By Thomas Neuburger, a regular contributor to God’s Spies
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Brave New World
The world is no longer the world; a different place from what you see, the world of your youth or even a few years ago. Your eyes look outside and see familiar things – grass and fields, buildings, rivers and roads. Your mind looks and sees the data. It sees what allows it to think, draw conclusions, evaluate, knowing with certainty that the world it sees reflects, at least in part, what the world has always been.
But what if some of what you see reflects the real world? What if the old things are there, but placed on top of them, like a planning grid, that’s what the masters, the irremovable masters, want you to understand by what you see?
Some would call this theft. Not Politico. Not the New York Times.
What if the planning grid is no longer yours, but something made for you? Would you think your thoughts are yours? You wouldn’t know if they weren’t there?
Basic Concerns
I think Walter Kirn explained our situation best in a recent (paid only) “America This Week” podcast. Towards the end, he and Matt Taibbi discuss a wonderful short story by Delmore Schwartz (played here by Lou Reed), about how the present is connected to the past, how the destiny is locked. This leads them to discuss how our current time is “full” – not about elections by myself and its outcome, but with something larger, world history.
This is Kirn (slightly edited; emphasis mine):
I think this time is full. [We saw over the last few years] a machine that can make decisions themselves impossible in the ways we are used to. The tools of information control, the willingness to use them, the power they have, and the existential threat they pose to the idea that we can make informed decisions are, to me, the fundamental concern.
The social machinery that makes decision impossible creates a basic anxiety, one that we all feel. The world of our new communication contains tools of control, and elites are willing to use them. Bots are all over social media, but we don’t know the extent. AI drives disinformation.
Hacked emails released by the group Anonymous revealed that Palantir and two other defense contractors have blackmailed federal lawyers with a family vetting program for progressive activists, created fake identities to infiltrate left-leaning groups, infiltrated social media with bots, and planted false information with liberal groups for later use. let them go astray.
What can we believe?
Fifth Generation War
What we he calls it “the world,” the world of the rich calls it “the battlefield of knowledge,” the place where the war is fought against knowledge, knowledge itself, the war fought in the mind. Please join Naked Capitalism as one of the heroes of the struggle against this campaign, by joining this project and donating generously on the donation page.
I think there is little doubt that the West – and in particular, the United States – is at the bottom of a fifth generation war on the information battlefield. (For clues about the manipulation skills involved, start here and here. For the state’s willingness to use these skills, see here and here.)
Fifth-generation warfare (5GW) is warfare conducted primarily through non-kinetic military action, such as social engineering, disinformation, cyberattacks, and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and fully autonomous systems. Fifth generation warfare has been described by Daniel Abbot as a war of “knowledge and perception”.
From the NATO document entitled “Information Warfare” we find this:
What is information warfare? … [C]controlling personal information space, protecting access to personal information, while obtaining and using competitor information, destroying their information systems and disrupting the flow of information.
The information war on the internet… The Internet improves and expands the possibilities of data acquisition, information protection and information disruption, and facilitates access to both citizens of a particular country and the international community.
Remember, this was written by NATO, the group waging this kind of war, not one dedicated to protecting people from it. Ironically, it advises victims of the information war to escape the “bubble” by “segregating sources of information and finding information other than that suggested by the algorithms that control social media.”
Daniel Abbott, mentioned above as one of the gurus of the 5G war theory, wrote that the 5G war is “being fought by manipulating ideas and changing the context in which the world is seen”; that in the 5G war, “the losing side may not see that it has been won”; and that the 5G war is “to manipulate the context of observation to make the enemy do our will.”
The Colonial Mind
All of this deserves an essay on its own. But to see an attempt to colonize the mind in real time, think briefly about the Israel-Gaza war – which is actually a massacre, not a war at all (the first salvo in 5G’s attempt to control your thoughts).
Israel depends on the American nation and its natural resources – its money and media infrastructure, its massive arms industry – to keep up the killing spree. What are the ways our government keeps citizens compliant as it feeds this carnage?
To answer, consider: How is the genocide in Gaza reported in the mainstream press? First, by constantly calling it “the war against Hamas.” Second, by disappearing Israel’s involvement in killing and death:
How do universities (a connected ecosystem) and the billions that govern them deal with campus protests against genocide? Like this.
How does the mainstream media (the arm of information and the rest of the connected ecosystem) report those protests? Like this.
Isn’t all this about “controlling ideas and changing the context in which the world is seen” so that “the defeated side never realizes that it has been defeated”? How many people among us are not aware of this taking? Many? Most?
The only way to resist this colonization is, first of all, to see the opponents for who they are, and not to think the thoughts they promote. The way to do that is to escape the bubble (as NATO advises above) and find better news sources.
Yves Smith’s site was targeted by Google in 2024 for possibly false charges of promoting “violent extremism” and “hateful content.” The war of information against the Internet.
Even earlier, in 2016, before Trump’s election, the site was accused, among others, by Washington Post of spreading “Russian propaganda” to a “US audience.” These allegations are false and quickly shot down, but be aware of who is spreading them. Information war.
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And you need Naked Capitalism.
Our moment, as Walter Kirn says, is full. We are dealing with a machine that wants to make decisions impossible. The special need for control goes back to the early states, but modern technology has given new access, new power. Thanks to the Internet and social media, billions are connected, in ways never before, to a world that is more easily shaped.
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