The Great Reset. Globalist Scumbags. Things that don't fit somewhere else.
- Thread starter Bob B
- Start date
Just remember while the bee is buzzing there have been reported ~15,000 Palestine children killed in that slaughter over there. Every one that dies makes more potential terrorist x number. They will be moving here. Pissed off
Target Unveils New Line Of Hamas Intifada Wear For Children
MINNEAPOLIS, MN — In a show of support for anti-Israel protests on college campuses and other places across the country, retail giant Target unveiled a new line of Hamas intifada wear for children.babylonbee.com
War in the New Normal – slaughtering your Proles for convenience, fun & profit
There was a discussion on OffG recently under the latest column by CJ Hopkins, about whether the current spate of wars were “real”. Opinion was sharply divided. Binary you might say. On…
off-guardian.org
In times of war the baddies bayonet babies and the goodies rescue kittens.
And YOU are always on the side of the angels
Everyone knows that.
Question this comforting reality and you get an avalanche of indignation and assumed moral outrage.
What, are you saying bayoneting babies is ok?
Do you actually want more kittens to die?
But you see, I think we are actively helping to promote the continuation of war by refusing to interrogate its potential motives beyond the superficial.
If all you do is purchase one of those comfortable simplistic narratives and consume it, regurgitate it, I suggest you have little right to deplore the loss of life. In fact you are potentially actively promoting the continuation of violent death by reinforcing the narrative that justifies it.
Of course Oligarchy A and Oligarchy B both want you to do that. They want you to wave a flag (either flag, they don’t mind which), and they expend a lot of money and effort on creating propaganda on multiple levels to persuade you to do that.
They want you to buy their definition of war as a horizontal conflict and nothing else.
They want you to look at the killers but not at who put the weapons in their hands.
They want to you to weep over the slaughter but never ask why it’s being televised for you.
They want you to watch those videos of anonymous tanks being exploded or drones taking out unnamed persons in unidentified locations, but they don’t want you to ask who pays the production teams to put out this endless stream of war porn complete with action-movie sound tracks.
They don’t want you to think about the Y-axis. They don’t want you to remember Eric Blair’s definition of war.
They certainly don’t want you to see war as a mutual agreement between ruling elites to slaughter their proles for convenience, entertainment and profit.
I mean once enough of you start seeing it that way, you might get up and leave the movie theater before the show even ends.
And start remembering yesterday. And looking at the bigger picture. And thinking your own thoughts.
War in the New Normal – slaughtering your Proles for convenience, fun & profit
There was a discussion on OffG recently under the latest column by CJ Hopkins, about whether the current spate of wars were “real”. Opinion was sharply divided. Binary you might say. On…
In times of war the baddies bayonet babies and the goodies rescue kittens.
And YOU are always on the side of the angels
Everyone knows that.
Question this comforting reality and you get an avalanche of indignation and assumed moral outrage.
What, are you saying bayoneting babies is ok?
Do you actually want more kittens to die?
But you see, I think we are actively helping to promote the continuation of war by refusing to interrogate its potential motives beyond the superficial.
If all you do is purchase one of those comfortable simplistic narratives and consume it, regurgitate it, I suggest you have little right to deplore the loss of life. In fact you are potentially actively promoting the continuation of violent death by reinforcing the narrative that justifies it.
Of course Oligarchy A and Oligarchy B both want you to do that. They want you to wave a flag (either flag, they don’t mind which), and they expend a lot of money and effort on creating propaganda on multiple levels to persuade you to do that.
They want you to buy their definition of war as a horizontal conflict and nothing else.
They want you to look at the killers but not at who put the weapons in their hands.
They want to you to weep over the slaughter but never ask why it’s being televised for you.
They want you to watch those videos of anonymous tanks being exploded or drones taking out unnamed persons in unidentified locations, but they don’t want you to ask who pays the production teams to put out this endless stream of war porn complete with action-movie sound tracks.
They don’t want you to think about the Y-axis. They don’t want you to remember Eric Blair’s definition of war.
They certainly don’t want you to see war as a mutual agreement between ruling elites to slaughter their proles for convenience, entertainment and profit.
I mean once enough of you start seeing it that way, you might get up and leave the movie theater before the show even ends.
And start remembering yesterday. And looking at the bigger picture. And thinking your own thoughts.
from you:
“THEY’’ are always some hidden ppl …some secret group … no no look over here. the bee made a bad joke. If the bee showed another group with 2 triangles …. how would it be viewed. Would it be posted at all from The bee …….”They” would not dare.
There in is the inequality, one sided deal, and lack of recognition while you search for “THEY” which is “GHEY.’’ Where are your, bs Corbett post or were you broken from posting them.
I probably read book 1984 before you were born. You can drop that bs too.
Now deny this….a group “They” is only as strong as the ppl that promote, work for, and do their bidding. Grow up this is the real world..drop the “They” or stfu …you read like angry delusional child.
You either knee cap the henchmen carrying out the orders or “they” knee cap you….
“THEY”
"THEY" are ghosting you. Now put that small hat on get back to work on rest of them. Easter Egg hunting. Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus.
Keep serving "THEY" Aenyc is ignorant beyond belief. 1 sided too.
Both sides have tormented had their children raised in hell …. It just continues it. I don’t want Israel here influencing not do want their kicked out refugees coming here….. Pissed off. We have already had incidents ….
The UN delegates speaking from both sides made me want to slap shit out of both sides. Bickering like 2 bitches. Having lived there in person always worried which side was aiming at me.
Our society has been sheltered from War but not crime. We will see both if continue course - down path.
Bob B
Emperor Of Solar
- Joined
- Sep 21, 2019
- Messages
- 8,986
It's one of those situations that seems irreconcilable to me.
If I had been born Palestinian I might be wanting to drive the Jews into the sea and wipe them out ..... If I had been born Jewish I might be willing to do almost anything to create and protect a homeland.
I don't know what will end the conflict ..... Most likely to me seems that Iran gets their nuclear arsenal online and destroys Israel .... but then, it won't be habitable for anyone.
In any case, I don't see anything I can do to make it any better.
Bob B
Emperor Of Solar
- Joined
- Sep 21, 2019
- Messages
- 8,986
️ POT HOLES ☙ Monday, May 13, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 
Fareed Zakaria, while occasionally showing flashes of reality, is a reliable liberal who is obviously unhappy at the prospect of a second Trump term. Don’t forget Obama’s prophetic words: “never underestimate Joe’s ability to f— things up.”  Speaking of the Proxy War, alert C&C readers have long recognized that we are already enduring the early skirmishes of World War III, but corporate media has so far stubbornly refused to admit the obvious. So Bloomberg’s weekend op-ed headline — a major piece adorned with a dynamic, multi-media, animated photo gallery — was a startling surprise: “Ukraine Is Now a World War. And Putin Is Gaining Friends.”
Proxy war is war. As the article’s sub-headline dramatically reminded readers, “Global proxy conflicts were a constant in Cold War I, and Russia’s invasion marked the first of Cold War II.” Superpowers, the article pointedly noted, “dueled indirectly because direct confrontation was too dangerous in the nuclear age.” That’s why this World War is different. The cost of direct nuclear conflict is unaffordably dire. So instead, it’s proxy wars, sabotage, deniable attacks on energy infrastructure, psychological terrorism, cyber warfare, and unmoored cargo ships crashing into bridges. Bloomberg’s author admitted that “since 2022” — the start of the Ukraine war — “the proxy war has expanded and been fully joined by both sides:” To liberals, including Bloomberg, the global stakes could not possibly reach any higher. This world war is critical, it’s a survival issue, it’s about preserving for all time U.S. hegemony along with its chimeric, euphemistic “rules-based international order.” Bloomberg summarized how Biden’s neocons view the conflict in a single quote. This war, Biden opined, is not just a regional territory dispute. It is “a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.” Democracy, we note, comes in many shapes and sizes nowadays. It can omit voting, free speech, freedom of association, and religious liberty whenever necessary. Whenever necessary to preserve democracy. Distressingly, when it came down to any rational prescription for pursuing sanity, the article veered wildly off the rails of reason. First, the author implicitly admitted that we’re losing. “For a time,” the article noted, “it looked like Ukraine and its allies were winning the fight.” But “these days, it’s not so clear. Russia holds the battlefield initiative; its forces are slowly grinding out gains.” Despite acknowledging that ominous development, Bloomberg doubled down; it included not a single sentence advocating a peaceful resolution or even Cold War detente. Instead the financial rag spurred, we must “generate the urgency and capabilities to get ready for what comes next.” I’m old enough to remember when liberalism meant giving peace a chance. Hippies, peace signs, flowers in rifle barrels, and all that sort of thing. But now, liberalism means fighting more urgently, building up our military capabilities, and getting ready for what comes next: the hot part of the cold world war. The good news is that it is major progress to see a prominent corporate media acknowledgment that there is a problem. You can’t fix it until you admit the problem exists. President Trump has said that, if elected, he will end the war in 24 hours. I believe him. We pray that Fareed Zakaria is right. |
This is what is being built for you.
Take a look around. I think you’ll agree that what we really need is “a high-level event, bringing world leaders together to forge a new international consensus on how we deliver a better present and safeguard the future”. It sounds like just the ticket, doesn’t it?
This is in any case the billing that is being given to the 2024 Summit of the Future, a UN shindig taking place in September this year under the “co-facilitatorship” of Namibia and Germany. This “once-in-a-generation opportunity”, we are told in the bumf, “serves as a moment to mend eroded trust and demonstrate that international cooperation can effectively tackle current challenges as well as those that have emerged in recent years or may yet be over the horizon”. The aim is for all of these world leaders to get together and come up with something that will be called the ‘Pact for the Future’, a “concise, action-oriented outcome document” that will better prepare “the world” to “manage the challenges we face now and in the future, for the sake of all humanity and for future generations”. Input from electorates will be, needless to say, thin on the ground.
There is an awful lot to say about the Summit of the Future. It is sometimes genuinely hard to tell if there is no element of conscious self-parody involved (is there a single person alive who is convinced that the way to “mend eroded trust” is for world leaders to get together extra-constitutionally and undemocratically for a two day meeting in order to hash out a “new international consensus”?) And one could have a field day writing a critique on the entire concept (what could possibly go wrong when “world leaders” get together to decide on the outline of a “global financial system that works for all”, how to “shar[e] the benefits of space”, what “a new agenda for peace” should look like, how to “transform education”, and how to achieve “integrity in information” – all in the course of two days?) But here I want to draw particular attention to something called the Global Digital Compact, which is also going to be negotiated at the summit, and for which a ‘zero draft’ has already been circulated (on April 1st no less – did I say something about self-parody?)
The Compact describes itself as a set of objectives around which the aforementioned “international consensus” among “world leaders” can be expected to cohere with respect to the digital sphere. These are:
This in itself tells you an awful lot about the future which is being laid out for us: a kind of anti-politics, in which the response to the massive transformations which digital technology is exerting on societies is presented as being something around which ‘consensus’ can be easily built, and hence as basically just a matter of technical implementation that need not involve the messy business of elections and legislative deliberation or compromise at all. We merely need to facilitate “collaboration and partnership” among “all stakeholders, including governments, the private sector, civil society, international organisations and the technical and academic communities” and Bob will be your uncle. ‘Consensus’ will emerge – and we actually already apparently know pretty much what that will look like: “closing digital divides”; “accelerat[ing] progress”; “advanc[ing] equitable international data governance”; and above all inclusion, inclusion, inclusion. All we need to worry about is how we do it.
The idea that some of the stakeholders mentioned – governments and international organisations, say, or the private sector and civil society – might have orthogonal or even oppositional interests, and that this might need to be resolved politically – is not entertained. And nor is the idea that there might even be a political response to, and rejection of, the very idea that what we all desire is to be ‘included’ in the wonderful technocracy that is emerging online. The future is laid out: whether anybody actually wants it is not really imagined to be up for debate. And that is leaving alone the question of whether ‘consensus’ can be reached within all of the competing interests and incentives that will inevitably tug in different directions, or directly clash, when a subject as big as ‘the digital future’ is on the table.
The most obvious and salient illustration of a flashpoint around which consensus may be difficult to establish is that of freedom of expression, of course, which on the one hand is recognised in the Global Digital Compact as a fundamental right, and hence an “enabler of sustainable development and closing digital divides”, but which is also identified implicitly as a threat to the “inclusive, open, safe and secure digital future” we are all looking forward to. “Hate speech”, we are told, as well as “information manipulation and disinformation”, will in this future be “eliminated” – the circle here being squared by the elimination being done “in a manner consistent with human rights and freedom of expression”. The anti-politics is here at its zenith: freedom of expression will be eliminated in a manner consistent with freedom of expression – good luck making sense of that as anything other than the purest of wishful thinking or the most purblind hubris.
But in this article I would like to draw attention to what I think is an even deeper and more fundamental problem of anti-politics at the heart of the Global Digital Compact – and it concerns the idea of ‘inclusion’ itself.
The UN Plots Our “Inclusive, Open, Safe and Secure Digital Future”, But We Aren’t Invited
Take a look around. I think you’ll agree that what we really need is “a high-level event, bringing world leaders together to forge a new international consensus on how we deliver a better present and safeguard the future”. It sounds like just the ticket, doesn’t it?
This is in any case the billing that is being given to the 2024 Summit of the Future, a UN shindig taking place in September this year under the “co-facilitatorship” of Namibia and Germany. This “once-in-a-generation opportunity”, we are told in the bumf, “serves as a moment to mend eroded trust and demonstrate that international cooperation can effectively tackle current challenges as well as those that have emerged in recent years or may yet be over the horizon”. The aim is for all of these world leaders to get together and come up with something that will be called the ‘Pact for the Future’, a “concise, action-oriented outcome document” that will better prepare “the world” to “manage the challenges we face now and in the future, for the sake of all humanity and for future generations”. Input from electorates will be, needless to say, thin on the ground.
There is an awful lot to say about the Summit of the Future. It is sometimes genuinely hard to tell if there is no element of conscious self-parody involved (is there a single person alive who is convinced that the way to “mend eroded trust” is for world leaders to get together extra-constitutionally and undemocratically for a two day meeting in order to hash out a “new international consensus”?) And one could have a field day writing a critique on the entire concept (what could possibly go wrong when “world leaders” get together to decide on the outline of a “global financial system that works for all”, how to “shar[e] the benefits of space”, what “a new agenda for peace” should look like, how to “transform education”, and how to achieve “integrity in information” – all in the course of two days?) But here I want to draw particular attention to something called the Global Digital Compact, which is also going to be negotiated at the summit, and for which a ‘zero draft’ has already been circulated (on April 1st no less – did I say something about self-parody?)
The Compact describes itself as a set of objectives around which the aforementioned “international consensus” among “world leaders” can be expected to cohere with respect to the digital sphere. These are:
The idea is then that an array of “stakeholders, including governments, the private sector, civil society, international organisations and the technical and academic communities” will “work in collaboration and partnership” to achieve this “inclusive, open, safe and secure digital future”. (The phrase “inclusive, open, safe and secure” appears eight times in the 13-page document and is clearly intended to be used mimetically and repetitively by world leaders until we all get it into our thick skulls, as in ‘Build Back Better’ or ‘jabs in arms’). Legislatures and parliaments, of course, insofar as they represent mere voters, do not get a look in.
This in itself tells you an awful lot about the future which is being laid out for us: a kind of anti-politics, in which the response to the massive transformations which digital technology is exerting on societies is presented as being something around which ‘consensus’ can be easily built, and hence as basically just a matter of technical implementation that need not involve the messy business of elections and legislative deliberation or compromise at all. We merely need to facilitate “collaboration and partnership” among “all stakeholders, including governments, the private sector, civil society, international organisations and the technical and academic communities” and Bob will be your uncle. ‘Consensus’ will emerge – and we actually already apparently know pretty much what that will look like: “closing digital divides”; “accelerat[ing] progress”; “advanc[ing] equitable international data governance”; and above all inclusion, inclusion, inclusion. All we need to worry about is how we do it.
The idea that some of the stakeholders mentioned – governments and international organisations, say, or the private sector and civil society – might have orthogonal or even oppositional interests, and that this might need to be resolved politically – is not entertained. And nor is the idea that there might even be a political response to, and rejection of, the very idea that what we all desire is to be ‘included’ in the wonderful technocracy that is emerging online. The future is laid out: whether anybody actually wants it is not really imagined to be up for debate. And that is leaving alone the question of whether ‘consensus’ can be reached within all of the competing interests and incentives that will inevitably tug in different directions, or directly clash, when a subject as big as ‘the digital future’ is on the table.
The most obvious and salient illustration of a flashpoint around which consensus may be difficult to establish is that of freedom of expression, of course, which on the one hand is recognised in the Global Digital Compact as a fundamental right, and hence an “enabler of sustainable development and closing digital divides”, but which is also identified implicitly as a threat to the “inclusive, open, safe and secure digital future” we are all looking forward to. “Hate speech”, we are told, as well as “information manipulation and disinformation”, will in this future be “eliminated” – the circle here being squared by the elimination being done “in a manner consistent with human rights and freedom of expression”. The anti-politics is here at its zenith: freedom of expression will be eliminated in a manner consistent with freedom of expression – good luck making sense of that as anything other than the purest of wishful thinking or the most purblind hubris.
But in this article I would like to draw attention to what I think is an even deeper and more fundamental problem of anti-politics at the heart of the Global Digital Compact – and it concerns the idea of ‘inclusion’ itself.
The authors of the Global Digital Compact are clearly of the view that, in essence, more internet is better. (They even, tellingly, reify the technology itself with a capital letter throughout, as in ‘the Internet’.) This is naked; they make no bones about it; at times the message is almost messianic in nature. “Digital accessibility”, they tell us, “as well as equitable and affordable access to data and digital technologies” are “critical catalysts for development [emphasis added here and below]”. This means that we “must ensure that people can meaningfully use the Internet and safely navigate the digital space”. This will require “national digital skills strategies”; it will require “increas[ing] the availability of digital technology platforms”; it will mean extending network coverage to “rural, remote and ‘hard-to-reach’ areas”; it will mean “connecting the remaining 2.6 billion people to the Internet” and “address[ing] structural and systematic barriers to meaningful and affordable digital connectivity for all women and girls”. It will also mean increasing “capacity-building for women and girls, children and youth, as well as older, disabled and persons belonging to marginalised groups” (the rules of syntax will apparently be thrown out of the window in the digital future, along with middle-aged men). It will mean, in short, that our “world leaders” will “connect all people to the Internet”. And in a way, needless to say, which they deem to be “inclusive, open, safe and secure”.
The lack of self-awareness in the way this is framed is truly alarming – we should all I think be concerned that it does not seem to have occurred to anybody involved in the drafting of the Global Digital Compact that its contents might sound remotely sinister, or that nobody would sense anything dystopian at all about the idea of “world leaders” getting together to agree “common targets, indicators and metrics for universal and meaningful connectivity”, to commit to “develop[ing] and undertak[ing] national digital inclusion surveys”, and to create “enabling environments for digital transformation”. (Or indeed to “map and connect all schools to the Internet” and “includ[e] children and youth in the design and delivery of digital technologies”.) This does not suggest that the people in charge of the project have thought very deeply about what it really entails and how it will be received (and whether indeed it will “mend eroded trust”).
More importantly, though, it ignores a point which I think should be clear to anybody who is keeping an eye on things in the culture, which is that at some point – I don’t think we have quite got there yet, but I don’t think it is all that far away – there is going to be a serious push-back against ‘the digital’, and it is going to have deep political ramifications. And this is going to centre precisely around the subject of ‘inclusion’, because it strikes at the central faultline that runs through the very heart of our internet use.
If you are my age or older, you will likely remember a time when the internet was presented as being a technology of transformative liberation. It was going to allow us to communicate, create and even imagine in ways that we had never been able to before. And there is no doubt that to a certain extent it has fulfilled that promise – not always, it must be said, in particularly positive ways (does anybody, even the enthusiast, really benefit from being liberated to watch ‘clop’ porn or to find like-minded souls in order to enjoy severing each other’s appendages?)
But it is now becoming increasingly apparent that the internet is just as if nor more capable of being deployed as a technology of transformative compulsion or even enslavement. This is partly happening through the capacity for network technology to render communications taking place through the network recordable, traceable and legible. And it is partly happening through the sheer addictiveness of the technology itself, whether by accident or design. Hence, on the one hand, we have the creation of ‘hate speech’ and anti-disinformation laws, digital currencies, remotely controllable ‘energy smart devices’ and the like which point towards a micromanagement of daily life that will be truly all-pervading. And on the other we have the ‘promise’, if that is the right word, of our consciousnesses being permanently saturated by a digital equivalent of soma – the prospect of entertaining ourselves to a state of half-death like rats in a gargantuan dream-world Skinner box, never hammering away at the dopamine-pellet-dispenser with quite enough obsessiveness to forget to eat or drink, but always more than enough obsessiveness to forget to think.
These two influences cohere of course, around an image of perfect government as I have elsewhere described it. If modernity is characterised by a gradually strengthening relationship of complete vulnerability and reliance on the part of the governed and complete knowledge and control on the part of the governor, then the unfolding of the digital future would appear to be the pinnacle of that process. For the governed, the promise of being ‘included’ in a perfectly safe, perfectly secure, perfectly equal fantasia; for the governor, the promise of being able to see and know the governed with perfect accuracy – every communication, every act, every thought, every emotion – and to subject society to absolute and total control accordingly.
The idea that there will be no pushback against this vision – the idea that people will not increasingly opt-out of ‘inclusion’ in the digital future being laid out for us – is scarcely credible. This pushback will not, obviously, always be conscious. But it is I think inevitable as the experience of using the Internet becomes increasingly ‘enshittified’, manipulative and bossy.
This pushback will take place along a number of different axes. In the first place, physical media and physical interactions will take on a samizdat-like function: in a world in which every time one listens to a piece of music it is logged and registered and one’s musical options are increasingly dictated by algorithm, the act of listening to a vinyl record in the privacy of one’s attic will come to feel almost rebellious. In a world in which e-books can be edited remotely for ‘sensitivity’ at the click of a few mouse buttons (or by an AI), the act of reading physical books will become a matter of low-level sedition. In a world in which every word one types in an email or social media post, or speaks in a Zoom meeting, is carefully combed through for microaggressions and hate speech, offline face-to-face conversations of even the most banal kind will become imbued with significance and excitement. This will not happen because people will do these things in self-consciously counter-cultural ways (for the most part); it will happen because the physical world will sooner or later be re-invigorated with a sense of ‘cool’, and being ‘extremely online’ will become seen as low status. This is in fact beginning to happen already.
In the second place, people in the long-term don’t like the feeling of being addicted to anything, and nor do they like the feeling of being manipulated and controlled. Over time, there will develop different methods for subjecting internet (sorry, ‘Internet’) use to much more careful control than that to which it is currently subjected – from the religious (think of the Jewish sabbath, or the practices of the Amish) to the secular (whether in law, regulation or custom), and with a great deal of pragmatic experimentation in between. It seems highly likely to me, for instance, that Cal Newport’s message about the destructiveness of unrestricted email use in terms of office productivity will eventually filter into the mainstream. It also seems quite likely that the banning of smartphones for children will become a political issue in the very near future.
The lack of self-awareness in the way this is framed is truly alarming – we should all I think be concerned that it does not seem to have occurred to anybody involved in the drafting of the Global Digital Compact that its contents might sound remotely sinister, or that nobody would sense anything dystopian at all about the idea of “world leaders” getting together to agree “common targets, indicators and metrics for universal and meaningful connectivity”, to commit to “develop[ing] and undertak[ing] national digital inclusion surveys”, and to create “enabling environments for digital transformation”. (Or indeed to “map and connect all schools to the Internet” and “includ[e] children and youth in the design and delivery of digital technologies”.) This does not suggest that the people in charge of the project have thought very deeply about what it really entails and how it will be received (and whether indeed it will “mend eroded trust”).
More importantly, though, it ignores a point which I think should be clear to anybody who is keeping an eye on things in the culture, which is that at some point – I don’t think we have quite got there yet, but I don’t think it is all that far away – there is going to be a serious push-back against ‘the digital’, and it is going to have deep political ramifications. And this is going to centre precisely around the subject of ‘inclusion’, because it strikes at the central faultline that runs through the very heart of our internet use.
If you are my age or older, you will likely remember a time when the internet was presented as being a technology of transformative liberation. It was going to allow us to communicate, create and even imagine in ways that we had never been able to before. And there is no doubt that to a certain extent it has fulfilled that promise – not always, it must be said, in particularly positive ways (does anybody, even the enthusiast, really benefit from being liberated to watch ‘clop’ porn or to find like-minded souls in order to enjoy severing each other’s appendages?)
But it is now becoming increasingly apparent that the internet is just as if nor more capable of being deployed as a technology of transformative compulsion or even enslavement. This is partly happening through the capacity for network technology to render communications taking place through the network recordable, traceable and legible. And it is partly happening through the sheer addictiveness of the technology itself, whether by accident or design. Hence, on the one hand, we have the creation of ‘hate speech’ and anti-disinformation laws, digital currencies, remotely controllable ‘energy smart devices’ and the like which point towards a micromanagement of daily life that will be truly all-pervading. And on the other we have the ‘promise’, if that is the right word, of our consciousnesses being permanently saturated by a digital equivalent of soma – the prospect of entertaining ourselves to a state of half-death like rats in a gargantuan dream-world Skinner box, never hammering away at the dopamine-pellet-dispenser with quite enough obsessiveness to forget to eat or drink, but always more than enough obsessiveness to forget to think.
These two influences cohere of course, around an image of perfect government as I have elsewhere described it. If modernity is characterised by a gradually strengthening relationship of complete vulnerability and reliance on the part of the governed and complete knowledge and control on the part of the governor, then the unfolding of the digital future would appear to be the pinnacle of that process. For the governed, the promise of being ‘included’ in a perfectly safe, perfectly secure, perfectly equal fantasia; for the governor, the promise of being able to see and know the governed with perfect accuracy – every communication, every act, every thought, every emotion – and to subject society to absolute and total control accordingly.
The idea that there will be no pushback against this vision – the idea that people will not increasingly opt-out of ‘inclusion’ in the digital future being laid out for us – is scarcely credible. This pushback will not, obviously, always be conscious. But it is I think inevitable as the experience of using the Internet becomes increasingly ‘enshittified’, manipulative and bossy.
This pushback will take place along a number of different axes. In the first place, physical media and physical interactions will take on a samizdat-like function: in a world in which every time one listens to a piece of music it is logged and registered and one’s musical options are increasingly dictated by algorithm, the act of listening to a vinyl record in the privacy of one’s attic will come to feel almost rebellious. In a world in which e-books can be edited remotely for ‘sensitivity’ at the click of a few mouse buttons (or by an AI), the act of reading physical books will become a matter of low-level sedition. In a world in which every word one types in an email or social media post, or speaks in a Zoom meeting, is carefully combed through for microaggressions and hate speech, offline face-to-face conversations of even the most banal kind will become imbued with significance and excitement. This will not happen because people will do these things in self-consciously counter-cultural ways (for the most part); it will happen because the physical world will sooner or later be re-invigorated with a sense of ‘cool’, and being ‘extremely online’ will become seen as low status. This is in fact beginning to happen already.
In the second place, people in the long-term don’t like the feeling of being addicted to anything, and nor do they like the feeling of being manipulated and controlled. Over time, there will develop different methods for subjecting internet (sorry, ‘Internet’) use to much more careful control than that to which it is currently subjected – from the religious (think of the Jewish sabbath, or the practices of the Amish) to the secular (whether in law, regulation or custom), and with a great deal of pragmatic experimentation in between. It seems highly likely to me, for instance, that Cal Newport’s message about the destructiveness of unrestricted email use in terms of office productivity will eventually filter into the mainstream. It also seems quite likely that the banning of smartphones for children will become a political issue in the very near future.
And in the third place, we will in the long-term no doubt witness a kind of slow-burning revolution as the birth-rate declines. The ‘extremely online’ phenotype does not appear to be one which propagates itself. It will, as sure as eggs are eggs, therefore die out. And this may happen sooner than we think as economic conditions rapidly worsen; there may be a time coming at which the luxury of being able to sit around gazing at TikTok all day simply no longer becomes affordable, and the physical reasserts itself in a much more direct way than we would really like it to do.
We are in short heading for a collision between the ‘inclusive’ digital future which our ‘world leaders’ are imagining, and a number of different countervailing forces whose strength and timing are difficult to predict, but whose trajectories are roughly foreseeable. This suggests that much more is up for grabs than the authors of the Global Digital Compact realise. And it also suggests that the idea of ‘digital inclusion’, around which those authors naively think that consensus will centre, will be a major site of conflict in the coming decade.
Big questions will be at stake in that conflict: among them being how much digitisation human beings desire or can tolerate; how much state control is possible or desirable; and whether we will be the masters of digital technology or its slaves. This all suggests that our future is going to be anything but driven by consensus, or defined by being “open, safe and secure”. And it also suggests that ‘world leaders’ and other ‘stakeholders’ may wish to think twice before setting out their stall for total connectivity of everyone, everywhere, as they may find the ground on which they think themselves to be standing rapidly starting to shift.
We are in short heading for a collision between the ‘inclusive’ digital future which our ‘world leaders’ are imagining, and a number of different countervailing forces whose strength and timing are difficult to predict, but whose trajectories are roughly foreseeable. This suggests that much more is up for grabs than the authors of the Global Digital Compact realise. And it also suggests that the idea of ‘digital inclusion’, around which those authors naively think that consensus will centre, will be a major site of conflict in the coming decade.
Big questions will be at stake in that conflict: among them being how much digitisation human beings desire or can tolerate; how much state control is possible or desirable; and whether we will be the masters of digital technology or its slaves. This all suggests that our future is going to be anything but driven by consensus, or defined by being “open, safe and secure”. And it also suggests that ‘world leaders’ and other ‘stakeholders’ may wish to think twice before setting out their stall for total connectivity of everyone, everywhere, as they may find the ground on which they think themselves to be standing rapidly starting to shift.
Bob B
Emperor Of Solar
- Joined
- Sep 21, 2019
- Messages
- 8,986
ONE party is trying to usher in "elite" control in the US.
Nancy Pelosi goes abroad to spread her venom and gets it handed back to her in this video ..... there's some good stuff around the 2/3 mark, it's worth the 10 minutes to watch.
Nancy Pelosi goes abroad to spread her venom and gets it handed back to her in this video ..... there's some good stuff around the 2/3 mark, it's worth the 10 minutes to watch.
Ms13 open borders and so on with USA backing the wrong ppl. Caused them to come here with their bad luggage.
There are thousands and thousands ms13 - that is only one criminal group.
Our govt picks one side and supports it. Both sides might be criminals. Again they run here and across our open borders. … Our borders laws are going to have to be changed some coming here are gang members
Guess who is coming ……
Our politicians - Govt are compromised too.
“‘’’’’
The Federal Bureau of Investigation website in 2014 stated that there were some 33,000 gangs in the United States which they classified as street gangs, motorcycle gangs or prison gangs. While some gangs are multi-ethnic, many criminal enterprises are organized along racial lines and restrict membership to individuals of particular ethnicities or races.[4]
“‘’’’’’
en.wikipedia.org
Millions of them here.. millions gang members….. i read there were 250,000 gang members just in Chicago……
Prison is a recruiting - training ground here.
When gangs use to kill one another the news reported as “ gang violence.” Later to put spot light on guns instead of saying gang violence news media would say “GUN VIOLENCE.’
There are thousands and thousands ms13 - that is only one criminal group.
Our govt picks one side and supports it. Both sides might be criminals. Again they run here and across our open borders. … Our borders laws are going to have to be changed some coming here are gang members
Guess who is coming ……
Our politicians - Govt are compromised too.
“‘’’’’
The Federal Bureau of Investigation website in 2014 stated that there were some 33,000 gangs in the United States which they classified as street gangs, motorcycle gangs or prison gangs. While some gangs are multi-ethnic, many criminal enterprises are organized along racial lines and restrict membership to individuals of particular ethnicities or races.[4]
“‘’’’’’
List of gangs in the United States - Wikipedia
Millions of them here.. millions gang members….. i read there were 250,000 gang members just in Chicago……
Prison is a recruiting - training ground here.
When gangs use to kill one another the news reported as “ gang violence.” Later to put spot light on guns instead of saying gang violence news media would say “GUN VIOLENCE.’
Bob B
Emperor Of Solar
- Joined
- Sep 21, 2019
- Messages
- 8,986
It's ONE party facilitating the influx of these criminal gangs into the US.Ms13 open borders and so on with USA backing the wrong ppl. Caused them to come here with their bad luggage.
There are thousands and thousands ms13 - that is only one criminal group.
Our govt picks one side and supports it. Both sides might be criminals. Again they run here and across our open borders. … Our borders laws are going to have to be changed some coming here are gang members
Guess who is coming ……
Our politicians - Govt are compromised too.
“‘’’’’
The Federal Bureau of Investigation website in 2014 stated that there were some 33,000 gangs in the United States which they classified as street gangs, motorcycle gangs or prison gangs. While some gangs are multi-ethnic, many criminal enterprises are organized along racial lines and restrict membership to individuals of particular ethnicities or races.[4]
“‘’’’’’
List of gangs in the United States - Wikipedia
Millions of them here.. millions gang members….. i read there were 250,000 gang members just in Chicago……
Prison is a recruiting - training ground here.
When gangs use to kill one another the news reported as “ gang violence.” Later to put spot light on guns instead of saying gang violence news media would say “GUN VIOLENCE.’
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