Bye bye, reality.
And bye bye, republic? The military-industrial complex gets up to new tomfoolery.
Yesterday there was an item from The Intercept that made my eyes pop. “The Pentagon Wants to Use AI to Create Deepfake Internet Users.” The reporting is based on a procurement document of the Special Operations Command, which, in addition to taking care of jobs such as we learn about in movies and the news (killing Osama bin Laden, for example), is also deeply invested in psychological operations and propaganda in the service of whatever mission they are handed by civilian authorities.
The procurement document, which seems to be more of a “wish list” than a record of actual appropriations, states that “special operations command (SOF) are interested in technologies that can generate convincing online personas for use on social media platforms, social networking sites, and other online content.” Specifically, SOF wants to be able to create online profiles that “appear to be a unique individual that is recognizable as a human but does not exist in the real world.” The hope is to be able to generate selfie video with full backgrounds “to create a virtual environment undetectable by social media algorithms.”
All of this would be disturbing enough, if one supposed that the targets of these psy-ops would be confined to foreign actors. But it is well established that the information warfare techniques developed in the Global War on Terror were turned to domestic political purposes after the 2016 election. I am removing the paywall from an April 2023 post where I went deep into that:
Anatomy of the consensus-borg
So now we have the military-industrial complex seeking the capability to elide the distinction between reality and politically useful fakery. This is not comforting, given that our domestic politics (and that of the Western powers more generally) currently has as its distinguishing feature the nearly comical attempts at narrative-control of an establishment that is desperately flailing against democratic challenge. Reality is the last refuge, the real limit on power. The new technologies threaten to turn politics into epistemic warfare, all the way down.
All the way down? Maybe not. At some point in politics, when power is threatened, things get real material. How are we to interpret the September 27 update to a DoD directive, in which our military claims for itself1 the right to use deadly force against Americans, on American soil? This is in seeming violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which limits the powers of the federal government in the use of federal military personnel to enforce domestic policies within the United states. It was passed shortly after the end of Reconstruction, when the defeated South had been under military occupation, and was intended to mark that end decisively by putting some limit on lengths to which the federal government could go in pursuing political and social transformation in the teeth of opposition.
The opposition in 1878 consisted of unreconstructed Southerners. You can decry the specific grounds of their opposition — the wish to maintain racial apartheid — and still be justly alarmed about this apparent rejection of a limit on the use of military force. The aspiration to “reconstruction” long ago slipped the bounds of its historical origin to become the baseline mentality of those whom Mencken called “the civilized minority.” But in the Pentagon, or among its civilian paymasters, they seem to be forgetting that the term “culture war” is supposed to be an analogy. When psy-ops fail, what is the logical next step against the kulaks, if you really think you enjoy the mandate of heaven?
Enjoy the election season, friends.
DoD directive 5240.01 section 3.3 a. part c: “Defense Intelligence Components may provide personnel to assist a Federal department or agency, including a Federal law enforcement agency, or a State or local law enforcement agency when lives are in danger, in response to a request for such assistance,” in particular, “Assistance in responding with assets with potential for lethality, or any situation in which it is reasonably foreseeable that providing the requested assistance may involve the use of force that is likely to result in lethal force, including death or serious bodily injury. It also includes all support to civilian law enforcement officials in situations where a confrontation between civilian law enforcement and civilian individuals or groups is reasonably anticipated.”
Mafia bosses avoided capture resorting to the so called "pizzini" (small slips of paper, in the Sicilian dialect) containing their communications and orders, which were handed over from person to person, until they received their destination. Naturally, at the end they get captured, but only through good old perseverance, stakeouts and undercover agents.
In a world in which every technology is a surveillance technology, that's the only way.
I think that, in the future, to keep our sanity we will need more and more to create analog spaces. We will need to recreate "truth" through interpersonal, in-person, trust relations, physically meeting and talking to people. When machines will become untrustworthy, we will have to seek trustsworthiness among humans, imperfect as it is. Knowledge might come from circles of trust, linked to each other.
Our transactional society is based upon institutionalized mistrust. It might not hold up unless we get back to trust, forged by bodily closeness and personal, disintermediated knowledge.
Who knows, maybe a warmer, less alienating world could arise from the ashes of the lying machines...
The nature of Power is interestingly described by Bertrand de Jouvenel in his book 'On Power'. He leaves me with the idea that Power can almost be viewed as a metaphysical force seeking a host, potentially corrupting and destroying for its continual expansion unless carefully harnessed. You could say Power seeks to destroy Reality.