Let's say you had an idea, or two or three which you believed could have a great positive impact on the world. What would you do? Do you think its as easy as telling people and sitting back as it spreads like wildfire throughout the world?
If the idea would carry any real positive change with it, this would automatically disqualify it from the above scenario. I would like to explore the two major obstacles that I encountered in the last few months while I explored my ideas through creative expression. One is the industrial mind, the other is meticulous domination of communication tools.
In my last post, I covered some relevant history which will help to understand who we are. The vast majority of our modern human form has lived in societies based on cooperation and clever use of our environment. More industrious activities such as agriculture and domestication of livestock set the stage for our own domestication. It was not long before we made obedient tools out of ourselves, as competition replaced cooperation. A simple strategy of divide and conquer.
We are solely dependent on government and corporation to meet all of our needs, and we call this independence. Indigenous wisdom traditions show us how to relate through cooperation and interdependence, while competition isolates us for the purpose of appropriation. When you lose your job, you quickly find out just how this illusion of independence is actually extreme dependence, without the traditional community support as backup.
In the exact same way as the gold standard was used to bankrupt nations who had plenty of other resources, dependence on income straps us to a single method of survival. Bills may only be paid in dollars, they do not accept trade or skill. Our minds are warped so hard around this idea that we do not believe it is acceptable to earn a living in any other way than to be told exactly what to do in a situation of directed labor aka employment.
"Oh," but you say, "we can own our own business and this is freedom!" Not so fast you are still playing the game of divide and conquer known as competition. You will inevitably deceive and exploit others, or quickly find yourself overrun by those who do. How many ways have we been subconsciously shaped into these perfectly manageable tools is beyond comprehension for most. Our most core beliefs make us cold and pessimistic, and even encourage deceit on a subconscious level.
The point that I am getting at is that we have been so far divorced from the idea of individual initiative that it is nearly impossible to achieve cooperation, even in the interests of the community. We are waiting for instructions, to be processed. We do not listen to understand, we listen to reply. The leap from production to creation is a great chasm for most. It can be as simple as sharing or liking a post, but it will not happen, the message crashes upon the rocks of dead patterns which make up the whole of each of us.
If this is not sinking in perhaps we should give this clip some thought. It is about the manufacture of consent. It is no longer seen as acceptable to rule by physical force, and with democracy came a need to instead control what we think.
So if we are born and raised in this society to take orders and thoughts, how does an idea spread which relies on individual initiative? If we are to be honest, it has to involve some level of manipulation, because tools do not act on their own, they are designed to be manipulated. However, in an open knowledge society, access and participation to the reasoning behind initiatives is available to all who are willing to look.
When we look at society and politics, we see the surface which tells us that everything works as we think it does. When we look at what kinds of things must go on to create this illusion, we are looking at what has been termed realpolitik.
Realpolitik (from German: real "realistic", "practical", or "actual"; and Politik "politics", German pronunciation: [ʁeˈaːlpoliˌtɪk]) is politics or diplomacy based primarily on power and on practical and material factors and considerations, rather than explicit ideological notions or moral or ethical premises. In this respect, it shares aspects of its philosophical approach with those of realism and pragmatism. The term Realpolitik is sometimes used pejoratively to imply politics that are coercive, amoral, or Machiavellian.Let's experience. Here are three TED talks which were banned:
Is it shocking to hear that trickle down economics involves piss and not money? It seems obvious that if we want to develop our yacht and bunker economies that we should give money to those who buy that, and if we want to develop our human needs sectors we would find ways to help people who buy for that. At any rate, we can see how easy it was to pull this off. We actually support our own poverty willingly. How could it be possible in a thinking population?
Our default worldview. Scientific Dogma. An interesting look at some of our closely held beliefs. Scientism is a wildly successful method of thought control which plays very well into the meaningless exploitation of each other. Science is our only hope! We can escape this doomed planet and find a new home (like the aliens in Independence Day)
Manifesto of the Committee to Abolish Outer Space
[...] This society depends for its existence on the presence of a frontier, a blank homogeneous space to be settled and transformed by the desires and fantasies of an entrepreneurial libidinality, one whose open freedom can’t help but transform in turn those settled societies back East. The old frontier has been closed for a long time, and the results are clear to see: “the spread of irrationalism; the banalization of popular culture; the loss of willingness by individuals to take risks, to fend for themselves or think for themselves.” Our manly vigor has been sapped, but we can regain it if we take a new lover. We must inseminate Mars.Naah, fuck Mars, and fuck the Moon if we think that we will ever have a meaningful existence in space on the basis of competition and exploitation.
Already in this argument you can smell the blood and slaughter, feel the slow tugging dispersal that leads to an utterly empty world. Our uniquely enlightened society in which human life is valued beyond measure could only achieve this feat through the free labor of tens of millions of slaves. That blank gaping frontier was, inconveniently, also someone’s home; tens of millions more had to be brutally exterminated. Still, Mars is different, Mars is lifeless.
Even those who become aware of their surroundings, who have "woken up," seeing the dead patterns which drive us, have only attained power over the highest levels of control. Even if they wanted to change with their community, they may find there is no community to be had. Even if there was, they would find that they cannot escape their dependence on private hierarchy. There are bills to be paid, they must be paid in dollars. Debt payments suck up all potential to invest in local sustainable abundance (permaculture).
I devised a way to reach people while at the same time bringing awareness and participation to the local community. I shouldn't have been so surprised when hardly a single flinch or response could be detected in any of my peers. I do not have the network reach to even play the numbers game in hopes of a few bites. Check out this crowdfunding campaign for an idea of what it might look like to bring massive participation to meaningful community projects.
I believe it failed because of my small network, because people respond to instructions not participation, and because it's inconceivable that capital should be spent on vague meeting of human needs with no specific capitalistic exploit or employment. Or maybe I just suck at organization (randomly came across this just now, might be useful). At any rate, it may help to serve as a template, for someone who has the funds to do something like this in their own town.
Hopefully this has begun to convey the brick wall of dead patterns that is our modern society. Let's look at another layer of stagnation, the tools we use to communicate with.
The Internet is part of a massive shift towards network and peer based behavior. At its heart, it is incomparable with old broadcast techniques such as book, radio, and television used to blast propaganda. Should we be surprised then to realize that it has been subverted? Again, we are going to centralized websites such as Facebook and Reddit and we just sort of trust that they aren't screwing with us.
So Facebook manipulates our newsfeed. They maintain a ban list, which I have encountered, prevent the sharing of disruptive material. Youtube can remove your videos from suggested area (or sitewide), never to be encountered. Reddit is notorious for moderator abuse and divides communities. Our tools are corrupted. Movements can simply be turned off through central ban lists. Let's take a quick look at reddit
A while back I made a post to the /r/Buddhism sub, hoping to find some people willing and conscious enough to look at themselves. The post was a total failure simply because it did not conform to known patterns and expectations. One would think this should not be a problem for those claiming to value self-awareness.
Case Study: Samsara the current event. - To encourage inward thought and expansion of possibility through encountering our environment. - A Reddit experience.
[...] Where does one post a political joke on Reddit? You can not post it to /r/Politics because it is a joke: “No satire or humor pieces.” Humor is a form of creative expression, it bypasses the ego (bored, offended, distracted, etc) in a snap. You can not post a political joke to /r/Funny : “No Politics – Anything involving politics or a political figure. Try /r/PoliticalHumor instead.” Politics and Funny combine for a readership of 10 Million redditors, while Politlcal Humor is relegated to a mere 50'000.Destroying all potential synergy. Dividing communities. The entire post is a really great compliment to this post as it explores very deeply the mind structures which lead to our collective complacency, our dead unconscious patterns. If you found the above video about the War on Consciousness interesting I would recommend checking the entire post.
How Reddit Was Destroyed (ver3.0)
1) The first thing they did was take away r/reddit.com.We should be supporting decentralized p2p projects which aim to replace centralized social networks because its an obvious weak link. How do I know if my site is on a slowball list or if I am shadowbanned in certain places where only I can see my comments? How do I know if people have actually started ignoring me or if my messages never made it (seriously wondering...)?
This took away the only tool for communicating with reddit about reddit. If you had any concerns about the website as a whole, you could address them through r/reddit. Taking that away was the first step.
2) The power now resided in individual subreddits, obviously the most popular ones. There was a power grab to become moderators of these subreddits.
3) Once the default subreddits were controlled, drastic changes began to occur.
I remember when r/IAma was open to anyone and the popularity was decided by voting. Now it is nothing more than a cheap place for celebrities to whore out their products and you need to be "approved". Someone named Victoria[2] is involved and how does that makes any sense whatsoever? Celebrities have entire teams of branding/PR/social media teams that work for them. Why do they need to be at reddit HQ and/or required to have a reddit rep? Because these AMA's are extremely organized and sponsored with money.
There are plenty of subreddits that are now covertly controlled. Check out this post which was pushed into r/undelete for identifying a list of keywords banned from r/technology.[3]
4) The appearance of shills soon became VERY apparent.
All of a sudden new accounts started popping up out of nowhere. Cue the birth of r/HailCorporate. "Feel good" military posts started appearing, like a soldier coming home to his dog. New users entered AMA's to lob softball questions "Mr Burns, your campaign has the momentum of a runaway freight train, how does it feel to be so popular?" [4] From brand new accounts that never posted again.
Anyone who tries to convince you that shills don't exist is either grossly uninformed or a liar.[6] Protip: the big political subreddits can’t seem to keep the seal on the circlejerk during weekends, almost as if an entire team of manipulators is suddenly on weekend hours.
5) Now we have blatant censorship on r/news, r/worldnews etc... saying that X site is not allowed.
What ever happened to letting people vote on the content of this website? Trash tabloids constantly go viral on political subreddits due to sensationalized headlines and the fact that most Americans are unaware of different overseas publications.
Major politically-charged subreddits now insist on exact titles or quotes because that stops users from being able to post the important point summary of the article as the title . Using only official titles from only approved media has turned reddit into mainstream media.
6) Speaking of voting, they changed that too.
We now have an entirely new way to view upvote/downvote scores. A user used to be able to see their score. But now, everything is fuzzed. For example, if you made a semi-controversial comment before, but many people agreed, you may have a score like (47/45), leaving you with a -2 next to the comment. Now you just get a -2 and nobody knows if anyone agreed with you.
9) Reddit is not a meritocracy[9] .
tl;dr: Your votes do not matter. The front page is not decided on merit. Different subs are given different algorithms. There is a behind the scene ranking system that gives certain content a "head-start". As we have learned at r/conspiracy, if they don't like our sub, then we are banished from the front page, forever. Just like we were banished from r/bestof, after this amazing comment[10] that was gilden 8X and received over 3000 upvotes. They actually gave that user the boot.[11] How dare you bring your unique, first-hand perspective to a web-forum!!!
10) The arrival and subsequent take over of r/undelete.
Due to the now rampant censorship on the site, users took it into their own hands to bring the truth into the light. They created a part of reddit where users could see what was being deleted. Nope.[12]
11) Now we are seeing a new site-wide trend that is designed to make it even harder to call out shills.[13] Which is interesting considering that nobody seems to care when the accusations are sponsored by the mob: “This guy is a Putin-bot! Everyone must think the exact same way about complex geopolitical events.”
12) All of the proper "checks and balances" are now in place.
R/worldnews has become the ultimate modern-day version of the Two-Minutes Hate[14] from George Orwell's 1984:
a daily period in which Party members of the society of Oceania must watch a film depicting the Party's enemies and express their hatred for them.But when we really want to drive a point home, the entire front-page gets in on the action!!!
Look what happened in the immediate aftermath of the Boston Bombing, while users were pooling resources, the website was DDos attacked to stop the momentum[15] . Good thing to, since moments later, our honest government said “Hey everybody, these two guys did it!” For arguments sake, despite anything that followed, it should be extremely alarming that millions of people suddenly decided they were guilty based on nothing more than a picture, the government’s word, and the manufactured consensus of their peers. I was on reddit in the exact moment the shift happened and NOBODY could tell me why they suddenly believed, without any other evidence, that two people attending the marathon with a circle around them was evidence of guilt. And I was gang-downvoted every time I asked.
And speaking of the BB, reddit will apparently never live down the fact that someone was wrongly accused. Why should a community be demonized for aggregating information and doing something that has proven to be successful in 90% of cases, particularly disasters? Why? Because the government can’t have people doing their own detective work, that would make their cover-ups way more difficult.
13) Online guerrilla tactics.
When reddit changed the voting system and people were on their last nerve with this site, a place called Whoaverse (now https://voat.co/[16] ) became popular overnight. It is basically a reddit clone and at the time was run by one guy. He was happy about the surge but mentioned it was going to be hard to keep up with, but was committed to making it happen. Guess what happened next?
Did you guess: “Thousands of targeted spam attacks to overload and destroy the website”? Then congrats, you now understand how far these fucks are willing to go to keep the herd in their pen. Hijacking a cool brand and using it’s facade to conduct propaganda games is extremely profitable, just ask VICE.[17] And once you have the customer, it costs much less to keep them than to acquire new ones[18] . So we are seeing online guerrilla tactics designed to destroy the competition by any means.
I believe this can essentially be boiled down to not just greed, but controlling and manipulating the information that the millions of people see on a daily basis. Reddit gets billions of views. Manufactured consensus[21] is very real and doing it through social media is the gold standard because people are hard-wired to value the opinions of their peers.
Communication Security Establishment's cyberwarfare toolbox revealed
Canadian cyber-spy capabilities that go beyond hacking for intelligence, including:
- destroying infrastructure, which could include electricity, transportation or banking systems;
- creating unrest by using false-flags — ie. making a target think another country conducted the operation;
- disrupting online traffic by such techniques as deleting emails, freezing internet connections, blocking websites and redirecting wire money transfers.
It's not just social media. The internet is compromised on so many levels. This is why its so important to support blockchain technology such as Ethereum which is capable of removing the intrusions and corruption of third party trust in many aspects of daily life.
Who will build this cooperative society? The capital is not coming, it's not interested in subverting its own domination. We don't even hear the words that are spoken: "it's up to you."
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