have created a web of surveillance that encompasses all major cities in order to monitor large groups of people seamlessly, as in the case of protests and rallies.

    Flagging you as a danger based on your social media activities. As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are increasingly investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior.

    Flagging you as a danger based on your social network. Not content to merely spy on individuals through their online activity, government agencies are now using surveillance technology to track one’s social network, the people you might connect with by phone, text message, email or through social message, in order to ferret out possible criminals.

    Flagging you as a danger based on your car. License plate readers are mass surveillance tools that can photograph over 1,800 license tag numbers per minute, take a picture of every passing license tag number and store the tag number and the date, time, and location of the picture in a searchable database, then share the data with law enforcement, fusion centers and private companies to track the movements of persons in their cars.

    Flagging you as a danger based on your political views. The Church Committee, the Senate task force charged with investigating COINTELPRO abuses in 1975, concluded that the government had carried out “secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power.” The report continued: “Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles… Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials.” Nothing has changed since then.

    Now the government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from these mass spying programs as long as we’ve done nothing wrong.

    Don’t believe it.

    The government’s definition of a “bad” guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale.

    Moreover, there is a repressive, suppressive effect to surveillance that not only acts as a potentially small deterrent on crime but serves to monitor and chill lawful First Amendment activity, and that is the whole point.

    Weaponized surveillance is re-engineering a society structured around the aesthetic of fear.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the police state wants us silent, servile and compliant.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Criminal Insanity of Climate Change

    Climate change – climate change – climate change – the world is burning. The Global North with the CO2 emission is the culprit. Weather maps in Southern Europe and Australia are deep red. Add an invented degree or two, and they are going to be black.

    News are talking about 48 to 50 and more degrees C in Spain, Southern Italy, Sicily, Greece. Scary. Hardly anybody notices and reports that the temperatures are largely exaggerated by the media, to cause a fear and guilt effect. Possibly a precursor to heat-lockdowns.

    Meteorologists are part of the lie-game. Often, for fear and shock effect, they are reporting ground temperatures instead of air temperatures which are usually measured 2 meters above the ground and are typically 10 or more degrees C lower than ground temps.

    It is like MK-Ultra has been socialized: When people see the deep-red-colored weather map and are being told that temperatures are at record heights, in the upper forties into the fifties, they feel the burning heat, they feel it is much hotter than other years, when, in fact, it is not.

    This is the map that climate researchers themselves use.

    TEMPERATURE DEVIATIONS FOR LAND AND SEA, APRIL 2023 relative to the temperature normal, the average for the years 1991–2020. In this map, which uses a clearly indicated and color-coded temperature scale that the scientists themselves use, the temperature deviations we reported about over the last few months from North and South America, Central and Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, with hard-hit Mongolia, India, and Australia, are confirmed. This is despite the fact that critics argue it consistently shows higher temperatures due to non-representative and then tampered with measurement data. Source and map: NOAA

    This is a list of heatwaves going back 500 years, demonstrating that worldwide temps vary widely and that there were much “hotter” years even in the past 20 to 30 years, than 2023. See this.

    Since 2020, with the onset of the infamous UN Agenda 2030, the news and fake news about the heat, the man-made CO2-provoked “climate-change” reaches new heights. To press that point, forest fires are not just made by paid arsonists, but by military grade Directed Energy Weapons (DEW) and other means of Environmental Modifications (ENMOD) technologies.

    It is called geoengineering – and what we are witnessing today, in the last three years and even way before, is an outright war with highly sophisticated weaponized laser-directed electromagnetic energy. The energy is so strong, it blows up entire buildings on impact, with towers of flames, but it spares trees, blows up and burns cars, but not tires – and also boats on the sea, far from burning forests.

    This is how the beautiful Hawaiian island, Maui, and her major city Lahaina was destroyed. For more on this – see further down.

    Directed Energy Weapons are defined as electromagnetic systems capable of converting chemical or electrical energy to radiated energy, then these energies are fired by laser beams with the speed of light on specific targets. DEWs can produce forces that range from deterrent, to damaging, to destructive.

    In parallel with these horrendous heat waves come typhoons, hurricanes and tsunami-like floodings around the world, especially but not exclusively, in the northern hemisphere. Most of them are also the result of geoengineering. Scandinavia was hit by deluge-like rains, causing floods throughout Norway and Denmark.

    Extreme floodings were also experienced in Japan and northeastern China. Beijing registered almost simultaneously record heat waves, closely followed by extreme typhoon-caused torrential rains and consequential flooding. Natural? You bet.

    Just a thought: The self-styled masters of the universe think linear. That is what their minds have been trained for. What if these weather and climate modifications they now carry out on specific – always more diverse – targets, develop their own dynamic, since they are not linear, but, yes, dynamic – and have long-lasting effects much different from those intended by the Globalist Cult? – Just saying.

    Now while everybody screams “climate-change, climate-change, climate-change”, always referring to man-made CO2 emissions, on July 6, 2023, the Aviation Tracking System, “Flightradar 24”, registered a record number ever of civilian airplanes in the air – some 134,384 airplanes. This does not include military airplanes and other non-civilian flights.

    See this.

    Have you noticed, airlines put on your ticket or your flight reservation how many kilograms of CO2 your flight produces – and so far, mostly on a voluntary basis they suggest you pay for the global warming or climate change “damage” you cause. Nobody has been able to provide a clear answer what happens with this money.

    Maybe the money helps compensating for the airlines’ losses during the covid hoax, or it flows into budgets of governments. The same way traffic fines do. Speeding infractions are not reduced by the fines, nor are the numbers of civilian flights reduced by the CO2-emission charge.

    Have you noticed, the media must have a restraining order not to speak about military CO2 emission, let alone war-emissions. Just imagine, CO2 emissions of the Ukraine war and other armed conflicts around the globe, dwarfs all civilian car and industrial CO2 emissions worldwide. But nobody talks about it. Very strange.

    Back to DEWs and other ENMOD technologies. This science has been developed since the 1940s and in the last 80 years has become highly sophisticated, resulting in a myriad of technologies, capable of causing unspeakable damage, destroying infrastructure, housing, forests – and lives of all sentient beings, including animals and humans.

    These technologies are very diverse and range from DEW, to the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP, a US Airforce program, as well as Scalar electromagnetic wave weaponry, similar to DEW – and more.

    There is a vast literature on the subject but virtually no media coverage.

    HAARP array of antennas. Gakona, Alaska

    It is worth noting that the HAARP program was acknowledged by a CBC Program as early as 1996

    Video HAARP CBC. Weather Control

    Why Is It So Massively Used?

    People are spellbound – have no idea what is going on and why. They cannot understand that such all-destructive and killing disasters are actually man-made, by technologies intent of simulating “climate change”. These people, the Globalist Cabal, who have sold their soul to the devil cannot be called humans anymore.

    Maybe part of the answer provides the case of Australia – which is committed to the UN Agenda 2030. It supports the implementation of radical changes in the central role of land ownership and natural resources over the next decade.

    In this context, Aussi authorities are developing a series of smart city initiatives, promising locations full of “sustainable” programs.

    Could it be that the current forest fires across Australia – and across the world for that matter – are part of this plan? What is the hidden agenda? The link below provides more details of Australia’s bushfire ‘crisis’, including weather / climate geoengineering, the proposed CLARA high-speed rail network and the connection to the smart city agenda led by the fully compromised United Nations. See this and this: Australia under Fire – Environmental Warfare and the Climate Change Deception.

    See also this by Jeff Philips and this.

    A similar question, why and how is Lahaina of Maui and much of this paradisical Hawaiian island destroyed, with so far officially close to 100 deaths – and thousand missing?  The unofficial but closer-to-the-truth figure, is up to thousand and more deaths. And the devastation and the count goes on.

    The rumor mill about the destruction of Maui is diverse. One of the more consistent gossips has it that the Lahaina and Maui fires are meant to depopulate Maui and pave the way for a buyout of all property owners – for a penny on the dollar – by the multi-multi billionaires. It is living in paradise when the shit storm hits.

    Here are terrifying images on how “paradise” became hell and this.

    Maui, a paradise island, might be bought for pennies on the dollar… privatized paradise for the powerful financial interests.

    And for more on Maui you may also want to see this (video of more than an hour).

    Apparently some 90% of the people of Maui know what is going on, that it has nothing to do with the climate change hoax, but was a direct assault on their paradise island. See this.

    Who are actors behind the DEW attacks? Were the US and State governments involved?

    There are several, speculative answers, but they are food for reflection for those who are somewhat familiar with UN Agenda 2030 and the Great Reset — and with Klaus Schwab’s (WEF) dream of the all digitized Fourth Industrial Revolution.

    The government of Hawaii states as goal of the destruction is the rebuilding to make the entire island of Maui the first Smart Island. They want the entire island governed by Artificial Intelligence (AI), as outlined in the Hawaii Digital government summit of 2023 that they have planned to host on September 25, 2023 on Maui.

    Plans to Implement a Digital AI Government over Hawaii

    See this and this and this, Maui Island of Hawaii, a case study.

    Dr. Rosalie Bertell, author of Planet Earth: Latest Weapon of War, says:

    While the earth’s human civic community has been trying to rid itself of nuclear weapons over the last 65 years, some economically developed nations have quietly moved into the realm of geo-warfare. Geo-weaponry has recently been introduced to the public as a ‘new’ high tech way to mitigate the effects of ‘global warming’, and it is being called ‘geo-engineering’…defined as planetary-scale environmental engineering of our atmosphere: that is, manipulating our weather, our oceans, and our home planet itself.

    What is planned now are climate and weather wars, wars in which earthquakes and volcanoes, floods and droughts, hurricanes and monsoon rains will play a role. (See this.)

    Does this make living today on Mother Earth scarier? Is it fear-mongering for pushing the Agenda 2030? – or is it real?

    In any case, Do Not Fear, But Stand UP – as We, the People, against this unhuman atrocity, in unison and solidarity and in a mind of PEACE – not anger, not aggression, but PEACE. This is the only way we can defeat the drive to the abyss – and start afresh. But the time is NOW.

    • First published in Global Research

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Evolved Homo Sapiens (and the frustrated “ID”)

    As we move further into the 21st century, shared delusions about human complementarity with robots, “artificial intelligence”– or even the bizarre fantasy of a forthcoming “trans-human” fusion with AI (Ray Kurzweil’s “Singularity” 1 ) — are becoming all-pervasive.  In a previous article, “Homo Sapiens: Not a Machine!,” I offered a trenchant critique of this growing technophilia, with its false definition of the human organism as just another machine.  Furthermore, in my article “The Blank Slate: A Liberal-Totalitarian Dogma,” I warned of the now-prevailing notion that human behavior is entirely programmable (rather than directed by bio-psychological drives).

    For decades now, post-modernist academics have indoctrinated students in the notion that scientific claims about a shared human bio-psychology are intrinsically biased and reductionist, and that a universal human nature does not exist(!). We may recall that Orwell and others repeatedly warned that, when an absurdity is repeatedly proclaimed indefinitely (and when there are sanctions against skeptics), most people will eventually come to believe it.

    Admittedly, in the nineteenth century the deliberate distortion of Darwin’s thought into a pernicious Social Darwinism was used to justify a brutal capitalism (Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest), and with it came rationalizations for racist and sexist policies. 2  But in our present time, the ideology that humans are programmable machines, rather than biological organisms with drives and needs, is entirely compatible with a totalitarian Corporate State.

    In the 18th century, the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus introduced a brilliant taxonomic system for Kingdom Animalia.  Although not explicitly Darwinian in its design, his system seemed to indicate that species emerged from ancestral larger groups (and therefore that an evolutionary process of “descent” produced new species).  When Darwin, having spent twenty-years of painstaking research, finally published Origin of the Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), the ensuing heated debate and uproar testified to a very real Scientific Revolution in the understanding of what human beings really are–and where they came from.  Christian theologians were outraged and aghast: was the whole story of Creation in the Book of Genesis to be discarded?  (Unfortunately not: it certainly survives today, notably re-marketed as Creation “Science.”)

    Within Linnaeus’ static taxonomy was the clear implication of evolutionary change over time (as later explained in Darwin’s theory of natural selection).  Over vast geological periods, Kingdom Animalia became subdivided into vertebrates and non vertebrates. Within the former eventually emerged several Classes, Mammalia being the one relevant to this article (intra-uterine gestation, lactation, four-chambered heart, etc.).  But various Orders of mammals were to gradually branch off, among them Order Primates (grasping hands with opposable thumb, prolonged dependency of offspring, binocular vision, etc.).   And from there?  Several million years ago, the Family of Hominids further split, one line leading to our genus Homo and later Homo sapiens (bipedal locomotion, freed hands for tool-use, dramatically enlarged cerebral cortex, and concealed ovulation). 3

    By the mid-20th century, education and public knowledge not only recognized that humans are first and foremost an animal species, with specific drives and needs, but also that Freud’s emphasis on the primacy of our drive-psychology–and the neurotic consequences of its denial and repression–was valid. 4  Sadly, our society has by now regressed to the extent of ignoring our animal origins and nature.  Classical Freudian theory is now completely out-of-fashion.

    In classic psychoanalytic theory, the primal core of our survival-oriented drives was simply labeled the “id” (latin).  This designation was chosen by James Strachey, the preeminent translator of the complete Standard Edition of Freud’s writings.  The “id,” hardly mysterious, is nothing more than a label for the combined survival-drives dominating human motivation (hunger, sex/reproduction, aggressive drive to master the natural world and its threats, etc.).  (Oddly, even in popular psychoanalytic books, it is often confused with Freud’s conception of “the Unconscious,” which by definition contains material which we have repressed, such as forbidden desires and fantasies and traumatic memories, and which only come to our awareness through our dreams, Freudian slips, and “free associations”).

    How much time do we as humans actually devote to subconscious sexual fantasies, efforts to find an intimate sexual partner (so as to assuage the urgent frustration of unfilled sexual desire), as well as to aggressive outlets in violent sports (and TV) and in domination and control of others, including animals? 5

    It is simply incredible that, with the exception of our present-day acceptance of homosexuality, the primacy of sexual drives and needs has become an almost–taboo subject.  Seemingly a throwback to Puritan asceticism, the prevailing attitude today just assumes that the “human machine,” however inadequate in its struggle to overcome “irrational” emotions and urgent desires, will eventually conform entirely to, and even fuse with, systemized Artificial Intelligence.

    END NOTES

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Vacation Autopsy

    There’s something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes yet simple in its effect: on board the Nadir (especially at night, when all the ship’s structured fun and reassurances and gaiety ceased) I felt despair.
    — David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I will Never do Again, 1997

    Leop­ards break in­to the tem­ple and drink all the sac­ri­fi­cial ves­sels dry; it keeps hap­pen­ing; in the end, it can be cal­cu­lat­ed in ad­vance and is in­cor­po­rat­ed in­to the rit­ual.
    — Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms, 1931

    This will constitute my end of summer report. Not that anyone commissioned an end of summer report, or even that there really is something called an end of summer report. But as an American in Norway, I have had to adjust (more than even in France) to this idea of an almost obligatory vacation somewhere in this period (brief in Norway) called summer. I think when David Foster Wallace wrote A Supposedly Fun Thing I will Never do Again (The Atlantic, 1997) he about covered the vulgarities of American culture on holiday. And he touched on the specific nature of packaged Ocean Cruises. So fast forward some 25 plus years and certain of the irrationalities of leisure time have shifted. That shift, though, is subsumed by the massive intensification of the war on the working class, and holiday and not. It was certainly there in 1997, but today it is naked. It is overt and even become a part of the marketing of tourist destinations. It is now the Kafka leopards in the temple.

    Class was never Foster Wallace’s thing, and so while his instincts were keen, his politics were muddy.  Today, though, this assault on the working class (and underclass) is reaching, I think, unprecedented intensity and magnitude. Everything about the so called digitalization of life is actually a form of attack on workers and the poor. Literally everything. Since I did a lot of driving on this vacation I could not escape the weaponizing of parking costs. Everything to do with parking, the permits, the fees, the meters, the lack of spaces TO park, all of it is targeting those not driving expensive cars into reserved special spaces, spaces that are not for use except by them, the brahmins, the aristocracy. The rest of us can circle and circle and circle and circle and circle for shockingly long periods of time searching for an empty space. It is a cliche, of course, kids crying in the back seat, kids needing to use the restroom, not to mention the general atmosphere of hostility in what is supposed to be an escape from stress and anxiety. This, on a larger scale, is mirrored by the private jet industry vs commercial airline flights.

    There  are never enough public toilets at amusement parks or resorts. They get by with the absolute fewest possible allowed by law. Nothing is free. N O T H I N G. The sense now is that those paying these extortionist level costs should be grateful. After all, you are one of the lucky ones, you got to come and suffer this assault on mind and body.

    You can reserve a hotel room online, pay online and then check into said hotel, go to your room all without speaking to a single human being. There is a new feature in hotels involved this key-card system. To turn on lights you have to slip the card into the holder by the entrance. But at night, when you want to charge your phone or hearing aids, or computer, you can’t do it because the electricity is turned off when the lights go off.  The hotel is saving on costs, you see, anyway they can. And it’s always ‘green’. The excuse is always we must sacrifice for the environment.  One night we were awoken at 2 am by an emergency announcement to immediately leave the building because of fire. Of course, once outside, holding half asleep kids, in their underwear, it turned out to be, as the front desk put it, a computer malfunction. During this 8 day trip the news was mostly about ‘boiling earth’.  Turns out nearly all of it was exaggerated, fires in Greece were arson, the floods in Nova Scotia affected only a tiny part of the island, and reports of forty plus degrees in Lyon, Palermo, Wyoming, were all simply lies. But then everything today is a lie. And that begins with the climate change hysteria (fast on the heels of Covid and Ukraine).

    Now I should add that all of these online and digital procedures, from reserving a hotel room, to buying a coke at the local pizza joint often don’t work. The platform or page is badly designed and there is, literally, nobody to ask for help. There is zero support. You have simply, sometimes, to abandon the idea of two nights at this hotel, or just leave the registration unfinished and go ahead anyway and hope for the best.

    Everything must be pre-ordered. Nothing is spontaneous anymore. And this sense of determinism, as it were, dulls the excitement of the entire adventure, especially for the young. This, all this digital payment and reservation and ordering, is exhausting. For older people it is often impossible, and highly stressful. They stay home. And that’s the idea, really. For children, I suspect there is a lingering unconscious anxiety associated with ideas of ‘fun’, or rather with officially sanctioned organized ‘fun’. My children had a great time, but I suspect they noticed the adults were highly stressed.

    …one could not avoid the suspicion that ‘free time’ is tending toward its own opposite, and is becoming a parody of itself. Thus unfreedom is gradually annexing ‘free time’, and the majority of unfree people are as unaware of this process as they are of the unfreedom itself.
    — Theodor Adorno, Free Time, 1991

    The growing restrictions on movement (under cover, again, of climate change or boiling earth or whatever) are obviously an intensification of control. The idiocy of the fifteen minute city is but one example. But here one bumps into tourism.  Everyone hates tourism. Even tourist operators, who make their living from tourism, hate it. Even tourists hate other tourists. And this concept, ‘the tourist’ is worth unpacking a bit. Traveling is invaluable for the young. And even the Euro or North American white backpacker has more positives to their endeavour than negatives. The spectre of white privilege visiting the colonies still exists, or the echoes of it, and certainly the institutional aid, whether Church or NGO is basically another form of colonial appropriation, but the answer to these issues does not lie in allowing the ruling class exclusive access to the world.

    Does tourism and/or postmodernity, conceived in the most positive possible way as a (perhaps final) celebration of distance, difference, or differentiation, ultimately liberate consciousness or enslave it? Is modernity, as constituted in the system of attractions and the mind of the tourist, a “utopia of difference,” to use Van den Abbeele’s energetic phrase~~Or does it trap consciousness in a seductive pseudo-empowerment, a prison house of signs?
    — Dean MacCannell,  The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, August 31, 2013

    Well, post modernity aside, this is the question. And the answer has to do with several expressions of ‘tourism’. The traveller, the visitor to distant lands (Romans allocated several months each year to visit relatives in the provinces; a kind of ur-vacation time slot) and the seeker of otherness and cultural expansion is something that I think is inborn almost. People (peoples) have always migrated. People have always travelled and returned, too. The figure of the exile is hugely significant in modernist art. I might argue it is hugely significant in all art. Homesickness being one of the themes of all artworks. This is important to distinguish from corporate mass profit based tourism. Such tourism actually is designed to remove any sense of the unfamiliar. It is designed to remove anything that might expand one’s consciousness or lead to actual experience. It is designed to give the average affluent Westerner an ersatz experience of owning slaves.

    There are countless studies on the exploitation of resorts located in the global south. And the strange tribalism of the ugly American (or Canadian or British, or German et al) on vacation. The very idea of pre-packaged tours of limited duration carries an unsavoury quality of white supremacism because the destinations are almost always poor countries crippled by western debt and restructuring. It promotes the ugly trinket industry, and the colonial displays of local authentic natives and handicrafts. I mean , it literally, in places today, is nearly identical to the ‘human zoos’ of the fin de siecle.

    But there are less vulgar expressions of holiday travel. The post 60s American tendency, or corrective of sorts, was a search for simplicity and naturalness. Vacations included camping, natural fibre clothing, and sometimes fishing or even hunting. This was the Sierra Club idea of re-visiting ‘nature’. But all of this was shaped by the forces of marketing. And it was highly bureaucratised, with a fair amount of cost for permits, etc.  And not only marketing, but more sinister themes or narratives were being imposed on the public. This was also the era (or first era, really) of the overpopulation fanatics. Those readers of Pogo who bought into a fear of a Soylent Green future. This era constituted the precursors for global control of the wild. The domestication of nature became a given, and cloaked in a brochure prose akin to that selling cemetery plots.

    Actually, self-discovery through a complex and sometimes arduous search for an Absolute Other is a basic theme of our civilization, a theme supporting an enormous literature: Odysseus, Aeneas, the Diaspora, Chaucer, Christopher Columbus, Pilgrim’s Progress, Gulliver, Jules Verne, Western ethnography, Mao’s Long March. This theme does not just thread its way through our literature and our history. It grows and develops, arriving at a kind of final flowering in modernity. What begins as the proper activity of a hero (Alexander the Great) develops into the goal of a socially organized group (the Crusaders), into the mark of status of an entire social class (the Grand Tour of the British “gentleman”), eventually becoming universal experience (the tourist).
    — Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, August 31, 2013

    MacCannell’s perspective is interesting but also reductive to the point of neglect. Still, it makes a point. And if Odysseus (per Adorno) was the original bourgeois exile, the Aeneas was the original tourist. The Crusades, of course, ushered in Euro racism under cover of the Church, and by extension, later, slavery and occupation and land theft. Resource theft. The Grand Tour of the British (it’s always the British) was the precursor of Carnival Cruise lines, and the precursor to ‘safaris’ in Africa today (for white Europeans). In between was the hard fought wars of independence for African states, the assistance of the USSR and the obstacle that was the interests of western capital. Remember Dick Cheney called Mandela a terrorist into the 90s. Orson Welles once said whenever something becomes folkloric it has died. He was thinking of bullfighting which no longer was part of the religious/ cultural makeup of Spain. He noted he cannot go to the Corrida only to see Japanese tourists in the first row with their cameras. Today, there are very few spots on earth where some aspect of this folkloric corruption does not exist. But there ‘are’ places. There are even places all over Europe free of U.S. and U.K. tourism. Hungary’s Lake Balaton, for example, once the site of Communist vacationers, from all over the Soviet Union, is today hugely popular with Hungarian families and largely vacationers from Eastern and Central Europe. It is a bit of a throw back to mid century ideas of summer holiday. It is not a resort for the elite, but it retains its own elegance.

    But then, today, there has also been a transformation of the idea of leisure. Leisure under capitalism has always resembled work but today they are often positively impossible to separate. The destruction of unions, the drastic contraction of industrial labor sites (in the US and North America), but in the EU as well, has made ‘industry’ a kind of touristic attraction itself. Like some nearly extinct species, an old steel mill is given guided tours with commentary in several languages.  Tours of old factories, and photography shows of abandoned industrial parks or quarries or mines is now commonplace. Industrial activity is now hid, much as death is hid by the aforementioned mortuary business. And that those highly extractive and invasive mining or industrial factories are now located in remote corners of usually very poor countries is never mentioned. Nor that the cameras around the neck of these tourists have lenses made by Zeiss or Nikon, et al. The making of just the lenses involves melting of silica glass at very high temperatures (lenses used as well for microscopes, digital signage and TV flat screens) that is produced by chain reaction and is massively energy inefficient. And highly toxic. Among the minerals used, variously for various photographic products, include antimony, arsenic, barium, bromine, platinum, tungsten, palladium, mercury and indium. And quite a few more, actually. But you get the idea. The disposal of these chemicals is done exclusively in the very poorest countries in the world.

    As a sort of side bar, it is interesting to note the changes in the funeral parlour business. New green start ups are taking a huge chunk of the business now. After all, ‘burials are polluting’. Here from a piece on trends in Canada:

    Lucille Gora is 73 and lives alone on the outskirts of Amherst, N.S. According to StatsCan, single-person households like hers are now the most common in the country—it’s a demographic that has more than doubled in the past 35 years. Since she doesn’t have children, Gora has been taking on end-of-life planning on her own. “I don’t want anyone else to have to do it, and I certainly don’t want them to do it in a way I don’t like,” she says. Gora, who’s retired from a career in health care, is very familiar with issues of death and dying and adamant that she doesn’t want to “be put in a hole in the ground.” “Cemeteries are polluting,” she says. “They put all sorts of chemicals like formaldehyde into the ground, and we’re running out of space anyway.” Some studies estimate the carbon emissions of a typical funeral—from chopping down trees to manufacturing a casket to transporting said casket to the cemetery—to be upwards of 245 kilograms of CO2, which is akin to driving 4,000 kilometres. Then there’s the cost. Like most real estate, cemetery burials in Canada have skyrocketed in price: In Amherst, a plot alone costs up to $10,000; a plot in Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery starts at $31,000. Caskets range from $1,000 to $10,000. Opening and closing up a grave for burial is about $1,500, and a grave marker or head-stone can run up to $3,000. Fees for the ceremonies themselves vary widely based on location, size, required staff and even season, but the average funeral bill—obituary, church rental, flowers, reception—is between $5,000 and $10,000. Beyond her ethical concerns, a traditional burial exceeded Gora’s budget. So she took to Google to explore alternatives.
    — Rosemary Counter, “A Wave of Start-ups Are Disrupting the $2-Billion Funeral Industry”, Canadian Business, February 2023

    This is, I would argue, inextricably bound up with the cultural shifts in travel. Today, one’s death and remains can become fertilizer for a tree of your choice, or can be covered in mushroom spores, and THEN used as fertilizer, or even, from a company in Texas (where else?) pressed (through some sort of process using carbon pressure) into a diamond. And then I guess you can wear Aunt Tilly on your finger. And there are several digital funeral directors who can do the planning for you online or with Zoom. But this all reflects a kind of fear of mortality. A growing number of people, apparently, celebrate their death before they actually die. Pre-packaged death and pre-packaged travel. I am reminded of those many scenes in the novels of Dickens or Eliot or Hardy, where the weary travellers get out of their coach and find refuge at the inn, before a hearth with a burning fire. Strangers share stories, share some soup or bread. They process the experience of their journey. They reflect, and no doubt some of that reflection is on their death. Why do I think Disneyworld makes sure you do NOT reflect on that.

    The traditional funeral is, though, admittedly a Victorian leftover. And David Bowie apparently had what is called a ‘direct cremation’ that cost 700 US dollars. And perhaps the idea of tourism is Victorian, too, in a sense. Those travellers in Hardy did not need passports, for they were not even invented at that time. Today there is a dramatic increase in tracking and surveilling all cross border movements.

    In mid-to-late 2023, U.S. citizens and nationals of over 60 other countries will need an electronic travel authorization to visit much of Europe. Travelers to any Schengen-zone country will have to register with a European Travel Information and Authorization System (ETIAS). ETIAS will be similar to the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) already used in the United States.
    — James Bridges InterExchange, 2021

    This sort of additional gratuitous digital infrastructure, and bureaucracy, is hardly a gesture of green. The public seems stunningly ignorant about server farms or the costs and expense of maintaining these infrastructure.

    All publicly accessible digital material—including data that is personal or potentially damaging—is open to being harvested for training datasets that are used to produce AI models. There are gigantic datasets full of people’s selfies, of hand gestures, of people driving cars, of babies crying, of newsgroup conversations from the 1990s, all to improve algorithms that perform such functions as facial recognition, language prediction, and object detection. When these collections of data are no longer seen as people’s personal material but merely as infrastructure, the specific meaning or context of an image or a video is assumed to be irrelevant.
    — Kate Crawford, The Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs

    Increasingly travel, in fact, all movement today, has begun to feel fungible, and this in large part because the technologies of public management are the same wherever you go. The surveillance system in the airport at Buenos Aires is the same one used in a dozen other major airports, or in super markets in a dozen countries, or at the unemployment office in Des Moines.

    It is about extraction, capture, the cult of data, the commodification of human capacity for thought and the dismissal of critical reason in favour of programming. . . . Now more than ever before, what we need is a new critique of technology, of the experience of technical life.
    — Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 2017

    In the late 19th century there was a revolution going on in photography (see Jonathan Beller, The Message is Murder, or any of Jonathan Crary’s books) that allowed for the white public in Europe to *see* the people of Africa; ‘primitive’ people. This entertainment carried a scientific veneer that was couched in the slave trade. Photography grew and was shaped by racial ideologies.

    David Livingstone’s instructions to his brother, a photographer, transpose William Holman Hunt’s ideas into the incipient scientific language of the day: he asked Charles Livingstone to “secure characteristic specimens of the various tribes … for the purposes of ethnology.” Unlike “exhibitions,” traveling shows, and museums, photography illustrated Africa primarily by means of iconic signs, not indexical ones; like mobile displays, photography transferred “the location of analysis” back to the comfort of the metropole. Photography greatly increased people “in-the-know”: postcards, magazines, white hunter’s books, illustrated travel stories all yielded their messages in urban living rooms and studies. The trajectory from painting to mechanical reproduction traced the shift from public display to private viewing.
    — Paul Landau, Empires of the Visual: Photography and Colonial Administration in Africa, October 2002

    Landau added:

    John Tagg has argued that such a history of photography’s use, rather than any of its intrinsic properties, is what has made photography “realistic.” Thus from police records, the photograph matured in institutions concerned with the establishment of truthful identities: security clearances, medical records, state permits, and the like, often in the service of institutional power.

    The white western vacationeer still sees his vacation destination as a colony. As sites of occupation. Israelis I know often take vacation in Arab countries, at beaches in Tunisia or Egypt. I asked one, once,  about this. I thought you hated Arabs (he was a military guy for the IDF) I said. He answered, oh, they are perfectly great as servants.

    But under capitalism the home market is inevitably bound up with the foreign market. As the export of capital increased, and as the foreign and colonial connections and spheres of influence of the big monopolist associations expanded in all ways, things naturally gravitated towards an international agreement among these associations, and towards the formation of international cartels.
    — Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1917

    As the internet complex expands and aggregates, more facets of our lives are funneled into the protocols of digital networks. The disaster is the irredeemable incompatibility of online operations with friendship, love, community, compassion, the free play of desire, or the sharing of doubt and pain.
    — Jonathan Crary, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World, April 12 2022

    This (the Crary quote above) is really the story of my summer in a nutshell (to employ a cliche). The new protocols are incompatible with libidenal openness, with humanness. This, the vacation panopticon, is an emotionally denuded landscape as imagined by the sociopath. It is not conducive to enjoyment, certainly.
     One should not have to suffer while spending time with your family.
     This is just more work. Alienated work.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Home Office secretly backs facial recognition technology to curb shoplifting

    Covert government strategy to install electronic surveillance in shops raises issues around bias and data, and contrasts sharply with the EU ban to keep AI out of public spaces

    Home Office officials have drawn up secret plans to lobby the independent privacy regulator in an attempt to push the rollout of controversial facial recognition technology into high street shops and supermarkets, internal government minutes seen by the Observer reveal.

    The covert strategy was agreed during a closed-door meeting on 8 March between policing minister Chris Philp, senior Home Office officials and the private firm Facewatch, whose facial recognition cameras have provoked fierce opposition after being installed in shops.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Dotty Domains: The Pentagon’s Mali Typo Leak Affair

    Fleet-footed agility and sharp thinking rarely characterise the plodding bureaucrat.  An argument can be made that different attributes are prized: cherished incompetence, spells of inattentiveness, and dedication to keeping things secret with severity.  What matters is not what you did, but what you pretended to do.

    Even with maintaining secrecy, the plodding desk-job hack can face problems, all falling under the umbrella term of “human error”.  Papers and files can stray.  The occasional USB stick can find its way into unwanted hands. And then there is that damnable business about the cloud and who can access it.

    Despite repeated warnings over a decade by the Amsterdam-based Mali Dili, contracted to manage email accounts of the West African state, traffic from the US military continued to find its way to the .ml domain, the country identifier of Mali.  (For all we know, this may still be happening.)  This arose because of a typing error, with .mil being the suffix for US military email addresses.

    Other countries also seemed caught up in the domain confusion.  Over a dozen emails intended for the Dutch military also found their way into the Johannes Zuurbier with .ml being confused with .nl.  Eight emails from the Australian Department of Defence, intended for US military consumption, also met the same fate.  These include problems about corrosion in Australia’s F-35 and an artillery manual “carried by command post officers for each battery”.

    The man most bemused by this is not, it would seem, in the Pentagon, but a certain Dutch entrepreneur who was given the task of managing the domain.  Johannes Zuurbier has found himself inconvenienced by the whole matter for some years.  In 2023, he decided to gather the misdirected messages.  He currently holds 117,000 of them, though he has received anywhere up to 1,000 messages a day.  He has been good enough to badger individuals in the US national cyber security service, the White House, and the local defence attaché in Mali.

    The Financial Times reports that the contents of such messages vary.  Much of it is spam; a degree of it comprises X-Rays, medical data, identity documents, crew lists for ships, staffing names at bases, mapping on installations, base photos, naval inspection reports, contracts, criminal complaints against various personnel, internal investigations on bullying claims, official travel itineraries, bookings, tax and financial records.

    While not earth shaking, one of the misdirected emails featured the travel itinerary of General James McConville, the US Army’s Chief of Staff, whose visit to Indonesia was noted, alongside a “full list of room numbers”, and “details of the collection of McConville’s room key at the Grand Hyatt Jakarta.”  Not the sort of thing you necessarily wish your adversaries to know.

    Another email from the Zuurbier trove came from an FBI agent and was intended for a US Navy official, requesting personal information to process a visitor from the Navy to an FBI facility.

    Lt. Commander Tim Gorman, a spokesperson from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, has put a brave face on it.  “The Department of Defense (DoD) is aware of this issue and takes all unauthorized disclosures of Controlled National Security Information or Controlled Unclassified Information Seriously,” he outlined in a statement to The Verge.  He further claimed, without giving much away, that emails sent from a .mil domain to Mali are “blocked”, with a notification being sent to the sender “that they must validate the email addresses of the intended recipients.”

    To keep things interesting, however, Gorman confesses that there was nothing stopping other government agencies or entities working with the US government from making the mistake and passing on material in error.  His focus, rather, was on the Pentagon personnel, who continued to receive “direction and training”.  The Defense Department “has implemented policy, training, and technical controls to ensure that emails from the ‘.mil’ domain are not delivered to incorrect domains.”

    The whole affair is becoming a thick parody of administrative dunderheadedness.  It follows a pattern of inadvertent exposure of data, the sort that would, if published, probably lead to harassment and prosecution by the Department of Justice.  But the incompetent are almost never found wanting; only the well-intentioned deserve punishment.  Instead, IT misconfigurations are blamed for what happened, for instance, in February, when three terabytes of US Special Operation Command unclassified emails were made available for public consumption for some two weeks.

    Even as the typo-leaks continue, the United States has imposed sanctions against, of all individuals, Mali’s own defence officials, including the defence minister, Colonel Sadio Camara.  The two other individuals in question are Air Force Chief of Staff Colonel Alou Boi Diarra and Deputy Chief of Staff Lieutenant Colonel Adama Bagayoko.  In one of his tedious moral fits, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused the trio of facilitating and expanding “Wagner’s presence in Mali since December 2021”, claiming an increase of civilian fatalities by 278 percent since the Russian mercenary group established itself in the country.

    The Mali authorities, as of July 25, should have assumed control of the domain.  This worries retired US admiral and former director of the National Security Agency and US Army’s Cyber Command, Mike Rogers.  “It’s one thing when you are dealing with a domain administrator who is trying, even unsuccessfully, to articulate the concern.  It’s another when it’s a foreign government that … sees it as an advantage that they can use.”

    Zuurbier, at the conclusion of his decade-long contract, may still have a few juicy numbers for safe keeping, though he will be mindful about what happens when such contents are published, namely, the Assange-WikiLeaks precedent.  Mali’s officials, in the meantime, will simply anticipate the dotty domain business to continue.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Trinity’s Shadow

    I sit here in the silence of the awakening dawn’s stillness stunned by the realization that I exist.  I wonder why.  It is my birthday.  The first rays of the rising sun bleed crimson over the eastern hills as I imagine my birth. The house and my family sleep.

    Someday I will die and I wonder why.  This is the mystery I have been contemplating since I was young.  That and the fact that I was born in a time of war and that when my parents and sisters were celebrating my first birthday, my country’s esteemed civilian and military leaders celebrated another birth: the detonation of the first atomic bomb code-named Trinity.

    Trinity has shadowed my life, while the other Trinity has enkindled my days.

    Sick minds play sick word games as they inflict pain and death.  They nicknamed this death bomb “the Gadget,” as if it were an innocent little toy.  They took and blasphemed the Christian mystery of the Trinity as if they were mocking God, which they were.  They thought they were gods.

    Now they are all dead gods, their fates sealed in their tombs.

    Where are they now?

    Where are all their victims, the innocent dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

    Where are the just and the unjust?

    Where are the living now, asleep or awake as Trinity’s progenitors in Washington, D.C. and the Pentagon prepare their doomsday machines for a rerun, the final first-strike run, the last lap in their race to annihilate all the living?  Will they sing as they launch the missiles – “So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, good night?”

    Joseph Biden, the second Roman Catholic president, while mocking the essence of Jesus’s message, pushes the world toward a nuclear holocaust, unlike JFK, the first Catholic president, who was assassinated by the CIA for pushing for the elimination of nuclear weapons and the end of the Cold War.

    The wheel turns.  We count the years.  We wonder why.

    Years ago I started my academic life by writing a thesis entitled “Dealing With Death or Death Dealing.”  It was a study of the transformation of cultural symbol systems, death, and nuclear weapons.  The last hundred years and more have brought a transformation and disintegration of the traditional religious symbol system – the sacred canopy – that once gave people comfort, meaning, and hope.  Science, technology, and nuclear weapons have changed all that. Death has been socially relocated and we live under the nuclear umbrella, a sinister “safeguard” that is cold comfort. The ultimate power of death over all life has been transferred from God to men, those controlling the nuclear weapons. This subject has never left me.  I suppose it has haunted me.  It is not a jolly subject, but I think it has chosen me.

    Was I born in a normal time?  Is war time our normal time?  It is. I was.

    But to be born at a time and place when your country’s leaders were denouncing their German and Japanese enemies as savage war criminals while execrably emulating them and then outdoing them is something else again.  With Operation Paperclip following World War II, the United States government secretly brought 1,600 or more Nazi war criminals into the U.S. to run our government’s military, intelligence, space, chemical, and biological warfare programs.  We became Nazis.  Lewis Mumford put it this way in The Pentagon of Power:

    By the curious dialectic of history, Hitler’s enlargement and the refurbishment of the Nazi megamachine gave rise to the conditions for creating those counter-instruments that would conquer it and temporarily wreck it. In short, in the very act of dying the Nazis transmitted their disease to their American opponents; not only the methods of compulsive organization or physical destruction, but the moral corruption that made it feasible to employ those methods without stirring opposition.

    There are always excuses for such moral corruption.  When during WW II the U.S. firebombed almost all Japanese cities, Dresden and Cologne in Germany, and then dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in gratuitously savage attacks, these were justified and even celebrated as necessary to defeat evil enemies.  Just as Nazi war criminals were welcomed into the U.S. government under the aegis of Allen Dulles who became the longest running CIA director and the key to JFK’s assassination and coverup, the diabolic war crimes of the U.S. were swept away as acts of a moral nation fighting a good war.  What has followed are decades of U.S. war crimes from Korea through Vietnam and Iraq, etc.  A very long list.

    The English dramatist Harold Pinter, in his Nobel Address, put it bluntly:

    It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force  for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

    Nothing could be truer.  When in 2014 the U.S. engineered the coup in Ukraine (coups being an American specialty), it allied itself with neo-Nazi forces to oppose Russia.  This alliance should have shocked no one; it is the American way.  Back in the 1980s when the U.S. was supporting death squads in Central America, Ronald Reagan told the world that “The Contras are the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers.”  Now the Ukrainian president Zelensky is feted as a great hero, Biden telling him in an Oval Office visit that “it’s an honor to be by your side.”  Such alliances are not anomalies but the crude reality of U. S. history.

    But let me return to “Trinity,” the ultimate weapon of mass destruction since I was reading a recent article about it.

    Kai Bird, the coauthor of  American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the book that inspired the new film Oppenheimer about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist credited as “the father of the atomic bomb” and the man who named the first atomic bomb Trinity, has written an Op Ed piece in The New York Times titled, “The Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” True in certain respects, this article is an example of how history can be slyly used to distort the present for political purposes.  In typical NY Times fashion, Bird tells certain truths while concealing, distorting, and falsifying others.

    I do not consider Oppenheimer a tragic figure, as does Bird.  Complicated, yes; but he was essentially a hubristic scientist who lent his services to a demonic project, and afterwards, having let the cat out of the bag by creating the Bomb, guiltily urged the government that used it in massive war crimes to restrain itself in the future.  Asking for such self-regulation is as absurd as asking the pharmaceutical or big tech industries to regulate themselves.

    Bird rightly says that Oppenheimer did not regret his work inventing the atomic bomb, and he correctly points out the injustice of his being maligned and stripped of his security clearance in 1954 in a secret hearing by a vote of 2 to 1 of a security panel of The Atomic Energy Commission for having communist associations. “Celebrated in 1945 as the ‘father of the atomic bomb,’” Bird writes, “nine years later he would become the chief celebrity victim of the McCarthyite maelstrom.”  A “victim,” I should add, who named names to save his own reputation.

    But tucked within his article, Bird tells us: “Just look at what happened to our public health civil servants during the recent pandemic.”  By which he means these officials like Anthony Fauci were maligned when they gave the public correct scientific information.  This is absurd.  Fauci – “attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science” – and other government “civil servants” misinformed the public and lied over and over again, but Bird implies they too were tragic figures like Oppenheimer.

    He writes:

    We stand on the cusp of another technological revolution in which artificial intelligence will transform how we live and work, and yet we are not yet having the kind of informed civil discourse with its innovators that could help us to make wise policy decisions on its regulation. Our politicians need to listen more to technology innovators like Sam Altman and quantum physicists like Kip Thorne and Michio Kaku.

    Here too he urges “us” to listen to the very people responsible for Artificial Intelligence, just as “we” should have listened to Oppenheimer after he brought us the atomic bomb.  Implicit here is the belief that science just marches progressively on and there’s no stopping it, and when dangerous technologies emerge from scientists’ work, we should trust them to control them.  Nowhere does Bird suggest that scientists have a moral obligation before the fact to not pursue a certain line of research because of its grave possible consequences.  Maybe he has never read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, only written over two hundred years ago.

    Finally, and most importantly, Bird begins his concluding paragraph with these words:

    Today, Vladimir Putin’s not-so-veiled threats to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine are a stark reminder that we can never be complacent about living with nuclear weapons.

    This is simply U.S. propaganda.  The U.S. has provoked and fueled the war in Ukraine, broken all nuclear weapon treaties, surrounded Russia with military bases, stationed nuclear weapons in Europe, engaged in nuclear blackmail with its first strike policy and threats, etc.  Putin has said in response that if – and only if – the very existence of the Russian state and land is threatened with extinction would the use of nuclear weapons be considered.

    So Bird, in writing a piece about Oppenheimer’s “tragedy” and defending science, has also subtly defended a trinity of other matters: the government “science” on Covid, the transformative power coming from AI, and the U.S. propaganda about Russia and nuclear weapons. There is no mention of JFK’s call to abolish nuclear weapons.  This is how the “paper of record” does its job.

    I sit here now at the end of the day.  Shadows are falling and I contemplate such trinities.  I am stunned by the fact that we exist, but under a terrifying Shadow that many wish to ignore.  Jung saw this shadow side as not just personal but social, and when it is ignored, the collective evils of modern societies can autonomously erupt.

    Bird argues that nuclear weapons are the result of a scientific quest that is unstoppable.  He writes that Oppenheimer “understood that you cannot stop curious human beings from discovering the physical world around them [and then making nuclear bombs or designer babies].”

    This is the ideology of progress that brooks no opposition since it is declared inevitable. It is a philosophy that believes there should be no limits to human knowledge, which would include the knowledge of good and evil, but which can then be ignored since it and all thought and beliefs are considered a priori to be relative.  The modern premise that everything is relative is, of course, a contradiction since it is an absolute statement.  Many share this philosophy of despair disguised as progress as it has crept into everything today.  It is tragic, for if people accept it, we are doomed to follow a Faustian pact with the devil and all hell will follow.

    I think of Bob Dylan singing :

    I just don’t see why I should even care
    It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there

    But I do care, and I wonder why.  As night comes on, I sit here and wonder.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Targeted for Tyranny: We’re All Suspects Under the Government’s Pre-crime Program

    We’re all being targeted now.

    We’re all guilty until proven innocent now.

    And thanks to the 24/7 surveillance being carried out by the government’s spy network of fusion centers, we are all now sitting ducks, just waiting to be tagged, flagged, targeted, monitored, manipulated, investigated, interrogated, heckled and generally harassed by agents of the American police state.

    Although these pre-crime programs are popping up all across the country, in small towns and big cities, they are not making us any safer but they are endangering individual freedoms.

    Nationwide, there are upwards of 123 real-time crime centers (a.k.a. fusion centers), which allow local police agencies to upload and share massive amounts of surveillance data and intelligence with state and federal agencies culled from surveillance cameras, facial recognition technology, gunshot sensors, social media monitoring, drones and body cameras, and artificial intelligence-driven predictive policing algorithms.

    These data fusion centers, which effectively create an electronic prison—a digital police state—from which there is no escape, are being built in partnership with big tech companies such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon, which helped to fuel the rise of police militarization and domestic surveillance.

    While these latest expansions of the surveillance state are part of the Biden Administration’s efforts to combat domestic extremism through the creation of a “pre-crime” crime prevention agency, they have long been a pivotal part of the government’s plans for total control and dominion.

    Yet this crime prevention campaign is not so much about making America safer as it is about ensuring that the government has the wherewithal to muzzle anti-government discontent, penalize anyone expressing anti-government sentiments, and preemptively nip in the bud any attempts by the populace to challenge the government’s authority or question its propaganda.

    As J.D. Tuccille writes for Reason, “[A]t a time when government officials rage against ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ that is often just disagreement with whatever opinions are currently popular among the political class, fusion centers frequently scrutinize peaceful dissenting speech.”

    Indeed, while the Biden Administration was recently dealt a legal blow over its attempts to urge social media companies to do more to combat so-called dis- and mis-information, these fusion centers are the unacknowledged powerhouses behind the government’s campaign to censor and retaliate against those who vocalize their disagreement and discontent with government policies.

    Already, the powers-that-be are mobilizing to ensure that fusion centers have the ability to monitor and lock down sectors of a community at a moment’s notice.

    For instance, a 42,000-square-foot behemoth of a fusion center in downtown Washington is reportedly designed to “better prepare law enforcement for the next public health emergency or Jan. 6-style attack.” According to an agency spokeswoman, “Screens covering the walls of the new facility will show surveillance cameras around the city as well as social media accounts that may be monitored for threatening speech.”

    It’s like a scene straight out of Steven Spielberg’s dystopian film Minority Report.

    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.

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

    The American police state’s take on the dystopian terrors foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick have all been rolled up into one oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package.

    In this way, the novel 1984 has become an operation manual for an omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state in which ordinary Americans find themselves labeled domestic extremists for engaging in lawful behavior that triggers the government’s pre-crime sensors.

    With the help of automated eyes and ears, a growing arsenal of high-tech software, hardware and techniques, government propaganda urging Americans to turn into spies and snitches, as well as social media and behavior sensing software, government agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state.

    It’s also a setup ripe for abuse.

    For instance, an investigative report by the Brennan Center found that “Over the last two decades, leaked materials have shown fusion centers tracking protestors and casting peaceful activities as potential threats. Their targets have included racial justice and environmental advocates, right-wing activists, and third-party political candidates.”

    One fusion center in Maine was found to have been “illegally collecting and sharing information about Maine residents who weren’t suspected of criminal activity. They included gun purchasers, people protesting the construction of a new power transmission line, the employees of a peace-building summer camp for teenagers, and even people who travelled to New York City frequently.”

    This is how the government is turning a nation of citizens into suspects and would-be criminals.

    This transformation is being driven by the Department of Homeland Security, the massive, costly, power-hungry bureaucracy working hard to ensure that the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful.

    Yet here’s the thing: you don’t have to do anything illegal or challenge the government’s authority in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal.

    In fact, all you need to do is live in the United States.

    It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.

    Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score.

    Without having ever knowingly committed a crime or been convicted of one, you and your fellow citizens have likely been assessed for behaviors the government might consider devious, dangerous or concerning; assigned a threat score based on your associations, activities and viewpoints; and catalogued in a government database according to how you should be approached by police and other government agencies based on your particular threat level.

    Combine predictive policing with surveillance, over-criminalization and pre-crime programs, then add in militarized police trained to shoot first and ask questions later, and as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, you’ll be lucky to escape with your life.

    If you’re not scared yet, you should be.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Armageddon and the Limits of Evolution

    On March 28, 2022, the Biden administration sent to Congress a revised version of its classified National Defense Strategy. The new version removed the longstanding doctrine of “no first use” of nuclear weapons, and opened the door to a nuclear response to a non-nuclear threat. Within months of the new U.S. policy, but without referring to it, the Putin administration responded that it might consider first use in case of an existential threat to Russia, including a non-nuclear one.  More recently, Sergei Karaganov, head of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, a non-governmental Russian think tank, argued that perhaps Russia should use a low yield tactical nuclear weapon in order to convince NATO to back off and stop threatening Russia’s security.

    What drives human society to engage in such reckless behavior? The answer to this question is at once familiar to any student of human nature, human society and human history, and yet equally perplexing given the prospect of potential obliteration. This article is an exploration of such causes and their consequences, with possible implications that go far beyond human behavior alone, and may be grounded in universal principles.

    We live in extraordinary times – possibly more extraordinary than we realize. How many of those living even fifty years ago imagined that today we might be able to carry in the palm of our hand a device that can access most of human knowledge. Or quantum computers with almost infinite and instantaneous computing capacity, which are now being designed. We can now even peer at the birth of the universe.

    We owe this to human intelligence, which is sometimes ridiculed, but is an extraordinary evolutionary development nonetheless. More specifically, we owe our superpowers to human technology, which is a product of human intelligence, and which further expands the production of human intelligence with new tools, even including the ability to augment human intelligence with artificial intelligence.

    How did this come about? The answer is quite simple and well known, although only the most imaginative science fiction writers have even scratched the surface of its potential consequences. Intelligence is born of evolution.

    Evolution, in turn, is born of competition, and more specifically the competition between life forms. In fact, if there is another form of competition, such as between astronomical or chemical or physical units, they might have to be defined as life forms by virtue of that competition. Even the most ancient and primitive life forms, such as viruses, compete against other life forms and against each other. This is the fundamental fact of evolution.

    We know that evolution has produced a fantastic array of life forms on earth, and we can imagine that the array is infinitely greater when life forms in the rest of the universe are eventually included. We also know that life forms have lived and died and gone extinct and passed on their genes according to their ability to compete and survive in different environments and in response to other life forms, and to great catastrophes, as well, such as the Chicxulub asteroid that wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs and ushered in the age of mammals 65 million years ago.

    What are the strategies that organisms have employed in the competition for survival? There are many that we all can name: size, speed, venom, diet, teeth, claws, regeneration of tissue, immunity to disease, etc. These can also be called tools or weapons, though not in the technological sense. The term weapon is nonetheless appropriate because it confers advantages in the competition against other organisms, eventually resulting in the survival or extinction of some over others, depending on the success or failure of the weapon.

    But there is a special weapon that is implied by the term strategy itself, namely intelligence. Intelligence is present in all living things. Even a virus has a form of intelligence and responds to its environment. Plants and fungi have also shown this ability, including a means of communication. Intelligence therefore qualifies as a tool or weapon in the tool chest or arsenal of every organism.

    It is not surprising, therefore, that evolution should experiment with intelligence in much the same way as with teeth, claws, horns, plumage and other traits. The antlers of the Irish elk, the diving adaptations of the sperm whale, the size of the Beast of Baluchistan, the plumage of birds of paradise, the predations of the strangler fig and carnivorous plants are all examples of evolutionary experiments that have gone to extremes. Some organisms, like the nautilus, have survived relatively unchanged for vast eons, while others have painted themselves into evolutionary corners that have resulted in extinction. The development of humans, therefore, demonstrates that evolution is also capable of taking intelligence to extremes.

    It has often been noted that humans are relatively helpless creatures, except for their brains. Furthermore, those brains place a great demand upon the body’s metabolism, the female birth canal, the rearing requirements of the young, the number of offspring, etc. Nevertheless, our brain confers enough of an advantage to overcome these disadvantages, at least thus far in our evolution.

    This has been true in the last few million years of our existence, and especially in the last ten thousand. Today, human technology has carried us off the charts as a species. It began in the paleolithic period, so called because stone tools are the only ones that survive in the archaeological record from this earliest and most basic stage of technological development. From then on, the human species has continued to evolve physically, eventually resulting in the homo sapiens species. But our technological evolution proceeded and accelerated even faster. In fact, our species essentially invented technological evolution, at least within our corner of the universe, and it is now proceeding at breakneck speed.

    The reasons for the acceleration of technological advancement have been widely discussed elsewhere, and may be summarized as 1) population growth (the increase in the number of minds that can be applied to technological advancement), 2) the increase in available time at the disposal of those minds, and 3) the multiplying effect of technological advances, i.e. the use of existing technology to create new technology, at an ever increasing and perhaps geometric pace.

    Why is technology so attractive to us? Most of the reasons are self-evident. It has the potential (though not always the effect) to make our lives easier, more comfortable and more secure. These are motives that drive all life forms, not just humans. It also gives us competitive advantages, both against other species (now a lesser issue), and within our own.

    In fact, the competition within our own species has become the primary evolutionary drive for humans. This sometimes takes relatively benign forms, such as social achievement and recognition, but the most intense competition is what we call warfare. Not surprisingly, it is also the time of greatest and fastest technological advancement, due to the much greater investment in the development of new weaponry during times of conflict. As noted earlier, we are now proceeding into unknown territory, powered by our ancient competitive drive, our relatively recent brain capacity, and our seemingly self-propelled technology.

    Are we the only life forms in the universe to experience these developments? Many well-known thinkers agree that this is extremely unlikely. Although the proportion of planets capable of developing and sustaining life is undoubtedly a small fraction of the total, and although the number that have developed intelligent life and technological societies is smaller still, the total number of planets is so enormous that intelligent life cannot be unique on a cosmic scale. Furthermore, some or many such planets will have reached an evolutionary stage comparable to our present millions or billions of years before us.

    Why, then, is there no incontrovertible evidence of alien societies having come to our planet? Why is there no synthetic substance of clearly alien origin that we can point to? We have sent synthetic terrestrial substances to the moon, Mars and other planets despite our short history of space travel, so why would alien civilizations not do the same?

    This is sometimes called the Fermi paradox, after a famous question posed by Enrico Fermi in a conversation with other physicists in 1950. Many thinkers have proposed explanations, but I would like to approach it from first principles rather than responses to the question, per se.

    I propose that just as physical laws govern the entire universe, there are evolutionary and biological laws that also apply universally, not merely on earth. A good candidate for one such law is clearly evolution, and the competitive forces that drive it. It is, in fact, hard to imagine that competition between species and among the same species is not one of these universal laws. A species without such a drive would simply not bother to attempt to survive, and therefore disappear in short order (or, more likely, never come into being).

    It is also reasonable to assume that, sooner or later, intelligence inevitably becomes one of the experimental paths of evolution. As on earth, it becomes the impetus for technological development, and also more rapid in times of warfare than at other times, in pursuit of an advantage against competitors.

    This is a clue that we can use to help answer the question of why alien civilizations would not have visited earth, and why we are unlikely to visit theirs. It is also the reason for the title of this article. In order to explore this line of inquiry, it is instructive to look at the history of weapons development, already mentioned in passing.

    Weapons are often cited as a metric for technological advancement. They may have other uses, but it is their use in warfare that often stands out in the creation of empire and domination of competing societies. Such may have been the case with fire and stone implements, although we often have only inferential evidence for prehistorical periods. Clearer evidence comes for the taming of the horse and other domesticated creatures, and from metallurgy and then gunpowder. Shipbuilding, external and internal combustion engines, chemistry, electricity and the other developments of the industrial revolution eventually also contributed to advances in weaponry and warfare.

    Since 1900, we have experienced poison gas, aircraft, hypersonic missiles, electronic weapons, artificial intelligence, and of course, nuclear weapons. We know that poison gas (“chemical weapons”) has been banned by international treaty, and that no one has used nuclear weapons in warfare since 1945. But poison gas has been used despite the ban, and nuclear weapons still exist in great quantities, with delivery systems capable of destroying most or all of humanity. It is a Sword of Damocles over the human race, with other swords under development. Some suspect that biological weapons have also been tried.

    Will we succeed in avoiding our own destruction? For how long? Will no one in the next 10 years trigger a nuclear war? The next 100? 1000? 10,000? No one at all? Has there ever been a weapon that has not been used? In the case of nuclear weapons, a single war between nuclear powers might be enough to finish us off. Will the US/NATO use a nuclear weapon when it runs out of conventional weapons, to prevent a defeat in Ukraine? In eastern Asia? Will Russia be driven to use if nuclear weapons in order to avoid disappearance as a nation?

    Most of us know the story of the scorpion and the frog. The scorpion asks the frog to carry him across the river. “No way!” says the frog. “You’ll kill me with your stinger!”

    “Why would I do that?” asks the scorpion. “I can’t swim.”

    So the frog takes him halfway across, when the scorpion mortally stings him.

    “Why did you do that?” asks the dying frog,

    “I’m a scorpion,” says the scorpion. “It’s in my nature.”

    And what is the nature of humans? Has there ever been a time without war? Many of us will acknowledge that we came close to nuclear Armageddon during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Reportedly, there were scorpions in both Washington and Moscow. Washington’s chief scorpion was Gen. Curtis Lemay, the Air Force Chief of Staff. He is reported to have considered a nuclear war “winnable” and worth the risk, and he even permitted some of his bombers to stray beyond the callback point despite lacking the authority. Khrushchev made reference to similar pressures on his side (a negotiating bluff, perhaps, but certainly plausible).

    Are there scorpions in Washington today? Some policy makers are certainly tempting fate, principally the neoconservative warmongers. They bear major responsibility for pulling the U.S. out of nuclear arms reduction and limitation treaties, including the manufacture and testing of low-yield “battlefield” nuclear weapons that both sides previously refrained from developing, for fear that the temptation to use them would be too great if they found themselves losing a conventional war, as in Ukraine. This sort of nuclear brinkmanship is exactly the sort of folly that can lead to masses of dead scorpions and frogs.

    The question therefore arises: is nuclear holocaust even avoidable (permanently, that is)? Or a holocaust by biological or other means, such as a takeover by artificial intelligence? Or other technology that we haven’t even thought of yet? If not, does it explain why we have no evidence of visitation by alien civilizations? Are we hitting a barrier to further evolution that is universal in scope, and which sooner or later results in a lifeless burnt-out planet, or one with only primitive life forms, or perhaps a small number of intelligent survivors, doomed to rise again, bump against the ceiling of evolutionary development and get thrown back in an endless cycle?

    I am not the first to make this case, but I believe that it is unfortunately very timely, and I hope it stimulates new thoughts for consideration.  I also hope that I am wrong, that there is something that I am overlooking, and that we can find a way to overcome this aspect of our nature and build a more peaceful – or at least less warlike – society that has eluded us for as long as we have existed.  But the evidence is not encouraging, and I would feel a lot better if an alien civilization came calling soon, proving that self-destruction is not the inevitable end of evolution and technology.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Frankenstein Chatbots are Erupting

    Rick Claypool is a level-headed policy analyst and number-cruncher for Public Citizen, who is known for reporting the decline in corporate crime enforcement with each succeeding Presidency. (Biden less than Trump). His latest report (with Cheyenne Hunt) clearly shows him in an unusually agitated state. Its title is “‘Sorry in Advance!’ Rapid Rush to Deploy Generative A.I. Risks a Wide Array of Automated Harms.”

    Claypool is not engaging in hyperbole or horrible hypotheticals concerning Chatbots controlling humanity. He is extrapolating from what is already starting to happen in almost every sector of our society.

    I challenge you to read his report without experiencing cognitive dissonance and throwing up your hands thinking the genie is already out of a million bottles. Claypool takes you through “… real-world harms [that] the rush to release and monetize these tools can cause – and, in many cases, is already causing.”

    Claypool’s analysis takes you through five broad areas of concern, excluding the horrific autonomous weapons the Department of Defense (aka the Department of Offense) is deeply involved in developing. The various section titles of his report foreshadow the coming abuses: “Damaging Democracy,” “Consumer Concerns” (rip-offs and vast privacy surveillances), “Worsening Inequality,” “Undermining Worker Rights” (and jobs), and “Environmental Concerns” (damaging the environment via their carbon footprints).

    Before he gets specific, Claypool previews his conclusion: “Until meaningful government safeguards are in place to protect the public from the harms of generative A.I., we need a pause.” Just how, he doesn’t say. Because with so many increasing generators of these Chatbots around the world, this flood of Frankenstein Chatbots may present a problem the Dean of the Harvard Law School, Roscoe Pound, described regarding the prohibition of alcoholic beverages in the 1920s as being beyond “the limits of effective legal action.”

    Claypool quotes Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, who released last November the shocking ChatGPT A.I. product, saying afterward: “I think we are potentially not that far away from potentially scary ones.” Altman has been busy up on Capitol Hill mesmerizing legislators by saying “regulation is needed” by which he means the industry itself writing the rules and standards for Congress.

    Using its existing authority, the Federal Trade Commission, in the author’s words “… has already warned that generative A.I. tools are powerful enough to create synthetic content – plausible sounding news stories, authoritative-looking academic studies, hoax images, and deepfake videos – and that this synthetic content is becoming difficult to distinguish from authentic content.” He adds that “…these tools are easy for just about anyone to use.” BIG TECH is rushing way ahead of any legal framework for AI in the quest for big profits, while pushing for self-regulation instead of the constraints imposed by the rule of law.

    There is no end to the predicted disasters, both from people inside the industry and its outside critics. Destruction of livelihoods, harmful health impacts from promotion of quack remedies, financial fraud, political and electoral fakeries, stripping of the information commons, subversion of the open internet, faking your facial image, voice, words, and behavior, tricking you and others with lies every day. AI’s potential for deception will make Fox News’ deceptions look comparatively restrained.

    With Congress and the White House issuing unenforceable exhortations to the industry to be nice, safe and responsible, critics are looking to the European Union’s first stage passage of an A.I. Act to protect its people from the more overt damages to their common and individual rights and interests. The Act’s focus is on which uses of A.I. need to be curbed, including the adverse impact on elections. It mandates the labeling of A.I.-generated content. On May 16, 2023, Public Citizen petitioned the Federal Election Commission to issue a rule preventing the use of AI to deceive voters.

    All legislative bodies will have to confront the barriers of secrecy – claims by governments on weapons and surveillance development and the already asserted “trade secrets” by corporations. In the U.S., there will also be First Amendment defenses for free speech by these artificial entities called corporations. Their corporate lawyers will have a lucrative field day concocting delays and obstructions.

    Our nation and the world are barely organized enough to control through treaties the use of nuclear weapons – through treaties, poorly prepared for devastating pandemics, and virtually nowhere in foreseeing and forestalling the mega-threats of generative A.I. “to society and humanity.” Those were the words of an open warning letter calling for a six-month pause, signed by top CEOs (such as Elon Musk), technologists and academics.

    With few exceptions, a lazy Congress, readying for a long July 4 holiday break followed by taking off all of August for a congressional recess, is oblivious to its special powers and duties to the American people. Let’s see some congressional urgency to put some specificity and enforcement teeth behind and beyond Biden’s nonbinding “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights” published by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in October 2022.

    Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA), who sits on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, is pushing for the creation of a new federal agency to regulate A.I. Technologies.

    For now, I have two recommendations. Demand your Senators and Representatives join you for local town meetings during Congress’s August recess where you and your lawmakers can listen to each other and address the pressing issues. Tell them that this run-away robotic juggernaut is stripping humans of their own mental identities, autonomy and self-reliant judgments.

    Everyone is at risk. Even Microsoft and Google have little idea of the whirlwind they are unleashing, driven by shortsighted profits, not wisdom, civic principles and accountabilities to public institutions and the people themselves. Have your local experts formulate the focus of the town meeting agendas, backed by your sense of urgency.

    Then demand that your members of Congress end their three-day a week work routine and conduct rigorous hearings in D.C. and around the country with a deadline for passing legislation. Tell them they, too, are at risk for the fakery, slander, and imitations of the Chatbots.

    Lastly, upgrade and make more precise your skepticism toward the Chatbots already entering and affecting your lives and localities. Be on guard and develop an ever-larger circle of trusting relatives, friends, neighbors and coworkers.

    The corporate Chatbots are coming on fast without any legal or ethical frameworks to restrain and discipline them from subverting your freedoms and true sense of realities.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Distract, Divide, and Conquer

    Step away from the blinders that partisan politics uses to distract, divide and conquer, and you will find that we are drowning in a cesspool of problems that individually and collectively threaten our lives, liberties, prosperity and happiness.

    These are not problems the politicians want to talk about, let alone address, yet we cannot afford to ignore them much longer.

    Foreign interests are buying up our farmland and holding our national debt. As of 2021, foreign persons and entities owned 40.8 million acres of U.S. agricultural land, 47% of which was forestland, 29% in cropland, and 22% in pastureland. Foreign land holdings have increased by an average of 2.2 million acres per year since 2015. Foreign countries also own $7.4 trillion worth of U.S. national debt, with Japan and China ranked as our two largest foreign holders of our debt.

    Corporate and governmental censorship have created digital dictators. While the “Twitter files” revealed the lengths to which the FBI has gone to monitor and censor social media content, the government has been colluding with the tech sector for some time now in order to silence its critics and target “dangerous” speech in the name of fighting so-called disinformation. The threat of being labelled “disinformation” is being used to undermine anyone who asks questions, challenges the status quo, and engages in critical thinking.

    Middle- and lower-income Americans are barely keeping up. Rising costs of housing, food, gas and other necessities are presenting nearly insurmountable hurdles towards financial independence for the majority of households who are scrambling to make ends meet. Meanwhile, mounting layoffs in the tens of thousands are adding to the fiscal pain.

    The government is attempting to weaponize mental health care. Increasingly, in communities across the nation, police are being empowered to forcibly detain individuals they believe might be mentally ill, even if they pose no danger to others. While these programs are ostensibly aimed at getting the homeless off the streets, when combined with the government’s ongoing efforts to predict who might pose a threat to public safety based on mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), the specter of mental health round-ups begins to sound less far-fetched.

    The military’s global occupation is spreading our resources thin and endangering us at home. America’s war spending and commitment to policing the rest of the world are bankrupting the nation and spreading our troops dangerously thin. In 2022 alone, the U.S. approved more than $50 billion in aid for Ukraine, half of which went towards military spending, with more on the way. The U.S. also maintains some 750 military bases in 80 countries around the world.

    Deepfakes, AI and virtual reality are blurring the line between reality and a computer-generated illusion. Powered by AI software, deepfake audio and video move us into an age where it is almost impossible to discern what is real, especially as it relates to truth and disinformation. At the same time, the technology sector continues to use virtual reality to develop a digital universe—the metaverse—that is envisioned as being the next step in our evolutionary transformation from a human-driven society to a technological one.

    Advances in technology are outstripping our ability to protect ourselves from its menacing side, both in times of rights, humanity and workforce. In the absence of constitutional protections in place to guard against encroachments on our rights in the electronic realm, we desperately need an Electronic Bill of Rights that protects “we the people” from predatory surveillance and data-mining business practices.

    The courts have aligned themselves with the police state. In one ruling after another, the courts have used the doctrine of qualified immunity to shield police officers from accountability for misconduct, tacitly giving them a green light to act as judge, jury and executioner on the populace. All the while, police violence, the result of training that emphasizes brute force over constitutional restraints, continues to endanger the public.

    The nation’s dependence on foreign imports has fueled a $1 trillion trade deficit. While analysts have pointed to the burgeoning trade deficit as a sign that the U.S. economy is growing, it underscores the extent to which very little is actually made in America anymore.

    World governments, including the U.S., continue to use national crises such as COVID-19 to expand their emergency powers. None are willing to relinquish these powers when the crisis passes. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, the U.S. government still has 42 declared national emergencies in effect, allowing it to sidestep constitutional protocols that maintain a system of checks and balances. For instance, the emergency declared after the 9/11 has yet to be withdrawn.

    The nation’s infrastructure is rapidly falling apart. Many of the country’s roads, bridges, airports, dams, levees and water systems are woefully outdated and in dire need of overhauling, and have fallen behind that of other developed countries in recent years. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that crumbling infrastructure costs every American household $3,300 in hidden costs a year due to lost time, increased fuel consumption while sitting in traffic jams, and extra car repairs due to poor road conditions.

    The nation is about to hit a healthcare crisis. Despite the fact that the U.S. spends more on health care than any other high-income country, it has the worst health outcomes than its peer nations. Experts are also predicting a collapse in the U.S. health care system as the medical community deals with growing staff shortages and shuttered facilities.

    These are just a small sampling of the many looming problems that threaten to overwhelm us in the near future.

    Thus far, Americans seem inclined to just switch the channel, tune out what they don’t want to hear, and tune into their own personal echo chambers.

    Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, no amount of escapism can shield us from the harsh reality that the danger in our midst is posed by an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution, Congress, the courts or the citizenry.

    The post Distract, Divide, and Conquer first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • What Does “Real” Mean in an AI World?

    The images in this post are not photographs taken at a recent party for relatively well-off white people.

    These people do not exist. Rather, they were created by an artificial intelligence platform called Midjourney.

    Remember these images whenever the “news” or some other “official” entity shows you photos or videos that you’re supposed to trust and take a face value.

    Keep yer guard up…

    The post What Does “Real” Mean in an AI World? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • France under fire over fast-track plan for AI video surveillance at Paris Olympics

    Ministers say exceptional security needed but rights groups warn new law could extend police powers permanently

    The French government is fast-tracking special legislation for the 2024 Paris Olympics that would allow the use of video surveillance assisted by artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

    Ministers have argued that certain exceptional security measures are needed to ensure the smooth running of the events that will attract 13 million spectators, but rights groups have warned France is seeking to use the Games as a pretext to extend police surveillance powers, which could then become permanent.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Battle Royal: Robots, Transhumans, and Humans

    Amazing robot sci-fi stories from the 1960s that spell out what we are about to go through with transhumanism and robotics. The Creation of the Humanoids

    Isaac Asimov’s
    Little Lost Robot

    Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot by BBC Radio 4

    The post Battle Royal: Robots, Transhumans, and Humans first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Eric Schmidt: A Conflict of Interest

    Ethics and Eric Schmidt are rare bedfellows.  The former Google/Alphabet CEO/Chairman exudes a sense of predatory self-interest, always making the point that what he wants aligns with what is supposedly good for the United States.

    He has splashed money on numerous projects, including such artificial intelligence outfits as Rebellion Defense, all the time maintaining uncomfortably close ties to the government advisory circuit.  For years, he has been hectoring the Department of Defense to uncritically embrace AI, in other words, machine-learning technology.  “You absolutely suck at machine learning,” Schmidt boldly told General Raymond Thomas in July 2016, head of US Special Operations Command.  “If I got under your tent for a day, I could solve most of your problems.”

    His efforts to get under that tent were already well underway.  In the 2000s, Schmidt began shaping Google’s cloud computing and AI capabilities, readying it to be a recipient of DoD contracts.  But the speed of such technological adoption proved infuriatingly slow.  “I am bizarrely told by my military friends that they have moved incredibly fast, showing you the difference of time frames between the world I live in and the world they live in.”

    During the Obama administration, he was highly placed on the regular guest list, and was even brought in to do some cleaning when the launch of the government’s healthcare.gov website was botched.  (Since then, he has drummed the narrative that healthcare would also benefit from a “combination of cloud, deep neural networks”.)

    Thanks to WikiLeaks, we also know how deeply involved Schmidt was in Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.  “He’s ready to fund, advise [sic] recruit talent, etc.,” wrote Clinton’s excited confidante and advisor John Podesta in a 2014 email.  Preferring to avoid the direct donations route, focus was instead placed upon the stealthy funding of start-ups packed with engineers and analysts crunching campaign data for advertising and voter-turnout operations.

    As chair of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), a body formed in 2018 to advise both the White House and Congress, Schmidt formally entered the world of federal advisory committees, dubbed by the Project on Government Oversight the “fifth arm of government”.  A 2010 bill passed in the House of Representatives prohibiting the appointments of commission members with conflicts of interest failed to get traction in the Senate.

    A mere five months after his appointment to the NSCAI, an investment by Schmidt was made in the British start-up company Beacon, which combines chain finance with technology to identify, as the Financial Times puts it, “the most cost-effective shipping routes for cargo.”  This also included contributions from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Uber founder Travis Kalanick.  The whole gang, it seemed, was in on the act.

    Schmidt also found himself as chair of the Defense Innovation Board, created in 2016 to establish a bridge between Silicon Valley and the US military complex.  Its more formal mission is to provide senior officials in defence “with independent advice and recommendations on innovative means to address future challenges through the prism of three focus areas: people and culture, technology and capabilities, and practices and operations.”

    The Board did more than just build a bridge, beating and ultimately knocking down the doors of government in getting its way.  The October 2019 recommendations by DIB on AI ethical principles were wholly adopted by the US Secretary of Defense, Mark T. Esper, in February 2020.  In the words of the Pentagon, “These principles will apply to both combat and non-combat functions and assist the US military in upholding legal, ethical and policy commitments in the field of AI.”

    Schmidt repaid the favour in a flattering statement of approval.  “Secretary Esper’s leadership on AI and his decision to use AI Principles for the Department demonstrates not only to DoD, but to countries around the world, that the US and DoD are committed to ethics, and will play a leadership role in ensuring democracies adopt emerging technology responsibly.”

    The Biden administration ensured that the Big Tech focus, and its entanglement with government, would continue unabated.  Rebellion Defense, and for that matter the entire Schmidt investment universe, obtained plum positions of influence.  Schmidt Futures is also intimately involved in the funding of office staff at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), an institutionally unacceptable state of affairs justified by the body’s chronic underfunding.

    The nature of such arrangements, partly covered by the American Prospect last year, meant that Schmidt was essentially advising, and berating federal entities, to advance a cause central to his own entrepreneurial projects.  Investments could be made in national security start-ups that could, in time, be sold back to the government, harmonious if you’ve got the gig, terrible if you are interested in transparent transactions.

    As John Davisson, senior counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, described it, “He’s got many, many financial incentives to ensure that the Department of Defense and other federal agencies adopt AI aggressively.”

    For those who feel that accountable partitions should be maintained between big business and government, the tale of Schmidt’s investment activities is woefully unethical.  Walter Shaub, a senior ethics fellow at the Project on Government Oversight makes the obvious point: “It’s absolutely a conflict of interest.”

    For the cut and thrust go-getters who see little problem in advisors holding government advisory positions who make recommendations that only advance their causes and personal wealth, such conduct is admirable.  Schmidt, an unelected official, essentially shaped the rules and regulations of an emerging industry he has a vast stake in.

    All in all, over 50 investments in AI companies were made as chairman of the federal commission on AI.  For a person bothered about AI and its ethical frameworks, Schmidt has shown himself to be distinctly free of ethics in terms of corporate governance and accountability.  “The ethics enforcement process in the executive branch is broken, it does not work,” a resigned Craig Holman of consumer advocacy organisation Public Citizen told CNBC.  “And so the process itself is partly to blame here.”  Well, only partly.

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  • The 4th Industrial Revolution

    The post The 4th Industrial Revolution first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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