Look, I'm not saying that the smartphone was designed as the perfect spying device, but if I were going to make the perfect spying device, it would look an awful lot like a smartphone.
Or forcing you to have it in order to access bathrooms, as one of my subs told me is happening in Japan. I need a phone to access my laundry machines now! Most people LOVE their smartphones, they're trying to get those few people who resist and would rather be present when out among the people.
I was given a business card that only had a QR code for her information. I told the person who handed me that "I will not use this." She said, "why not?" And I told her that she was making ME do the work to access HER infomation. Like, no way. Sorry. And I handed it back to her.
In a recent airport trip, I was deciding between two places but ultimately was turned off by the "order via QR code" at one place, so I went across the concourse and got a real breakfast sandwich made by a real person right in front of me!
At Newark Liberty International Airport ("Liberty" was added after 9/11) you cannot buy anthing without using credit card. No cash even for a cup of coffee or a bannana.
I would much rather deal with a human. I hate sitting on the phone listening to instructions on what number to press and then sitting on hold forever while hearing annoying Muzak and repeated suggestions that could do my business on line.
If you remember the "You will own nothing and be happy" article, they talk about how some people live outside the big cities because they don't agree with all the technology.
There's also quite a bit of resistance against "Smart Cities" and "15 Minute Neighborhood" initiatives in the big cities. People recognize them for what they are . . .
My cell is not even connected to the internet. Younger brother keeps sending me twitter links to my cell. I just replied a few days ago, my cell is a talk/text device on purpose, no access to internet. Never on FB or Twitter. I have a computer with a VPN and favorite websites and substacks. No TV either. My thoughts are my own - using critical thinking when reading spin-filled news from both sides of the isle.
Wow! That sounds so complicated and out of the box (sarcasm). The illusion of engaging with others when, at best, we're dealing with bots works for lots of folks. I commute a lot, rather than use the device to read or listen to a book, many of my co-commuters prefer games and online shopping. The notion of exercising choice or agency 'never' occurs to some folks, including it seems - Matt and many others here.
Telling us ourselves how smart we are while our devices are monitoring and controlling our relationships with our world is pure comedy gold. We're the joke and the laughs really are on us.
Hah, yeah. I have a similar setup and from normies I get reactions along the lines of "how do you even live?"
Guys, guys, everyone lived this way up until 15 years ago. It's really not complicated. What you've got is complicated. Complicated to the point of distraction and irritation.
An enormous amount of complexity goes into even making it happen - I should know, I work on this stuff. And because I work on it, I know better than to use it.
You know, when the guys making the stuff* they're pushing on you tell you that you should really not be using it, you might want to listen.
*(I don't work on things that I find objectionable - especially social media and other attention-addiction software - but I work close enough to it that I know how it works and what it's doing to you. You might as well shoot heroin)
I was that way until I moved to Tokyo. Most complicated transportation system in the world. Navigating without a smart phone seems impossible (what did people do without it?) I ended up getting hooked on the thing.
I said I'll get rid of the imp from Hell when I get back to Bali. But then my girlfriend insisted I carry the thing at all times. So I ditched the girlfriend.
I really do admire you for sticking to your guns. Unfortunately it's impossible for most people unless they live a very off grid lifestyle. Most of us at best can only limit ourselves to all but necessary apps. I really hate having to download apps unless I have no choice. And if I only need something temporarily. I make sure to delete them until I have no choice but to use them again. I also think I'm able to live that way only because I'm older GenX and also work for myself. Not so easy for younger generations into the future.
Yes, I’m a hermit. I have no smart devices, an old fashioned princess phone so I can get internet, pay all my monthly bills via snail mail. I have a rooftop antenna but if it’s windy or raining I get very little reception. I don’t even have a smart meter to measure my electricity, instead an old fashioned analog. I also drive a 2007 car so it’s unlikely it has a tracking device. I live in the sticks so there’s no chlorine in my water and I generally eat healthy organic food. I suffer from none of the illnesses of old age at a time when most people my age treat cancer as if it’s the common cold. None of this is much of a challenge for me.
Also … I pay my bills with a check but for my day to day spending I use cash.
I ditched my Smartphone at the beginning of the year for a flip phone and my life has greatly improved in most areas (attention span, better mood etc), but damn! they really make it hard on ya! The Machine has punished me for leaving in so many strange and devious ways. if my wife didn't still have one, I might not be able to do it...pretty insane.
When we finally succumbed and got IPhones, on the way home from The Store, I was (I think I was, because I am clueless) disabling almost everything on the phone. I distinctly remember saying to my spouse, we goobers had more computing capability in our hands that day leaving the phone store than the Apollo astronauts.
Sometime later the St. Louis Science Center had an exhibit honoring the trip to the moon. It was awesome and humbling to see what these humans (with a huge team backing them up, of course) used to go --- to the Moon! If you are of that vintage, you remember humans all over the world watching what was happening. "We came in peace for all mankind."
So now, we have the machine. But I think the machine has us.
I printed out the comment thread and reply by writing out, longhand, a paper response which is then faxed to an associate in an undisclosed location who then converts the text to paper tape which is attached to a WANG terminal connected to the mainframe. I'm told the terminal's CRT is green phosphor.
Fascinating article. I'd never heard of this old technique. By the way, I was going to say smoke signals, but I self-censored so the ex CIA agent who reads these comments wouldn't report me for "cultural appropriation." LOL!
I lived in Japan two years ago and didn't see that. But I did go to a small concert where I couldn't buy a ticket at the door without scanning a QR code. I couldn't get it to work. So someone else used their phone for me.
In Bali I went to Maybank to open an account. They wouldn't do it unless I had a smart phone with an active number they could call. No paper statements or deposit slips, smart phones only.
To enter Indonesia during Covid I was supposed to download an app to a phone. This did not work at all. I thought, "this isn't going to be enforced." And it wasn't.
I also went to Spain in December of 2021. There was some app you were supposed to have but no one paid any attention to it. The people did what they wanted to do. Everyone in the family was vaccinated but almost everyone got Covid anyway. Nobody had any problems.
That claim about Japan is grotesquely inaccurate. Try searching for a few facts rather than relying on anecdote. You talk a lot and often make sense. Try to improve that ratio, please. We'll all benefit.
There are not places in Japan in which you need to make a purchase, then get a QR code for the bathroom? Obviously this is not ubiquitous, but do you deny that it's happening?
If it's happening, how is the claim grotesquely inaccurate?
Edit -- these have to be in use SOMEWHERE, right?:
“What The Fauci is a QR Code Only Restroom?” I asked myself. I had no answer. Kid jumping up and down telling us they really really need to go, we sought out anyone who could provide the answer. Finally, a sales clerk in a store provided it. To use the restrooms in the shopping area, you need the QR code. To get the QR code, you need to make a qualifying purchase at a qualified store. Upon completion of the transaction, the sales clerk can provide the QR code to be scanned by your idiot phone. Then you can have the QR code scanner at the restroom read the QR code on your phone to open the door and let you in. Not what you want to have to learn and do when your 8 year old is doing the “The I gotta go!” Dance.
Luckily, my wife has an idiot phone as I do not and I do not carry my iPad on hikes. Actually, I rarely carry it on family outings. She having hers, we narrowly averted an accident.
This link doesn't help you make your case. It's clear that at this point your displaying little interest in the issues Matt is addressing. Other cultures and communities really do have a lot to teach us: especially about social contracts, privacy, and responsibility. Worth looking into if you're interested.
Correct - the notion of turning the device off and keeping the device off except when we elect to turn the evil little monster on is beyond the vast majority and unthinkable for many here. Coz we are so smart TM.
They cut off my dopamine supply when they permanently suspended my account. Even the new Elon version of Twitter won’t let many of us have voices anymore. It’s still about censorship (and “content creator” ad revenue drivers)
Thank you for calling this out I join Twitter a little while ago, and even despite the reforms most of my original tweets (as opposed to responses to other people) get censored.
And the automobile, once the symbol of individual freedom and empowerment, is no longer available new without a satellite uplink which harvests your phone's data, the car's sensor data, your location, and perhaps even your conversations to send to the manufacturer, who is free to sell the data to the lender, the leasing agent, your insurer, and anyone else who can afford to buy access to it . . . including federal law enforcement agencies.
Not to mention all the other problems with new cars, like how they're made not to be repaired by ordinary people and with parts as specialised (and difficult to replace) as possible. Everything these people do is designed to enslave us, they wouldn't have eliminated chattel slavery in the first place if there hadn't been more promising and marketable alternatives.
What creeps me out the most is that someone could hack it and take control of the vehicle from a remote location, putting you and other drivers at risk. Think the authorities don't have that ability?
In the last few years, the self-driving cars have been hacked to show how dangerous they are. In the movie Ex Machina, the AI creator explains his creation gets to listen into billions of conversations because all the big tech firms do it.
In the next Black Death event, robots will be at the ready and the serfs will remain serfs
Google is making full use of this. It has assembled inarguably* the greatest surveillance network the world has ever seen. Even the consumer profiles acquired by Facebook pale in comparison with those maintained by Google, which is collecting information about people 24/7, using more than 60 different observation platforms—the search engine of course, but also Google Wallet, Google Maps, Google Adwords, Google Analytics, Chrome, Google Docs, Android, YouTube, and on and on. Few Gmail users are aware that Google stores and analyzes every email they write, even the drafts they never send—as well as all the incoming email they receive from both Gmail and non-Gmail users.
I understand having trust issues, but unless you want to maintain your own email server you have to trust someone. Protonmail seems to be commited to privacy.
"Seems to be" is as close to truth as we can usually get in this world. One cannot be an expert on everything, so we are forced to trust others based on their their perceived knowledge of a subject and their integrity.
If I were NSA, I would create a "private" browser and a "private" "secure" email service and then just sit back and harvest all those "private" data.
#honeypot
Mandatory pigman quote:
“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place, but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it’s important, for example that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities.” - Erich Schmidt, former CEO of Google
All this has occurred to me, but I didn't want to be a total bummer. Wasn't it the NSA who used a front to sell a "secure" encryption service to foreign nations?
At least ProtonMail might keep your data out of the hands of Google/Facebook. As long as you mail only to others who are also using ProtonMail.
WaPo thought that was really cool, "The intelligence coup of the century!"
It also would seem likely that in the relatively near future quantum computers are going to be able to break even so called "strong" encryption.
And as I have said many times, AI's are going to be used to spy on us in ways that we cannot even imagine.
Frank Church saw it all coming too. Okay, not all of it, but he saw the big picture.
"Even among US Senators, virtually nothing was known at the time about the National Security Agency. The Beltway joke was that "NSA" stood for "no such agency". Upon completing his investigation, Church was so shocked to learn what he had discovered - the massive and awesome spying capabilities constructed by the US government with no transparency or accountability - that he issued the following warning, as reported by the New York Times, using language strikingly stark for such a mainstream US politician when speaking about his own government:
"'That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide.'
"He added that if a dictator ever took over, the NSA 'could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.'"
The conditional part of Church's warning - "that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people" - is precisely what is happening, one might even say: is what has already happened. That seems well worth considering." - Glenn Greenwald
Encryption, even perfect encryption doesn't stop them from identifying not just "social" networks. But hierarchies. Based on those data they can then really get up your ass.
From chat.
Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a methodology used to study and analyze social structures and relationships among individuals or entities within a particular network. It focuses on understanding the patterns of connections, interactions, and information flow between nodes (individuals, organizations, or other units) in the network. These connections are often represented graphically as nodes (vertices) and edges (links) to visualize the relationships and understand the overall structure of the network.
SNA has various applications, including but not limited to:
Understanding Social Structures: SNA helps researchers and analysts understand the social dynamics, influence, and power structures within a community or an organization. It can be used in sociology, anthropology, and management studies to explore relationships within groups.
Identifying Key Players: By analyzing a social network, one can identify influential individuals or central nodes in the network, often referred to as "hubs" or "brokers." These key players can have significant impacts on information dissemination, decision-making, and overall network cohesion.
Information Diffusion and Viral Marketing: SNA can be used in marketing and advertising to understand how information, trends, or innovations spread through social networks. It helps identify the most effective nodes to target for promoting a message or a product.
Detection of Criminal Networks: Law enforcement and intelligence agencies can use SNA to uncover criminal or terrorist networks, track their activities, and identify the main actors involved.
Now, concerning surveillance, social network analysis can be used for both legitimate and controversial purposes. Here are some examples:
Counterterrorism and National Security: Government agencies may use SNA to identify and dismantle terrorist networks, track their funding sources, and understand their operational structures. Analyzing communication patterns and connections between suspected individuals can help predict potential threats.
Law Enforcement: SNA can aid law enforcement in understanding criminal organizations, identifying key members, and uncovering the relationships between criminals. It can be instrumental in fighting organized crime and drug trafficking.
Marketing and Surveillance Capitalism: Private companies may employ SNA to gather data on users' social connections, preferences, and behaviors to develop targeted advertising and personalized recommendations. This raises privacy concerns as users' data is often collected without their explicit consent or knowledge.
Social Media Monitoring: Governments and organizations may monitor social media platforms using SNA to gather information about public sentiment, opinions, and potential social movements. This can be used for public policy development or, in some cases, to suppress dissent.
It's important to note that the use of SNA for surveillance purposes raises ethical and privacy concerns. Surveillance can infringe on individuals' privacy rights and may lead to abuse or misuse of data. Therefore, its implementation should be governed by appropriate laws, regulations, and oversight to ensure that it respects individuals' rights and freedoms.
I can’t say how but they claim both incoming and outgoing are encrypted. Truthfully, encryption is likely impossible but they operate out of Belgium so there’s that. I did a little research but I mostly relied on a good friends recommendation. She’s pretty thorough.
Well you can run your own mail server if you must (an absolute nightmare even if you know what you're doing) and set up pgp with all your co-conspirators, then use k9mail or another desktop client with pgp support to at least automate the cryptography. But short of that a service that makes at least a plausible privacy claim is better than one that doesn't. Until demonstrated otherwise protonmail and similar options are a clear improvement over google, yahoo, microsoft, etc and not hard to get going with.
You could have a separate computer that is never connected to the Internet to compose your mail. Encrypt it with a program you write yourself to avoid the legally required back door. Use a thumb drive to transfer the result to the Internet computer where it can be emailed. The recipients move the encrypted email to a similar no-Internet computer to decrypt. Even this isn't foolproof, but I say good enough.
Though all this might motivate a pre-dawn SWAT raid on your home. Just what are you trying to hide?
"U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement"
WASHINGTON — Leslie James Pickering noticed something odd in his mail last September: a handwritten card, apparently delivered by mistake, with instructions for postal workers to pay special attention to the letters and packages sent to his home.
“Show all mail to supv” — supervisor — “for copying prior to going out on the street,” read the card. It included Mr. Pickering’s name, address and the type of mail that needed to be monitored. The word “confidential” was highlighted in green.
“It was a bit of a shock to see it,” said Mr. Pickering, who with his wife owns a small bookstore in Buffalo. More than a decade ago, he was a spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental group labeled eco-terrorists by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Postal officials subsequently confirmed they were indeed tracking Mr. Pickering’s mail but told him nothing else."
We don't presently have any evidence that the encryption algorithms used by, e.g., ssh and pgp are compromised. Or rather, there have been a couple that the NSA compromised that were detected and removed. But there's no overt legal force except in a few countries like China and North Korea that attempt to restrict access to true encryption. So you could skip the writing your own encryption software part. You wouldn't want to do that anyway unless you were a top-tier cryptographer, and if you were you'd probably already have a job ... with the NSA or a private data security firm.
You can also be reasonably certain that even if your computer is internet-connected it's not compromised just by virtue of that connection, if you follow the right precautions, which are the same ones you'd use to set up an "air gapped" computer. Air gapping is more about preventing outside attacks.
Not transmitting your stuff over the open internet is not a bad idea though, if you have any concern that it might be decrypted in the future, since you can prevent it being captured and archived that way. Sneaker nets are cool.
Problem with paper mail is nothing whatsoever prevents it from being intercepted in transit, and few cyphers you could implement on paper would survive ten minutes with a cryptographer, other than a handful that are difficult and require a lot of coordination to pull off. You'd be better off mailing encrypted USB drives if you wanted to piggyback on public courier services.
But this is all silly really unless you're a superspy. Like this is over the top if you're an international terrorist. Mostly what you want is to not be casually spied on by spooks, corporations, or any random mail exchange server admin, and end-to-end encryption solves that, which anybody can do with pgp. Encryption at rest solves the problem of the actual physical hardware being confiscated, or a bad actor wherever that hardware is, or the admin who runs your mail service itself, and protonmail (at least allegedly) provides that too.
"Until demonstrated otherwise protonmail and similar options are a clear improvement over google, yahoo, microsoft, etc and not hard to get going with."
That's not how logic works. It's their claim. Now it's yours. PROVE IT.
You really don't want to do that. You'd be flooded by thousands of spam messages a day if your email address was public. You don't see most of the spam sent to you because the bulk of it gets blocked at a higher level before it reaches your inbox/spam folder, and that can't be turned off for you without turning it off for everyone using your mail host. Yeah spam filtering does provide a vector for censorship but it's also the duct tape and bubblegum holding the whole thing together. Better to just not use email for anything you might worry about being censored and leave it for bills and whatnot.
My sister once showed me an account she had with no spam filter. Incredible quantity of the stuff. I can't understand how this spam generates anyone enough business to make it worthwhile, but apparently it does.
Well it costs practically nothing to dispatch emails by the millions so you really only have to catch enough fish to cover electricity. You don't even have to pay that if you happen to have taken over someone's shitty webserver. Then they're paying for it. So that's the main reason it works. Botnets quietly scour the internet for insecure webservers and use them to pump out millions of spam emails until a mail admin notices the pattern. Then he sends a nastygram to the web server admin, who hopefully fixes it, or else to the host/datacenter, who shuts the thing down. But in the time it takes to do that, the botnet has already found a thousand other shitty webservers to do the same with. Endless whack-a-mole.
Some spam is so bad I can't understand how even one person in a million buys anything. Like the one that put so many ads on my computer that I couldn't do anything else. It took an hour to rid of them all. After that who's going to buy their bodybuilding product?
I read Proton Mail was trojan horse. Search just now 2021 story ARS Technica that Proton turned over French climate activists IP & browser info to Swiss authorities - and removed “we do not keep any IP logs” from its privacy policy.
when i tell people this, which is not often because they do not want to hear it, they accede but basically accept as a fait accompli. they have two reasons
1. They are not afraid as they have done nothing wrong. Odds are they are right and the chances this being unleashed on them to their noticeable detriment is unlikley.
2. The part they don't say is they have no fear is because they support those in power and would not dream of that technology being unleashed on them.
1. They haven't don't anything wrong, yet. Many people on the Democrats side are happy because it is feeding some dark part of their soul to be on the "right side of the argument". Like all things, that too shall pass and the very tools they enjoy being unleashed on their enemies will soon be deployed on them.
2. Have those people ever met a human before? We do some terrible things to one another. The Holocaust comes to mind. No one could ever imagine concentration camps that were incinerating thousands of Jews per day. There was a time when they couldn't imagine the NSA existed. They probably would have never imagined the US government has all but confirmed the existence of alien life but all those things are true. No one would imagine that Bill and Melinda Gates foundation supplies 88% of the WHO annual budget but it's happenings. Then there is the laptop that didn't exist. To me, there are more things to believe than one can assume will never happen. Thank you for your post. I hope we can save your friends before it's too late.
BTW - mostly not friends i am referring too. My friends have many views, not all I agree with but we have so much more in common than that and we are not afraid to express our opinions openly. Im talking about family LOL
1. I agree but the odds are in their favor that nothing will happen to them. The Gestapo and Stasi could not arrest everyone and most people just altered their behavior. I imagine a lot did not mind.
2. The irony of course is part of the family is Jewish. They, the millennials, are so afraid of right wring bogeymen, they will accept anything in the name of security. Also their historical knowledge is nil. Even regarding events directly related to them. Im the nerd of the family as I am the only one who is aware of history that occurred before 1990. To them, this includes my offspring also, the world is supposed to be some benign place where nothing bad ever happens and when it does we just need more laws against bad things like guns.
Tragic. But its Saturday night, the family is out of town, this nerd just got out for 9 and shot a 38 and there is a decent cab (Freemark Abbey) in the bar, so am going to enjoy the night before we touch off WWIII in the Ukraine.
The irony is that they really do not know me, if the ads they send are any indication.
Sometimes Google seems to think I am a Hindi-speaking woman with an interest in celebrity culture. Sometimes, it has me pegged as a black woman who is dissatisfied with her hair care options. Lately, it is sending me a bunch of Spanish-language ads, mostly for snack foods.
That's not all. If I post something to even the most obscure website this is immediately collected by a Google bot then used. True, it is public information, but such total surveillance is creepy.
By the time I found out what was going on I'd already left such an extensive trail that privacy was a lost cause. So I don't bother to even try to hide.
Though I once did try to remove the battery from a phone so I couldn't be tracked. This was possible with difficulty but left such a mess the whole thing was impractical.
There was a metal box thingy called Privacy Case a while back that blocked transmissions. (But it seems they went "out of business".) I had one (second hand) and it worked for a while, then a couple years later I tried it with a new phone ... and that was able to receive signal.
"the greatest surveillance network the world has ever seen"
I'd have to say it was the Statsi. The occupying Russians had no love for East Germany. The populace was so intimidated that family members would turn one another in, as it was a crime not to do so. It is true that the Internet surveillance is much less labor intensive, but if you want to go to the trouble of having an extensive network of finks you can't beat that. Then nothing and nowhere is safe. Even if you try your hardest you might slip up.
On the other hand the US gvt. has recently started a program to get citizens to snitch on each other. So give them time.
Yes, great point. They updated their Code of Conduct for the first time in 17 years back in 2018. As you point out, the previous version had opened with the words “Don’t be evil,” which among other things required “providing our users unbiased access to information.” But the new version omits any assurance of objectivity, instead opening with an ambiguous reference to “Google’s values” and adding a new mention of “respect for our users.”
Even if one consciously avoids all things g00gle I find g00gle footprints in my website and search data. Clear your history and website data in Safari, visit almost any website then view what shows up in that data afterwards. I see 10-20 names afterwards including G and tik tok. With my limited tech knowledge I don’t really understand what it all means but it’s there.
SC, you're more correct than you know. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Alan Watts & Aaron Russo predicted the advent of the smartphone years before we ever heard of such a thing. As the fabulous Paul Kingsnorth has observed, the terms "Web" & "Net." are not accidental but rather forthright descriptors. I would contend that the stunning, mass social engineering function of our hand-held telescreens is far more sinister than the built-in, comprehensive surveillance feature.
There are those who claim that the tec titans of our day, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Gates, Musk, et al, are all myths, frontmen for DARPA. In my blatant delirium I don't go quite that far, but am open to the notion. Again, the concept of the smartphone has been around for decades. You can look it up.
Technology–including pharma–is the cross that humanity is being crucified upon. Yes Virginia, it's all by design. Our species stumbles blindly toward some Brave New Oceania. I wish I had better news.
I literally thank God for Matt Taibbi. No matter how passionate or eloquent, he cannot even slow down the procession, let alone halt it, but I surely do appreciate his heart & effort.
The sad part is that the smartphone could've been the ultimate security device. It could've made us, our identity, accts, health, etc, almost untouchable even if a stranger found the device. However, we're a country of opportunistic hucksters, and the greediest motherfuckers among us are the ones behind selling all that away to the top bidder. Android was designed as an ad and notification delivery system. It lets anyone that pays have a crack at keeping someone's attention by using their behavior as a key.
It changes the Internet so much when you always try to consciously remind yourself there is another actual person on the other end of the screen—those "someones" do the complete opposite! It is so dehumanising, an inhuman concept really that takes away the full, complete idea of a person and goes against the way we are made to function.
You do realize that the web itself is not social media; all you need is an account, which is not dependent on any social media, but on SMTP, basically. Which is decentralized.
"HTTP is a protocol for fetching resources such as HTML documents. It is the foundation of any data exchange on the Web and it is a client-server protocol, which means requests are initiated by the recipient, usually the Web browser."
~ I sold car telephones & mobile phones in the mid-80's, at the start of all this. For safety & convenience it was a game-changer. Then phones got smart & people are got dumber. I only got an iphone 2 years ago because of access requirements (work, concerts, etc.). But before that folks used to look at me crossed-eyed & w/disgust when I pulled out my flip-phone. "Why don't you have a smart phone?". I felt like a teetotaler at a frat party. It was fun resisting their arguments for why I should have one when I really knew they were justifying their own addiction/usage. ~
I wanted to taunt him after 'no one else to intereview but the gorilla' because I am so very fond of his writing and have been since he blew the red hot guilty label across BHO's yellow back when BHO claimed the pitchforks were at his back. Then I wanted to ask BHO, why are there no pitchforks in you photo ops of that infamous deplorable meeting in which you gave the treasury department to those deplorable bankers and let them leave millions of innocent victims of those deplorable bankers homeless?
In the case of M T's 'no one else to interview but the gorilla,' I wanted to ask M T if his gorilla of the day is RFK, Jr., whom I also admire greatly for having the courage to tell us the truths that no one else in D or R party elites wants to tell us! And I totally admire both of them for the scheduled interview this evening in Memphis!
Why did Obama not allow himself to be photographed with a pitchfork? Well, perhaps then they would have evidence of post-presidency bribe-taking. You don't think Obama actually PAID for the massive real estate he has accumulated post-presidency, now do you? Nice waterfront compounds in Hawaii and Martha's Vineyard and a beautiful mansion in DC. I'd love to see his "mortgages." Yeah, most likely non-existent.
The biggest fucker that has lived in my lifetime: Barack Obama.
"First they became addicted to the Internet as a tool of convenience. Then it became a cheap substitute for real-life interaction."
Go into any bar these days. People are all around looking at their phones instead of enjoying the impromptu company. You don't sit down next to some old sot on on side telling you why man never went to the moon while on the other side you have a couple stopping for a snort before they have to go to the opera. Now it is just everyone looking down at their glowing brick trying to find something better. Somewhere where they are just a number, another face in the crowd.
Used to be you lived in the world you were in, not in the digitaverse.
We are going to hell in a bucket of bits and bytes.
I had such a WTF moment a couple years ago when the softball team went out for beers after the game. Me being the old man I am, I don't bring my phone when I'm hanging out with people -- I'm busy! But at one point I looked around and EVERYBODY ELSE was on their phones. Like, wtf are we even here for?!?!?
A friend & I recently went to lunch. We noticed four teenage girls at a nearby table. NONE were talking to each other. They sat there, with their phones. One took a photo of the others. Then back to the phone.
Imagine! Four teenage girls, sitting together and NOT talking.
I wonder (and maybe vainly wish...) if it will reach the point where it breaks, and a few alpha fe/males just say, Hell no. And it becomes a trend NOT to do it.
I run a 1-year program for young professionals. Three times in the year, we do a camp-out weekend. No phones, no watches, no electronics, no showers, no beds (sleeping bags). They love it. Most have never been without their phone that long. But I look at them huddled around a picnic table, talking, laughing, so PRESENT to one another....
It's possible. We just need some super-strong-willed, gregarious, opinionated examples.
I've often had the same thought. Maybe one day there will be a rebellion like the back-to- the-land-movement of the 60s and 70s. A trendy cohort will just say fuck these electronic leashes, we're going without. The problem is I've been wondering about this for what seems like a couple of decades, and no sign of any such insurgency.
Part of it is that the system has raised the stakes of their decisions so much that it becomes difficult, and sometimes inadvisable, to ignore. I certainly want to know if we're getting ready to put NATO into a war with Russia.
They're as addicted to the attention as we are to giving it to them.
Back in the day, 60's 70's 80's, we were one lunatic away from nuclear armageddon. We didn't worry everyday about being wiped off the face of the earth. We went on with our lives. If NATO goes in to war with Russia, does getting a tweet about it change anything?
I went back to college in my 30s. Back in like 2016, when I was 34, I was approaching a classroom. I heard silence, and for a moment I thought I was late, and class had already started. Entering the room, I saw about 30 college freshman and sophomores, seated at 30 desks, all staring at their phones in silence. It freaked me out so much that to this day I go without my phone as much as possible.
My office overlooks my yard and the street, where there is a dedicated bike path. Most people, like 80% are "checking" their phones as they walk or even as they ride their bicycles! I see this on beautiful spring/summer days when the skies here are alive with birds of all kinds. My neighbours have great gardens, there are squirrels and cats and dogs out for a walk. The phoneheads, degraded addicts as they are, literally see or hear none of these, intent as they are on doing whatever the hell it is that they are doing! It's a sickness, an actual evil.
I actually do really like my phone and find it tremendously useful for: navigation, info on the fly, and when called for, like a long bus ride, as a distraction, inter alia. I am fully aware of all the downsides and struggle against them as much as possible.
Sometimes I feel like stopping people and declaring, "It's a beautiful day and the world is alive all around you. What the fuck are you looking at that's more interesting than that?"
I don't of course as I would only get anger or genuine confusion, or fear, "Is this guy crazy?".
There is a false assumption that people were full of interaction before cell phones. I’d wager that more people interact now because of them than they would have without them. Before cell phones I went into bars and people routinely just sat around by themselves or their small group of friends not interacting with other groups. I went into clubs and people danced alone.
The book “Bowling Alone” was written before social media.
Ha! My spouse came up with this observation. In the old days in the local pub when the sole phone rang, the bartender had to say, "No he's* not here." Now, everybody at the bar is looking at their phone all the time. So dependent.
When I was going through unlawful foreclosure through no fault of my own in 2010, I kept thinking that if more people knew what the bankers were doing, they'd rise up! So, I proceeded to tell everyone who would lend an ear. Most of my friends said, "Just pay your mortgage!" Some said, "Bummer." But when I told them it was happening to their mortgage too, they said, "Can't be bothered." So, none of the people I told did anything. They just went along with the crooked behavior.
When I heard Michael Shellenberger say that it was a weird phenom to lose all your friends at 40 years old......I knew that at least I was not alone. I lost almost all my friends at the age of 50. And frankly, the reason I was in foreclosure is because the construction job market collapsed. So, it wasn't that I "took out more loan that I qualified for" or "wanted a free house" or "bought too much house." Or any of the bank propaganda that was spewed by the media. It was that the banks crashed the global market and that meant there were no construction jobs!
So, do I think Americans are stupid, foolish, unlearned? Nope. I think Americans are "if the crooked behavior doesn't personally affect me, fuck it." And also, "anyone who makes me face that my government is fucked up, fuck them too." Which is a sad revelation of our society.
"all experience has shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed"
We are just not far enough down the road of suffering yet.. But we are headed in that direction!
I'm going through that very thing right now with my book and it is so frustrating. I spent several years developing the first realistic solution to the political divide and her other political problems. I thought everyone would be overjoyed that they could now have hope. A smaller percentage are excited about it but the majority won't even look, even close friends who are highly intelligent. It has been shocking to me. https://endpoliticsnow.com/
I looked at your book. Your writing's okay, and there's no question you know your stuff.
It's heartbreaking to sit down and put 300+ pages down and have it disappear. Been there, did that.
Today, I earn a FT living as a novelist- I know, I know your bag is non-fic, but selling a book is selling a book right? RIGHT Here's a couple of things to know that (hopefully) will take some of the sting out:
1. NONE of your friends/family will EVER read your stuff. That's just the way it is. It's a cliche among authors. I've been to conferences w/ other writers (outfit's called NINC). On average, it's people doing about 150K/year with the top players making millions. We laugh about how one author bought her mother a frikkin HOUSE w/ her writing income (paid cash too) and her mother had never read any of her books. No, not porn; fantasy.
2. Best way to sell a book is write another. Let me put it like this: many, MANY authors have hit the NYT best sellers rank, sold 100K + in hardcopy and 500K in paperback who are now back driving a cab. Like YouTubers, content volume is important. In your field (politics) a book a year is an OK start. Please note: NOTHING is going to even have a hope of happening until you get to book 3 or 4.
3. There are a million ways you can promote your book, but it takes time and it's sooo hard on what I call 'Newbie writer ego'. We get sooo enamored with the drivel we pound out that we think it's special. Well... it ain't. It's a tree in a forest, buddy. And if it doesn't find a readership, it may as well be a blank piece of paper, despite the effort you put in.
***
Selling a book is fuckin' HARD man.
BUT...
Once you develop the tools and skills to sell a bunch, those skills remain. And you build on them.
However, a writing career is a marathon, not a sprint. You need to decide how much effort you're willing to expend in a writing career. As in hours/ day-week-month. You say you've been a high flying consultant; I assume that many of the techniques from your past life can apply.
Best of luck. Don't feel bad that your first effort's not doing what you expected. It's the way the game goes, man. Shit, when I wrote MY first novel I had visions of being on Ellen and Oprah. Today, that 90K words (324 pgs) of hopeless dreck has been sitting on the back a shelf in my office for 12 years. But it was the start.
Jim, How very kind of you to take the time to respond to comment with some advice from your experience and your empathy regarding a first book and book marketing. I hear you and I take your advice to heart. As my first book, for you to say my writing is okay, means a lot and is very encouraging. As soon as it was printed I thought of several other ways to communicate the message and make it more interesting. I'm practicing with other voices on Instagram, @EndPoliticsNow. I can't imagine writing a novel. My talents lay in analyzing and modeling systems and in process engineering, not in writing. So thank you again! Congratulations for making it to FT as a novelist. I have huge respect for that. To me, that's amazing.
"So, do I think Americans are stupid, foolish, unlearned? Nope. I think Americans are "if the crooked behavior doesn't personally affect me, fuck it." And also, "anyone who makes me face that my government is fucked up, fuck them too." Which is a sad revelation of our society."
To be fair, when people try to speak up, what happens? The fate of Occupy Wall Street is indicative, all with a wink and a nod from St. Barack.
I think we're witnessing the end of the control system. Just twenty-five years ago, I would have instinctually accepted the vast majority of pronouncements from the authorities (government, universities, media) as probably true. Now it's none, zero, zilch, nada... and I'm certainly not alone.
As a result of this failure of confidence, the system is freaking out and clamping down. It's true that some do not want to be extricated from control and never will be. Look at how many Russians still yearn for the Soviet Union and bemoan its end. These were usually the nomenklatura and we have our own in the United States in the form of the aforementioned authorities.
But there are more and more who don't believe a word any more. They will never trust the system again. With each passing day, that number grows and it does not shrink. The damage that the system has done to itself will take generations to reverse, if ever. The transitional period, however, is going to suck as those who are in the system, believe in the system, profit from the system, are going to hang on by their teeth and nails, but that cannot last forever.
Lee, I pray you are right, but the core of people is very small. Too small now. My own daughter and son-in-law think I'm overreacting to the three letter agencies.
I'm with you, I won't trust a word the government puts out. I used to think Rand Paul was crazy. Now I see him as a prophet.
And they'll remain that way until it costs them, maybe even past that. Some will not see.
But the system does not exist in a vacuum. The world is changing rapidly and the rest of the globe is catching on to our ways. As they extricate themselves from our grip, the repercussions will be felt here at home. Hence why the administration is so hell-bent on the "rules-based order". They know that once it's gone, the jig is up. Once we can't export our inflation anymore, all of the overhead in our economy is going to get shredded and perhaps we'll return to an economy that produces actual value instead of hype.
Nothing is instantaneous. The liquidation of of overseas dollar reserves won't happen overnight unless we get WW3 going in earnest (which unfortunately is still a distinct possibility).
I'm sure the recent big bank failures were due to a big outflux of foreign capital. Why would Chinese forbidden to buy semiconductors keep their money in Silicon Valley Bank any more? Why would anyone keep their money in a country where the government will confiscate it all should they ever feel like doing that?
It was mostly bad management that assumed record low interest rates were here to stay forever.
But you are very correct that everyone across the globe watched how we seized the accounts of a nuclear power and said to themselves "Yeah, maybe we shouldn't keep our money there anymore."
Once DC weaponized the financial system, they assured its demise.
My concern, as a mother, is they will create war to deflect our attention from the enemy within. And a generation of beautiful young men will be sent to Asia or Eastern Europe to do their bidding
I always ask people what happens when the government is wrong? They go home on Friday and come back on Monday. There is no consequence for being wrong. How can you expect excellence from that?
They'll escalate again if they think they can get away with it without collapsing the entire thing. The problem is that we're fast approaching the point where the people will simply say no. Once that happens, it's over and they know it.
Everything is a confidence game in human relations. Money and authority are no different. Once the confidence is gone, it's not coming back.
Agreed. But I'm also worried that this will metastasize into a crazy level of distrust, spying, and reporting of nearly everyone in every context, merely to survive. Something like they once had in max-communist Romania, and in the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
I don't see how they can hold that together. The American system of authoritarianism is primarily built around maintaining the illusion that they're not abusing you. They've been pushing the envelope on that lately (see Biden's speech at Independence Hall) but it's not getting the results they want.
Thank you for the...grim optimism (it really feels like one of those things that needs its own slightly-silly neologism, the whole 'this is the moment before your infected, pus-suppurating limb finally falls off, and that's going to hurt like hell, BUT it'll be a relief compared to what you've already been enduring' kind of thing - "grimtimism"? "Hopedoom"? "Apocalyptophilia"? "Tragicomicism"? "Pseudocidal hopression"??? "Pesachopathy"?!?).
I've been saying for a while that, like it or not, I predict a "libertarian-right" near-future, warts and all, not because it's what most of us really want, but because it'll be the most livable option among those that can be readily communicated. A lot of people have heard by this point about how "The Wild West" as portrayed in the heyday of "Western" movies was McMythology for 1950's/'60s American audiences and not an accurate portrayal of the past - but maybe it'll prove to be a guiding template for the future...?
Selbstschadenfreude -- being happy because you're miserable? Or, to parody one of your selections, "tragicommunism" -- being miserable just like everyone else.
Would to God you prove correct. I suspect however, that most people will go along, simply because it allows them to put off consequences, for the time being at least.
I grew up with family that served in WWII. I grew up with family stories about how the family farm was lost to The Bank during the Depression. I grew up in a family --- Mother, Father, no particular hierarchy, but present and working hard.
It sickens me that most people will go along. Too lazy to learn. Too lazy to care. As long as they can buy cheap stuff to celebrate any number of fake occasions. Made in China. Uyghurs? Never heard of it.
People naturally gravitate towards the strong horse. That is how most of humanity has lived for tens of thousands of years. Our method is an aberration.
I applaud your optimism. But I think the numbers speak for themselves and the numbers right now show that "they" have an iron fucking grip on this shit.
Very soon it will be AI doing the work of keeping the public in line. Then there's no turning back.
You still believe the polls? They've got a an iron grip on DC, the universities, and the corporate media, but that's it.
They're going to try for an iron grip on the banking industry, and that's what everyone should be focused on, because that one will be near impossible to roll back.
Well I wasn't referring to polls. More like the percentage of people out there that are even paying attention to things like the twitter files, or assange, or the war machine.
I have a similar sense. It's not that they just started lying about everything. They've been lying to us the whole time. Now it's gotten too hard to maintain.
I think you may be right. From my perspective, it appears that for the first time since WWII, the us is in real danger of losing its hegemony. There are other factors but I believe this is the biggest reason the deep state is unleashing their tools of surveillance, censorship and control in ways we haven't seen before in terms of visibility if not also breadth and force. They've always done this, but as theyre global power and dominance is threatened, the tighten their grip to such an extent that it's becoming harder and harder not to see the man behind the curtain, so to speak. I do think more people are waking up to this and are starting to really push back. The popularity of independent media and the waning influence of traditional media are a sign of this shift. The people clinging to facade and those trying to preserve the power structures of the 20th century are certainly the loudest right now but the dam is breaking. Perhaps I'm an optimist, but that's what it looks like to me
That is very hopeful. Do you think the hope lies with the younger people? In promoting my solution, https://endpoliticsnow.com/, I find that 80% of those who are supportive are under 40 and 80% of those who are cynical are over 60. Any suggestions?
Our entire intellectual/cultural class have been turned en masse into the intellectual equivalent of the Manson Family by a simple yet ugly process of Skinner Box cultural conditioning.
First the device/rat trap is the delivery method: Smartphones, constant internet access, and social media have turned out to be the greatest tools of social conditioning and mass-opinion control and formation ever invented, they have created a digital panopticon of docile anxious conformists constantly monitoring each other for social miscues or deviations from orthodoxy, all happy to report each other to the authorities for social credit and virtual virtue points.
Next is the delicious hate pellet they ingest when rewarded by His Majesty, the Algorithm: the Maoist Maniachean moralism of Social Justice, which tricks its user into believing by vomiting out new jargon about "Oppression" and "marginalization" etc they become part of a moral priesthood, which allows them to denounce and destroy every opponent without tarnishing their virtual halos, because (as all the Good People know): nothing exists but Power and Silence is Violence.
It's hard for liberals with 20th-century brains still intact to accept and acknowledge what's happened: an entire generation and all the institutions it controls have been lost to an apocalyptic death cult that have the same morals and ruling strategy as Lady Macbeth.
They will not be coming to their senses anytime soon, if ever, so will have to be opposed and defeated if free thought, speech, and expression are to survive.
At least Lady M came to harbour some serious second thoughts and regrets. Not so much the algorithms, and those who benefit from them, that run our lives.
"It's hard for liberals with 20th-century brains still intact to accept and acknowledge what's happened: an entire generation and all the institutions it controls have been lost to an apocalyptic death cult that have the same morals and ruling strategy as Lady Macbeth."
I disagree. Very few liberals are members of the Republican Party. And most liberals have the same morals and ruling strategy of Uriah Heep.
I think that was what they were trying to do that earned them Musk's enmity, That being said,I have been subscribing to some of the smaller substack writers who contribute here. a lot less noise in the comments and many familiar faces. I agree, we need to build a community of disparate voices who agre on core principals.
I believe part of the issue of why liberals seem perfectly fine with this censorship apparatus is because the Democratic Party has changed to encompass the “managerial class” as it adopted neoliberal economic policies over the past 35+ years.
Instead of the working class and poor that used to be the Democrat’s constituency, it’s socially liberal managers in tech companies, banks, and other corporations that make up many of its supporters. Having worked my whole adult life in large corporations, some of the things you learn to survive and excel is to “story tell”, “control the narrative”, and self-censor. If you don’t, you won’t make it far in the corporate world.
In many ways it’s not that different from the deference given to kings and princes that Matt mentions; if you apply the same logic to dealing with directors, VPs, etc., you start to understand that self-censorship is key to avoiding scrutiny and exuding power. You also can’t rely on the scientific method or evidence; at the end of the day, if the boss says it’s not true, it’s only detrimental to your career if you disagree.
As corporations have merged and gotten bigger, and thus more people work in large corporations, I believe more people are trained in surviving in self-censoring situations, and thus tolerant of them. And this would explain why corporate leaders and Democratic politicians are tolerant of it - it’s a survival instinct they learned in an ever more corporatized society where we’re not citizens, we’re human capital.
Our school system is based on putting young people in square boxes in order to train them for a life of working in square boxes and ending life in a box.
A few more issues which tend to be forgotten in the miasma of US corporate/military propaganda involve a reliance upon a form paternalism - a veneer of credibility whereby Doctors are sold cigarettes (1940s) and minimize their harm until it's too late (1970's). Chemical companies dump remnants upon unsuspecting populations until illness, and long term damage take root downstream. Pharma bros, drug companies, and cartels corner the market on all kinds of substances that foster addiction, permanent market share and daily mis-dosage of death. By the time we figure it out, the death pattern and the death of trust waft over all us all.
When we consider the Patriot Act, how our data is being used against us, and what has happened to voices who dissent in this culture, we see that the normal is abnormal or as Dr West says - propaganda helping us adjust to the new normal. We haven't reached death yet on the media front, even with Russiagate, Ukraine/Syria intelligence proxy wars and CoVid - but the patient is terminal. The last gasps from corpse of American media are being belched out - careerism, concision, repetition, and self-censorship.
Somehow, many of us Americans sense that this empire is over, has been over for a decade, but the corporate zombie-foreign policy-insider keeps pumping up dead like its the Federal Reserve after the Financial Crisis. The wonks are back-dating the documents, the press are ignoring the crimes and the people are splintered into atomized units that are to be ignored at the same rates to how their SES grows.
These networks (relations) inside the Empire have been corroded for the last 75 years - we just did not know how much. The first rule of any type of reader or citizen awareness is to know who to trust. The fact that this is so difficult now speaks to how far gone we are as a cultural and a hegemon. Trust should be incremental and reciprocal binding the parties together in self-interest and allowing for cessation. This is the exact opposite of the US media - being told what to think, trying to create a permanent revenue generating stickiness that causes all of the parties to die, to become ill, or dependent.
The Patriot Act...I remember GWB standing at ground zero telling us we “would never let the terrorists win” They did win..the second that act passed. We’ve worshipped “safetyism” for way too long. What a way to live
There is no better concept than that of 'anti-racism' to sum up the sentiment in this article.
When you have to prove you are not something, there is the assumption of guilt. Before there was an implicit acknowledgment that we live in a world where there were laws against discrimination and this protected people.
Now we live in a world where we have to prove our thoughts are not racist and the assumption is we are guilty unless we prove otherwise.
That is how you create a Stasi-style climate of fear. Where anyone, anywhere can be accused of wrongthink. And this is how we learn that the safest position is to agree with the crowd lest you be the next one lynched.
Mr. Taibbi,, kudos on a very American speech, in the very best sense. You do well to quite Learned Hand. Well done, and thank you for all you do for us.
I came across a simple solution several years ago. I turn my phone off and leave it off for extended periods - numerous hours at a time. Then I'll turn it on for a moment, see to who's called/messaged and turn it right back off. Sometimes my phone is only on an hour total a day. By way of example, I'll turn the phone on and then leave it in my car when I go into restaurants. Check my calls or messages when I return to the car and then promptly turn it off. Why would I leave it on to bother me?
The first thing I noticed was that I started long form reading again. Great novels, classic books and hand held magazines. Then the 1990's reappeared in my life and my three automobiles (around town beater, nice family car, and van life van ) each started harbouring separate libraries again including maps. We only use Google maps for finding our way around cities now. Anywhere else and it's a map atlas. I reintroduced myself to vinyl records in the house and cds in the car.
Most importantly my mind became peaceful again. No more blue check dopamine shots or opinions from "friends" on Facebook who really weren't. Best of all with my phone turned off I've become semi-invisible again. I can travel without being tracked. There's more but you get the gist... As Richie Havens sang at Woodstock, 🎶Freedom, freedom...🎶
I had a conversation about the Missouri vs. Biden case the other day with friends (or at least people I know).
Half of them think that the Twitter Files is bullshit, and if you even say "Twitter Files" in any tone other than disgust, then anything you say afterwards is automatically invalidated.
The other half think that the government has only ever tried to censor vaccine misinformation. In other words, the only censorship that has occurred has been in the name of public health, and they wholeheartedly agree with it.
Personally, I would appreciate some kind of list of all the different sorts of things the government has tried to censor. Something I can point to during these sorts of discussions. I know it's a lot more than vaccine stuff, but everybody looks at me like a crazy person when I start saying "uhhhhhh... Hunter Biden laptop... uhhhhhhhhhhh"
At CBC, where many of my comments are "deactivated", they explicitly state that any comment on "moderation" will be deactivated. "Content deactivated".
Sometimes my account is put in "Pre-moderation", which means that literally every comment must be approved before appearing on their website.
Congratulations to your employment with the Ministry of Truth. We feel it will be a long and productive partnership. Together we protect America from untruth. There however are a few things you must know. The first is,
There is no Ministry of Truth.
Should you be asked if there is a Ministry of Truth, possible responses are "Stooge of Putin!", "Take off your tinfoil hat," or taking a drag on your cigarette then exhale while staring into the distance over the head of your interlocutor.
Long before the pandemic I got flagged from Facebook for posting a comment on a BBC FB comment thread that contained a link to Chomsky's view on Russiagate. I'd have to go back into my data to pull up the exact message and consequence but it was clear then that some algorithms were monitoring "wrong thoughts" and censoring certain websites. Ironically, I was able to post about, and complain about the experience on FB, which only shows the insidiousness and sophistication of western propaganda compared to the blunt censorship of other countries. Here, the authorities can say:
"What do you mean we are censoring free speech? We are simply protecting you from misinformation, and trust us, we know it when we see it. And look - you are free to talk about how you think we are encroaching on your freedom even though we are not...now...as you were, citizen!"
Sadly, a large swath of society continues to play along with this doublespeak.
"Well, DUUUUH!! If I've never even *heard* of it, how can it be something that is known to be censored?! The NYT and WaPo -- which I read *every day*, TYVM -- would be *all over it.* You know, like DeSantis and the library books in Florida? [under breath:] Idiot."
At some point we will have to face the reality that the heart is deceitfully wicked.. and there’s none who can know it... but that that heart is in deep need of transformation....That heart is in such deep need of becoming what it can not become completely on its own in order to be of any good to anyone including, and perhaps most importantly, to one’s self first and than to be good for another
remind the Obamas to beware dog trainers - there are some wonderful ones, truly, but the bad ones, ignorant ones, hard ones, celebrity- hunters , heavy-handed ones are dangerous to dogs. It is too easy to call ones self "a dog trainer".
Look, I'm not saying that the smartphone was designed as the perfect spying device, but if I were going to make the perfect spying device, it would look an awful lot like a smartphone.
Not to mention hijacking your dopamine to induce withdrawal without it.
Or forcing you to have it in order to access bathrooms, as one of my subs told me is happening in Japan. I need a phone to access my laundry machines now! Most people LOVE their smartphones, they're trying to get those few people who resist and would rather be present when out among the people.
I was given a business card that only had a QR code for her information. I told the person who handed me that "I will not use this." She said, "why not?" And I told her that she was making ME do the work to access HER infomation. Like, no way. Sorry. And I handed it back to her.
It is like going to a restaurant and having to scan a QR code for the menu. Reading on a phone is not like reading on paper.
In a recent airport trip, I was deciding between two places but ultimately was turned off by the "order via QR code" at one place, so I went across the concourse and got a real breakfast sandwich made by a real person right in front of me!
At Newark Liberty International Airport ("Liberty" was added after 9/11) you cannot buy anthing without using credit card. No cash even for a cup of coffee or a bannana.
I would much rather deal with a human. I hate sitting on the phone listening to instructions on what number to press and then sitting on hold forever while hearing annoying Muzak and repeated suggestions that could do my business on line.
So true. They've done studies that show reading from paper can help you recall information much more easily and retain it for longer periods.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-screens/
Yeah, FTS!
Imagine coming across that thing a couple weeks later. Would you even remember what it was for, or would it just go in the trash?
It was handed back. Hopefully, she will think about what I said.
I won't even take a card. I take a pic with my phone instead.
I continue to hold out, refusing to buy or download a single app for my phone. Big tech can shove it up their apps.
If you remember the "You will own nothing and be happy" article, they talk about how some people live outside the big cities because they don't agree with all the technology.
That's us.
There's also quite a bit of resistance against "Smart Cities" and "15 Minute Neighborhood" initiatives in the big cities. People recognize them for what they are . . .
And it's exactly the kind of thing that sort of sounds good at first glance.
"You can get everywhere in just a few minutes by walking! All your needs are close by!"
"Cool!"
"Also, you get fined if you leave too many times."
"Wait, what?"
My cell is not even connected to the internet. Younger brother keeps sending me twitter links to my cell. I just replied a few days ago, my cell is a talk/text device on purpose, no access to internet. Never on FB or Twitter. I have a computer with a VPN and favorite websites and substacks. No TV either. My thoughts are my own - using critical thinking when reading spin-filled news from both sides of the isle.
Wow! That sounds so complicated and out of the box (sarcasm). The illusion of engaging with others when, at best, we're dealing with bots works for lots of folks. I commute a lot, rather than use the device to read or listen to a book, many of my co-commuters prefer games and online shopping. The notion of exercising choice or agency 'never' occurs to some folks, including it seems - Matt and many others here.
Telling us ourselves how smart we are while our devices are monitoring and controlling our relationships with our world is pure comedy gold. We're the joke and the laughs really are on us.
Hah, yeah. I have a similar setup and from normies I get reactions along the lines of "how do you even live?"
Guys, guys, everyone lived this way up until 15 years ago. It's really not complicated. What you've got is complicated. Complicated to the point of distraction and irritation.
An enormous amount of complexity goes into even making it happen - I should know, I work on this stuff. And because I work on it, I know better than to use it.
You know, when the guys making the stuff* they're pushing on you tell you that you should really not be using it, you might want to listen.
*(I don't work on things that I find objectionable - especially social media and other attention-addiction software - but I work close enough to it that I know how it works and what it's doing to you. You might as well shoot heroin)
I’ve never owned a cell phone and have never downloaded an app on my iPad.
I was that way until I moved to Tokyo. Most complicated transportation system in the world. Navigating without a smart phone seems impossible (what did people do without it?) I ended up getting hooked on the thing.
I said I'll get rid of the imp from Hell when I get back to Bali. But then my girlfriend insisted I carry the thing at all times. So I ditched the girlfriend.
I really do admire you for sticking to your guns. Unfortunately it's impossible for most people unless they live a very off grid lifestyle. Most of us at best can only limit ourselves to all but necessary apps. I really hate having to download apps unless I have no choice. And if I only need something temporarily. I make sure to delete them until I have no choice but to use them again. I also think I'm able to live that way only because I'm older GenX and also work for myself. Not so easy for younger generations into the future.
Now it’s time To ditch the phone funny …
You must be a hermit because it is impossible to live in society w/o a smart phone. e.g., see the comments above and below.
Yes, I’m a hermit. I have no smart devices, an old fashioned princess phone so I can get internet, pay all my monthly bills via snail mail. I have a rooftop antenna but if it’s windy or raining I get very little reception. I don’t even have a smart meter to measure my electricity, instead an old fashioned analog. I also drive a 2007 car so it’s unlikely it has a tracking device. I live in the sticks so there’s no chlorine in my water and I generally eat healthy organic food. I suffer from none of the illnesses of old age at a time when most people my age treat cancer as if it’s the common cold. None of this is much of a challenge for me.
Also … I pay my bills with a check but for my day to day spending I use cash.
I ditched my Smartphone at the beginning of the year for a flip phone and my life has greatly improved in most areas (attention span, better mood etc), but damn! they really make it hard on ya! The Machine has punished me for leaving in so many strange and devious ways. if my wife didn't still have one, I might not be able to do it...pretty insane.
When we finally succumbed and got IPhones, on the way home from The Store, I was (I think I was, because I am clueless) disabling almost everything on the phone. I distinctly remember saying to my spouse, we goobers had more computing capability in our hands that day leaving the phone store than the Apollo astronauts.
Sometime later the St. Louis Science Center had an exhibit honoring the trip to the moon. It was awesome and humbling to see what these humans (with a huge team backing them up, of course) used to go --- to the Moon! If you are of that vintage, you remember humans all over the world watching what was happening. "We came in peace for all mankind."
So now, we have the machine. But I think the machine has us.
It really is insidious. "Download our app! Save 10%! Get bombarded with MORE ADS!"
I printed out the comment thread and reply by writing out, longhand, a paper response which is then faxed to an associate in an undisclosed location who then converts the text to paper tape which is attached to a WANG terminal connected to the mainframe. I'm told the terminal's CRT is green phosphor.
Top that! 🤪
Next time, send your comments by Morse code.
Semaphore telegraph, encoded in Navajo.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22909590
Fascinating article. I'd never heard of this old technique. By the way, I was going to say smoke signals, but I self-censored so the ex CIA agent who reads these comments wouldn't report me for "cultural appropriation." LOL!
I lived in Japan two years ago and didn't see that. But I did go to a small concert where I couldn't buy a ticket at the door without scanning a QR code. I couldn't get it to work. So someone else used their phone for me.
In Bali I went to Maybank to open an account. They wouldn't do it unless I had a smart phone with an active number they could call. No paper statements or deposit slips, smart phones only.
To enter Indonesia during Covid I was supposed to download an app to a phone. This did not work at all. I thought, "this isn't going to be enforced." And it wasn't.
I also went to Spain in December of 2021. There was some app you were supposed to have but no one paid any attention to it. The people did what they wanted to do. Everyone in the family was vaccinated but almost everyone got Covid anyway. Nobody had any problems.
Okay, new info that frankly creeps me out. But I am glad you shared that. Not afraid to hear things I don’t want to hear.
That claim about Japan is grotesquely inaccurate. Try searching for a few facts rather than relying on anecdote. You talk a lot and often make sense. Try to improve that ratio, please. We'll all benefit.
There are not places in Japan in which you need to make a purchase, then get a QR code for the bathroom? Obviously this is not ubiquitous, but do you deny that it's happening?
If it's happening, how is the claim grotesquely inaccurate?
Edit -- these have to be in use SOMEWHERE, right?:
https://futurism.com/public-toilet-requires-qr-code-tracks-cleanliness-score
Public Toilet Requires QR Code to Access, Tracks Your Cleanliness Score
If you don't have a smartphone, you're out of luck.
Invoking the "must be happening somewhere" defense (and is) situates your claim where it belongs. You see that, yes? Maybe not. I'll check your link.
Yes I should have phrased that better. I meant something more along the lines of "These wouldn't be in production if there wasn't a market"
Here's the article written about the subject:
https://zakitsune.substack.com/p/life-regulated-by-qr-code?r=mza28
“What The Fauci is a QR Code Only Restroom?” I asked myself. I had no answer. Kid jumping up and down telling us they really really need to go, we sought out anyone who could provide the answer. Finally, a sales clerk in a store provided it. To use the restrooms in the shopping area, you need the QR code. To get the QR code, you need to make a qualifying purchase at a qualified store. Upon completion of the transaction, the sales clerk can provide the QR code to be scanned by your idiot phone. Then you can have the QR code scanner at the restroom read the QR code on your phone to open the door and let you in. Not what you want to have to learn and do when your 8 year old is doing the “The I gotta go!” Dance.
Luckily, my wife has an idiot phone as I do not and I do not carry my iPad on hikes. Actually, I rarely carry it on family outings. She having hers, we narrowly averted an accident.
This link doesn't help you make your case. It's clear that at this point your displaying little interest in the issues Matt is addressing. Other cultures and communities really do have a lot to teach us: especially about social contracts, privacy, and responsibility. Worth looking into if you're interested.
Simulation Commander writes "Yakking (non-stop) in Your Ear."
Correct - the notion of turning the device off and keeping the device off except when we elect to turn the evil little monster on is beyond the vast majority and unthinkable for many here. Coz we are so smart TM.
Lol
They cut off my dopamine supply when they permanently suspended my account. Even the new Elon version of Twitter won’t let many of us have voices anymore. It’s still about censorship (and “content creator” ad revenue drivers)
Thank you for calling this out I join Twitter a little while ago, and even despite the reforms most of my original tweets (as opposed to responses to other people) get censored.
It’s like some kind of brave new world
And the automobile, once the symbol of individual freedom and empowerment, is no longer available new without a satellite uplink which harvests your phone's data, the car's sensor data, your location, and perhaps even your conversations to send to the manufacturer, who is free to sell the data to the lender, the leasing agent, your insurer, and anyone else who can afford to buy access to it . . . including federal law enforcement agencies.
Not to mention all the other problems with new cars, like how they're made not to be repaired by ordinary people and with parts as specialised (and difficult to replace) as possible. Everything these people do is designed to enslave us, they wouldn't have eliminated chattel slavery in the first place if there hadn't been more promising and marketable alternatives.
"Telematics"
https://www.geotab.com/blog/what-is-telematics/
What creeps me out the most is that someone could hack it and take control of the vehicle from a remote location, putting you and other drivers at risk. Think the authorities don't have that ability?
Michael Hastings
In the last few years, the self-driving cars have been hacked to show how dangerous they are. In the movie Ex Machina, the AI creator explains his creation gets to listen into billions of conversations because all the big tech firms do it.
In the next Black Death event, robots will be at the ready and the serfs will remain serfs
If the next Black Death (or Black Swan) event goes too far, the serfs will rise up, and the robots will be easily rendered useless.
Google is making full use of this. It has assembled inarguably* the greatest surveillance network the world has ever seen. Even the consumer profiles acquired by Facebook pale in comparison with those maintained by Google, which is collecting information about people 24/7, using more than 60 different observation platforms—the search engine of course, but also Google Wallet, Google Maps, Google Adwords, Google Analytics, Chrome, Google Docs, Android, YouTube, and on and on. Few Gmail users are aware that Google stores and analyzes every email they write, even the drafts they never send—as well as all the incoming email they receive from both Gmail and non-Gmail users.
Arguably?
I would assert, "inarguably".
The STASI had nothing on Google.
Google knows more about most people than their mom does. Literally.
To be fair, my mom doesn't know all that much about me. I think it's more accurate to say Google knows more about us than we do ourselves.
Spotify will recommend songs for me that I have never played. 95% of the time, they are correct and I like it.
The major reason I moved to ProtonMail. I let gmail read all my spam.
But that brings privacy only if you mail exclusively to other ProtonMail accounts. Besides, I didn't see why I should trust ProtonMail.
I understand having trust issues, but unless you want to maintain your own email server you have to trust someone. Protonmail seems to be commited to privacy.
While we don't know that ProtonMail is any better, it certainly isn't any worse.
"Seems to be"
That's your metric?
This is not a trust issue. It's a reality issue.
You are welcome to go look over their source code yourself.
https://github.com/ProtonMail
"Seems to be" is as close to truth as we can usually get in this world. One cannot be an expert on everything, so we are forced to trust others based on their their perceived knowledge of a subject and their integrity.
If I were NSA, I would create a "private" browser and a "private" "secure" email service and then just sit back and harvest all those "private" data.
#honeypot
Mandatory pigman quote:
“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place, but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it’s important, for example that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities.” - Erich Schmidt, former CEO of Google
Is Proton secure? Is Duck Duck?
I have no idea, but I would not bet on it.
All this has occurred to me, but I didn't want to be a total bummer. Wasn't it the NSA who used a front to sell a "secure" encryption service to foreign nations?
At least ProtonMail might keep your data out of the hands of Google/Facebook. As long as you mail only to others who are also using ProtonMail.
Yes! The NSA did indeed sell compromised systems for decades.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/11/crypto-ag-cia-bnd-germany-intelligence-report
WaPo thought that was really cool, "The intelligence coup of the century!"
It also would seem likely that in the relatively near future quantum computers are going to be able to break even so called "strong" encryption.
And as I have said many times, AI's are going to be used to spy on us in ways that we cannot even imagine.
Frank Church saw it all coming too. Okay, not all of it, but he saw the big picture.
"Even among US Senators, virtually nothing was known at the time about the National Security Agency. The Beltway joke was that "NSA" stood for "no such agency". Upon completing his investigation, Church was so shocked to learn what he had discovered - the massive and awesome spying capabilities constructed by the US government with no transparency or accountability - that he issued the following warning, as reported by the New York Times, using language strikingly stark for such a mainstream US politician when speaking about his own government:
"'That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide.'
"He added that if a dictator ever took over, the NSA 'could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.'"
The conditional part of Church's warning - "that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people" - is precisely what is happening, one might even say: is what has already happened. That seems well worth considering." - Glenn Greenwald
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/25/frank-church-liberal-icon
And then there is SNA, Social Network Analysis.
Encryption, even perfect encryption doesn't stop them from identifying not just "social" networks. But hierarchies. Based on those data they can then really get up your ass.
From chat.
Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a methodology used to study and analyze social structures and relationships among individuals or entities within a particular network. It focuses on understanding the patterns of connections, interactions, and information flow between nodes (individuals, organizations, or other units) in the network. These connections are often represented graphically as nodes (vertices) and edges (links) to visualize the relationships and understand the overall structure of the network.
SNA has various applications, including but not limited to:
Understanding Social Structures: SNA helps researchers and analysts understand the social dynamics, influence, and power structures within a community or an organization. It can be used in sociology, anthropology, and management studies to explore relationships within groups.
Identifying Key Players: By analyzing a social network, one can identify influential individuals or central nodes in the network, often referred to as "hubs" or "brokers." These key players can have significant impacts on information dissemination, decision-making, and overall network cohesion.
Information Diffusion and Viral Marketing: SNA can be used in marketing and advertising to understand how information, trends, or innovations spread through social networks. It helps identify the most effective nodes to target for promoting a message or a product.
Detection of Criminal Networks: Law enforcement and intelligence agencies can use SNA to uncover criminal or terrorist networks, track their activities, and identify the main actors involved.
Now, concerning surveillance, social network analysis can be used for both legitimate and controversial purposes. Here are some examples:
Counterterrorism and National Security: Government agencies may use SNA to identify and dismantle terrorist networks, track their funding sources, and understand their operational structures. Analyzing communication patterns and connections between suspected individuals can help predict potential threats.
Law Enforcement: SNA can aid law enforcement in understanding criminal organizations, identifying key members, and uncovering the relationships between criminals. It can be instrumental in fighting organized crime and drug trafficking.
Marketing and Surveillance Capitalism: Private companies may employ SNA to gather data on users' social connections, preferences, and behaviors to develop targeted advertising and personalized recommendations. This raises privacy concerns as users' data is often collected without their explicit consent or knowledge.
Social Media Monitoring: Governments and organizations may monitor social media platforms using SNA to gather information about public sentiment, opinions, and potential social movements. This can be used for public policy development or, in some cases, to suppress dissent.
It's important to note that the use of SNA for surveillance purposes raises ethical and privacy concerns. Surveillance can infringe on individuals' privacy rights and may lead to abuse or misuse of data. Therefore, its implementation should be governed by appropriate laws, regulations, and oversight to ensure that it respects individuals' rights and freedoms.
I use mailfence, it’s out of Belgium. It encrypts incoming and outgoing messages.
How do you know that?
Encrypts it how?
I can’t say how but they claim both incoming and outgoing are encrypted. Truthfully, encryption is likely impossible but they operate out of Belgium so there’s that. I did a little research but I mostly relied on a good friends recommendation. She’s pretty thorough.
Well you can run your own mail server if you must (an absolute nightmare even if you know what you're doing) and set up pgp with all your co-conspirators, then use k9mail or another desktop client with pgp support to at least automate the cryptography. But short of that a service that makes at least a plausible privacy claim is better than one that doesn't. Until demonstrated otherwise protonmail and similar options are a clear improvement over google, yahoo, microsoft, etc and not hard to get going with.
You could have a separate computer that is never connected to the Internet to compose your mail. Encrypt it with a program you write yourself to avoid the legally required back door. Use a thumb drive to transfer the result to the Internet computer where it can be emailed. The recipients move the encrypted email to a similar no-Internet computer to decrypt. Even this isn't foolproof, but I say good enough.
Though all this might motivate a pre-dawn SWAT raid on your home. Just what are you trying to hide?
Or you could use traditional paper mail.
"U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement"
WASHINGTON — Leslie James Pickering noticed something odd in his mail last September: a handwritten card, apparently delivered by mistake, with instructions for postal workers to pay special attention to the letters and packages sent to his home.
“Show all mail to supv” — supervisor — “for copying prior to going out on the street,” read the card. It included Mr. Pickering’s name, address and the type of mail that needed to be monitored. The word “confidential” was highlighted in green.
“It was a bit of a shock to see it,” said Mr. Pickering, who with his wife owns a small bookstore in Buffalo. More than a decade ago, he was a spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental group labeled eco-terrorists by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Postal officials subsequently confirmed they were indeed tracking Mr. Pickering’s mail but told him nothing else."
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html
There is already essentially "no place to hide"
We don't presently have any evidence that the encryption algorithms used by, e.g., ssh and pgp are compromised. Or rather, there have been a couple that the NSA compromised that were detected and removed. But there's no overt legal force except in a few countries like China and North Korea that attempt to restrict access to true encryption. So you could skip the writing your own encryption software part. You wouldn't want to do that anyway unless you were a top-tier cryptographer, and if you were you'd probably already have a job ... with the NSA or a private data security firm.
You can also be reasonably certain that even if your computer is internet-connected it's not compromised just by virtue of that connection, if you follow the right precautions, which are the same ones you'd use to set up an "air gapped" computer. Air gapping is more about preventing outside attacks.
Not transmitting your stuff over the open internet is not a bad idea though, if you have any concern that it might be decrypted in the future, since you can prevent it being captured and archived that way. Sneaker nets are cool.
Problem with paper mail is nothing whatsoever prevents it from being intercepted in transit, and few cyphers you could implement on paper would survive ten minutes with a cryptographer, other than a handful that are difficult and require a lot of coordination to pull off. You'd be better off mailing encrypted USB drives if you wanted to piggyback on public courier services.
But this is all silly really unless you're a superspy. Like this is over the top if you're an international terrorist. Mostly what you want is to not be casually spied on by spooks, corporations, or any random mail exchange server admin, and end-to-end encryption solves that, which anybody can do with pgp. Encryption at rest solves the problem of the actual physical hardware being confiscated, or a bad actor wherever that hardware is, or the admin who runs your mail service itself, and protonmail (at least allegedly) provides that too.
"Until demonstrated otherwise protonmail and similar options are a clear improvement over google, yahoo, microsoft, etc and not hard to get going with."
That's not how logic works. It's their claim. Now it's yours. PROVE IT.
You cannot.
I've found no major email provider lets you turn off the spam catcher (aka censorship vector). Hmmm...
You really don't want to do that. You'd be flooded by thousands of spam messages a day if your email address was public. You don't see most of the spam sent to you because the bulk of it gets blocked at a higher level before it reaches your inbox/spam folder, and that can't be turned off for you without turning it off for everyone using your mail host. Yeah spam filtering does provide a vector for censorship but it's also the duct tape and bubblegum holding the whole thing together. Better to just not use email for anything you might worry about being censored and leave it for bills and whatnot.
My sister once showed me an account she had with no spam filter. Incredible quantity of the stuff. I can't understand how this spam generates anyone enough business to make it worthwhile, but apparently it does.
Well it costs practically nothing to dispatch emails by the millions so you really only have to catch enough fish to cover electricity. You don't even have to pay that if you happen to have taken over someone's shitty webserver. Then they're paying for it. So that's the main reason it works. Botnets quietly scour the internet for insecure webservers and use them to pump out millions of spam emails until a mail admin notices the pattern. Then he sends a nastygram to the web server admin, who hopefully fixes it, or else to the host/datacenter, who shuts the thing down. But in the time it takes to do that, the botnet has already found a thousand other shitty webservers to do the same with. Endless whack-a-mole.
Some spam is so bad I can't understand how even one person in a million buys anything. Like the one that put so many ads on my computer that I couldn't do anything else. It took an hour to rid of them all. After that who's going to buy their bodybuilding product?
I read Proton Mail was trojan horse. Search just now 2021 story ARS Technica that Proton turned over French climate activists IP & browser info to Swiss authorities - and removed “we do not keep any IP logs” from its privacy policy.
when i tell people this, which is not often because they do not want to hear it, they accede but basically accept as a fait accompli. they have two reasons
1. They are not afraid as they have done nothing wrong. Odds are they are right and the chances this being unleashed on them to their noticeable detriment is unlikley.
2. The part they don't say is they have no fear is because they support those in power and would not dream of that technology being unleashed on them.
1. They haven't don't anything wrong, yet. Many people on the Democrats side are happy because it is feeding some dark part of their soul to be on the "right side of the argument". Like all things, that too shall pass and the very tools they enjoy being unleashed on their enemies will soon be deployed on them.
2. Have those people ever met a human before? We do some terrible things to one another. The Holocaust comes to mind. No one could ever imagine concentration camps that were incinerating thousands of Jews per day. There was a time when they couldn't imagine the NSA existed. They probably would have never imagined the US government has all but confirmed the existence of alien life but all those things are true. No one would imagine that Bill and Melinda Gates foundation supplies 88% of the WHO annual budget but it's happenings. Then there is the laptop that didn't exist. To me, there are more things to believe than one can assume will never happen. Thank you for your post. I hope we can save your friends before it's too late.
BTW - mostly not friends i am referring too. My friends have many views, not all I agree with but we have so much more in common than that and we are not afraid to express our opinions openly. Im talking about family LOL
1. I agree but the odds are in their favor that nothing will happen to them. The Gestapo and Stasi could not arrest everyone and most people just altered their behavior. I imagine a lot did not mind.
2. The irony of course is part of the family is Jewish. They, the millennials, are so afraid of right wring bogeymen, they will accept anything in the name of security. Also their historical knowledge is nil. Even regarding events directly related to them. Im the nerd of the family as I am the only one who is aware of history that occurred before 1990. To them, this includes my offspring also, the world is supposed to be some benign place where nothing bad ever happens and when it does we just need more laws against bad things like guns.
Tragic. But its Saturday night, the family is out of town, this nerd just got out for 9 and shot a 38 and there is a decent cab (Freemark Abbey) in the bar, so am going to enjoy the night before we touch off WWIII in the Ukraine.
If people know nothing outside of their daily lives then it is very easy to lie to them about the world. They'll believe almost anything.
I just mentioned to my neighbour how badly demented Joe Biden is.
She sincerely asked me, "Why do you say that?"
When I went through the list she had not seen or heard any of it. She's no idiot or partisan ideologue either, she's simply trapped in an MSM bubble.
that brings to mind Chestrton's comment that "those who no longer believe in God do not believe in nothing, they believe in everything."
The irony is that they really do not know me, if the ads they send are any indication.
Sometimes Google seems to think I am a Hindi-speaking woman with an interest in celebrity culture. Sometimes, it has me pegged as a black woman who is dissatisfied with her hair care options. Lately, it is sending me a bunch of Spanish-language ads, mostly for snack foods.
I find this a positive trend.
😆
That's not all. If I post something to even the most obscure website this is immediately collected by a Google bot then used. True, it is public information, but such total surveillance is creepy.
Embrace being on The List.
By the time I found out what was going on I'd already left such an extensive trail that privacy was a lost cause. So I don't bother to even try to hide.
Though I once did try to remove the battery from a phone so I couldn't be tracked. This was possible with difficulty but left such a mess the whole thing was impractical.
I rarely take my phone out with me at all, but don't they have travel bags for that sort of thing these days?
There was a metal box thingy called Privacy Case a while back that blocked transmissions. (But it seems they went "out of business".) I had one (second hand) and it worked for a while, then a couple years later I tried it with a new phone ... and that was able to receive signal.
Faraday bags totally work.
"the greatest surveillance network the world has ever seen"
I'd have to say it was the Statsi. The occupying Russians had no love for East Germany. The populace was so intimidated that family members would turn one another in, as it was a crime not to do so. It is true that the Internet surveillance is much less labor intensive, but if you want to go to the trouble of having an extensive network of finks you can't beat that. Then nothing and nowhere is safe. Even if you try your hardest you might slip up.
On the other hand the US gvt. has recently started a program to get citizens to snitch on each other. So give them time.
Do no evil - used to be the Google mantra
Yes, great point. They updated their Code of Conduct for the first time in 17 years back in 2018. As you point out, the previous version had opened with the words “Don’t be evil,” which among other things required “providing our users unbiased access to information.” But the new version omits any assurance of objectivity, instead opening with an ambiguous reference to “Google’s values” and adding a new mention of “respect for our users.”
https://euphoricrecall.substack.com/p/googlegov-part-2
Once they sold out to Wall Street any ethics were...what always happens.
Even if one consciously avoids all things g00gle I find g00gle footprints in my website and search data. Clear your history and website data in Safari, visit almost any website then view what shows up in that data afterwards. I see 10-20 names afterwards including G and tik tok. With my limited tech knowledge I don’t really understand what it all means but it’s there.
Mandatory Onion Video...
"Congress today reauthorized Facebook the massive online surveillance program run by the CIA. . ."
https://youtu.be/cqggW08BWO0
Great post!
SC, you're more correct than you know. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Alan Watts & Aaron Russo predicted the advent of the smartphone years before we ever heard of such a thing. As the fabulous Paul Kingsnorth has observed, the terms "Web" & "Net." are not accidental but rather forthright descriptors. I would contend that the stunning, mass social engineering function of our hand-held telescreens is far more sinister than the built-in, comprehensive surveillance feature.
There are those who claim that the tec titans of our day, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Gates, Musk, et al, are all myths, frontmen for DARPA. In my blatant delirium I don't go quite that far, but am open to the notion. Again, the concept of the smartphone has been around for decades. You can look it up.
Technology–including pharma–is the cross that humanity is being crucified upon. Yes Virginia, it's all by design. Our species stumbles blindly toward some Brave New Oceania. I wish I had better news.
I literally thank God for Matt Taibbi. No matter how passionate or eloquent, he cannot even slow down the procession, let alone halt it, but I surely do appreciate his heart & effort.
The sad part is that the smartphone could've been the ultimate security device. It could've made us, our identity, accts, health, etc, almost untouchable even if a stranger found the device. However, we're a country of opportunistic hucksters, and the greediest motherfuckers among us are the ones behind selling all that away to the top bidder. Android was designed as an ad and notification delivery system. It lets anyone that pays have a crack at keeping someone's attention by using their behavior as a key.
That reminds me of another comment I heard recently: If the Internet wasn't specifically designed for porn addicts, it sure worked out well for them.
Smart phone!…well that didn’t work did it?
Is it just me but isn’t the enormity of dumbness grown exponentially. Or is it we are not getting the proper info/journalism
Seems I now am too stupid to come to a conclusion.
All made in China, too. That place has got to be censorship ground zero.
Here,here!
Beep, beep, beep. . .
We are all just moving green dots on someone's screen today.
It changes the Internet so much when you always try to consciously remind yourself there is another actual person on the other end of the screen—those "someones" do the complete opposite! It is so dehumanising, an inhuman concept really that takes away the full, complete idea of a person and goes against the way we are made to function.
The irony, of course, being that I can only read this article or these comments on social media.
You do realize that the web itself is not social media; all you need is an account, which is not dependent on any social media, but on SMTP, basically. Which is decentralized.
SS is social media.
The web is based on http protocol.
"HTTP is a protocol for fetching resources such as HTML documents. It is the foundation of any data exchange on the Web and it is a client-server protocol, which means requests are initiated by the recipient, usually the Web browser."
~ I sold car telephones & mobile phones in the mid-80's, at the start of all this. For safety & convenience it was a game-changer. Then phones got smart & people are got dumber. I only got an iphone 2 years ago because of access requirements (work, concerts, etc.). But before that folks used to look at me crossed-eyed & w/disgust when I pulled out my flip-phone. "Why don't you have a smart phone?". I felt like a teetotaler at a frat party. It was fun resisting their arguments for why I should have one when I really knew they were justifying their own addiction/usage. ~
No doubt. They’re the ultimate Trojan Horse
No doubt. They’re the ultimate Trojan Horse
"when you get to the “there’s no one left to interview but the gorilla” moment, you move on"
I cracked up so much that I had to comment before reading further. That made my day!
Matt's a helluva writer
I wanted to taunt him after 'no one else to intereview but the gorilla' because I am so very fond of his writing and have been since he blew the red hot guilty label across BHO's yellow back when BHO claimed the pitchforks were at his back. Then I wanted to ask BHO, why are there no pitchforks in you photo ops of that infamous deplorable meeting in which you gave the treasury department to those deplorable bankers and let them leave millions of innocent victims of those deplorable bankers homeless?
In the case of M T's 'no one else to interview but the gorilla,' I wanted to ask M T if his gorilla of the day is RFK, Jr., whom I also admire greatly for having the courage to tell us the truths that no one else in D or R party elites wants to tell us! And I totally admire both of them for the scheduled interview this evening in Memphis!
Why did Obama not allow himself to be photographed with a pitchfork? Well, perhaps then they would have evidence of post-presidency bribe-taking. You don't think Obama actually PAID for the massive real estate he has accumulated post-presidency, now do you? Nice waterfront compounds in Hawaii and Martha's Vineyard and a beautiful mansion in DC. I'd love to see his "mortgages." Yeah, most likely non-existent.
The biggest fucker that has lived in my lifetime: Barack Obama.
Agreed. He is also responsible for the division in the country and making it worse during his 3rd term currently.
Same. Stopped cold with its brilliance.
Well, I think he should have interviewed the gorilla.
Haha!!!
Haha. At least have gotten some grunts.
Right! And more than anyone gets from Grampa Joe.
"First they became addicted to the Internet as a tool of convenience. Then it became a cheap substitute for real-life interaction."
Go into any bar these days. People are all around looking at their phones instead of enjoying the impromptu company. You don't sit down next to some old sot on on side telling you why man never went to the moon while on the other side you have a couple stopping for a snort before they have to go to the opera. Now it is just everyone looking down at their glowing brick trying to find something better. Somewhere where they are just a number, another face in the crowd.
Used to be you lived in the world you were in, not in the digitaverse.
We are going to hell in a bucket of bits and bytes.
I had such a WTF moment a couple years ago when the softball team went out for beers after the game. Me being the old man I am, I don't bring my phone when I'm hanging out with people -- I'm busy! But at one point I looked around and EVERYBODY ELSE was on their phones. Like, wtf are we even here for?!?!?
A friend & I recently went to lunch. We noticed four teenage girls at a nearby table. NONE were talking to each other. They sat there, with their phones. One took a photo of the others. Then back to the phone.
Imagine! Four teenage girls, sitting together and NOT talking.
I wonder (and maybe vainly wish...) if it will reach the point where it breaks, and a few alpha fe/males just say, Hell no. And it becomes a trend NOT to do it.
I run a 1-year program for young professionals. Three times in the year, we do a camp-out weekend. No phones, no watches, no electronics, no showers, no beds (sleeping bags). They love it. Most have never been without their phone that long. But I look at them huddled around a picnic table, talking, laughing, so PRESENT to one another....
It's possible. We just need some super-strong-willed, gregarious, opinionated examples.
(And yet, here I sit, in front of a screen....)
Having a terrible impact on physical health, too.
https://substack.com/@euphoricrecall/note/c-18538723?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=7x9qm
I've often had the same thought. Maybe one day there will be a rebellion like the back-to- the-land-movement of the 60s and 70s. A trendy cohort will just say fuck these electronic leashes, we're going without. The problem is I've been wondering about this for what seems like a couple of decades, and no sign of any such insurgency.
Same here.
I saw a couple having dinner at a restaurant in tropical paradise both on their phones.
Part of it is that the system has raised the stakes of their decisions so much that it becomes difficult, and sometimes inadvisable, to ignore. I certainly want to know if we're getting ready to put NATO into a war with Russia.
They're as addicted to the attention as we are to giving it to them.
Back in the day, 60's 70's 80's, we were one lunatic away from nuclear armageddon. We didn't worry everyday about being wiped off the face of the earth. We went on with our lives. If NATO goes in to war with Russia, does getting a tweet about it change anything?
Sounds sort of like heaven.......... ;)
HA!
🤣🤣🤣
But they ARE "talking" - as they swipe and text on their devices.
I went back to college in my 30s. Back in like 2016, when I was 34, I was approaching a classroom. I heard silence, and for a moment I thought I was late, and class had already started. Entering the room, I saw about 30 college freshman and sophomores, seated at 30 desks, all staring at their phones in silence. It freaked me out so much that to this day I go without my phone as much as possible.
My office overlooks my yard and the street, where there is a dedicated bike path. Most people, like 80% are "checking" their phones as they walk or even as they ride their bicycles! I see this on beautiful spring/summer days when the skies here are alive with birds of all kinds. My neighbours have great gardens, there are squirrels and cats and dogs out for a walk. The phoneheads, degraded addicts as they are, literally see or hear none of these, intent as they are on doing whatever the hell it is that they are doing! It's a sickness, an actual evil.
I actually do really like my phone and find it tremendously useful for: navigation, info on the fly, and when called for, like a long bus ride, as a distraction, inter alia. I am fully aware of all the downsides and struggle against them as much as possible.
Sometimes I feel like stopping people and declaring, "It's a beautiful day and the world is alive all around you. What the fuck are you looking at that's more interesting than that?"
I don't of course as I would only get anger or genuine confusion, or fear, "Is this guy crazy?".
There is a false assumption that people were full of interaction before cell phones. I’d wager that more people interact now because of them than they would have without them. Before cell phones I went into bars and people routinely just sat around by themselves or their small group of friends not interacting with other groups. I went into clubs and people danced alone.
The book “Bowling Alone” was written before social media.
Ha! My spouse came up with this observation. In the old days in the local pub when the sole phone rang, the bartender had to say, "No he's* not here." Now, everybody at the bar is looking at their phone all the time. So dependent.
*Yes, it was somebody calling for "he . . ."
I had my own bananas and gorillas story.
When I was going through unlawful foreclosure through no fault of my own in 2010, I kept thinking that if more people knew what the bankers were doing, they'd rise up! So, I proceeded to tell everyone who would lend an ear. Most of my friends said, "Just pay your mortgage!" Some said, "Bummer." But when I told them it was happening to their mortgage too, they said, "Can't be bothered." So, none of the people I told did anything. They just went along with the crooked behavior.
When I heard Michael Shellenberger say that it was a weird phenom to lose all your friends at 40 years old......I knew that at least I was not alone. I lost almost all my friends at the age of 50. And frankly, the reason I was in foreclosure is because the construction job market collapsed. So, it wasn't that I "took out more loan that I qualified for" or "wanted a free house" or "bought too much house." Or any of the bank propaganda that was spewed by the media. It was that the banks crashed the global market and that meant there were no construction jobs!
So, do I think Americans are stupid, foolish, unlearned? Nope. I think Americans are "if the crooked behavior doesn't personally affect me, fuck it." And also, "anyone who makes me face that my government is fucked up, fuck them too." Which is a sad revelation of our society.
Willful ignorance has become endemic. People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.
"all experience has shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed"
We are just not far enough down the road of suffering yet.. But we are headed in that direction!
Thanks, sounded familiar and, forced me to re-read the Declaration of Independence.
Yep. A lot of people are going to have to lose everything before they wake up.
But they will.
I'm going through that very thing right now with my book and it is so frustrating. I spent several years developing the first realistic solution to the political divide and her other political problems. I thought everyone would be overjoyed that they could now have hope. A smaller percentage are excited about it but the majority won't even look, even close friends who are highly intelligent. It has been shocking to me. https://endpoliticsnow.com/
I looked at your book. Your writing's okay, and there's no question you know your stuff.
It's heartbreaking to sit down and put 300+ pages down and have it disappear. Been there, did that.
Today, I earn a FT living as a novelist- I know, I know your bag is non-fic, but selling a book is selling a book right? RIGHT Here's a couple of things to know that (hopefully) will take some of the sting out:
1. NONE of your friends/family will EVER read your stuff. That's just the way it is. It's a cliche among authors. I've been to conferences w/ other writers (outfit's called NINC). On average, it's people doing about 150K/year with the top players making millions. We laugh about how one author bought her mother a frikkin HOUSE w/ her writing income (paid cash too) and her mother had never read any of her books. No, not porn; fantasy.
2. Best way to sell a book is write another. Let me put it like this: many, MANY authors have hit the NYT best sellers rank, sold 100K + in hardcopy and 500K in paperback who are now back driving a cab. Like YouTubers, content volume is important. In your field (politics) a book a year is an OK start. Please note: NOTHING is going to even have a hope of happening until you get to book 3 or 4.
3. There are a million ways you can promote your book, but it takes time and it's sooo hard on what I call 'Newbie writer ego'. We get sooo enamored with the drivel we pound out that we think it's special. Well... it ain't. It's a tree in a forest, buddy. And if it doesn't find a readership, it may as well be a blank piece of paper, despite the effort you put in.
***
Selling a book is fuckin' HARD man.
BUT...
Once you develop the tools and skills to sell a bunch, those skills remain. And you build on them.
However, a writing career is a marathon, not a sprint. You need to decide how much effort you're willing to expend in a writing career. As in hours/ day-week-month. You say you've been a high flying consultant; I assume that many of the techniques from your past life can apply.
Best of luck. Don't feel bad that your first effort's not doing what you expected. It's the way the game goes, man. Shit, when I wrote MY first novel I had visions of being on Ellen and Oprah. Today, that 90K words (324 pgs) of hopeless dreck has been sitting on the back a shelf in my office for 12 years. But it was the start.
Jim, How very kind of you to take the time to respond to comment with some advice from your experience and your empathy regarding a first book and book marketing. I hear you and I take your advice to heart. As my first book, for you to say my writing is okay, means a lot and is very encouraging. As soon as it was printed I thought of several other ways to communicate the message and make it more interesting. I'm practicing with other voices on Instagram, @EndPoliticsNow. I can't imagine writing a novel. My talents lay in analyzing and modeling systems and in process engineering, not in writing. So thank you again! Congratulations for making it to FT as a novelist. I have huge respect for that. To me, that's amazing.
"So, do I think Americans are stupid, foolish, unlearned? Nope. I think Americans are "if the crooked behavior doesn't personally affect me, fuck it." And also, "anyone who makes me face that my government is fucked up, fuck them too." Which is a sad revelation of our society."
To be fair, when people try to speak up, what happens? The fate of Occupy Wall Street is indicative, all with a wink and a nod from St. Barack.
The story is always far more complicated than the first telling.
I disagree.
I think we're witnessing the end of the control system. Just twenty-five years ago, I would have instinctually accepted the vast majority of pronouncements from the authorities (government, universities, media) as probably true. Now it's none, zero, zilch, nada... and I'm certainly not alone.
As a result of this failure of confidence, the system is freaking out and clamping down. It's true that some do not want to be extricated from control and never will be. Look at how many Russians still yearn for the Soviet Union and bemoan its end. These were usually the nomenklatura and we have our own in the United States in the form of the aforementioned authorities.
But there are more and more who don't believe a word any more. They will never trust the system again. With each passing day, that number grows and it does not shrink. The damage that the system has done to itself will take generations to reverse, if ever. The transitional period, however, is going to suck as those who are in the system, believe in the system, profit from the system, are going to hang on by their teeth and nails, but that cannot last forever.
Lee, I pray you are right, but the core of people is very small. Too small now. My own daughter and son-in-law think I'm overreacting to the three letter agencies.
I'm with you, I won't trust a word the government puts out. I used to think Rand Paul was crazy. Now I see him as a prophet.
And they'll remain that way until it costs them, maybe even past that. Some will not see.
But the system does not exist in a vacuum. The world is changing rapidly and the rest of the globe is catching on to our ways. As they extricate themselves from our grip, the repercussions will be felt here at home. Hence why the administration is so hell-bent on the "rules-based order". They know that once it's gone, the jig is up. Once we can't export our inflation anymore, all of the overhead in our economy is going to get shredded and perhaps we'll return to an economy that produces actual value instead of hype.
When the grip on Saudi slipped I knew it was over. But the money involved is so large it moves like a glacier.
I figure Their plan is to grift as much as fast as they can before the roof falls in. That's what the arms "sales" to Ukraine are all about.
Nothing is instantaneous. The liquidation of of overseas dollar reserves won't happen overnight unless we get WW3 going in earnest (which unfortunately is still a distinct possibility).
I'm sure the recent big bank failures were due to a big outflux of foreign capital. Why would Chinese forbidden to buy semiconductors keep their money in Silicon Valley Bank any more? Why would anyone keep their money in a country where the government will confiscate it all should they ever feel like doing that?
It was mostly bad management that assumed record low interest rates were here to stay forever.
But you are very correct that everyone across the globe watched how we seized the accounts of a nuclear power and said to themselves "Yeah, maybe we shouldn't keep our money there anymore."
Once DC weaponized the financial system, they assured its demise.
My concern, as a mother, is they will create war to deflect our attention from the enemy within. And a generation of beautiful young men will be sent to Asia or Eastern Europe to do their bidding
I always ask people what happens when the government is wrong? They go home on Friday and come back on Monday. There is no consequence for being wrong. How can you expect excellence from that?
That's why the gov is using private companies to get propaganda out. They've certainly been able to take over the finanically-strangled MSM.
They'll escalate again if they think they can get away with it without collapsing the entire thing. The problem is that we're fast approaching the point where the people will simply say no. Once that happens, it's over and they know it.
Everything is a confidence game in human relations. Money and authority are no different. Once the confidence is gone, it's not coming back.
Agreed. But I'm also worried that this will metastasize into a crazy level of distrust, spying, and reporting of nearly everyone in every context, merely to survive. Something like they once had in max-communist Romania, and in the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
I don't see how they can hold that together. The American system of authoritarianism is primarily built around maintaining the illusion that they're not abusing you. They've been pushing the envelope on that lately (see Biden's speech at Independence Hall) but it's not getting the results they want.
"The American system of authoritarianism is primarily built around maintaining the illusion that they're not abusing you."
Comic gold, my man, comic gold.
Please enlighten us then Feldspar---take a chance.
Note how they switch jobs back and forth. Government, media. Now we even have the actual spooks doing it.
Thank you for the...grim optimism (it really feels like one of those things that needs its own slightly-silly neologism, the whole 'this is the moment before your infected, pus-suppurating limb finally falls off, and that's going to hurt like hell, BUT it'll be a relief compared to what you've already been enduring' kind of thing - "grimtimism"? "Hopedoom"? "Apocalyptophilia"? "Tragicomicism"? "Pseudocidal hopression"??? "Pesachopathy"?!?).
I've been saying for a while that, like it or not, I predict a "libertarian-right" near-future, warts and all, not because it's what most of us really want, but because it'll be the most livable option among those that can be readily communicated. A lot of people have heard by this point about how "The Wild West" as portrayed in the heyday of "Western" movies was McMythology for 1950's/'60s American audiences and not an accurate portrayal of the past - but maybe it'll prove to be a guiding template for the future...?
Selbstschadenfreude -- being happy because you're miserable? Or, to parody one of your selections, "tragicommunism" -- being miserable just like everyone else.
Those would both be missing the mark a bit too much, I think.
Would to God you prove correct. I suspect however, that most people will go along, simply because it allows them to put off consequences, for the time being at least.
I grew up with family that served in WWII. I grew up with family stories about how the family farm was lost to The Bank during the Depression. I grew up in a family --- Mother, Father, no particular hierarchy, but present and working hard.
It sickens me that most people will go along. Too lazy to learn. Too lazy to care. As long as they can buy cheap stuff to celebrate any number of fake occasions. Made in China. Uyghurs? Never heard of it.
The dilemma today is who can we believe?
People naturally gravitate towards the strong horse. That is how most of humanity has lived for tens of thousands of years. Our method is an aberration.
I applaud your optimism. But I think the numbers speak for themselves and the numbers right now show that "they" have an iron fucking grip on this shit.
Very soon it will be AI doing the work of keeping the public in line. Then there's no turning back.
You still believe the polls? They've got a an iron grip on DC, the universities, and the corporate media, but that's it.
They're going to try for an iron grip on the banking industry, and that's what everyone should be focused on, because that one will be near impossible to roll back.
Well I wasn't referring to polls. More like the percentage of people out there that are even paying attention to things like the twitter files, or assange, or the war machine.
I'm curious what you mean. The banking system seems to have an iron grip on the rest.
I sure hope you're right. I mean I feel it , but I get so discouraged at the same time
I have a similar sense. It's not that they just started lying about everything. They've been lying to us the whole time. Now it's gotten too hard to maintain.
I think you may be right. From my perspective, it appears that for the first time since WWII, the us is in real danger of losing its hegemony. There are other factors but I believe this is the biggest reason the deep state is unleashing their tools of surveillance, censorship and control in ways we haven't seen before in terms of visibility if not also breadth and force. They've always done this, but as theyre global power and dominance is threatened, the tighten their grip to such an extent that it's becoming harder and harder not to see the man behind the curtain, so to speak. I do think more people are waking up to this and are starting to really push back. The popularity of independent media and the waning influence of traditional media are a sign of this shift. The people clinging to facade and those trying to preserve the power structures of the 20th century are certainly the loudest right now but the dam is breaking. Perhaps I'm an optimist, but that's what it looks like to me
That is very hopeful. Do you think the hope lies with the younger people? In promoting my solution, https://endpoliticsnow.com/, I find that 80% of those who are supportive are under 40 and 80% of those who are cynical are over 60. Any suggestions?
At the risk of exposing my age---Burn it all the fuck down?
“...the worst part is, we often do not distinguish between thinking that is ours, and thinking that is someone else’s.”
That is one of the most disheartening things I’ve seen in the community I once felt a part of.
Our entire intellectual/cultural class have been turned en masse into the intellectual equivalent of the Manson Family by a simple yet ugly process of Skinner Box cultural conditioning.
First the device/rat trap is the delivery method: Smartphones, constant internet access, and social media have turned out to be the greatest tools of social conditioning and mass-opinion control and formation ever invented, they have created a digital panopticon of docile anxious conformists constantly monitoring each other for social miscues or deviations from orthodoxy, all happy to report each other to the authorities for social credit and virtual virtue points.
Next is the delicious hate pellet they ingest when rewarded by His Majesty, the Algorithm: the Maoist Maniachean moralism of Social Justice, which tricks its user into believing by vomiting out new jargon about "Oppression" and "marginalization" etc they become part of a moral priesthood, which allows them to denounce and destroy every opponent without tarnishing their virtual halos, because (as all the Good People know): nothing exists but Power and Silence is Violence.
It's hard for liberals with 20th-century brains still intact to accept and acknowledge what's happened: an entire generation and all the institutions it controls have been lost to an apocalyptic death cult that have the same morals and ruling strategy as Lady Macbeth.
They will not be coming to their senses anytime soon, if ever, so will have to be opposed and defeated if free thought, speech, and expression are to survive.
Very well-stated. I agree.
And "panopticon" is a great word. Perfect for what you describe.
thanks!
Panopticon is from Foucault. Very trendy in certain rarefied circles.
Also in prison design.
That's where Foucault got the word.
One of your best posts Clever Pseudonym.
Thanks!
At least Lady M came to harbour some serious second thoughts and regrets. Not so much the algorithms, and those who benefit from them, that run our lives.
"It's hard for liberals with 20th-century brains still intact to accept and acknowledge what's happened: an entire generation and all the institutions it controls have been lost to an apocalyptic death cult that have the same morals and ruling strategy as Lady Macbeth."
I disagree. Very few liberals are members of the Republican Party. And most liberals have the same morals and ruling strategy of Uriah Heep.
the irony that i am reading this on the internet is not lost on me.
Yes, and I yearn for “Taibbi fan clubs” or local live chapters of avid substack readers.
I’m a little too old for a fan club but meeting in person?
Now that’s a novel idea. Start the ball rolling
I think that was what they were trying to do that earned them Musk's enmity, That being said,I have been subscribing to some of the smaller substack writers who contribute here. a lot less noise in the comments and many familiar faces. I agree, we need to build a community of disparate voices who agre on core principals.
I believe part of the issue of why liberals seem perfectly fine with this censorship apparatus is because the Democratic Party has changed to encompass the “managerial class” as it adopted neoliberal economic policies over the past 35+ years.
Instead of the working class and poor that used to be the Democrat’s constituency, it’s socially liberal managers in tech companies, banks, and other corporations that make up many of its supporters. Having worked my whole adult life in large corporations, some of the things you learn to survive and excel is to “story tell”, “control the narrative”, and self-censor. If you don’t, you won’t make it far in the corporate world.
In many ways it’s not that different from the deference given to kings and princes that Matt mentions; if you apply the same logic to dealing with directors, VPs, etc., you start to understand that self-censorship is key to avoiding scrutiny and exuding power. You also can’t rely on the scientific method or evidence; at the end of the day, if the boss says it’s not true, it’s only detrimental to your career if you disagree.
As corporations have merged and gotten bigger, and thus more people work in large corporations, I believe more people are trained in surviving in self-censoring situations, and thus tolerant of them. And this would explain why corporate leaders and Democratic politicians are tolerant of it - it’s a survival instinct they learned in an ever more corporatized society where we’re not citizens, we’re human capital.
Our school system is based on putting young people in square boxes in order to train them for a life of working in square boxes and ending life in a box.
Interesting, and makes sense.
This is good analysis Matt.
A few more issues which tend to be forgotten in the miasma of US corporate/military propaganda involve a reliance upon a form paternalism - a veneer of credibility whereby Doctors are sold cigarettes (1940s) and minimize their harm until it's too late (1970's). Chemical companies dump remnants upon unsuspecting populations until illness, and long term damage take root downstream. Pharma bros, drug companies, and cartels corner the market on all kinds of substances that foster addiction, permanent market share and daily mis-dosage of death. By the time we figure it out, the death pattern and the death of trust waft over all us all.
When we consider the Patriot Act, how our data is being used against us, and what has happened to voices who dissent in this culture, we see that the normal is abnormal or as Dr West says - propaganda helping us adjust to the new normal. We haven't reached death yet on the media front, even with Russiagate, Ukraine/Syria intelligence proxy wars and CoVid - but the patient is terminal. The last gasps from corpse of American media are being belched out - careerism, concision, repetition, and self-censorship.
Somehow, many of us Americans sense that this empire is over, has been over for a decade, but the corporate zombie-foreign policy-insider keeps pumping up dead like its the Federal Reserve after the Financial Crisis. The wonks are back-dating the documents, the press are ignoring the crimes and the people are splintered into atomized units that are to be ignored at the same rates to how their SES grows.
These networks (relations) inside the Empire have been corroded for the last 75 years - we just did not know how much. The first rule of any type of reader or citizen awareness is to know who to trust. The fact that this is so difficult now speaks to how far gone we are as a cultural and a hegemon. Trust should be incremental and reciprocal binding the parties together in self-interest and allowing for cessation. This is the exact opposite of the US media - being told what to think, trying to create a permanent revenue generating stickiness that causes all of the parties to die, to become ill, or dependent.
The Patriot Act...I remember GWB standing at ground zero telling us we “would never let the terrorists win” They did win..the second that act passed. We’ve worshipped “safetyism” for way too long. What a way to live
What is this 'trust' of which you speak?
There is no better concept than that of 'anti-racism' to sum up the sentiment in this article.
When you have to prove you are not something, there is the assumption of guilt. Before there was an implicit acknowledgment that we live in a world where there were laws against discrimination and this protected people.
Now we live in a world where we have to prove our thoughts are not racist and the assumption is we are guilty unless we prove otherwise.
That is how you create a Stasi-style climate of fear. Where anyone, anywhere can be accused of wrongthink. And this is how we learn that the safest position is to agree with the crowd lest you be the next one lynched.
Mr. Taibbi,, kudos on a very American speech, in the very best sense. You do well to quite Learned Hand. Well done, and thank you for all you do for us.
I came across a simple solution several years ago. I turn my phone off and leave it off for extended periods - numerous hours at a time. Then I'll turn it on for a moment, see to who's called/messaged and turn it right back off. Sometimes my phone is only on an hour total a day. By way of example, I'll turn the phone on and then leave it in my car when I go into restaurants. Check my calls or messages when I return to the car and then promptly turn it off. Why would I leave it on to bother me?
The first thing I noticed was that I started long form reading again. Great novels, classic books and hand held magazines. Then the 1990's reappeared in my life and my three automobiles (around town beater, nice family car, and van life van ) each started harbouring separate libraries again including maps. We only use Google maps for finding our way around cities now. Anywhere else and it's a map atlas. I reintroduced myself to vinyl records in the house and cds in the car.
Most importantly my mind became peaceful again. No more blue check dopamine shots or opinions from "friends" on Facebook who really weren't. Best of all with my phone turned off I've become semi-invisible again. I can travel without being tracked. There's more but you get the gist... As Richie Havens sang at Woodstock, 🎶Freedom, freedom...🎶
I had a conversation about the Missouri vs. Biden case the other day with friends (or at least people I know).
Half of them think that the Twitter Files is bullshit, and if you even say "Twitter Files" in any tone other than disgust, then anything you say afterwards is automatically invalidated.
The other half think that the government has only ever tried to censor vaccine misinformation. In other words, the only censorship that has occurred has been in the name of public health, and they wholeheartedly agree with it.
Personally, I would appreciate some kind of list of all the different sorts of things the government has tried to censor. Something I can point to during these sorts of discussions. I know it's a lot more than vaccine stuff, but everybody looks at me like a crazy person when I start saying "uhhhhhh... Hunter Biden laptop... uhhhhhhhhhhh"
Reporting of censorship is censored.
At CBC, where many of my comments are "deactivated", they explicitly state that any comment on "moderation" will be deactivated. "Content deactivated".
Sometimes my account is put in "Pre-moderation", which means that literally every comment must be approved before appearing on their website.
Congratulations to your employment with the Ministry of Truth. We feel it will be a long and productive partnership. Together we protect America from untruth. There however are a few things you must know. The first is,
There is no Ministry of Truth.
Should you be asked if there is a Ministry of Truth, possible responses are "Stooge of Putin!", "Take off your tinfoil hat," or taking a drag on your cigarette then exhale while staring into the distance over the head of your interlocutor.
Long before the pandemic I got flagged from Facebook for posting a comment on a BBC FB comment thread that contained a link to Chomsky's view on Russiagate. I'd have to go back into my data to pull up the exact message and consequence but it was clear then that some algorithms were monitoring "wrong thoughts" and censoring certain websites. Ironically, I was able to post about, and complain about the experience on FB, which only shows the insidiousness and sophistication of western propaganda compared to the blunt censorship of other countries. Here, the authorities can say:
"What do you mean we are censoring free speech? We are simply protecting you from misinformation, and trust us, we know it when we see it. And look - you are free to talk about how you think we are encroaching on your freedom even though we are not...now...as you were, citizen!"
Sadly, a large swath of society continues to play along with this doublespeak.
"Well, DUUUUH!! If I've never even *heard* of it, how can it be something that is known to be censored?! The NYT and WaPo -- which I read *every day*, TYVM -- would be *all over it.* You know, like DeSantis and the library books in Florida? [under breath:] Idiot."
I’m wont to leave the phone behind and take long drives in a car without a satellite receiver.
Reminds me a little of my youth spent wandering the country.
You youngsters should try it.
Me too Marie! And yes, youngsters should try it!
I hear Obama got a puppy!
Aww, everybody! Don't you like puppies?
That puppy narrative was one of, if not the first lie that Obama told.
In the election they claimed they would get "pound puppy".
But then the "pound puppy" became a purebred Portuguese water dog, something something "allergies" that their girls had.
Okay, sure.
I love puppies, but feel sad that it has to live with the Obamas. I want to save it!
Lol
Drone it.
I thought cats didn't like puppies.
I can't stand the things. But humans see a puppy and go "awwww!" like their brains had turned into tapioca.
My cats love puppies.
At some point we will have to face the reality that the heart is deceitfully wicked.. and there’s none who can know it... but that that heart is in deep need of transformation....That heart is in such deep need of becoming what it can not become completely on its own in order to be of any good to anyone including, and perhaps most importantly, to one’s self first and than to be good for another
remind the Obamas to beware dog trainers - there are some wonderful ones, truly, but the bad ones, ignorant ones, hard ones, celebrity- hunters , heavy-handed ones are dangerous to dogs. It is too easy to call ones self "a dog trainer".
He’s a smoothie
I love puppies