By Thomas Neuburger, who writes regularly at God’s Spies
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A Brave New World
The world is no longer the world; it’s a different place from what you recognize, the world of your youth or even a few years ago. Your eyes look out and see familiar things — grass and fields, buildings, rivers and streets. Your mind looks out and sees data. Sees what allows it to think, to draw conclusions, to evaluate, to know with confidence that the world you see reflects, at least in part, what the world has always been.
But what if only some of what you see reflects the actual world? What if the old things are there, but layered across them, like an organizing grid, is what the lords, the unremovable kings, want you to understand by what you see?
Some might call this a theft. Not Politico. Not the New York Times.
What if the organizing grid is no longer your own, but something created for you? Would you still think your thoughts were your own? Would you know if they weren’t?
A Fundamental Anxiety
I think Walter Kirn described our situation best in a recent (paid-only) “America This Week” podcast. Near the end, he and Matt Taibbi discuss a magnificent short story by Delmore Schwartz (performed by Lou Reed here), about how the present is hooked to the past, how fate is locked in. This leads them to discuss how our present moment is “fraught” — not by the election per se and its consequence, but by something larger, more world-historical.
This is Kirn (lightly edited; emphasis mine):
I think this moment is fraught. [We saw over the last few years] a machine that could make decision-making itself impossible in the ways we’re used to. The tools for controlling information, the willingness to use them, the power that they have, and the existential threat they pose to the notion that we can make informed decisions is, to me, the fundamental anxiety.
A social machine that makes decision impossible creates a fundamental anxiety, one we all feel. The world of our new connectedness contains tools of control, and elites are willing to use them. Bots infest social platforms, but we don’t know the extent. AI drives disinformation.
Hacked emails released by the group Anonymous indicated that Palantir and two other defense contractors pitched outside lawyers for the organization on a plan to snoop on the families of progressive activists, create fake identities to infiltrate left-leaning groups, scrape social media with bots, and plant false information with liberal groups to subsequently discredit them.
What can we believe?
Fifth Generation Warfare
What we call “the world,” the world of the mega-rich calls the “information battleground,” a place to wage war against information, knowledge itself, a war that’s fought in the mind. Please join Naked Capitalism as one of the guerrilla warriors opposing this campaign, by sharing this work and giving generously at the donation page.
I think there’s little doubt that the West — and in particular, the United States — is subject to fifth-generation war on the information battlefield. (For clues about the manipulative capabilities involved, start here and here. For the state’s willingness to deploy these capabilities, see here and here.)
Fifth-generation warfare (5GW) is warfare that is conducted primarily through non-kinetic military action, such as social engineering, misinformation, cyberattacks, along with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and fully autonomous systems. Fifth generation warfare has been described by Daniel Abbot as a war of “information and perception”.
From the NATO document titled “Information Warfare” we find this:
What is information warfare? … [C]ontrolling one’s own information space, protecting access to one’s own information, while acquiring and using the opponent’s information, destroying their information systems and disrupting the information flow.
Information war over the Internet … The Internet enhances and expands the possibilities of data acquisition, information defence and information disruption, and makes it easy to reach both the citizens of a given country and the international community.
Remember, this was written by NATO, a group that wages this kind of war, not one devoted to protecting people from it. Ironically, it advises victims of information war to escape the “bubble” by “diversifying the sources of information and acquiring information other than that suggested by algorithms regulating social media.”
Daniel Abbott, mentioned above as one of the gurus of 5G war theory, has writtenthat 5G war is “fought through manipulating perceptions and altering the context by which the world is perceived”; that in 5G war, “the losing side may never realize that it has been conquered”; and that 5G war is “the manipulation of the observational context in order to make the enemy do our will.”
The Colonized Mind
All this deserves an essay on its own. But to see the attempt to colonize the mind in real time, consider briefly the Israeli-Gaza war — which is in fact a slaughter, not a war at all (the first salvo in the 5G attempt to control your thoughts).
Israel depends on the American state and its connected ecosystems — its money and media infrastructures, its massive armaments industry — to keep the slaughter going. What are the ways our government keeps its citizens compliant as it feeds this killing?
To answer, consider: How is the genocide in Gaza reported in the mainstream press? First, by constantly calling it a “war against Hamas.” Second, by disappearing Israeli complicity in murder and death:
How do universities (a connected ecosystem) and the billionaires who control them deal with campus protests against the slaughter? Like this.
How does the mainstream press (the information arm and another connected ecosystem) report those protests? Like this.
CNN — In a new report from Columbia University’s antisemitism task force, a student described the situation on campus following the October 7 attacks in Israel.
“People that you sat in class with, you had drinks with, you had lunch and dinner with, the next day they say they hope your entire family dies,” the report read.
The testimony is just one example in a deluge collected as part of an overall report that incorporated testimonies of “hundreds” of Jewish and Israeli students. …
Is all this not “manipulating perceptions and altering the context by which the world is perceived” so that “the losing side may never realize that it has been conquered”? How many of our fellow citizens do not notice this takeover? Many? Most?
How to Resist
The only way to resist this colonization is, first, to recognize the combatants for who they are, then unthink the thoughts they’re promoting. The way to do that is escape the bubble (as NATO advises above) and find better sources of news.
Sources like Naked Capitalism. Please go right now to the Tip Jar to preserve this independent and intrepid space.
Yves Smith’s site was targeted by Google in 2024 for the provably false charges of advancing “violent extremism” and “hateful content.” Information war against the Internet.
Even earlier, in 2016, well before Trump’s election, the site was accused, with others, by the Washington Post of spreading “Russian propaganda” to “a U.S. audience.” The claims were false and immediately shot down, but note who was spreading them. Information war.
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Our moment, as Walter Kirn says, is fraught. We face a machine that wants to render decision-making impossible. The elite need for control goes back to the earliest states, but modern technologies have given it new reach, new force. Thanks to the Internet and social media, billions are joined, in ways they’ve never been, to a world much more easily molded.
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