In the context of this week’s annual gathering of the aspirational global, central-planner technocrats at Davos, in an apparent PR rebrand, Klaus Schwab has ditched his quintessential comic book supervillain vibe in favor of a new human skinsuit: the kindly grandfather preoccupied with the fate of his posterity.
Set against a backdrop of sad piano music and a bunch of New Age gibberish about Schwab’s newfound self-professed humanitarianism, here’s the failed global totalitarian:
“We are missing in our society two fundamental pillars: its truth and its trust. And without restoring those pillars, we will not be able to solve the big global issues we face at this moment. It’s the keyword of dialogue, of listening each to another and in such a way to see the different aspects and dimensions of a problem. And that’s fundamental… to create solutions…
I think it’s the capability, in view of the fast and disruptive technological change, to remain human beings. As human beings, we have to exercise empathy. We have to listen each to another. And, I think, we have to analyze issues not just with our brains, but also with our heart and with an understanding that ultimately we have to serve not ourselves, but society.”
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Which brings us to the engine of that popular distrust in institutions that so vexes sweet Grandpa Klaus: the internet.
Despite Al Gore’s self-aggrandizing and delusional claim to the contrary, the internet was not, in fact, the spontaneous, organic product of one mediocre politician’s visionary leadership.
Rather, the highest (and most secretive) levels of American government, over multiple decades, engineered and constructed the infrastructure for what would become colloquially known as the “internet” today.
Via Internet Society (emphasis added):
“In 1973, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated a research program to investigate techniques and technologies for interlinking packet networks of various kinds. The objective was to develop communication protocols which would allow networked computers to communicate transparently across multiple, linked packet networks. This was called the Internetting project and the system of networks which emerged from the research was known as the “Internet.” The system of protocols which was developed over the course of this research effort became known as the TCP/IP Protocol Suite, after the two initial protocols developed: Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP).
In 1986, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) initiated the development of the NSFNET which, today, provides a major backbone communication service for the Internet. With its 45 megabit per second facilities, the NSFNET carries on the order of 12 billion packets per month between the networks it links. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the U.S. Department of Energy contributed additional backbone facilities in the form of the NSINET and ESNET respectively…
A great deal of support for the Internet community has come from the U.S. Federal Government, since the Internet was originally part of a federally-funded research program and, subsequently, has become a major part of the U.S. research infrastructure.”
All of which is to say: without the all-hands-on-deck efforts by the federal government, the internet as we know it would not have come about, at least not at the disruptive rate at which it developed.
Related: Chinese Communist Party Literally Names Its Domestic Surveillance Program ‘Skynet’
One of the many consequences of the internet becoming ubiquitous has been the increasing displacement of traditional media sources.
Even just fifty years ago — a tiny blip in the arch of human evolution — the media landscape was dominated by three television networks and a few dozen major newspapers.
They set the national consensus.
They determined the mass perception of reality.
For all intents and purposes, they collectively were the mouth of God.
The trusting public trusted them reflexively; the rabble had no obvious reason not to, because they had no convenient access to alternative viewpoints that weren’t confined to obscure texts hidden in libraries.
Capturing and perverting institutional media via covert intelligence programs like Operation Mockingbird, due to the relatively few number of outlets that really mattered in terms of manufacturing consensus, was entirely feasible in the good old days.
Related: Elite Media Propagandist Cries at Davos: ‘We Owned the News’
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Prior to 1963, JFK hadn’t yet had his head blown off on camera with a magic bullet; the military-industrial complex (then a little-noted reference to what might seem like a throwaway line in an outgoing president’s speech) hadn’t yet initiated endless foreign quagmires based on lies; 9/11 and all of the anomalies later exposed by independent journalists (on the internet) hadn’t yet happened.
To find alternative sources of esoteric information, one had to actively look for them, often painstakingly.
In summary, public perception, and therefore social control, was relatively easy to shape and maintain — and it largely came down to controlling information flow through mass media.
Given the extraordinary lengths these entities were and are willing to go to in order to manipulate public perception, the natural question, which I’ve spent a lot of time pondering, is: why did they ever let the genie out of the bottle in the first place?
(One could make the argument that the corporate state is not interested in manufacturing preferred narratives and suppressing dissident views, and that to claim they do is “conspiracy theory.” However, the last ten years of government suppression of dissident views and narrative manufacturing would contradict that claim. My social media accounts and so many others’, nuked during the COVID offensive, are casualties of that very real censorship regime.)
Most notably in recent years, the mass COVID gaslighting campaign fell apart upon scrutiny as rascally independent media honey-badgers who, with a world of information at their fingertips, picked the narrative apart like vultures.
Ditto with the official 9/11 story used to sell multiple wars, the Russiagate hoax to impeach the legitimacy of a legitimately elected president, Hunter Biden’s crack laptop being “Russian disinformation,” etc.
These were all carefully crafted narratives that likely easily could have been shoveled down America’s collective throat in the absence of the internet and the independent media that it incubated.
Related: Senator Demands 9/11 Investigation Into ‘Controlled Demolition’ of Building 7
So, again, the question arises: Was the loss of control over the narrative not a second-order effect the aspiring technocrats could have easily foreseen?
It must have been.
Which brings us back to the ultimate question, the answer to which I’m not sure I have: why?
Why did the government facilitate the construction of the mechanisms that would ultimately undermine its own legitimacy by exposing its own duplicity and often outright criminality?
Possible reasons:
· Constructing and distributing the infrastructure for social control grid (the Internet of everything) is more important than allowing a few dissident narratives to take root in pockets of the population.
· The benefits of a competitive advantage over adversaries that would also develop and weaponize internet-based technologies outweigh the risks of increased information distribution
· They simply believe that their social control machinations can outpace the groundswell of popular resistance. By the time, if and when, enough people are informed and motivated enough to actually threaten the nascent technocracy, the control grid will have already been erected.
Once total or near-total control over resource allocation, the enforcement mechanisms of the security state, etc. is achieved, then, instead of mostly not mattering, how the rabble feels about the governing authorities will no longer matter at all; they will simply have been beaten into submission like the proles in 1984. The prison will already be fully constructed, the prisoners will have entered their cells willingly without a single bullet being fired, and the architects of their imprisonment will be untouchable.
Benjamin Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile (now available in paperback), is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
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Or perhaps they aren't the omniscient geniuses people assume them to be, and they didn't really comprehend that it would evolve to the threat to the propaganda system that it became? Prior to the Mosaic browser and html spawning the WWW, and suddenly made accessible to the masses via AOL and dial-up BBS's patching into it, it was still rather arcane and inaccessible to the majority of the public. When I first got on (~1986-1987), via the University computer lab, it was just terminal access, things like email, Usenet newsgroups, FTP, telnet, and light search capabilities through utilities like Archie and Veronica. Even before DNS, there was the "lists of lists" of interesting sites/services, mostly academic and research, that one could browse through.
More than 16 years ago - lifetimes in internet time and a decade before overnight automated updates of all your connected surveillance devices- the BBC ran this Adam Curtis piece about non linear media warfare, mentioning Vladislav Surkov's approaches in Russia.
https://youtu.be/KOY4Ka-GBus?si=iWwJnlLOyDT-fXt8
You could make a strong argument that the brief period of wide open western world internet - the early websites, video sharing etc - was similar to Russia's Glasnost period before as you say in your piece all the surveillance apparatus was built out.