Tuesday 17 May 2016

GLEICHSCHALTUNG !

The following is the unedited version of an exposé currently featured in the 25th revised edition of Malleus Maleficus'  [title withheld].  If you wish to report defamation or inaccuracies, please email MalleusMaleficus@aol.com  To make a formal complaint under IPSO rules please contact IPSO directly at ipso.co.uk .  

The word for what is happening is Gleichschaltung.  
            However inapplicable the thought-processes Mark Zuckerberg devotes to the same dictatorial powers under which, in 1933 Germany, all individuals and organizations, all ministries, agencies, boards and companies, had to be absorbed into the National-Socialist cause under the banner of Gleichschaltung, no Fascist had his penetration or cunning.  For that is measured by compliance. Compliance with the contemporary socio-cultural policy of collective synchronization, or “forcing into line.” Subverting the human race is not, of course, a valid accusation in law. Nor have I heard anyone question why an American organisation that answers only to its shareholders should have the controlling stake in our global destiny? Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that in a sudden historical moment of globalisation, an alternative  cyber-cerebral universe has been created, and an entirely new method of engaging in major predatory  activity while turning human beings into junkies. Which is deceptively simple: subvert the laws on the ‘fair use’[1] of other people’s work, and sell it back to them at enormous expense - the business model which is based on “freeloading and strip-mining the world’s creative content”.[2] It is not offering dreams or fairy-tales, but hacking your soul and flogging it back to you in the shape of  crowd manipulation and massive online shopping malls. Nor do any of us have any real understanding  of the weird and wacky hall-of-mirrors that is endorsed by the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse: Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google (FANG). Incisors gleaming, shares in the Fang tech companies are up between 30% and 60%. For contrary to the social revolution’s understanding of itself, the human being is a robotic commodity, programmed to switch on and be fed amusement - "attention harvesting," as it is called. And since that is not regulated in any way, shape, or form, it is unclear what infraction the great stateless internet giants such as Apple, Amazon and Alibaba, could actually be accused of. In
Front fanged and highly venomous...
this Brave New World, we're all commodities, barely distinguishable from any other. Nor is it just a handful of oligarchic corporations you have on your hands, increasingly able to bypass existing government structures, but an anonymous  international takeover - a vast virtual monopolization - scripted by sophisticated trading algorithms and mechanized as evolution.
            I’m drawn to mention this because I am, in fact, really ill. And the reason for that, needless to say, is an instinctual distaste for groupthink and  collectivism. Indeed, I share the recently declared conviction “that everything in the world is becoming the same, that choice is a chimera, and what a free market really does is make lateral plagiarism where everything is a copy of everything else.” No précis better exemplifies the catch-22 of your own imagination, since it is altogether impossible to distinguish a piece of solipsistic feedback  from the vortex of smoke and mirrors made by and for a self-defining civilization. Indeed, it is the fundamental postulate of its feedback mechanism, that it is not possible to beat the system. And I'm sure I don't need to remind you that there is no "Them." There is only "You" and a "global newsroom run by robot editors" boosting covert consumer generated news feedback while you're thinking about escaping the economic and digital predicament you are in.         

        Or could it be that we have become Elois of eternal contentment; weak, vacillating, purposeless human beings taking no further part in the history of the world? That we mature on hand-held tablets which are designed chiefly to nurture our bodies and brains while we absorb a precisely calculated balance of intellectual nutrients?  Inert fibrous pods growing in an organised pattern all over the entire planet, performance, activity and emotions being controlled by the Morlocks! [3]

            That concept is called hydroponics.  
            Most of the growth is synthetic. Only about 10% is organic. The rest continues to tick upwards at the rate of one new pod every few seconds. Perhaps too late, as the years wear on, will we ever know that we became subject to a vast, unidentified digitalised mutation. Cognitive computers and neuromorphic chips are hacking the human mind. At the time of this writing, well over two billion pods are caught up in a highly professional operation for the mass production of all kinds of intravenously fed life forms. Neuro-engineered, industrially reared and fattened in conditions designed to maximise profit by turning them into consumers in the shortest possible time, they are kept permanently indoors, treated like clones and flushed with dopamine. Having forfeited their individuality and their independent egos, they exist inside their own single, solitary information system controlled by the Morlocks. For it embraces - as
far as I can judge - a shared extrapolation from the banks of every computer wired into the global id.  Fuelling hallucinations, delusions and genuine psychoses, this form of hyperstimulation is experienced daily by millions of regular users whose parasympathetic system has learned how to cohere in a cluster that  combines the consensual hallucination of the individual pod with its aggregate computational muscle.
            And the virtue of such an algorithm clearly lies in its performance. Or, as Isaac Asimov found: “The individual human being is unpredictable, but the reactions of human mobs can be treated statistically. The larger the mob, the greater the accuracy that can be achieved” - until at some point,  finally, the system kills off the consensual units and replaces them with what become matrix elements that can no longer place themselves outside the aggregate as individuals.  It only remains to express the laws of this algometry in a concise form, so that one can begin to explore the prospect of translating the accuracy of its results, its scope and its complexity into a pattern that can be exploited in socio-economic terms.  




[1] “‘Fair use’ as in expropriating a commodity from one party, charging a second party for advertising on it and allowing a third party to use it.” Dr Amanda Foreman.
[2] Google: “Do the right thing!”
[3] “(mostly men, white, living in San Francisco, aged 25-35)” - Driven to Distraction. Josh Glancy. The Sunday Times 30.10.2016
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 Malleus Maleficus is an advocate of English liberal democracy, and the  anonymous author of an historiographic apology of the British Empire.

1 comment:

Alicia P. xx said...

What fresh hell is this? And I tell you what,
this is Satan in corporate form!!