Image Source: The Transmetropolitan Review via The Conversation.
This year, I am presenting a series on ideology and the technosphere. The series rejects mainstream political discourse and returns to first principles, historical background, and online trends to deconstruct the current evolution of politics.
Thus far and in today's post, I have identified the following components of tech-oriented politics:
- New political terms, like the Red Pill and Black Pill
- The weaponization of political virtues, morals, ideals, and values, leading to inversions of those values in practice
- Internet dynamics and unpredictability
- New moral, spiritual, or ethical frameworks of common reference
Political virtues, moral labels, and positive platforms contrast with real outcomes, whether in everyday reality or online practice. There is a vast gap between what people say they are doing politically and what actually happens. On the Internet, this gap is exposed and described, especially among the alt media and conspiracy theorists, as corruption.
But is this inversion indicative of corruption, or a deeper commitment to Realpolitik? WikiLeaks revealed that Hillary Clinton considered this distinction - between what the public is ideally told and what actually happens - to be business as usual and not a sign of corruption. A January 2016 e-mail quoted her 24 April 2013 speech to the US National Multi-Housing Council. She asserted that for security reasons, and because the public is too ignorant and inexperienced to understand high policy, a private and public position must be maintained when it comes to policy-making:
Clinton had a point in that very few people on earth actually know what it is like to wield a state level of power and responsibility. Not all information is provided to the public, and so the popular view of what informs policy-makers' decisions is incomplete."CLINTON: You just have to sort of figure out how to -- getting back to that word, 'balance' -- how to balance the public and the private efforts that are necessary to be successful, politically, and that's not just a comment about today. That, I think, has probably been true for all of our history, and if you saw the Spielberg movie, Lincoln, and how he was maneuvering and working to get the 13th Amendment passed, and he called one of my favorite predecessors, Secretary Seward, who had been the governor and senator from New York, ran against Lincoln for president, and he told Seward, I need your help to get this done. And Seward called some of his lobbyist friends who knew how to make a deal, and they just kept going at it. I mean, politics is like sausage being made. It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody's watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position."
Because of this, the public forgives some degree of inconsistency on the part of its politicians and other authorities. This is especially true when it comes to officials who defend one's preferred ideology. People will overlook almost anything if the perpetrator aligns with their personal views. However, when public affairs become insane - as they are now - it is hard to overlook the fact that sanctioned agents in the system almost universally say one thing and do another.
No Liberation in Higher Truth: The Internet is a Higher Prison
AFP: "WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange said Saturday that 400,000 classified US military documents leaked by the whistleblowing website showed the 'truth' on the Iraq war. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has condemned the leaks for putting the lives of Americans at risk." Leaked documents show 'truth' on Iraq war: WikiLeaks founder (2011). Video Source: Youtube.
The Internet initially changed the landscape because it exposed concrete examples of extreme political hypocrisy. Julian Assange was convinced that the Internet could be used as a revolutionary medium to show the common people the truth. With their eyes finally opened to the reality of daily political practice, the people could insist on real change, transparency, and consistency in the implementation of political values.
Today marks 7 yrs since the death of Aaron Swartz.— AaronsLaw (@AaronsLaw2017) January 11, 2020
The day our world and community lost a truly great man.
In memoriam we would like to share this collection of tributes to Aaron in the days following his passing. #AaronSwartz https://t.co/WJfL3lmBB0
Assange wasn't alone in this hope in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Among other early activists was the late Aaron Swartz, one of the co-founders of the Creative Commons and Reddit. He was also a Harvard research fellow, who hacked MIT's trove of academic research articles held on JSTOR.
Normally, JSTOR is only accessible to members of academic communities; its subscription fees are beyond what an independent individual can afford and you must be a member of an institution which foots the hefty bill for its students, researchers, and professors. For those who inhabit these communities, the privilege of access to this information is held lightly, blindly, with little awareness of those who are denied it. Scholars take a resource like JSTOR for granted and do not understand the rage of those who cannot even gain entry into a university library, much less have a password to log onto a university computer and even see what is in JSTOR's catalogue. They don't understand what it feels like to be shut out from that body of knowledge.
Imagine how the mob feels, then, when confronted with the political claim that suppression and control of the grassroots is justified by the popular ignorance of higher ideas.
To remedy this situation, Aaron Swartz disseminated the JSTOR trove onto the Internet for free, on the principle that the public should have access to research results, without the MSM used as an intermediary. It was not unlike the moment in the Protestant Reformation, when the masses bypassed the priesthood and talked directly to God. In response, the political and judicial system in America made an example of Swartz: he faced $1 million in fines and 35 years in prison; after receiving this sentence, he hanged himself in 2013. He was 26 years old, and became a martyr in the eyes of hacktivists and the alt media.
There are many figures from this period who were involved in new Internet politics who started from this basic premise: information should be accessible and free, and not used as a tool of social, economic, and political authoritarianism. This period saw the rise of illicit, anti-copyright download sites like Pirate Bay, where BitTorrent technology enabled free, anonymous sharing of all published information, music, and film media imaginable.
While these sharing sites violated existing laws, they also heralded a new era for the popular voter. Sites like Pirate Bay became global reading rooms, and the grassroots began to read all the international press, all the newly-published books, hear all the music, see all the films, which they normally would never be able to afford, or to which they would never have any access. The mob became autodidactic, and parts of it became very motivated, very articulate, and very, very angry.
Therefore, when we speak of the alt media, we are not just talking about the initial phase of whistle-blowing and exposure of corrupt, old school politicans. The Creative Commons threatened the mainstream establishment's control of information, root and branch. The Internet challenged the place of academics, journalists, and anyone else who claimed public authority based on access to, and knowledge of, information. The alt media attacked all control over who has the right to learn, shape and spread ideas, and to act politically in the name of those ideas.
Nine years later: UK: Assange leaves in prison van after court hearing (13 January 2020). Video Source: Youtube.
When we see the crushing of Assange prior to the 2020 American election, it is obvious that this horrendous exercise aims to deny him a repeat performance of his actions in 2016. Visitors report that Assange has been drugged and possibly tortured. They are not sure what treatment has rendered him addled, forgetful, and inarticulate. It is also plain that those who covered up policies he revealed really were corrupt. The corruption was not just a question of finessing the messiness of backroom policy-making. Assange's exposures unveiled deep problems in the system, which continued to say one thing and do another, as the tweets below from this week indicate.
"Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been denied access to evidence and even basic items like paper and pens by British prison officials, putting his US extradition case on the brink of judicial review"https://t.co/iNA5DL9gJ4— Courage Foundation (@couragefound) January 16, 2020
Prison officers at Belmarsh have been obstructing and preventing Julian Assange from spending sufficient time with his legal team, despite the availability of empty rooms. https://t.co/J1bzhd4owm— CounterPunch (@NatCounterPunch) January 16, 2020
In short, although the Internet did expose the truth, the truth did not set us free. The results were strange. There was something in the Internet as a medium, wherein truth did not lead to consequences. Assange and WikiLeaks became entangled in a vortex of Internet dynamics, of memes and disinformation. The virality of information, the way data could be released into the wild and run amok in mainstream electoral and political processes, tapped broad human instincts and actions in a way almost akin to magic.
Destroy the Political Divide
That online magic did begin to dislodge popular complacency about state-engineered violence, political hypocrisy, and abuses of power. However, enflamed public anger about those abuses was misdirected toward opposing political groups, thus deepening the right-left divide. Assange was carted off to prison, and almost the whole world rolled over and went back to sleep, lulled by the comforting left-right jamboree of Brexit, or of the upcoming US election.
Over the past decade, some researchers in the alt media devoted their lives to making sense of WikiLeaks' revelations. Many got sidetracked by conspiracy theories, identity politics, and pet bug bears. Some of these theories - like flat earth theory - were probably seeded by intelligence agencies directly onto the Internet to discredit alt researchers and to enforce social control. When that did not entirely work, corporate-owned social media platforms began to censor alt media channels.
Again, the core problem emerges that there is something chaotic and uncontrolled about the Internet experience. Tech corporatists refuse to acknowledge the contrarian power of the Streisand Effect: anything that is suppressed will be shared more and gain in potential virality.
Internet theorists struggled to develop new templates for political engagement, including crypto- and blockchain-based models of decentralized action. A typical example comes from the Website, All Sides, which seeks to stop endless haggling about left and right issues and to solve imminent problems through realtime online discussions.
Before anything resilient could take hold, Internet activists found they were still confronted by the massive, real world political system. Several commentators, including the president of the New Zealand Internet Party, Suzie Dawson, concluded that the left-right paradigm is an outdated, bloated, dying vestige of the French Revolution, and generator of monstrous political illusions.
Although many media personalities clung to left and right paradigms in online discourse, the alt consensus increasingly veered towards the independent and the apolitical. This was because there was a feeling that whether we speak of the left or the right, the whole system is compromised. The left-right division of political parties is a higher mechanism of popular control.
WikiLeaks' revelations showed that politics in practice is not truly divided, because behind closed doors, politicians of different stripes associate with one another and cut deals. Overtly divided politics projects its division down upon the populace via the MSM. The public absorb this concept and then willingly divide themselves. This is an example of 'divide and conquer,' perfectly executed. Meanwhile, true power remains apolitical. And if true power is apolitical, a truly engaged public must become apolitical as well.
The main barrier to widespread adoption of these ideas, despite available information, was personal commitment. If everyone wanted real individual freedom, they would read all of WikiLeaks' revelations from the beginning. They would understand what those revelations meant. They would see that the whole system needed revamping, along with the political class which presides over it. They would force changes within their own professional and job environments which feed into that system. This is not happening and the mainstream narrative is not changing. It is too much to ask people to change the system when they are part of that system, when rooting out corruption and false slogans threatens their livelihoods and access to material comforts and personal stability. In some cases, as in France, material comforts and personal stability have declined. Only then do people take to the streets.
Whoa.— Sarah Abdallah (@sahouraxo) January 11, 2020
This is #France today.
Huge anti-Macron #YellowVests protests happening all across the country for the 61st consecutive weekend.
Why isn’t this all over the media? #GiletsJaunes #Acte61 pic.twitter.com/RksComkTSy
To effect change, you don't have to jeopardize your whole life and start manning a street barricade. All you have to do is become politically neutral. The moment you do, the mainstream political puppet show rolls on without you.
The Crypto-Anarchists' Moral Dilemma
In its wake, we are left with the problem of how to develop a new model in the unruly Internet space. The most vocal critics in the Internet politics movement are the crypto-anarchists and anarcho-libertarians of various types. Convinced that left-right paradigms lead straight to political enslavement, their factions have nonetheless struggled to find a new consensus.
One of the reasons for this is that they are not necessarily dyed-in-the-wool intellectual purists. They did not come to anarchy in a moment of revelation. Many hail from stable western democracies, which they despise, but from which they have also benefited. They are anarchists in that they reject modern states as murderous, exploitative, dishonest entities. Yet they remain in some cases capitalists and materialists, with a contradictory dependence upon on virtual activity.
Therein lies their confusion, since a rejection of state structures obligates self-reliance. That, in turn, forces one to internalize a profound set of ethical doctrines, individual responsibility, and self-governing attitudes. Without the state there to act as your nanny, you have to be a nanny to yourself, and to those around you. In the absence of a functioning state, one must have a solid, collectively-acknowledged moral system.
It is a tricky path to follow, since many of these Millennial political pioneers treat anarchy like a start-up or social-media-based entrepreneurial opportunity. As I pointed out in previous posts, they see no conflict in taking that stance. Many hail originally from the technology sector, and their faith in the material world - the superior notion that one can build gods out of machines - remains unshaken, until they confront the nebulous morass that is the Internet's political creche.
They cannot go forward without reconciling their materialism with life on the Internet. Anarchists cannot realize the alternate order they crave without some kind of moral common ground with others in their communities. At first, it seemed like blockchains could solve the problem, since they replaced trust in centralized economic and state institutions with cryptographic, peer-to-peer trust. But in the virtual world, it is not enough to let cryptography take care of communal moral consensus. Nor can you use cryptography to monitor your own mind and heart in the physical world - at least not quite yet; for now, in these circles, only drugs can provide an artificial substitute for a conscience or a soul.
This is why the anarchists find themselves lured by Satanist and Luciferian propaganda. You can see examples online here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. The American television show, Silicon Valley, makes fun of this trend with its Satanist character, Bertram Guilfoyle. The prevalence of Luciferianism can be traced through an interesting red flag: watch when the name 'Lucy' or 'Lux' is used for characters. See: Bram Stoker's Dracula; the Beatles' song; The Virgin Suicides; the 2014 Luc Besson film of that name; and of course, the television show, Lucifer. Luciferianism as a source of political individualism long pre-dated the Tech Revolution.
"That's A Lie." (25 August 2017). Video Source: Youtube. Reproduced non-commercially under Fair Use.
Christians ✞ Silicon Valley (19 August 2017). Video Source: Youtube. Reproduced non-commercially under Fair Use.
Both Satanism and Luciferianism appeal to ego, with varying degrees of theism and atheism. These value systems are strongly focused on acquiring material comforts in the real world, with hands-on manuals for doing so. For example, a Luciferian Youtube playlist from Michael W. Ford welcomes initiates for practical self-help. He advocates "11 points of power" applied to your life according to the "Luciferian triad of liberation, illumination, and apotheosis." 'Apotheosis' is the opposite of the Christian tradition. It refers to the means by which humans become gods, as opposed to the idea of Christ (a god) becoming human. If the techno-anarchist achieves personal material freedom, he or she may be seduced under Ford's tutelage to set up rituals for increased, god-like success, by learning about dark magic.
Unfortunately, it is easy to see how the insane and ungovernable aspects of virtual reality can complement a self-empowerment journey into dark magic, while offering a quasi-moral and materialistic framework for anarchic online communities. Below, see Mark Passio, an ex-engineer, ex-Catholic, ex-Satanic priest, and current Luciferian, read the riot act to anarchists at last year's Anarchapulco event.
Mark Passio - Anarchy & The Occult - Part II - Religion vs. Initiation (22 October 2019). Video Source: Youtube.
Passio advocates an objective truth beyond human experience in Natural Law (his 8-hour lecture on Natural Law is here), which attacks liberal moral relativism and subjective truths as bases for political action. Passio also accepts science, but rejects 'scientism' as an ultra-materialistic, atheistic cult. Notice that there is a rift in this vision between scientists and technologists. He also - as a self-proclaimed Church of Satan whistle-blower - provides a lot of Youtube content to demystify arcane symbols which dominate the public, such as the Masonic visual lexicon. Most Luciferians defend Lucifer as the ultimate freedom fighter and anarchist, who uses Natural Law to ascend and evolve.
Notice that the tech-oriented libertarian depiction of Natural Law incorporates Egyptian iconography. Images Source: Steemit.
For anarchist technologists, there may be a greater challenge than their material and virtual Prometheanism. Passio admits that Satanists and Luciferians are the cultists behind current governments and authoritative structures. One can dismiss that comment as conspiracy theory, but the point is that here, Passio is contradicting his own defense of Luciferianism as a suitable challenge to the New World Order and an underpinning for a post-New World Order Technosphere. Passio side-steps this contradiction by insisting that there are dark Luciferian orders - including leaders of the New World Order - and light Luciferian orders, and he feels that he is on the side of light in the Technosphere.
LUCIFERIAN DOCTRINE explained by Hans Wilhelm (16 January 2017). Video Source: Youtube.
A quick explainer (above) from a Youtuber with twinkly eyes, Hans Wilhelm, similarly reveals that Luciferianism was the core philosophy of the very systems which the anarchists reject: Luciferianism was there in the Old World Order; it was - supposedly - the defining philosophy of the New World Order; and now is making rounds in the heretical and anarchic Technosphere.
See my related posts at The Dragonfly.
Read my posts on Materialism and Anti-Materialism in relation to politics.
See all my posts on Politics and the Technosphere.
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