The Internet is so much easier to control than radio
Anyone who thinks the internet is going to allow non-approved actors to organize opposition to our increasingly dysfunctional Deep State is completely unaware of the history of mass media in wartime, specifically in WW2. I'm going to first review that history, and then talk about the Internet.
Radio in WW2
During WW2, radio was the dominant mass medium; and newly developed propaganda techniques were a major undertaking. The US/UK had a real commitment to free speech, to the point where they did not even try to prevent people from listening to Axis propagandists like Tokyo Rose or Lord Haw Haw. The English speaking democracies trusted their populations to be smart enough to separate truth from propaganda.
The Nazis, on the other hand, criminalized listening to foreign broadcasts; and encouraged informers to report the listeners. Listening to foreign broadcasts was called "Radio verbrechen" (radio crimes).
The moment the war broke out, tuning in to foreign stations was made a criminal offense punishable by death. It was all too easy, in apartment blocks poorly insulated for sound, for listeners to face denunciation to the authorities by fanatical or ill-intentioned neighbors who overheard the sonorous tones of BBC newsreaders coming through the walls. Some 4,000 people were arrested and prosecuted for ‘radio crime’ in the first year of the law’s operation, and the first execution of an offender came in 1941.
- Richard Evans, "The Third Reich at War" (2009)
Like all countries at the time, except for the US, radio broadcasting in Germany was done exclusively by the government. So, it was easy for the Nazis to submerge Germany under a wave of total propaganda that penetrated into all aspects of life - leisure, sports, family life. In fact, the Nazis created cheap radios so that people would be forced to listen to Hitler's speeches and important announcements. These radios were deliberately weakened so people often did not even have the ability to listen to foreign broadcasts. The propaganda was total. It was possible to ban even popular things like jazz (although, by mid-war, Goebbels was forced to back off; so he began producing jazz with anti-US lyrics).
radios were too expensive for the majority of Germans in the depressed Germany Hitler inherited. Soon after achieving power the Nazis decided to introduce an affordable radio, the Volksempfänger, ” the people’s receiver”, so Nazi propaganda and approved broadcasts, consisting of news, propaganda, volkische (folk) music and classical music (the Reich Broadcasting Corporation was banned from playing populist “negroid” music such as jazz and music by Jewish composers and songwriters) could reach a mass audience. In 1939, ...the Volksempfänger had made radio a mass commodity...
few Volksempfänger came with short wave, and they generally had limited sensitivity so as to receive only local stations, as the Nazis were worried listeners could pick up broadcasts from the Soviet Union or Britain. The dials were only marked with German stations...
larger versions were often rigged up to loudspeakers to provide saturation coverage of a major Nazi speech or the Nuremberg rallies. (Even if you were unwilling to tune your radio into the latest speech by Hitler, escape from his rantings, unless you took to a mountain top or a cave, was almost impossible as loudspeakers were in position in almost every public place, turned to a high volume.)...
Luftwaffe pilots...often tuned into the BBC and American forces stations as a form of light relief from the endless propaganda and volkische music on German stations – at least the Gestapo could not arrest you in the air –
The Internet in post-democracy America
From a First Amendment highpoint of the publication of the Pentagon Papers (due to a split in the factions of the American oligarchy over how to prosecute the Vietnam War), the US has witnessed the slow strangulation of a free press by means of corporate concentration. This was first noted in 1983 by Ben Bagdikian in The Media Monopoly. Bagdikian continued to document the ever-growing concentration through seven editions, the last in 2004.
The early internet caused a momentary hiccup in TPTB's plan for total media control, because it was too free. Anyone could say anything, anyone could listen, and there was no way for the government to monitor it. The Israelis soon remedied that problem by selling packet sniffers and other surveillance tech en masse to the rapidly metastasizing post-911 security state. Today, literally every bit that flows anywhere on the US internet is captured and stored in an NSA mega-facility in Bluffdale, Utah for post-"thought crime" perusal by the authorities.
Of course, government interrogation was too obvious and too sinister; so that task was handled by supposedly independent corporations: Google, Facebook, and Amazon. I say "supposedly" because there is an immense fight over exactly how much funding the CIA/NSA/In-Q-Tel provided to Google; just as there is an argument about how the Facebook private stock IPO was managed by Deep State forces. Amazon's CIA contract is well-known. That interrogation has been totally successful. We all can see that GFA know more about us than we know about ourselves - and they share all of that with the government. (Not clear about Apple, given their encryption policy; but they could just be another sheepdog.)
An "excess of democracy" - round two
The 2016 election campaign demonstrated to TPTB that the open internet had created what the infamous, "clash of civilizations" neocon, Samuel Huffington, called "an excess of democracy" in 1975 .
the problems of governance "stem from an excess of democracy" and thus advocates "to restore the prestige and authority of central government institutions."
CORRECTION: Lily O'Lady points out that that search does work. I must have made a typo, like Samuel Huffington. Then I went off on a rant. Sorry.
Just FYI: documenting this quote demonstrated the already effective censorship of the internet. When I pushed {"excess of democracy" "samuel huntington"} into Google, I got nothing useful. I had to go to the Huntington page on Wikipedia, and from there to the last paragraph of his academic career to get the name of his book "The Crisis of Democracy" from which I knew the quote came. Only in that article was I able to get the direct quote that I knew from my own life experience. Basically, if you didn't know that Huntington said that over 40 years ago, you would never learn it from Google.
To stop 2016's excess of democracy, TPTB had to expose our political system as a total fraud. They cheated in front of the world to deny Bernie Sanders and the grassroots of the Democratic Party the nomination. Based on that fraudulent outcome, they tried to get the public to swallow the Wall St/Pentagon neocon Hillary. But that darned excess had yet to be mopped up, so we got Trumpzilla instead. TPTB were more succesful inside the Democratic Party. After the election debacle they were still able to deny the progressives any meaningful representation on the DNC
For the last two years, we have been bombarded with the lies of Russiagate and serial false flag pretend gas attacks (with real dead bodies provided by our ISIS headchoppers). Of course, a huge majority doesn't trust anything the government or the media say. So, TPTB has been forced to take the next step down the road to the Gulag - the fake news canard.
Fake News
We have come full circle back to the Nazi radio propaganda apparatus. First, our TPTB made up out of thin air the ludicrous idea that the Russians helped Trump win. To mock that transparent lie is out of the scope of this essay. Suffice it to point to Herman Goring's quote:
the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.
Based on the lie of Russiagate (a vile retread of the Nazi "World Jewish Conspiracy" lie), we now have corporate promulgated lists of "fake news" organizations. Facebook and Google are busy generating their own secret lists and algorithms. Literal censorship is creeping up on us (as I demonstrated with my search for the Huntington quote).
America, the country that wrote freedom of speech into its Constitution, is now controlling what everyone can find out even more tightly than the Nazis. They are literally telling the adult population of America that TPTB does not trust them to do process the real world, does not trust them to draw the politically correct conclusions from the bowdlerized, embedded corpo-journalists.
Not only don't they trust you, they are spying on you even more proficiently than the infamous East German Stasi via your every mouse click. But, this is hardly any surprise when you know about Operation Paperclip, the Gehlen Organization, and the CIAs deep ties to unrepentant Nazis. As someone said, after WW2, the fascists did a costume change and came out as rightwing Americans.
Future prospects - dim
After the non-response of the public to today's latest illegal aggression by the US against Syria, I have pretty much given up on progressives being able to be heard in national-level politics. (Google news is complete propaganda. More lies and threats from the likes of Niki Haley. More phony corporatist analyses from the likes of Time magazine. Not one word about opposition or protest.) TPTB have simply demolished the facts and organizations necessary for (genuine) resistance to the MIC. The MIC is allowed to blow up any place they want in order to keep the tribute flowing to Wall St. Being anti-war is now somehow seen as being unpatriotic to the "exceptional nation".
People are too busy trying to survive in the Pottersville that TPTB have created, with Amazon warehouse sweatshops, call center boiler rooms, and all the other precariat jobs. And "automation" is coming to thoroughly eliminate the low-skill jobs. So, in their minimal spare time, they treat US foreign policy like just another football game. They cheer when "their side" (the US) bombs someone or sanctions someone. They implicitly recognize they have no control over their own government and that, as I said in a previous OP, they are "refugees in their own country". The internet is no help. It is just another arm of the corporate media. It keeps pushing snowflake memes and Kardashian distractions while our domestic economy is looted and our military loots or intimidates foreign countries into submission.
The internet is no longer free and no longer our ally. If what c99p said made a material difference in the world, it too would go on the fake news list; it too would be subjected to DoS attacks or be threatened with being taken down by its ISP.
The US is now run by a murderous bipartisan neocon/neoliberal oligarchy. It is draining the last assets of its former middle class, and squeezing its client states, to fund its aggressions. It is heavily armed and has attacked several countries with false flag provocations, leaving nothing but ruin and chaos in the wake of their campaign to "protect democracy".
The situation is quite akin to 1939. The US has, step-by-step, shown the world that our promises not to attack again are worthless, that we have no respect for international law, that our non-democratic government does whatever the neocon operatives tell it to, and that we (and our two fundamentalist allies, Israel and KSA) have no compunction about murdering millions in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Gaza, and Yemen and then cold-bloodedly blaming the victims or treating them as non-human ("mowing the lawn").
The Russians find themselves in the role of Great Britain versus the Nazis. The Russians are outgunned and still recovering from the last Cold War and the imposition of Shock Doctrine in its wake - much as the Germans were looted by post-WW1 reparations. But, like GB, the Russians are not going to roll over, however outgunned they are. Like the British, they are politically united; and, even better than the British, they have their Churchill in place before the war starts.
However, unlike 1939, the next war will be the last war; and it will last about 15 minutes. Maybe today's game-playing in Syria can be contained; but the future looks pretty bleak. The US is trying to maintain its failing economic control by means of ever more naked military aggression. Those aggressions are increasingly ineffective, and they are driving US allies away and driving US opponents into a grand alliance. The US leadership is completely cut off from the reality that no one can win a nuclear war, that even a few dozen nuclear explosions can bring on a nuclear winter. It is only because of that science-lobotomy that they dare to carry out their aggressions.
The problem is the neocon warmongers; and the internet is not the solution to that problem. The internet, aka "surveillance capitalism" is part of the problem.
Comments
Absolutely! And one of the biggest
Corporatist lackeys pushing for control is...
We plebs are on our own!
I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks
Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa
It's not content that draws censorship,
it's reach. We can say whatever we want here because our audience is so small. If c99 had, say, 3 million readers, you bet there'd be a problem.
We wanted decent healthcare, a living wage and free college.
The Democrats gave us Biden and war instead.
as I said, material difference
3 million followers would make a material difference.
Great options: small and ineffective or big and dead
Using DuckDuckGo as my search engine
for {"excess of democracy" "samuel huntington"} here's my first hits:
NOTE: The following was highlighted on the right side of the page
NOTE 2: The very first hit is a pdf of the entire 272 page book.
I gave up on Google several years ago because I had to go two, three and more pages down to find what I was looking for. They also track you like a sleepless bloodhound.
interesting
I thought DDG used Google as their engine. I thought all that DDG was selling was anonymous searches.
Thanks for the data point.
@arendt
I recall reading (and hearing on Democracy Now!) that they actually piggyback off Bing, but they anonymize it for you.
Mozilla Firefox also doesn't track or sell your data. They are my preferred browser...
StartPage (which I mostly
use) uses Google for Search.
But they don't track you. (or so they say).
If I can't find it on StartPage I'll look on Duck Duck.
And, yes, sadly, Dogpile has gone the way of the sellouts.
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
duckduckgo does not have their own search engine for sure.
Just a quick read about them on Wikipedia and it mentions using various APIs if I read right. Many results look to be identical to what google produced.
I wonder if your different results was the search engine being revised/updated.
One thing I have found about google is that you need to have pretty precise words to find possible alternative sources. Big difference in results if searching for "Rebels bomb Damascus" versus "Rebels shell Damascus".
I get the impression that they haven't some much built search algorithms to programmatically to ignore4 certain content, but that they have a list of "prohibited sites." As various leftists sites have found, they ares suddenly not appearing in search results. Same thing in reverse there is an accepted list of sites which automatically go to the top. Type in any keyword about some news topic, and from whhat I have seen, the top results point to MSMBC, etc. When Trump got out of TPP, it took looking at a shitload of result pages on how exactly China would gain from TPP. The pimp was that Trump was empowering China by getting out of TPP which was repeated endlessly page after page. (China would gain by very provisions of how much of a products part had to be built by signees--big hole for China.)
There is also dogpile.com. FYI
Prof: Nancy! I’m going to Greece!
Nancy: And swim the English Channel?
Prof: No. No. To ancient Greece where burning Sapho stood beside the wine dark sea. Wa de do da! Nancy, I’ve invented a time machine!
Firesign Theater
Stop the War!
Just tried it out.
That site gave pure MSM responses to my test questions for at least the first five pages.
In any event, it is mostly adverts. I wouldn't recommend it.
death of the last of the metacrawlers
Thus dies the last of the great metacrawlers. Alas.
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
metacrawlers
It appears that the reports of the death of one of the first metacrawlers, Metacrawler.com itself, have been exaggerated!
Give it a try!
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
You silly... It is to cry
Trump's now a fraud!': Alex Jones CRIES during rant about Syria attack on InfoWars livestream
Prof: Nancy! I’m going to Greece!
Nancy: And swim the English Channel?
Prof: No. No. To ancient Greece where burning Sapho stood beside the wine dark sea. Wa de do da! Nancy, I’ve invented a time machine!
Firesign Theater
Stop the War!
The Truth Is Depressing
Thanks for a great essay/synthesis of our dilemma arendt. I'll just highlight this:
I was stunned to wake up to almost zero coverage of last night's disaster. Almost like it never happened. Trump just sealed Obama's deal with Congress that the POTUS has carte blanche for any type of miltary intervention anywhere on the planet for no reason and without any rational justification.
"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn
Or the coverage was that Trump only hit empty buildings
after he told Putin to move out of danger which proves that he's his puppet and if he didn't do that then Putin would release the pee tape. The media seemed very upset that more damage wasn't done to Syrian structures.
The other meme was that Trump only did that to get the media to stop talking about Comey's book and his lawyer's office being raided. It sure doesn't seem like anyone was happy with the results of the bombing.
Krugman asked, "who will be the last man to die for a pee tape?" Seriously? Bite me, Paul!
Putin isn’t going to make you homeless or kill you or deny you health care.
Your government will allow it to happen though.
"The media seemed very upset that more damage wasn't done"
Yeah, the media cheerleads war and violence. The excuse might be that violence sells; but the reality is that they are constantly running "ten minute hates" against Russia, Iran, Syria, and North Korea. The giveaway is that they only cheerlead certain violence. They ignore genocide in Yemen, neo-Nazis in Ukraine, and mass murder in Gaza.
I don't want to get into this "Trump only hit empty buildings" detail, except to say don't get sucked in by this narrative. What Trump does or doesn't do is not important. He is merely the figurehead for arguments between the last few sane realists (rightwingers all) and the warmongering nutcases. The fate of the world is in the hands of someone named "Mad Dog", because he is better than the sociopathic war criminal Bolton.
If the media were doing anything like their job, they would blow the whistle on our murderous policies and our batshit crazy "leadership".
No worries, mon
"That Trump only hit empty buildings"
don't get sucked in by this narrative.
Aye, I'm well aware that this is what the media is telling people. But it's not just the media that is saying that. On many Twitter threads that is what a lot of people are saying. This and that he only did it to change the discussion.
UN-Net neutrality goes into effect on 4/22, IIRC. What do you think will happen then? If they slow the internet, how will it affect us. Any ideas?
Putin isn’t going to make you homeless or kill you or deny you health care.
Your government will allow it to happen though.
Alright, previous post was snarky
But the Norwegians waged guerrilla war against the Nazis. Their primary tool was the banned SW radios, penalties for having were death.
Norwegian resistance movement
To this day, Norway celebrates the Radio.
Prof: Nancy! I’m going to Greece!
Nancy: And swim the English Channel?
Prof: No. No. To ancient Greece where burning Sapho stood beside the wine dark sea. Wa de do da! Nancy, I’ve invented a time machine!
Firesign Theater
Stop the War!
It was much more personal then
Mass armies, occupations, secret police were very personal.
Courage and cowardice were on display every day, one on one. No sticking your face in a cell phone and ignoring your surroundings.
The Norwegians and the Danes got away with pushing back because they were Nordic, "Aryan" blonds. The Nazis couldn't just dismiss them as untermenschen. Still, the time everyone in Denmark, including the king, put on yellow (Jewish) armbands in solidarity was amazing.
The internet has the potential to bring all the vices of occupations and police states without the one on one possibilities. They will monitor you via the net, and if they decide you are a problem, they will send a squad of five or ten guys to the location your phone's GPS is giving them, realtime.
Maximilian Kolbe
The Nazi governors of Poland had a reserved hatred for Maximilian Kolbe, now a Saint in the Roman Catholic Church (and also venerated by Anglicans and Lutherans). Not only did he openly print and publish anti-Nazi documents in Polish, but he also operated an amateur two-way radio station (SP3RN) which meant he wasn't just listening to foreign radio stations but talking to them as well!
He died in 1941 at Auschwitz.
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
Hero! Prolly no statue
though.
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
Maximilian Kolbe's statue
False. Here's one at the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey in London:
(the furry-faced one on the left is the Saint)
source
Betcha there are a few in Polonia, too!
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
Google has become useless for . . . .
. . . finding anything that goes against the dominant MSM-narrative-of-the-moment, that might support an "alternative" or "dissident" or "anti-establishment" point of view, or that is anti-corporate. I have noticed this especially during the past year-and-a-half when looking for things that I KNOW exist (like Huntington's "Crisis of Democracy"), but for which I need to locate a specific webpage or about which I want to read more.
I chalk it up to the fact that the Deep State/Establishment has pretty much pushed Google into this position. Google has become a "gate-keeper" that protects the ruling/commercial elite, their lies, and their ideologies.
But then, it took Assange about two or three years ago to first enlighten me as to how Google and its executives are in bed with the deep state/intelligence apparatus in this country. Everything that has happened since then to that site and to YouTube, as well as the various revelations about the history of its inception and founding, have just served to confirm the truth or what Assange was talking about.
Thus, I use Google less and less these days (like, maybe to find a good pizza joint), and go to other sites like duckduckgo and yandex, which give me better and more accurate search results.
TPTB certainly have the MSM under their thumbs.
There is a non stop parading of talking heads chosen from the following....
1) Ex military who have never seen a war that they don't like.
2) Ex CIA individuals whose claim to fame is toppling left leaning governments.
3) Consultants who get their paychecks from the MIC.
4) A random smattering of war mongers.
5) Inept politicians who are along for the ride.
Missing are anyone who is anti-war!
The corporate media is the propaganda . . . .
. . . . mouthpiece of the corporate state. It tells us mostly what our rulers want us to think, know, and believe. That's its function.
It's been that way for decades. Noam Chomsky first enlightened me to this reality back in the early 90s, although since then, I've also come to modify for myself Chomsky's official "propaganda model" of how the media operates. So, for example, I now also know about active CIA/intelligence community infiltration of media outlets going back at least to the CIA's "Operation Mockingbird," something that Chomsky never spoke about. That is also another factor that accounts for how and why the media functions as a "lie machine."
The point is, if you want "truth," or anything that honestly or sincerely questions the agendas of the "establishment," the last place to look for or expect anything like this is in the corporate media.
The sooner you realize and accept these realities, the better off you will be.
Re: Chomsky
I have heard an urban legend about his books:
Did you ever wonder why bookstores that avoid leftwing authors like the plague always have a selection of Chomsky books? Well, bookstores keep records of who buys the stuff. Over the years, Chomsky has been marginalized further and further; so TPTB use him as a marker to identify potential troublemakers.
Do I buy this UL? Well, back when I could pay cash, or when credit cards were swiped by a mechanical reader that made a carbon copy, I thought this was paranoia. These days, every last transaction is reported. It isn't worth calculating the expense of just keeping a list of everyone who bought a Chomsky book. TPTB have that list.
Then again, this is just an early version of the "fake news" blacklist.
We really don't have freedom of anything anymore, except freedom to be exploited.
Perhaps there is truth to this, but . . . FUCK IT . . . .
At some point someone has to say, "I don't care if they are tracking me. I've done nothing wrong, and even if they want to keep me on some list of theirs so that they can track me as some kind of potential enemy of the power structure, then so be it."
Otherwise, one is no more than a coward who lives in fear, and lets that fear control him or her.
No matter how many times these jackasses are wrong...
they never get fired. Meanwhile people who are correct about disasters like the Iraq War are constantly fired.
I tuned out the corporate media over ten years ago. And, as soon as a leftie gets picked up by the CM, I can be sure they have sold out: Rachel Maddow, Jake Tapper, etc.
The media is nothing but propaganda. Just look at the crap they are spouting about chemical weapons: we bombed the "chemical weapons factories", but people are walking around the rubble with no protection - plus, we didn't give a shit if blowing up chemical weapons might kill people downwind of the attack. You have to be a moron to buy this stuff. Same nonsense about the Skripals: no deaths, no other people affected from "military grade nerve gas".
People who disagree with the CM used to be labeled "conspiracy theorists", but that became untenable as more and more "conspiracies" turned out to be true - especially ones about CIA operations with terrorists and regime changes. So, now we have "Russian influence" and "fake news". We are right back to neo-McCarthyism. Be loyal, name names.
Your search may have failed initially because you looked
for “Samuel Huffington” rather than “Samuel Huntington.” Go back and look at your text to see that you wrote “Huffington” and then finally found “Huntington.”
Huntington also wrote “The Clash of Civilizations”. He posits that we live in a post ideology era where divisions will arise over cultural divides pitting mainly the West against pretty much everyone else. Pretty scary stuff. See Wikipedia. Sorry I don’t have a,link, but I have trouble with links on my tablet.
"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"
You are right. I am a doofus. Google does serve up the ref.
I would have thought that the algorithms were good enough to catch the goof. But either the algos are not that clever, or Google isn't interested in correcting mistakes that lead to places google doesn't like.
thanks. It helps to be humiliated ever once in a while.
I do stuff like that all the time. That’s why it was so easy
for me to see.
"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"
One minor point,
you said that automation is going to replace low skilled jobs. Like a chemical engineer once (not exactly) told me, "A high school dropout with the right program on a tablet can do my job for $12.25 an hour." The quote didn't actually happen, it actually took several paragraphs from 2 speakers, but in fact, it is skilled workers who will go, if not first, more catastrophically. There is less of a return on investment to replace a minimum wage grounskeeper than to replace a $90k a year engineer. Human servants will come back in style, and of course there's always "police"... er, "private security".
On to Biden since 1973
I think its back office workers and the like who will...
be targeted for automation. People like law clerks, office managers - people who juggle a lot of simple balls, more balls than the average person can manage. These people are skilled; but their skills can be automated. Loan approvals got automated about ten years back. Its the kind of rote, by the book skill I'm talking about.
I don't think chemical engineers are on the list, because one mistake and you get a big explosion and/or toxic release. Yeah, you can automate basic chemical science. The big pharmas have been sending chemical scutwork to China for decades. You can hire ten Chinese bachelors-level chemists for the price of one American Ph.D. So, they outsource the rote work and leave the thinking for the Ph.D.s
I don't disagree with your general idea. I just think that the automation is not smart enough to think (just yet). So, IMHO, it can only replace rote white-collar jobs. They are making a lot of noise about Deep Learning and Machine Learning; but, like all so-called AI, the stuff is very brittle, very non-portable. It has to be highly tuned to the application by very expensive Ph.D. level computer scientists. I don't think companies are ready to dump their Ph.D. level humans and trust some flaky, hackable computer code just yet.
Pattern recognition
Middle class jobs that involve detecting patterns are the ones that will go. Radiology, stock brokers, driver, etc. The research is accelerating.
We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.
- Greta Thunberg
Interesting anecdote about the engineer. Hedges has similar
theory.
and,
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"
- Kurt Vonnegut
I agree with Hedges, and have used that quote..
in one of my essays or comments.
The problem for the 0.01% is that they still need a few really talented workers to keep the machinery turning over. As automation lets them fire more and more merely talented workers, they are growing their own executioners. The question is whether Bezos and Brin's minions can perfect Skynet before the disgruntled engineers are ready.
The profiling has been
achieved. Even if GoogFace etc became public utilities or made to disappear there's a profile on each of us in possession of the State. From what you are likely to buy, or vote or respond to this or that propaganda pitch. They don't have most of the four year olds yet; then again they have all their family to work with.
Orwell: Where's the omelette?
How long until Twitter stops letting people who have
the wrong thoughts about what the PTB are doing post their voices on it? We've already seen Google censoring not only alternative websites, but the information we're looking for. Farcebook is saying that it needs to be regulated by congress. Zuck face came up with that idea himself. No prodding needed. (BTW, how can members of congress restructure FB when they don't even understand how it works? Hatch had to have it explained to him.)
That Herheinous' supporters didn't think it was a problem with her basically buying the DNC or any of her foreign policies, using her foundation to scarf up money, etc) shows how much they have changed their ideals because of what Obama did during his tenure. This is why Russia Gate has worked on them. That very few of them had a problem with bombing Syria last night is another part of Obama's legacy. He did and they had no problem with what he did to Libya. I have not seen one diary there discussing how far Libya has fallen since his coup. Denise hasn't written a word about the slavery that has returned to Libya. Bad Denise, and the rest of black porch dwellers.
Excellent essay. I knew that net neutrality is going to be a thing of the past as I watched the legislation that was passed during the Obama administration. The NDAA that he signed that would let the military arrest us and then we're not allowed access to a lawyer and also the militarization of the police and others that have slipped my mind. All it's going to take for martial law to be declared is another bank crash, an natural disaster or war on our soil and whola, the legislation goes into effect.
Where were Germany and Italy last night? Merkel was probably pissing herself for not being able to play with her other friends last night, but she just signed an agreement with Russia for natural gas. How sad that she had to sit this one out.
Will Russia respond to last night's actions or not? Each time Putin watches as we bomb another country let's us get more aggressive. He's being bottled up and surrounded by the countries that are being admitted to NATO. Which Ukraine is being considered to join. Now how asinine is this? NATO was formed to make sure that another Hitler (Nazis) doesn't take over the world and now those NATO countries are considering letting a country ruled by Nazis into it. Someone stop this effing merry go round, I want off.
Putin isn’t going to make you homeless or kill you or deny you health care.
Your government will allow it to happen though.
NATO was formed to make sure.....
Actually, NATO was formed to make sure that another Russian like Stalin doesn't take over the world. The ex-Nazis (West Germany) were part of NATO's backbone from the beginning.
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
Awe. Oh well, history was never my strong suit
Either way, NATO is nothing but a bunch of warmongering pigs.
Thanks for setting me straight
Putin isn’t going to make you homeless or kill you or deny you health care.
Your government will allow it to happen though.
The US is taking notes from the Chinese...
about how to run an internet in a police state.
The Chinese have literally one million operatives monitoring every keystroke that is made (We do it with computers, remotely; they do it with people, in person at internet cafes and such.)
The Chinese are going to roll out some mandatory "social credit" scheme that penalizes people who do not expose themselves via Facebook-style biographies and constellations of "friends". It will go something like this:
Oh, we see that you don't go to enough football games, and don't spend enough money on new cars, and don't pay any interest on credit cards. We are penalizing you for this anti-
corporate-social behavior by reducing your credit rating, putting you at the back of any queue for airline tickets, etc. Nothing Draconian. Merely constant, petty, punitive harrassment and public opprobrium. We understand how peer pressure can wear people down, especially when others are happy that some other loser is the scapegoat.I said on here
a couple months (or three) ago that I think The grandkids and great grandkids of Third Reich Nazis now are running the U.S.A. Many of those Third Reich leaders made their way to South America in the waning days of the Reich. And, some of those made their way to the American (if not Canadian) Rockies, reminiscent of their beloved Alps. Hell, even a few were brought here courtesy of Uncle Sam as the Reich was collapsing! So... it took them some 70 years, but the Nazis eventually ended up winning WWII. And, now are carrying out Hitler's wet dream: conquer the world! And, nearly everyone inside The Beltway is on board. Sieg Heil, dammit!
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
They can join the descendants of the slaveowners
because the South won the Civil War, 150 years later. They never surrendered. They never admitted they were wrong. They held onto segregation for another hundred years. Then they jumped on the "government is bad" express and parlayed their racist school system into the privatization of education. Meanwhile, assholes like uber-racist, Strom Thurmond; and stealth racist, Senate Minority Leader, Trent Lott (paid up member of the Council of Consevative Citizens, a neo-Confederate front) made the GOP into the home of racism. Lincoln is turning in his grave.
The US has been fucked ever since Harry Truman was snookered into creating the CIA. Confederate slime, Nazi slime, John Birch Society slime (the Koch Brothers), Randian slime (Alan Greenspan, Paul Ryan). Every piece of rightwing slime out there is organized. The left? J Edgar ruined it; anti-left union leaders like George Meany sold it to Scoop Jackson, and then the Clintons hijacked what was left of it.
This democracy is so over.
Exactly right.
"The North" gave back
to The South everything The South
had "lost" in the Civil War ten or 12 years after the war's end.
Then, of course, as you mention, carried on as if they had won.
Becuz, for all intents and purpose they had! So, The North fights
the war all over again in the 1960s, with a Texan of all people, LBJ,
leading the parade. And the War Between the States continues to this day,
The South generally having their way with the rest of the country, and
Nazis like Paul Ryan cheering them on. And here we are, sitting on the sidelines,
watching the filth walk away with the treasure.
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
Big fan of your essays, arendt.
It's just that sometimes after I've read them my mind is so full of stuff in so many directions that I many times can't summarize succinctly enough what I want to say, and don't at all. I'm at home, full time, up to my neck with two babies. But I'm there reading, practically all the time (as much as time permits). And learning much from you specifically.
So this is just a deep thanks more than anything, at least for now.
Re: propaganda. It is the thing I perhaps ponder most. Because in a general sense it is the pivotal thing from which all else flows, the mortar that calcifies the status quo and keeps us perpetually divided and conquered. And its components are entrenched and woven so deeply into the education system, the MSM, sports and entertainment and are the cornerstone to the two Great Lies, American Exceptionalism and The American Dream, to which they hook the masses.
Great piece.
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"
- Kurt Vonnegut
Thanks for the kind words....
It sounds like your process is the inverse of mine:
Before I write the essay, I have one idea, maybe two. But as I start writing, it seems that the problem an essay addresses is connected to a whole bunch of other problems. So, I try to tie in as many of those other problems as I can without causing the essay to become unfocused.
So, it sounds like a reader's mind reproduces the ideas that I had to corral to do the writing. That is good. It means we are communicating at a level much deeper than the words.
Have you ever heard of the concept of "exformation". Here is a picture that has an interesting story behind it:
The link works, but does not embed. It is: https://goo.gl/images/cxxT12
The story is that Mr. Hugo wanted to know how his book was selling, so he sent a telegram of just one letter, "?" to his publisher. The book was selling very well, so the publisher sent back one letter, "!".
And that's exformation. I think c99p has a collective set of exformation; and I think that the c99p community is pretty much on the same page. Notice how none of us buys all the BS about chemical weapons. That is already a huge divergence in exformation from the audience for corporate media.
Thanks for taking some of your limited time to read my stuff and comment.
The link does not embed.
Try:
The image's original home wasn't Google, but another site. Right-clicking the image in the Google display and saving the image location got me an embeddable URL.
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
Thanks for the help
I found the image by doing a google search and then selecting "images for (my search term)". When I "visited" that image in google, it said it was a slide share. But, when I tried to right click on the slide it gave me this enormously long google hash. So, I didn't think I could copy from the slideshare.
I guess you went directly to slideshare.com. So, when you right clicked you got that comprehensible URL.
Thanks.
I like the idea of lots of shortwave radio near traffic sites.
I think radio has become overlooked in the glare of all the new social media and could be a great subversive tool again. My idea is (if I knew how) to set up a shortwave station and play nothing but radical speeches/lectures by everyone from Chris Hedges, Richard Wolff, Michael Hudson, Kshama Sawant and Cornel West, to Malcom X, IF Stone, MLK, Mario Savio, Abbie Hoffman, etc. Then put up signs (or have someone hold one) at the junctures of high-density, metropolitan traffic areas with a clever slogan telling people to tune in.
Another idea I have is to buy an old ice cream truck and just ride around town doing the same, and maybe selling a little ice cream too.
Was riding one of the new ferry services yesterday on a beautiful spring day. Had the Boy walking with me on the upper deck enjoying all the sites going down the East River. Started talking with a woman who was middle-aged and childless, who spoke so glowingly about her young nephew who was now in kindergarten, prompted by the sight of my son. I mentioned my misgivings about our education system and schools, which have been so accurately described by George Carlin, as
She began to tell me of a NASA study in which found young kids exhibited very high signs of creativity as children. But when they reached adolescence it was drastically reduced. I think Carlin's bit gets at why that may be. When she was about to depart she was doing some volunteer gardening that day and mentioned an Earth Day event near where I live later in the month. I thanked her, but added cynically that it was probably sponsored by some corporation (always seeking to get a rise out of someone within earshot). A guy in a bicyclist outfit chimed in and asked something like why that would be bad. But he was just trying to engage me more.
Found myself in a back and forth with a former 20 year Nation Magazine writer who quit 15 years ago. He saw my "Make Socialism Great Again" t-shirt on and asked me to give him one way that could happen. I began to say that it all starts with propaganda and he cut me off. No, give me one plan you have to achieve that (or something like that). I thought about it a moment and said it would have to all begin with taking Money Out Of Politics. I said that Bernie's campaign was revolutionary for exposing the fraud of the pay-to-play electoral system by proving one could raise enormous sums of money with only small individual donations and didn't have to grovel for corporate money. He seemed satisfied with that. But he gave some wise advice about the liberal press. Mentioned that the Nation was owned my a very rich woman who sees it as her toy (I kind of like Katrina Vanden Hueval) and that one had to write boilerplate stuff that fits within the echo chamber. I didn't disagree. But could think of at least some good stiff the Nation had done (including being one of the only publications to endorse Bernie, but there's more).
As he got up to go he said, "I like you shirt."
I thought how few times people have intense public conversations, and that the couple of dozen people in our vicinity had probably walked away with a few things to think about. No one talks in public anymore. I'm resolved to want to change that in my own small ways, to the best of my ability.
We need to get the conversations out in the open, to prevent them from festering online and in a frozen malaise inside people's heads, so that people are not just prone to lashing out at one another with the verbatim divide and conquer propaganda dictated by the MSM. My idea is to make a sign declaring myself a non-partisan who only wants to talk about the issues.
Gonna meet some activist friends this week to talk about how to do that in my local park this spring and summer.
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"
- Kurt Vonnegut
Interesting points about radio.
Many years ago, on an alternative talk show, a person talked about people setting up their own "guerilla radio stations". The technology was there to easily create a radio stations whose broadcast would go out 1-to-several-miles.
I think "low power" radio is now legal
We have such a station in our town. It started out doing interesting politics; but it soon switched over to 50s music. That is, it became just another station, with only local news to make it different. Of course, just bringing back local news is huge, since Clear Channel wiped out local news.
I would have to check the rules, but i think that an LP station is limited to 10 watts of transmitter power. (Vs 50,000 watts max for a conventional radio station.)
Just got an email about pirate radio in Brooklyn
Talk about serendipity...
From the fine folks at Interference Archives, came this:
Brooklyn Pirate Radio Sound Map
This looks great.
I've got a gig to play that night (for a celebrity for whom we had to sign a non-disclosure agreement; man do I despise corporate culture), for which I have to set up late afternoon, so I might not be able to make it. I'm really going to try though.
Anybody else in the NYC area I would encourage to go.
Let's get subversive.
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"
- Kurt Vonnegut
I hear you; but short-wave? Not AM or FM?
Very few Americans have short wave radios. I happen to have a 3-band AM, FM, shortwave that my brother gave me for boating/emergency purposes. But I have never even turned on the shortwave bands, and would not know where to get a station guide - if there is such a thing as a station guide.
I think low power AM or FM is the way to go; although I think you have to apply for a license. I think the regulations are pretty minimal. We have one in our little town.
Shows what a novice I am about radio transmission
Yeah, that’s what I meant. Low Power AM would be great.
The purpose being to hopefully reach bored and frustrated drivers stuck in traffic. Would have to have a catchy sign to get their interest.
As MrWebster also says, it would be like guerrilla radio. So much of radio is so abysmally stilted and corporate. Could see it being a refreshing choice for folks sick of both the homogenization or radio and even breaking through to their own little bubble catered to by satellite radio or their own playlist or whatever.
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"
- Kurt Vonnegut
Eye popping observation with incredible implications
Very true. Just thinking about this it looks now to be possible that the entirety of a person or instuitions and events can be totally wiped off much if not all of the internet storage. I believe Twitter and FB can run to their databases and simply delete any and every reference to something or someone they want to censor. It is like Stalin and 1984 making people invisible by going back through the archives.
I'm guessing this is in response to the OP...
The one gripe I have about c99p is that there is no indented hierarchy of response view. You have to look for the "@whoever" to discover the hierarchy. (The indents are too small to keep track of without a ruler; and they get messed up by edits.)
Anyway, about your content, your scenario was actually a thought experiment inside the CIA in the 1960s. Back when they had an analysis directorate, back before the covert ops people took over the entire agency, smart people started asking epistemological question (how do we know what we know). They said, what if we controlled all the info that people had access to? Could we create a completely artificial reality?
Guess what? We can.
As William Casey said in the 1980s: