Bcc: FYI
rkm website: http://cyberjournal.org
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Greetings,
I guess that’s some kind of record, a whole month with no cyberjournal postings. I miss the connection with you folks, but I’m not sure what to write about. I looked over the past few postings to get some kind of orientation.
I see that it was the beginning of the year, last January, that I announced I was going to drop out of writing and jump into local activism. I did that, and for a while it seemed like I was getting somewhere with it. I even persisted after the heart attack. But a few weeks ago I dropped it, told our little Tuesday circle that I didn’t want to continue. It just wasn’t getting anywhere, as regards the kinds of outcomes I think are necessary. And I have too much respect for the people involved to be wasting their time.
I’ve said several times, in recent postings, that I wasn’t going to be writing about negative things. But of course I kept doing it anyway, each time promising to be the last. The fact is I can’t predict what I’ll want to write about. It depends on what happens, in the world and in my life. And both of those places are in quite a bit of flux these days.
There are some very good things coming up in my life. From August 25th to October 1st I’ll be on an extended holiday. First comes a motorhome tour in France, with one of my Wexford friends who owns a motorhome. We have a mutual friend in Macon that we’ll be visiting. Then I fly from Lyon to Dublin to meet my brother and sister, who are coming over for a two-week tour of Ireland. We’ll be heading west and north, the parts of Ireland none of us have been to yet, staying in B&Bs. I’ll be taking a laptop along, just in case, but I doubt if I’ll be spending any time online. We’ll see.
New Dawn invited me to update my article, ‘Prognosis 2012’, for their next issue. I did so and I’m happy with the result, a much tighter presentation. But it took me most of a month to do the rewrite. I find that very discouraging, such low productivity. I hate having low energy and not being productive. Part of me wants to say, “You’ve done enough in your life; now you can just enjoy”. But the rest of me isn’t convinced. Perhaps the long holiday will shift me on this one. Meanwhile there’s a conflict between desire-to-do and lack-of-energy.
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Now for the ‘subject’: co-option. It’s the same principle as aikido. Instead of opposing the opponent’s energy, you first go with the flow of that energy, and then redirect it where you want it to go. Like when we all wanted ‘real hope’, so they sold us Obama Of The Golden Tongue, and he’s been leading progressive energy on a merry chase down the rabbit hole ever since. That’s what the Democratic Party is all about: co-opting progressive movements. Just as the Republican Party co-opts conservative movements.
The political parties operate mostly in the world of the mass media. There’s a new kind of co-option going on these days in the world of the Internet. It’s aimed at folks who think the whole system needs to be changed, folks who are looking for transformation, like some of the folks on this list. Just as Obama offered false hope to those who still believe in the political system, this new kind of Internet co-option offers false hope to those who have given up on the political system.
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The first example I noticed, of this kind of co-option, was the Zeitgeist Movement. We had a posting on that last November:
The Zeitgeist Movement & the NWO
The Zeitgeist vision for the future is a technocracy, where everything is planned and engineered by scientists and experts. There’s no concept of politics or participation in this vision. The scientists build us a hi-tech hive, and we then carry out our assigned worker-bee roles — roles which are an integral part of the hive design. We become components of the machine. There’s no money in this vision, so there can be no independent economic activity. In the videos, they almost make this dystopia sound attractive. That’s because it’s well-crafted propaganda. In fact, this technocratic, micro-managed future is exactly what the New World Order is about, and it’s slavery pure and simple. Technocrats are hired; those who do the hiring decide what ‘science says’.
The main reason people buy into this vision, in my opinion, is because they first watched the introductory Zeitgeist material, which does a fantastic job of exposing all the evils and conspiracies and lies of our current system. When I myself first watched those, I thought, “Wow, these guys really know what’s going on, and they make a lot of sense.” So I figured, “They’re on my side”, “They’re good guys”. It put me in a mood — initially — to view favorably whatever proposals they might come up with. And it seems this approach catches quite a few: over half a million members have signed up worldwide for the Zeitgeist Movement, nearly 100,000 in the USA.
A hundred thousand isn’t a large number, in relation to the general US population. The number becomes more significant, however, when you realize that all of those people probably bought into the early Zeitgeist material. That means they all believe Jesus is a myth, JFK was killed by a conspiracy, 9/11 was an inside job, electoral democracy is a scam, and the bankers run the world. How many such people are there in America? A hundred thousand may be a significant fraction.
That many people, of that kind, have found hope in Zeitgeist. Their ‘energy for change’ has been captured and channeled. They find hope partly because they believe in the message of the movement, and partly because they know that the message is very well presented (high production values) — therefore, they think, it has hope of capturing enough followers to ‘make a difference’. And when you look at the movement’s website, you see they’ve gotten all kinds of awards around the world for their videos. Motivated by the evils of the current system, the Zeitgeist followers are eager to embrace the evils of the next. Sheep being led willingly from one enclosure to another.
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Zeitgeist came on the scene incrementally, gradually expanding its message and refining its production values. It has been a pioneering project, researching how to capture minds on the Internet, how to co-opt the Internet. The first problem they needed to solve was, “How do you go viral with your message?” The second problem was, “How do you channel activist attention on an ongoing basis?” Co-opting the Internet is a quite different business than co-opting the mass media, where you can simply buy media outlets and dictate what they say.
As regards going viral, they learned that you’ve got to really understand your intended audience. You’ve got to know how they think, what they fear, and what their secret wishes are. You want them to invest faith in you, based on what you say and how you say it. Only then will people tell all their contacts and networks about you, and that’s what going viral is all about. The early Zeitgeist films, in their final versions, could be used to teach an advanced class in “How to go viral”.
As regards channeling ongoing activist attention, they learned that you’ve got to give people what looks like a promising movement. There has to be a way for you to join, and ways for you to contribute energy. There needs to be a well-designed website, reflecting effective movement organization. Production values are all-important; they inspire confidence. The website must make it look like “Lots is going on”, “Lots of people are involved”, “You are part of something important”. Again, the Zeitgeist Research Project provides material for an advanced class.
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Now that the lessons have been learned, and the technology refined, new co-option projects can be launched very quickly, immediately ready to take flight, equipped from birth with viral production-value wings. One of the latest projects is really a mind blower. It calls itself ‘ANONYMOUS‘. It seems to be already viral, and here are some URLs that lead to lots and lots of very-expensively-produced videos:
And of course, there’s the all important, “HOW TO JOIN ANONYMOUS – A BEGINNER’S GUIDE“:
The narrative in the videos is spoken, quite obviously, by computer. This gives the impression that the author of the video is successfully hiding his or her identity. We are to believe that everyone contributing to Anonymous is a super-hacker, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound, able to bring down credit-card websites on a whim, and able, for the most part, to avoid detection by the authorities. And mysteriously — even though this is supposed to be an anarchist, spontaneous, non-organization — all the videos seem to have come out of the same studio, produced by the same team, conveying a single, recognizable ‘brand’, with the V-for-Vendetta mask as a logo.
As with Zeitgeist, there is the analysis part, and the action part. The analysis part talks about the New World Order, is rather similar to the Zeitgeist analysis, and broadens out to include more views from the right-wing side of the fence. They claim to be ‘non-ideological’. The action part can be classed as terrorism, with a specialty in cyber-terrorism. They’re threatening to ‘bring the system down’, to ‘strike at will’, and to ‘get by with it’ by remaining anonymous. Here’s a video where they brag about successful attacks:
One has to be incredibly naive to think you could pose a real threat to the system, using the Internet, and get by with it. (But then not everyone knows about Project Echelon and its successors.) Anyone that naive probably fantasizes they could get by with it too, and would be a candidate to follow the beginner’s guide about joining. And if someone takes steps to join an avowedly terrorist organization, isn’t that prima facia evidence of supporting terrorism, and grounds for being locked up without trial? …
Police arrest Anonymous suspects in UK, US and Netherlands over PayPal cyber attack
These arrests have taken place, and yet Anonymous remains in place on the Internet, all over YouTube space, loudly proclaiming there is more to come. What, my friends, is wrong with this picture? If they were really afraid of Anonymous, do you think they’d leave all those videos online? Do you think they lack the power to take them down? Let’s cut to the chase…
Anonymous is the Al Qaeda of cyber terrorism. Both are non-existent, fictitious organizations. The purpose of each is to be the alleged carrier of a certain flag, so that false-flag operations can be carried out and blamed on someone. The Al Qaeda flag is about “hating our freedoms”. The Anonymous flag is about “bringing down the system”. Al Qaeda has been blamed for various mindless slaughters; Anonymous is to be blamed for effective strategic actions. Just as the Al Qaeda charade has succeeded in destroying our freedoms, I suspect that the Anonymous charade is likely to succeed in bringing down the system.
Imagine all the things that can be blamed on ‘super hackers’. Power grids coming down, air-traffic control systems going haywire, missile launch codes getting scrambled, banks losing all their files. And after each attack, any arbitrary list of people can be arrested as perpetrators. As they say on one of their videos, we at Anonymous are of all ages and all walks of life, we could be anyone around you. And how many systems need to come down, before it becomes ‘necessary’ to declare martial law?
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Finally, coming out of Greece, we have something called Real Democracy, and a video called One World One Revolution:
I’ll hold off commenting on this one for now. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader. Let me know what you come up with.
best wishes,
rkm
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