12 Comments

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...

Expand full comment

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.

Expand full comment

Interesting. I've heard references to de Jouvenal several times, but never read him. I like the biblical resonance of your suggestion of a Power that is hostile to reality, perhaps hating the author of that reality.

Expand full comment

Hi, Matt:

Thanks for another excellent post. You've got a great thing going here.

"Reality is the last refuge, the real limit on power." Yes. Solzhenitsyn, for one, understood and bore witness to that.

This suggests a related observation: What we need is not "meaning," but reconnection with the world beyond our heads, beyond the wall of manufactured consent. Or, perhaps better, the meaning we need is the intelligibility and purposefulness of that very world in its head-independent reality (a reality that is hard and resistant but--or: precisely therein--good).

On another note: The last line of that DoD directive is chilling, isn't it? I mean this one: "It also includes all support [=including, remember, support "with potential for lethality"] to civilian law enforcement officials in situations where a confrontation between civilian law enforcement and civilian individuals or groups is reasonably anticipated."

What ever could they be preparing for?

Expand full comment

So, to me, all this begs the question of, is there any changing the trajectory at all. If Trump should win, and put in place people like Elon Musk who are willing to turn up some large rocks and shine a light underneath, would it make any difference (refer to post 2016-present The Resistance)? Institutions are ruthlessly self-preserving and we are populated with 'nice' people who are busy raising families and going to work and don't have time or inclination to question what corporate media tells them. And with govt, law enforcement, military by the sounds of it here, media, academia, academia adjacent think tanks/centers for this and that, much of technology, and public health all close to being on the same page, really, is it just inevitable? There seems to be a Matrix mentality that as long as the peons with their bourgeois values don't become troublesome we'll let them think they're 'free' to create their own reality, ie think they live in a democracy, when they are really subjects of The Machine. I see some commenters here are moving on to the question of what the future looks like as this steamroller just keeps on rolling. Are we dead and just don't know it yet?

Expand full comment

Just to revive this thread by sharing a recent conversation I had with a friend of mine. There's some vulgarity: consider yourself warned!

We were talking about AI. After all, who doesn't, nowadays? It's weather and AI, food and AI, holidays and AI...

He said: "this AI thing is extending the concept of wanking at porn to the entire reality".

After a good laugh, I had to agree with him. One of the many ugliness of porn, is that it provides a canned version of unfulfilled desired, in a flat, emotionless, tasteless way. Just as canned food does as compared with real food. Real food requires love, dedication, time, effort and accepting to risk disappointment.

This masturbatory version of reality we're building is going to be just like that. Bland and unfulfilling.

Expand full comment

As a staff member at a small college I am witnessing the advance of AI in the educational world, not only as an application to improve operations of business, industry and medicine but as a teaching and learning application. I have been introduced to an AI based feedback system which contains censorship methods. In all of this I see a huge rush to justify the use of AI for all the supposed benefits it will bring ( I should say that this is common to all new technologies) but no concerns are being expressed on the possibility that AI can create and sustain alternative realities and in that it might be the ultimate way for people to leave society and live in a world of their own creation thus completing the horizontal stratification which began with social media.

I don't know the answer to all of this that will have to come from those smarter than I, but I have come to the conclusion that those of us of faith and who wish to know reality must take what Ernst Junger called the The Forest Path. We need to find freedom and realities in small groups (to reinvent the title of Thomas Hardy's book) Far From the Maddening Crowds.

Expand full comment

I know this topic seems ripe for supporting conspiracies but it's far from anything nefarious. Having a good bit of first hand knowledge about military PSYOP and information activities in general, I can tell you this is nothing more than trying to develop tools to counter what our adversaries are already doing. This is more about following industry's lead than it is about developing some nefarious capability. America's actions abroad rarely "speak for themselves" when someone else is doing all the interpretation to the audiences that matter (and those are not in the US when it comes to military action) so DoD does support military objectives in the information realm just as they do in all the other dimensions of military operations and that's the way it's always been going back for centuries. Better capabilities to counter foreign influence in places where we would be engaged are made all the more needed by our tiny under-funded public diplomacy efforts.

There's no conspiracy here to do anything more than help get our message to foreign audiences being motivated to attack us by others and to counter terrorism at its roots outside the U.S.

If there's anyone that should be the target of your ire, it would the silicon valley 'warlords' intent on squeezing every cent they can from an unwitting audience that continues to gobble up their services thinking they are getting something for 'free.'

Expand full comment

I'm pretty sure he has directed his ire at our tech overlords quite a bit already. This is a new issue. And not entirely separate; the evidence base of the Murthy v Missouri case reveals direct pressure on social media companies to conform to the requirements of federal intelligence agency psychological operations. It's becoming one big blob.

But anyways, if this was entirely about "foreign audiences" and "places we may be engaged", as you say, then why is it invoking *domestic* law enforcement?

Expand full comment

The difference here is in military operations and law-enforcement operations. Despite what Trump might say, it's still not possible to use the U.S. military in a federal capacity for law enforcement. PSYOP forces are used to support military operations outside the U.S. This is a fact and 28 years of military experience with 14 of those years involved in information operations to back up my statement. Nothing in the USSOCOM request for proposals says anything about domestic use because it can't be; hell, it's unlikely such a capability will be used even on foreign audiences. Our activities overseas are so narrowly focused on specific audiences, it's unlikely even the current state of tech would be effective in this regard.

Expand full comment

Yes,I consider:

- the white house directly petitioning social media companies to censor specific US citizens who happen to publicly disagree with their policies (again see Murthy v Missouri),

- 50+ intelligence officials including multiple retired CIA heads directly petitioning social media companies to censor a legitimate news story (which it was later shown that intelligence *knew* was legitimate at the time), in the lead up to a national election,

... to be psychological operations perpetrated on the American people, plain and simple. You can argue semantics but it sounds silly to common people, like Fauci crying foul when Rand Paul suggested that making viruses more virulent in a lab was gain-of-function research. The federal government coercing public opinion through mass media manipulation is a psy-op. And it's been going on a long time - see Gulf of Tonkin, WMDs in Iraq, Operation Mockingbird.

You may wish to trust the institutions you were part of, because you yourself had good intentions while part of them, but there are clearance levels above you and people above you with far fewer moral scruples and a more instrumental mindset than you may have.

Expand full comment