The highest heads of Facebook, the world’s largest virtual social network short of the Collective Unconscious, have once again refused to attend a privacy and ethics committee meeting by the Canadian House of Commons, which was hosting a collection of international Ministers of Parliament, many in attendance after these same Facebook heads had previously refused summons to appear before the United Kingdom’s own Parliament, in regards to the corporation’s role in the ongoing Brexit fiasco. Even away from keyboards, Zuckerberg and company would prefer to cowardly misconduct themselves by way of proxy.
One wealthy venture capitalist who was sitting in on the political meeting, presumably for no better reason than that he was indeed a wealthy venture capitalist, famously dared those gathered to call the bluff of Facebook’s arrogance and to sever through legislated regulations its abilities to further weaponize datum for profit. Even were it not so bluntly obvious that the man merely represented business interests quite eager for themselves to be granted reins over the controls currently enjoyed by Facebook board-members, his threat was laughable, laughable as Facebook’s millions of users would prefer to persist with their fantasies. The people would take up arms to prolong their indulgences, every sober person is aware of this and it is proven by the fact that Facebook’s plug wasn’t yanked years ago already.
Fantasy along the lines of elected governance still somehow retaining a magical authority of dependable checks and balances with which to hold greed to accountability, and with all of this being some sort of overly dramatic misunderstanding. But with just a wee more democratic elbow grease the ship’s course might be righted and everyone can go back to irresponsibly living and dying by artificial cultures while cowering like their role models behind manufactured avatars. All of which denies that, although nature abhors a vacuum, unnatural power is incapable of relinquishing itself. Greed possessing no limits, no self-awareness, is precisely what spawned these issues. I think it is hardly acerbic to acknowledge how capitalistic interests have transcended governments in absolute power, and that these committees are just more of the bread and circus game, with all players fully aware of the fact their civilization co-dependently rests on indulging private fantasy, even while indulging private fantasy is the root cause of all that ails the world.
I like to think that I am a good person, but I would never dream of insisting that others play along. Nobody self-identifies as villainous, certainly not you or anybody you love. I won’t demand that the people I have met and that the people I shall never meet, the world over, all maintain my self-perceptions. Because that is fascism. How we see ourselves, how we choose to define ourselves, is nobody’s fucking business, let alone are they guidelines mandating for all others to abide by. If dogma of any stripe has resources, it cannot be shared when everyone has their own already, self-formulated or otherwise. The denial of that is what powers online social networks, as well as empowering all varieties of greed incarnate no matter how big or small. Entertainment, indulging in fantasy whether of your own devising or the canon of another, is a shite replacement for virtues but it’s what the public demands. It’s no information super-highway, but a multi-lane reality tunnel that they are reprogrammed via constant updates to insist upon following their helpless labors in neglecting all things virtuous.
Reaffirming my long-held belief that editing is the only socially acceptable trade for sadomasochists, the Society of Editors is declaring that pulling the rug out from under the tech mogul feudalists of western society would somehow jeopardize the free press. As though the free press has only ever existed because of the efforts of these feudal lords. Do they seriously believe that the unwashed masses would largely prove incapable of self-publishing their own ideas? Or is it more likely that these editors would just rather continue favoring the electronic Halloween of the online world to the lonely existences of a real life where words have actual meaning, where actions have consequences? Are they not publicly admitting that their imaginations are confined to the containment spell that is the internet? It’s really a matter of textbook Stockholm syndrome, all the more with no voices online describing it in those terms.
I have yet to read anyone contrasting the Zuckerberg story with this, but the New York Times pushed a brown-nosed piece bending over backwards rationalizing Hope Hicks for her “existential crisis” in whether or not to comply with a federal subpoena. Being as shallow as any pinup, reluctance on her part comes from the selfish desire to place her own potential business opportunities, or those of whichever cults of personality she feels are worthy of her esteem, first and foremost before the same laws that all of her fellow citizens are expected with purported impartiality to pay heed to. As with Facebook’s rat-kings, she is granting the indulgence of private fantasy all the weight of reality, at the detriment of actual reality. On a grander scale, we can see this as symptomatic for how government and for-profit pathologies will never, ever contradict at the bottom line. Government in this day and age is nothing more than a platform to advance indulgence in private fantasy, specifically through enabling the most selfish to lay claim to the Earth, the stars and the sky. Not by any means necessary, but with all means taken as necessary.
The general public, giddily drowning itself in self-serving entertainment like little kids sent to play in the backyard while the grownups talk, are too senseless to find irony in how the Pentagon’s ever-expansive purse-strings are looking to further digitize authoritarianism for the profit of its favored white hats and war profiteers alike, while mainstream media throws stones at the Chinese for pursuing the same in their own rightful defense against what is the largest militaristic threat in the history of the world wielded by the most selfish in the history of the world. In keeping with my “nuke spooks vs virtual spooks” theory from ages ago, this national-level, for-profit weaponizing of datum is a pissing match perpetrated by the most selfish to see just how much of the otherwise preoccupied masses get drowned before more than plugs get pulled. The game is fixed however, as the winners are the same regardless of who exactly succeeds in pissing onward, pissing upwards.
This military muscle, reared to think that its shit doesn’t stink, is enlivened to outright lie to the public about the actualities of painfully obvious scenarios, usually involving its own negligence. Like brats. The Department of Defense is psychotic enough all on its own, that it will shop for the cheapest deals to equip its own troops, and then promptly arrest the people who made those deals possible. Presumably taking the monies back while keeping the malfunctioning generic versions in circulation among the nation’s more gullible. AIDS has destroyed far fewer communities around the globe than have Uncle Sam’s government-issued Joes, but who talks about how Uncle Sam would never survive a Nuremberg trial he couldn’t intimidate his way out of, demanding as he is prone to do that everyone in the world abide by his self-perceptions and his self-perceptions alone, or else. If Uncle Sam wants to self-identify as a god-king then how dare you give a pause and not respect his wishes, you godless animal bigot you. The logic applied by fascists everywhere doesn’t change its value simply because those barking the heartfelt orders refuse to address how self-possessed they themselves truly are. Bad-guys without exception view themselves as either the victims or the heroes, and the communication streams of social media and virtual realities were designed to cater to masks, seamlessly all the way back to their occidental originations in oxymoronic military intelligence.
The army has the technology to map out the insides of locked buildings. And evidently the self-perception that it has any earthly right to do so. We have every reason to believe it gets great use of it, even while its parent tech, Google Maps, can now be proven to increase risks of such life-threatening neurological maladies as Alzheimer’s. And this, without getting into the increasingly common 5G networks literally battle-tested on foreign fields of combat to microwave the insides of enemy combatants from afar. What gets defended? Maybe, it or similar radar weapons are what’s creating the deaths of so many dolphins in Delaware. Maybe what the dolphins are undergoing is a modern Masada, in protest of what we are told are the public’s own best interests, as the silent majority of humanity could not care less about much of anything not championed by masturbatory sexual dominance.
In a completely separate issue over the legality of what Facebook calls status quo, its attorneys spiritually aligned with both Google and the government of the USA, and announced that by being of the public, the public has neither rights or entitlement to guarantees of privacy. Thus freeing the corporation to cultivate, claim and sell the livelihoods and liberties from all that it does not own. In this case, they had been selling to third parties full control over what users see and experience on their personal feeds and walls and private messaging, for the purposes of advancing political partisanship representing a distinctly supremacist and profit-driven ideology. As long as the public has Game of Thrones to talk about then they would appear to be fine with possessing nothing but a variety of costuming with which to clothe their electronic voodoo dolls. Meanwhile, Facebook is outright shutting down legitimate populist groups, for no better reasons but that leftism makes the bankers writing laws look less than delightful. Financiers of government incidentally winning again is the most convenient coincidence of misfortune.
Abolitionism is about cutting the leash, breaking the chains and biting through the goddamn noose even if it means losing two-thirds of your teeth.
With that in mind, I think the Fahrenheit 451 fan who managed to ruin a White House lawn for a day bravely offered up to the world a brilliant game theory for the misplaced souls unable to guillotine those transatlantic telecommunications cables, encircling the Earth like Jörmungandr, the Midgard serpent chomping his bit in keeping with the end.