It is pointless to attempt to sway the masses when they have already given away control over themselves, their lives and their deaths.
Wikileaks is easy to vilify because the public are as likely to browse its docs and so inform themselves as they are to personally look into stories reported by their preferred news outlets. Autodidactism is fundamental now. Considerably nothing in life should ever be taken for granted, but instead, everything is. The public, assured that all of this is normal and to trust authoritative voices when neither corporate media or governmental stats exist to convey self-evident truths. This society openly encourages unflattering truths to be regarded as false, when the function of truth is not to placate anyone or anything. In a culture where everything is proxies and avatars, duplicitous by default, why on Earth take anything at face value?
Memes whether originating from people trying to be cute or trying to be dicks are partly to blame. Lies more appealing than truth, preferring the spoonful of sugar to the medicine it’s to help down into our gullets. But I also see correlation in what’s discussed here. A shaming of intelligence, of firsthand knowledge and experience and common sense. If it requires millions and billions to run in domestic elections then this could not be more undemocratic, and those spending such exorbitant amounts on campaigning while people are hungry and starving to death in this country or anywhere else are fucking pricks. But such examples of minutiae consequence go unvoiced by respectable platforms.
What is the likelihood that the bigger tech threats might in fact be traced back to white hats? I know that the Vault 7 release from Wikileaks showed that the CIA has had the means to falsify digital attrition for years, basically the ability to frame anyone for anything, but what are the prospects that the scarier viruses, ransomware and worms may have been very purposefully created as cyber-weapons by governments of first world nations whose makers simply lost control of them? Specifically, I wondered if the CIA and the Pentagon each paid Amazon those astronomical figures for the special cloud storage due to advance knowledge of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities affecting hardware. Or if origins for the WannaCry ransomware could be traced back to the comparable ransomware afflicting the city-wide surveillance systems of police in DC in the weeks leading up to the last Presidential inauguration. I wonder at all of this, as the first virus to result in actual human fatalities was the destructive STUXNET, created in cooperation between American and Israeli cyber-defense initiatives. And western nations “lose” physical weapons all the damn time. Once upon a time sci-fi was metaphor for any number of things, but those voices warning of self-aware AI seem more familiar with comic books than philosophy or reality. Malicious programming by egocentric goons is far more likely.
Basic human rights to life, liberty and pursuits of happiness for Americans are threatened most by their own most egocentric citizens, always. I’ve written thousands of words explaining how the one and only partisan divide in DC is over who gets to enjoy the bigger payday. This did not happen just yesterday or with this administration or in my lifetime. The largest and costliest military in world history isn’t being pushed about by anything but profiteers wanting bigger and bigger returns. The abject refusal for separation of Industry and State is guarantee that Democracy is absolutely for sale to whichever highest bidder investing in the parties. Politicians are paid to deregulate, paid to enable tax loopholes and paid to fight any hint of capping profit margins which inflate costs of living for everybody else. Insuring all monies and resources float only to the flaky upper crust of the worst con-artists humanity has ever experienced.
It should be common sense how there is no such thing as a populist billionaire, a leftist billionaire or an apolitical billionaire. But they can afford marketing and spin-doctoring for promotion to the contrary. Commercial media praises them as philanthropists for exchanging .1% of their holdings to charity for tax write-offs and publicity, without addressing how their hoarding directly causes the problems requiring assistance. Without backing none can afford a national platform, yet funding politicians that guarantee the biggest returns by deregulation or government contracts or other emoluments is far cheaper for them than taxes they unethically/immorally withhold from economies, sabotaging economies. Underpaying workers through legal tomfoolery and sleight of hand saves them some costs, but endlessly inflating price-gouging and over-charging manifestly robs the masses. They are pillagers, bribing self-proclaimed authoritarians to turn an eye as blind as those distracted by pop culture drivel.
If money did grow on trees we would plant enough to save us all along with the Earth, but the seed was probably copyrighted by GMOs aways back. Society left squeezing blood from turnips, sold on advertising that it’s sustainable exceptionalism as brand disloyalists get cancelled. Non-disclosure agreements and non-compete contracts are projections of ownership over the employee even after employment is terminated. Woe be unto anyone realizing the workers are the means of production though. Unemployment stats are low simply because more claims are being denied than ever before. All of the welfare programs are meeting quiet dissolution to cover taxes avoided by the investors and advertisers of commercial news media. Here in the gutters we know all too damn well that the last recession never fucking ended. This “late-stage Capitalism” is a prolonged bailout in slow-motion, taking money away from tax-payers to recompensate the largest thieves in world history for the monies which they themselves proactively make vanish from the economy. These arguments favoring free money are grossly ignorant. Nothing in this society exists to prevent costs of living from being endlessly inflated above and beyond whatever free monies allotted might cover. Those refusing to cap profits honestly seem to believe money grows on trees.
Paid journalists are the original brand ambassadors. The healthcare, pharmaceutical and insurance industries keep the populace feeble-minded and indebted. The Department of Defense creates wars to sell arms just as the Intelligence Community creates scapegoats for private business interests. Law enforcement manifests the drug and sex trafficking trades to divide the public while reprimanding their victims on behalf of further enriching the property-owning tax evaders claiming ownership of our lives and our livelihoods. This for-profit incarceration system eager for free or underpaid labor and grants for headcounts is sadistic. Any revelation that the USA military exists in 4/5 of all nations on Earth, pillaging and extorting the world barren, is advertised as peace-keeping and Americans accept the marketing for fear of the alternative, that they choose their own adventures and elect their own fates.
Everything is so painfully conceivable when human motivation is 99% self-interest. Shock in outcomes generally arrives from underestimating the greed and gluttony of ego, or in overestimating the esteem which others may regard for our own bias, fetishes and whims. I earned a side-living for ten years doing reviews and interviews for diverse media. Edward Bernays became a wealthy man attaching psychology to advertising, with law enforcement later incorporating his concepts of demographics into profiling. Political campaigns everywhere rely on masking generalizations as better angels, with respective followers refusing to see similarities among competing brands, arguing that what’s weakness or fallacy in others is strength for their own or versa vice. We are bred to favor a brand loyalty, religious fundamentalism or political partisanship as superior, willfully hiding what makes us individual or different under those banners because this culture shuns legit independence or individualism. All marketing is an expression of that, a conveying of disproportion as stability. I sincerely believe we misconstrue such loyalties as something other than co-dependence, when that dependence is precisely what makes so many of us utterly predictable. Demand manufactured for pre-ordained supplies, physically, psychologically and spiritually. The blatancy of ironies in fantasy actively chosen over freedom. Laws are as meaningless as wishes and prayers, checks and balances existing only to perpetuate unwarranted divisions and the most comforting of lies regarded as truth.
But anal is pretty cool.
Creative industries lean by design towards this modern definition of inclusivity, not for any sense of morality or egalitarianism but because the endgame for all industries is profit, and should any demographic be dissuaded then those potential sales are lost. It’s that simple. Nobody wants to see how disingenuous it truly is, unless seeing the vehemence in how it appeals to others. This conflict is due to actual equality being un-American. With no real culture of our own beyond products, artificial variants fill voids leading subcultures to believe in superiority; only “my” party is true, only “my” faith is true and only “my” brand deserves loyalty even at cost to all others. I think all of these divides are clearly bupkiss though, banners to cower behind while mistaken for self-identity, and I think all consumers are suckers getting pockets picked by ego-centrists needing divisions among us to keep us from seeing what this world would otherwise be without them.