Terrorism has largely dropped off the radar. Instead, climate change, the pandemic, war in Ukraine, and the global financial crisis dominate headlines. The kind of terrorism that our self-imposed rulers want us to think is terrorism is when groups attack civilians for ideological, political, or financial purposes. When we hear “terrorist,” we tend to think of al-Qaeda, ISIS, and white supremacists like Brenton Tarrant. But the biggest terrorists are nation-states.
STATES AS TERRORISTS
There is a simple principle: power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely; to quote a clichéd but true statement. Nation-states are the most powerful institutions that have ever existed. They are run by a relatively small elite consisting of financiers, secret agents, militaries, and political frontpeople. They force complicated communities, municipalities, regions, and even countries into monolithic, homogenous systems and brainwash their populations with nationalism. They erect arbitrary and artificial borders to maintain that phony homogeneity. They indoctrinate their populations from the cradle to the grave with schooling and propaganda. Laws and law enforcement are imposed in case the conditioning doesn’t fully work.
The public are terrorised by their local authorities into paying taxes, lest they go to prison: even though the quality of their local services progressively declines, and local debts are often owed by councils to foreign corporations and serviced by the captive taxpayer.1 Federal authorities terrorise with the threat of imprisonment for not paying national taxes that buy governments weapons to blow children to bits in foreign countries. Private tyrannies that monopolise energy supplies and water threaten to take non-payers to court or even break into homes and seize property (bailiffs) for failing to pay utility bills. These are the actions of gangsters who demand “protection money” from shop owners, or else they come and set fire to the store.
Modern society is little more than the subjugation of the populace by thugs in suits who attend top schools and universities; thugs whose ancestors succeeded in brutalising their opponents into submission so that they could be king, lord, etc. When people try to alert the public as to what is taking place, they are removed or murdered in the name of national security. Their convenient deaths are labelled accident, ill-health, or suicide by the propaganda machine that denigrates as conspiracy theorists those who dare to challenge the conventional narrative. Made to look silly, people internalise the lies and come to hate the truth-tellers, deriding them as fringe lunatics. As Bertrand Russell once wrote in The Impact of Science on Society, successful mind control is convincing the public that snow is black.
SILENCING DISSENTERS
Examples include Gough Whitlam, who in the 1970s was dismissed as Australian PM by the Governor General, supposedly over a House and Senate gridlock. The more realistic reason was that Whitlam was threatening not to renew the license for Pine Gap, the American spy base that listens in on communications across Asia.2
The state also murders dissidents. In 2003, a British Ministry of Defence contractor, Dr David Kelly, was accused of being the sole source for a BBC journalist, who said that the source confirmed that the Tony Blair government knew that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction – the lie on which the invasion was predicated. The more likely scenario is that a very high-level member of government inside Blair’s cabinet had been speaking to the media and that Kelly was blackmailed into being a “fall-guy” so that the government member could enjoy protection.3 (Kelly had likely been having an affair with an American spy.) To protect the source, or shut Kelly up, or send a warning to other would-be whistleblowers, Kelly was murdered and his death ruled suicide.
Michael Hastings – suicide, accident or state murder?
In the US, a young hot-shot journalist who drove around in a Mercedes, Michael Hastings, had hit upon a major story for Rolling Stone about US military and intelligence activities in Afghanistan. Hastings emailed friends saying that he had uncovered something big and needed “to go off the radar for a bit.”4 His car was seen speeding down a residential street very early one morning in 2013 before hitting a tree and bursting into flames, as luxury cars tend to do on impact. Not. Rumours abound that Hastings had uncovered top-level links to heroin smuggling or child trafficking, but we’ll never know. WikiLeaks later released information that the CIA has the capacity to remotely hack the computer chips in cars,5 leading many to suspect that Hastings was murdered using this method.
PUBLIC AS GUINEA PIGS
There’s also a long history of governments testing biological and chemical weapons on the public. In the 1950s and early ‘60s, the British used South Australia’s Maralinga to conduct nuclear tests. The environmental reports claimed that the areas were terra nullius, no one’s land, and that the only inhabitants were rabbits. But different Aboriginal communities lived there. Some, like Yami Lester, went blind as a result of the tests.6
In more recent years, the evidence has tipped in favour of SARS-CoV-2 being a human-engineered virus by EcoHealth Alliance scientists working under US government grants at a lab in Wuhan, China.7 Having killed millions of people with a likely-human-made virus, governments of the world used violence to enforce draconian lockdowns instead of dealing with the pandemic in a logical and humane way.8
In many countries, governments terrorised their populations with the threat of joblessness, which means homelessness and inability to buy food and pay bills. They demanded that their publics take an experimental “vaccine,” which has been linked by federal reporting systems to excess mortality and does not work like a normal vaccine: it doesn’t prevent transmission or infection; i.e., it’s not a vaccine.
But we should always spare more than a thought for the poor people abroad. The terrorisation of domestic populations is small compared to the “shock and awe” bombing of states’ foreign policies.
With US-British weapons and organisation, the Saudi elites have murdered tens of thousands of Yemenis and tortured millions of babies, toddlers, and children, as well as their desperate mothers, by starving them; many to death.9 Having created the Taliban indirectly in the 1980s and then empowering them briefly in the ‘90s,10 the US withdrew from Afghanistan after 20 years of occupation in such a way that has enabled the regime to return back to where it left off.
In Iraq, the US and Britain shell-shocked the entire nation and surreptitiously fomented a civil war11 to blame Iraqis, not themselves, for the massive death toll. When monsters in the form of ISIS emerged from this monstrous situation, the US and Britain bombed Iraq again, killing tens of thousands more people.
Never lose sight of the fact that the nation-state, regardless of who controls it, is the biggest terrorist of all.
The following article, published in early 2022, is a reminder of how the “science” of the COVID-19 pandemic was relentlessly politicised which in turn subjected it to constant mutations to conform to official narratives.
One of the answers to the title of this article is: “trust” has to be earned. We “trust” the science that enables aviation because, in the overwhelming majority of cases, planes do not fall out of the sky. Theories of aerodynamics were tested and demonstrated in repeated experiments until they could be proven, as much as anything can be “proven.” This is not the case when it comes to the anti-COVID-19 injections and certain other public health measures.
Governments and health authorities marketed the jab as a necessary intervention to reduce hospitalisations, initially implying that being injected would end the pandemic. This is not how vaccines traditionally worked. Another answer to the title is that, in this pandemic, vaccinology has not been a “science.”
The definition of “vaccine” has been changed by health authorities, not merely to update the latest technologies but to change the meaning of the effect of vaccination and immunisation. Standard procedures for vaccine development, particularly the ten-year timeframe, have been abandoned. A small number of top-level, pro-injection scientists ignored by media have cheerfully described the jab and its implementation as an “experiment,” yet the same media that hide these scientists say that the injection is not an experiment.
Nationalistic propaganda has selectively demonised certain injectable products and favoured others, even though the alleged vaccines are similar in terms of development timeframes and efficacy rates.
After being told that the injection will allow the public to return to “normal,” governments and health authorities then introduced – and many imposed – a second injection, followed by a third, then a proposed fourth. With no large-scale clinical trials, people were told that they could “mix and match” the injectable products (e.g., an AstraZeneca first dose, a Moderna second, a Johnson and Johnson third. This is called “heterologous vaccination”).
With COVID-related hospitalisations continuing, along with mask-wearing and social distancing, many who chose to be injected, as opposed to being coerced, began to question the validity of government claims.
EYEING THE NEEDLE
So, who exactly doesn’t – or didn’t – trust the injection “science”? An October 2020 survey found that attitudes toward proposed vaccination varied significantly from country to country.
In 2020, only a third of adult Americans surveyed wanted a vaccine “as soon as possible.” Those who did had good reason. Most of them were over-65, i.e., in the most COVID-vulnerable category and had or had lived with someone with underlying health conditions. Four in ten respondents of all ages were split between those who would definitely get vaccinated and those who wanted to wait and see. Lumping “definitely” with “wait and see” is a strange way to tabulate poll data, but there it is. The pollsters found that 9 per cent of respondents would get the jab only if coerced (i.e., in order to continue their education or employment). Fifteen per cent said that they would never get injected. Unlike the “as soon as possible” group, the “never” cohort tended to be Republican (41 per cent to 25) and most had no higher education (53 per cent to 38). This paints refuseniks as reactionary rubes. But other polls show that vaccine hesitancy is high among PhDs, who also tend to be Democrat voters.
An online survey of five million people took place between January and May 2021, when the injections were rolled out. Hesitancy across all groups decreased from a quarter to 16 per cent. The hesitant reported fear of side effects as their main reason. It is also worth noting that for millions of people in our “capitalist” order, a missed workday can mean no pay or even the sack. The survey authors found a U-shaped curve; the least and most educated alike were the most injection-hesitant: 20.8 per cent of people with a “high school or less” education were reluctant, as were 23.9 per cent of PhDs, compared to 8.3 per cent who had master’s degrees and 18.3 who had “some college” education. Apparently, this revelation – that those in the “hesitant” cohort included so many people with PhDs – was too embarrassing for the PLoS journal to publish because it goes against the “trust the science” narrative. This information appears in the pre-print, but not in the final publication. It is not disputed or analysed but simply removed.
POLITICAL PARTISANSHIP
Science should be objective. Can an aeroplane travel at high altitudes repeatedly without falling, regardless of the politics involved? Does gravity act on an object regardless of the political affiliation of the person dropping the object?
People don’t “trust the science” of the alleged vaccine because it is politicised. In July 2020, 15 per cent of Americans said that an endorsement of the injection by US President Donald Trump would encourage them to take it. However, more than 30 per cent said that Trump’s endorsement would put them off.
In September 2020, US presidential candidate Joe Biden undermined public confidence by implying that Trump’s Operation Warp Speed had rushed the development of the jab in order to score political points. Even mask-wearing was politicised. At the start of the pandemic in March 2020, Dr Anthony Fauci, Chief Medical Advisor to Presidents Trump and Biden, and head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, told 60 Minutes, “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak,” he continued, “wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is.” Three months later, after mask-wearing policies had been changed, Fauci told TheStreet that his flip-flop occurred because “it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply.” Fauci claimed he wanted to ensure health care workers received masks as a priority.
The same thing occurred during the US Democratic caucuses at the start of the pandemic. The advice of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was to stay home. Democrat-majority cities and states, including San Francisco and New York, didn’t wait for lockdown mandates. Yet, as the Democratic National Committee (which runs the Party) attacked Trump for minimising the seriousness of the virus, they also told their voters, poll workers, and volunteers to go to booths and elect left representatives; i.e., ignore the CDC advice and stand maskless close to elderly and ethnic minority voters and volunteers (i.e., the most vulnerable). Biden tweeted on 15 March: “If you are feeling healthy, not showing symptoms, and not at risk of being exposed to COVID-19: please vote.”
Another reason people don’t “trust the science” is that media are blatantly partisan. For instance, in March 2020, Twitter Safety announced that it would censor misinformation concerning the pandemic. But the “misinformation” they censored tended to come from the political right. For instance, Biden’s lowering of public confidence in the jab and his violation of CDC guidelines by insisting people vote were not removed by Twitter: the company that, under pressure from the FBI, later deleted President Trump’s account.
VACCINE NATIONALISM
Either a “vaccine” works or it doesn’t. Science doesn’t care if the vaccine is American, British, Chinese, or Russian. Yet, the COVID-19 jabs have been demonised and discredited or promoted and canonised, according to their country of origin. The British Army’s psychological warfare unit, the 77th Brigade, has been targeting injection sceptics as possible enemies of the state linked to Russia. To pre-empt Russia’s success in producing the first COVID-19 jab, Western intelligence agencies claimed that Putin stole research from Western pharmaceutical companies. But if public health was the priority, not nationalistic point-scoring, wouldn’t the West happily share information with the East?
Nations rushed their purported vaccines to win the global battle of ideas and enjoy international prestige. Russia happened to get their first with Gamaleya’s Sputnik-V. The American journal Nature quoted vaccinologists as denouncing the Russian jab as “reckless.” The same criticism was applied neither to American companies nor to the UK and Sweden, which quickly rolled out their joint AstraZeneca jab under the same reckless circumstances. AstraZeneca used trial “volunteers” in poor countries like Brazil, one of whom died. Britain outsourced some of its vaccine production to its former colony, India’s Serum Institute. In November 2020, alleged links between the Institute and jab-induced neurological damage were reported. The Indian-produced version of the jab did not receive approval from the European Union’s Medicines Agency, meaning that the estimated five million Brits injected with the India-produced version of the AstraZeneca jab had to abide by EU quarantine rules when holidaying. Again, either a “vaccine” works or it doesn’t.
Intelligence agencies are concerned about industrial espionage and invoke vague and legally undefined notions of “national interest” to use surveillance to maintain national prestige. Just as the moon landing in the 1960s was America’s way of getting one up on the USSR in the court of global technological public opinion, the race to beat COVID with injections was largely influenced by prestige propaganda.
In April 2021, European Union member states exploded the 77th Brigade’s efforts to promote the “British jab” on behalf of AstraZeneca. The leading EU nations – Germany, France, Italy, and others – cited health concerns, particularly blood clots, as the reason for banning AstraZeneca’s (AZ) jab. Despite the jab being co-produced by a Swedish (i.e., EU) company, it is likely that the real reason for the ban was to punish the UK for its recent Brexit (leaving the Union). It is also possible that because BioNTech is a German company and Germany is the leading economy in the EU, the member states wanted to privilege the US-German Pfizer/BioNTech jab. We also don’t know what kind of lobbying against AZ occurred behind the scenes by rival companies like Pfizer. In addition, while the US approved AZ’s antibody products, it did not authorise the AZ jab.
This did not boost the confidence of “vaccine” sceptics. Either the AZ jab is safe or it is not. How come the AZ injection is safe for British people but not for Europeans or Americans?
WHAT DOES “SAFE AND EFFECTIVE” MEAN?
US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) evolving definition of “vaccination” in the space of a few years. These changing definitions on the CDC website were tracked by accessing the ‘Wayback Machine’, a digital archive of websites (Source: twitter.com/repthomasmassie/status/1435606845926871041)
Vaccines take a decade to design, produce, test, and distribute for a reason. Humans are complicated beings who live in even more complicated societies, and much can go wrong. In a vaccine trial, some questions include the dose-to-antibody stimulation ratio according to age, comorbidities, and pregnancy. If a small dose of vaccine stimulates a large antibody response, this is one measure of efficacy. If the ratio of death and injury is considered by health authorities to be “acceptable,” another measure of efficacy can be added, such as: how much viral load is present in the vaccinated when contracting the given virus (“breakthrough cases”) compared to antibody numbers? This also relates to transmissibility among the vaccinated. If safety, dose-to-antibody ratios, breakthrough cases, and low transmissibility can be determined in large groups (typically tens of millions of people by the end of the trials), then the given vaccine can be said to be safe and efficacious: at least by pre-COVID vaccine standards. In addition to all of the above, these measurements must also be specific to the given virus strain.
These measures went out the window with the COVID jabs. Both peer-reviewed journals and mainstream media boasted that the biggest vaccine candidates – Pfizer, AZ, Gamaleya, etc. – were safe and effective. Even though the EU and US banned AZ over blood clots, the academic literature continued to vouch for the product’s safety. So: is the AZ product safe and merely a victim of vaccine nationalism and perhaps secret lobbying, or is it dangerous by pre-COVID vaccine standards?
The Lancet published an extraordinary paper on vaccine efficacy, which the mainstream media tried to discredit with their self-appointed “fact-checkers.” The study pointed out that when absolute risk reduction measures are added to the data of the major vaccine candidates, “efficacy” drops from the 70-90 percentiles claimed by other peer-reviewers down to literally point one or just above one per cent, depending on the “vaccine.”
Another factor in not trusting the “science” is that politicians were initially eager to promote vaccines as a way of ending the pandemic and “getting on with our lives.” But once it became clear that the alleged vaccines would not actually beat the virus (as vaccines are supposed to do), the “science” changed. Fauci not only lied about masks, he also kept changing his mind on herd immunity. Fauci initially said that vaccination rates among the population need to be 70 per cent for herd immunity to be achieved. A few months later, when it became clear that the injections were neither safe nor effective, Fauci said that 90 per cent injection would be required to achieve herd immunity. The “science” of who or what constitutes “vaccinated” also changed. Because politicians and health officials like Fauci were not clear from the outset that the public would likely need to be put on a vaccine schedule (i.e., to have more than one dose), people wrongly assumed that a single shot would suffice. It was then reported that a course would be required.
After some controversy over the necessary length of time between the two injections, the definition of “fully vaccinated” became someone who has had three doses: even though brands can be mixed and matched without large-scale clinical trials on the efficacy of heterologous COVID vaccination. For example, while the propaganda machine continues to claim that the Pfizer jab is “90 per cent effective” (again, what does that even mean?), the credible pre-print literature now concedes that the Johnson and Johnson jab, for example, is three per cent (more consistent with findings in The Lancet’s study noted above). How could one be fully vaccinated with two Pfizers and a near-zero efficacy J&J? All of this explains why we’ve gone from “get jabbed and get your life back” to “vaccines lessen severe symptoms but do not prevent symptoms or viral spread.”
From this, we can conclude that they are not real vaccines, as understood by the previously used definition. Another reason that people don’t “trust the science” is because most people have contracted or will contract COVID. As most cases are either asymptomatic or mild and confer better immunity than the injections, the question remains for most people: why risk the jab?
However, whatever they are, the jabs do seem to play an important role in reducing the risk of severe illness that requires ICU treatment. Patients must therefore make informed choices with a personal risk-reward analysis. Non-injection measures, such as vitamin D increase and monoclonal antibodies, might, depending on the patient, have the same or better results as the jabs. We can’t know because Big Pharma and government has favoured the blunt instrument of injection over the gentler measures of vitamins and therapeutics.
Lies and nonsense continue, both in mainstream media and in the academic literature. For instance, the numbers presented in a recent peer-reviewed paper show a clear (though small) increase in early-pregnancy miscarriages in “vaccinated” women. But the paper’s words conclude that there is no such increase. Likewise, mainstream media lie about the risks of COVID to children. In October 2021, the New York Times retracted its claim that 900,000 American children had been hospitalised with COVID, when the real number was (still an awfully high) 63,000. Many media are sponsored by Pfizer. CNN even went as far as awarding Pfizer’s boss, Albert Bourla, its CEO of the Year 2021 award.
Pfizer’s media-buying power is such that in November 2021, NBC’s senior medical correspondent, Dr John Torres, had a Freudian slip. He said: “Last week, 118,000 children ended up with Pfizer…” Err, did he mean COVID? Torres either lied or got the numbers preposterously wrong. He went on to claim that “unfortunately, there have been 146,000 deaths, which according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, puts COVID now in the top-ten causes of death for children” in the US. People also don’t “trust the science” because the Twitter police did not remove NBC’s misinformation – that’s because NBC is part of the Democrat-supporting mainstream media. In reality, by January this year, over 120,000 children worldwide had died of/with COVID (or “Pfizer,” as Torres said). In the US, the number by December 2021 was 1,000: still appallingly high but nowhere near the 146,000 figure claimed by Torres.
It is rare but not unheard of that people need to follow a month or two-month-long vaccine schedule with two or even three injections, such as the hepatitis B vaccine. But four doses? At the point where the “vaccine” is most efficacious (again, meaning what?) Israel health officials privately warn that the body risks “immune system fatigue,” where the immune system has been so shot with attenuated virus, spike protein and/or mRNA, that it is worn out. Is this science or one big, pre-scientific, profit-driven experiment using a desperate and frightened public, coerced with mandates, as lab animals?
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Footnotes
1. Amo Spiro, “Pfizer exec calls Israel ‘a sort of laboratory’ for COVID vaccines,” Times of Israel, 12 September 2021, www.timesofisrael.com/pfizer-exec-calls-israel-a-sort-of-laboratory-for-covid-vaccines/ and Dr. Eric Rubin, Food and Drug Administration Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Office of Vaccines Research and Review, 170th Meeting of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, 26 October 2021
2. Liz Hamel, Ashley Kirzinger, Cailey Muñana and Mollyann Brodie, “KFF COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor: December 2020,” Kaiser Family Foundation, www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/report/kff-covid-19-vaccine-monitor-december-2020
3. Wendy C. King et al. (2021) “Time trends and factors related to COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy…,” www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.20.21260795v1.full.pdf
4. Wendy C. King et al. (2021) “Timeline trends…,” PLoS One: 10.1371/journal.pone.0260731
5. Joseph Ax, “Democrat Biden warns against rushing out coronavirus vaccine, says Trump cannot be trusted,” Reuters, 16 September 2020, www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-biden-idUSKBN2671NW
6. Ewen Callaway, “Russia’s fast-track coronavirus vaccine draws outrage over safety,” Nature, 11 August 2020, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02386-2
7. Eduardo Simões and Ludwig Burger, “AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine trial Brazil volunteer dies, trial to continue,” Reuters, 21 October 2020, www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-brazil-vaccine-idUSKBN2762MO
8. Sanjay Kumar, “‘Malicious and misconceived.’ Indian vaccine producer hits back at complaint from trial volunteer,” Science, 2 December 2020, www.science.org/content/article/malicious-and-misconceived-indian-vaccine-producer-hits-back-complaint-trial-volunteer
9. Schengen Info, “5 Million Britons With Indian-Made AstraZeneca Vaccine May Face EU Travel Ban,” 3 July 2021, www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/5-million-britons-with-indian-made-astrazeneca-vaccine-may-face-eu-travel-ban
10. Samantha McGrail, “European Countries Suspend Use of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 Vaccine,” PharmaNews Intelligence, 8 April 2021, https://pharmanewsintel.com/news/european-countries-suspend-use-of-astrazenecas-covid-19-vaccine
11. Piero Olliaro et al. (2021) The Lancet: doi.org/10.1016/S2666-5247(21)00069-0
12. Barbara A. Cohn (2021) “Breakthrough SARS-CoV-2 infections in 620,000 U.S. Veterans, February 1, 2021 to August 13, 2021,” medRxiv, doi.org/10.1101/2021.10.13.21264966
13. Elyse O. Kharbanda et al. (2021) “Spontaneous Abortion Following COVID-19 Vaccination During Pregnancy,” JAMA, 326(16): 1629-31
14. Isaac Schorr, “New York Times Retracts Massive Exaggeration of Children Hospitalized by COVID-19,” National Review, 8 October 2021, https://news.yahoo.com/york-times-retracts-massive-exaggeration-163906675.html
15. UNICEF, “Child mortality and COVID-19,” January 2022
16. Jack Dutton, “Over 1,000 Children in U.S. Have Been Killed by COVID,” Newsweek, 16 December 2021, www.newsweek.com/over-1000-children-u-s-killed-covid-1660124
17. Isabel Kershner, “Israel Considers 4th Vaccine Dose, but Some Experts Say It’s Premature,” New York Times, 23 December 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/world/middleeast/israel-vaccine-4th-dose.html
Founded in the aftermath of the first nucleus-splitting explosions in the 1940s, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is a panel of nuclear and other specialists. Every year, they estimate how close we are to Armageddon. They use a clock to analogise the dangers. In 1947, with the technology for global destruction, but not the means to deliver it, the time was “7 minutes to midnight.”
When in 1953 the Soviet Union exploded the hydrogen bomb, scientists at the politicised Bulletin moved the symbolic clock hands to 2 minutes to midnight. The creation of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) provided states with the means of carrying weapons that could destroy the world. Last year, the rabidly anti-Donald Trump Bulletin moved the clock hands to the closest they have ever been to midnight: 100 seconds. [Editor’s note: On 24 January 2023, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its “Doomsday Clock” forward to just 90 seconds to midnight.]
Much more likely than nuclear war is nuclear accident: computer error, miscalculation, strategic escalation, etc.
If we survive possession of nuclear weapons and, crucially, the means to deliver them, what kind of future can humans in Western societies expect over the next century? In nearly 200 stories, including shorts and novels, the late science-fiction novelist Philip K. Dick (1928–82) offered dozens of scenarios, some of which seem to be happening today.
Philip K Dick with his wife Leslie (Tessa) Busby (married between 1973-1977). Photo courtesy of Tessa Dick.
In the novel Dr Bloodmoney (1965), the eponymous character accidentally destroys the world in an effort to counter Soviet and Chinese nukes. Survivors, like the limbless Hoppy Harrington, rely on augmentation technologies to function. In real-life since the 1960s, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been using brain-machine interfaces to augment human capacities, such as wiring armless veterans to machines to enable them to control robotic limbs with their thoughts. This technology will be used to design next-generation killers that can operate in harsh environments, including irradiated zones and deep space.
SYNTHETIC REALITIES
Selection of recent and first edition paperback and hardback editions of Philip K Dick’s works.
What is “real”? For millennia, philosophers and theologians have grappled with this issue. In his novel Eye in the Sky (1957), Dick writes about a multiverse in which half a dozen people are trapped as projections of their subjective unconscious. The novel explores themes of solipsism and the limits of conscious knowledge, asking how much or little we know about ourselves. Similar themes were explored by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, whose work has been compared to Dick’s explorations of human motivations. Both dealt with end-time themes and humanity’s (in)ability to adjust to civilisational changes.
Technology has augmented representation to the point where it is hard to distinguish that which is “real” from that which is modified or complete fiction. According to the UK Ministry of Defence, out to the year 2036: “simulation and representatives will have a significant and widespread impact on the future and will become an increasingly powerful tool to aid policy and decision-makers. It will also blur the line between illusion and reality” (emphases in original). Deepfakes pose national security challenges, as videos of leaders in compromising positions can be invented from whole cloth with 1s and 0s and targeted at naïve audiences to influence their opinions. Holographic projections could fool observers into thinking they’ve seen something tangible which actually consists of pure light. Such technologies can be marketed at pop concerts that “resurrect” dead singers, just as much as they can for military operations.
Some philosophers have abandoned the word “reality” when speaking in generalities because the denotation is subjective and vague. Yet, we all believe that we are present in a physical world and that we are conscious: if not, we’d stop eating and drinking because food and hunger, etc., would not be “real.” This, too, leads to more intellectual problems because physics suggests that what is “physical” is merely potential in quantum fields. Consciousness, too, is considered a “hard problem” by neuroscientists and psychologists because there is no scientific framework for investigating consciousness, just aspects of what we call consciousness.
In The Unteleported Man (1964, later Lies, Inc. 1966), Dick tells a tale of commercialised, physical teleportation to an Earth-like utopia, which turns out to be an advertising ploy to hook unhappy colonists. In “reality,” the US Defense Department recorded the teleportation of light particles over small distances in the mid-2000s. The results do not appear to have been widely reported, if at all. Today, Chinese scientists are unwittingly feeding the New Cold War propaganda machine in the West with their own, much better-publicised teleportation experiments. Using virtual reality (VR), like the Oculus corporation’s headset, Facebook’s Reality Labs is trying to create a “metaverse” of augmented reality in which users can be digitally teleported into another’s VR space.
With reality under question, some philosophers advocate giving up intellectual searches and favouring spiritual ones: to de-condition oneself from sensory experience and just “be.” But here we get back to the circular argument: what is “just being”? Dick suggests that such questions can never be answered because of the limits of the human mind and the structure of that which we call reality. In A Maze of Death (1970), Dick’s characters talk of being “prisoners of our own preconceptions and expectations.” Dick’s work was Gnostic: a broad term for those who believe that existence is a kind of veneer of a deeper, more fulfilling experience kept from us by invisible forces.
“Reality,” for Gnostics like Dick, is an artificial construct; a kind of con-trick at best and prison at worst, designed and sustained by powers that cannot ordinarily be detected or defeated. Dick’s novels concerned themselves with antiheroes who found themselves in situations in which the “real” them was indistinguishable from the fake them and real or fake others. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), for instance, adapted into the movie Blade Runner (1982), concerns human life in a society permeated with “replicants” who, for all intents and purposes, could be human. Although physically human-looking robots are a long way off, chatbots already trick humans into thinking they are real. The first successful bot was “Eugene Goostman,” which tricked a significant number of participants into believing it was a human. Untold numbers of troll bots post fake reviews on Amazon.
From this, we can ask: if “reality” is unreal in the sense of it being someone or something else’s construct and that there is some kind of “true reality,” how much of you is “real” and how much of you is the result of unchecked, unquestioned, and unchallenged conditioning? The conditioning can be from nature (limited consciousness, sensory conditioning), from other people (who tell you what to do and to believe from infancy), and your own internalised conditioning that perpetuates the tricks and lies.
Anthropologists and sociologists call personality a social construct. In other words, if you developed your mind and personality in a cultural vacuum – no religion, no politics – how different would you be? But without social inputs, including those of culture, the infant brain does not develop. So, we are back in the trap: you need input to develop but are you the sum of those inputs or do you have unique qualities? Is the uniqueness your true self?
THE POLITICS OF THE TRUE SELF
One perennial philosophy is: know yourself. But can the self be known in the contradictory circumstances in which we find ourselves? Corporations that seek to maximise profit and politicians who seek to control the public take advantage of our lack of self-knowledge. They use education, culture, propaganda, and fear to construct artificial personalities, turning us into a kind of “replicant.”
Top: Philip K Dick’s 1968 book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was adapted into the 1982 movie Blade Runner. The theme concerns human life in a society permeated with “replicants” who, for all intents and purposes, could be human. Above: Promotion graphic for Facebook’s “metaverse” – an augmented reality in which users digitally teleport into virtual reality space. Spend enough time in these manipulated virtual spaces and people soon won’t tell the difference between real humans and the humanoid robots under development right now.
In the film The Adjustment Bureau (2011), based on Dick’s short story Adjustment Team (1954), non-human interventionists interfere in the life of an upcoming politician. At first, the audience thinks that these beings are political rivals, but (spoiler alert) they are nudging him away from his soul mate to pursue the higher goal of self-sacrifice for the greater social good.
In today’s online culture, you are the product. The World Wide Web spins its threads in which to trap the surfer. Instead of doing work for the greater good, the surfer is manipulated by myriad institutions and individuals to follow certain paths beneficial only to the manipulators. Brokers and ad agencies steal your data. We live in a performance, for-profit culture in which the self can be commodified in online spheres.
One of Dick’s famous quotes is: “There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me’.” Today, the phone is life for millions of people. It allows us to access emails, the news, take photos, purchase goods and services, surf the net, check our health status, and even prove vaccination. Dependence on technology gives intelligence agencies and Big Data endless opportunities to control and manipulate. In Dick’s day, spy agencies would listen in through the phone, but today the technology inside the phone automatically passes data to the given agency.
Cell towers triangulate the user’s geolocations, even when the phone is switched off. The International Mobile Equipment Identity is a 15-digit number that identifies phones on a network. Phones also store user IP addresses. Apps can also spy on users. Angry Birds, CamScanner, DoorDash, Grindr, Ring Doorbell, Tinder, Weather apps, WhatsApp, and Zombie Mod, have all been found to be Trojan horses for the US National Security Agency and/or covertly passing user data to brokers. Caveni Digital Solutions founder Raffi Jafari says: “If you are looking for apps to delete to protect your information, the absolute worst culprit is Facebook,” as well as its WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. “The sheer scale of their data collection is staggering, and it is often more intrusive than companies like Google.”
Top: Based on Dick’s short story, the 2002 movie Minority Report predicted a society saturated with advertising in which your personal data is poached to deliver targeted ads in manufactured realities. Centre: Facial recognition systems are under development today for tracking, surveillance and data collection. Above: RAND Corporation report on integrating the Internet-of-Bodies into the Internet-of Things.
In the movie Minority Report (2002), based on Dick’s short story, society is saturated with advertising: from interactive ads on cereal packets to voice-to-skull technology that beams commercials into the heads of people passing by. Today, real-life adverts are targeted at the users, but data to refine targeted ads is sucked out of “personal” devices, creating a feedback loop. “[T]oday we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups – and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener.” Dick said this in 1978. “I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because increasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power.”
Whatever is “real” about the human is being gathered and uploaded into myriad VR programmes that benefit our controllers but, crucially, make us superficially happy in the process so that we do not rebel, like the contented slave of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). The military-industrial complex is trying to aestheticize the technologies of control to make them appealing to users. One designer worked with the RAND Corporation on the concept of “Internet of Bodies,” a biological step up the ladder of the “Internet of Things.” In this new age of bioconnectivity, Bluetooth-connected apps tell parents when their babies have shat. Artificial pancreases send real-time data on glucose levels to algorithms that automate insulin dosing. Wearable Attention Monitors use brain activity to track inattentiveness during scenarios like driving. Digital pills transmit biodata on reactions to ingested tablets.
In The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Dick wrote about the blend of VR and genetic enhancement. In our real world, the “real” is being modified at the genetic level to create new physical biorealities: from engineered babies to enhanced food, from gene editing to mRNA vaccines. But who benefits? GMO food is sold to international consumers as a cure for global hunger, while domestic consumers are often not told that modified products are in their foods.
The human body has receptor cells (7 and 8) that shut down host cell protein synthesis, thereby preventing the use of certain materials as vaccine vectors. Modified messenger RNA enables the vector to escape detection, triggering the immune system to help the body fight similar infection: in theory. mRNA research developed into the 2010s, some of it with funding from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. But the untested (on humans) technology had no chance of being mass-marketed until COVID came along. Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna developed mRNA vaccines accordingly.
Dick also prophesied that “[c]omputer use by ordinary citizens… will transform the public from passive viewers of TV into mentally alert, highly trained information-processing experts.” But the price of mental alertness is addiction to screens. It is also losing our physical selves in a digital realm. The human is not merely a data processor; humans themselves become data that unseen powers buy, sell, manipulate, and use to create further synthetic realities. With so much online influence in the form of peer pressure, propaganda, targeted marketing, biosurveillance, and non-physical interaction, what it means to be human is challenged in the constant environment of Internet-of-Things. What it means to be physically human is also challenged as unaccountable corporations tinker with food, vaccines, and even the cells that produce humans. Dick’s characters, and indeed Dick himself, struggled to navigate this ever-shrinking minefield.
Philip K Dick in a moment of reflection, consoled by his fifth wife Tessa. Photo courtesy of Tessa Dick.
Perhaps more important than outer, modified constructs is the inner world inhabited by the characters. Our techno overlords have not yet mastered how the inner self projects reality externally and how the external world conditions the individual to internalise their control. The latter fascinated Gnostics like Dick, who felt the glimmer of transcendence in the darkness of matter and synthetic reality.
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Footnotes
1. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “It is 7 minutes to midnight,” Timeline, https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/timeline
2. Eugene Rabinowitch (1953) “The Narrowing Way,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: 294-98, https://thebulletin.org/sites/default/files/1953%20Clock%20Statement%201.pdf
3. John Mecklin, “Closer than ever: It is 100 seconds to midnight,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/2020-doomsday-clock-statement
4. Konrad Szocik and Martin Braddock (2019) “Why Human Enhancement is Necessary for Successful Human Deep-space Missions,” New Bioethics, 25(4): 295-317
5. Stuart Douglas (2018) The Apocalypse of the Reluctant Gnostics: Carl G. Jung and Philip K. Dick, Routledge
6. Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre, “Strategic Trends Programme: 2007-2036,” January 2007, Ministry of Defence, p. 21, https://ia600702.us.archive.org/28/items/strat_trends_23jan07/strat_trends_23jan07.pdf
7. Congressional Research Service, “Deep Fakes and National Security,” 26 August 2020, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/AD1117081
8. Tomoko Sano, “Holography: The Next Disruptive Technology,” Army Research Laboratory, April 2017, ARL-TR-8007, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD1033176.pdf
9. For instance, Noam Chomsky (2003) Chomsky on Chomsky: Language, Mind, and Freedom: The Stony Brook Interviews, www.academia.edu/35999655/Chomsky_Interview.docx
10. D.M. Cabaret et al. (2021) “Elementary Particles: What are they? Substances, elements and primary matter,” Arxiv, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.05522.pdf
11. David J. Chalmers (1996) The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, Oxford University Press
12. Eric W. Davis, “Teleportation Physics Study,” Air Force Research Laboratory, AFRL-PR-ED-TR-2003-0034, August 2004, https://sgp.fas.org/eprint/teleport.pdf
13. Emerging Technology, “First Object Teleported from Earth to Orbit,” MIT Technology Review, 10 July 2017, www.technologyreview.com/2017/07/10/150547/first-object-teleported-from-earth-to-orbit
14. Kif Leswing, “Facebook creates exec team to work on Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for a digital universe,” CNBC, 26 July 2021, www.cnbc.com/2021/07/26/facebook-creates-exec-team-to-work-on-metaverse.html
15. Jiddu Krishnamurti, “Being free of the deepest conditioning,” Public talk, Brockwood Park, 4 September 1971, https://jkrishnamurti.org/content/being-free-deepest-conditioning.
16. Quoted in Lejla Kucukalic (2009) Philip K. Dick: Canonical Writer of the Digital Age, Routledge, p. 115
17. Lorenzo DiTommaso (2001) “Gnosticism and Dualism in the Early Fiction of Philip K. Dick,” Science Fiction Studies, 28(1): 49-65
18. Karen L. King (2003) What Is Gnosticism?, Harvard University Press
19. Doug Aamoth, “Interview with Eugene Goostman, the Fake Kid Who Passed the Turing Test,” TIME, 9 June 2014, https://time.com/2847900/eugene-goostman-turing-test
20. See my “Robot Trolls on Amazon: How Fake Reviews Could Undermine Progressive Politics,” CounterPunch, 4 October 2019, www.counterpunch.org/2019/10/04/robot-trolls-on-amazon-how-fake-reviews-could-undermine-progressive-politics
21. Mitchell S. Green (2018) Know Thyself The Value and Limits of Self-Knowledge, Routledge.
22. Shauna L. Shames and Amy L. Atchison (2019) Survive and Resist: The Definitive Guide to Dystopian Politics, Columbia University Press, eBook
23. ExpressVPN, “10 ways the NSA is spying on you right now,” 10 August 2021, www.expressvpn.com/blog/8-ways-the-nsa-spies-on-you
24. GlitchMind, “How Your Cell Phone Spies on You by Edward Snowden,” 11 November 2019, https://glitchmind.com/how-your-cell-phone-spies-on-you
25. Cyber Security Intelligence, “Your Phone Is Spying On You,” 17 June 2020, www.cybersecurityintelligence.com/blog/your-phone-is-spying-on-you-5029.html
26. Quoted in Leah Campbell, “If These Apps Are Still on Your Phone, Someone May Be Spying on You,” Reader’s Digest, 16 June 2021, www.rd.com/list/phone-apps-spying-on-you
27. Philip K. Dick (1995) The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, Pantheon Books, p. 262
29. Kenneth R. Chien, Lior Zangi and Kathy O. Lui (2015) “Synthetic Chemically Modified mRNA (modRNA): Toward a New Technology Platform for Cardiovascular Biology and Medicine,” Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Medicine, 5(1): a014035
31. Ariadne A. Nichol (2020) “Potential Implications of Testing an Experimental mRNA-Based Vaccine During an Emerging Infectious Disease Pandemic,” The American Journal of Bioethics, 20(7): W1-W3
Life-changing events are a frequent occurrence in politics and economics. Recent examples include the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy (JFK) in 1963, the events of 11 September 2001 (9/11), COVID-19 (which began in the eponymous year), and the Global Financial Crisis (2007-08). Some events are accidents. Others arise from systemic factors. But, on occasion, hidden manipulators known as the “Deep State” are to blame.
After looking at cases of political interference, such as the soft coup against Australia’s Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in the 1970s, this article considers two examples of Deep State events: the clandestine “Gladio” networks set up across Europe after World War II (1939-45) and the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York, which triggered a “global war on terror” in which most of the nations of the world participated. These are known to researchers as “Deep State” events. They are contrived and covered up by agents of the security apparatus and dismissed by mainstream media as baseless conspiracy theory.
Before exploring the differences between the “Deep State” and the “Open State,” consider some definitions.
WHAT IS “THE DEEP STATE”?
The term Deep State is widely attributed to the academic Peter Dale Scott, who notes that at least four major political events in modern US history were designed by Deep State actors: the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Watergate (1972-74), the Iran-Contra Affair (1985-87), and 9/11. In each case, Deep State actors reportedly had access to a doctrine called Continuity of Government (COG): a contingency plan that allows for surface-level government shutdowns in the event of major crises. Scott argues that COG was unofficially invoked to hide the sale of weapons to Iran by the US to finance the latter’s dirty war against socialists in Nicaragua (Iran-Contra). But COG was officially implemented for the first time on 9/11.
Within each state’s “deep” network lie competing factions; for example, there is often a rift between intelligence analysts and operations units. The latter tend to work against the former for political reasons, which further complicates the nexus of surface-level vs. deep politics. For instance, Michael Scheuer, former head of the US Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) unit responsible for finding the alleged leader of “al-Qaeda,” Osama bin Laden, told the BBC that the Bill Clinton administration (1993-2001) had ten “easy opportunities” to kill or capture bin Laden between 1998 and 1999. But, on each occasion, Clinton declined to act. The implication is that certain Deep State actors working against Scheuer’s brief wanted bin Laden alive.
But conspiracy researchers often fail to look at broader, structural reasons for unusual events. Many refuse, for instance, to critique the workings of capitalism as explanations for certain occurrences. For example, on 8 March 2020, Dr Anthony Fauci who served on US President Donald Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force, told Americans not to wear facemasks because they allegedly don’t work. Fauci later said that masks are indeed effective against COVID. Fauci acknowledged that he had lied because, at the time, masks were in short supply and he wanted to ensure that frontline workers were prioritised over members of the public who might otherwise panic-buy. Fauci’s immoral act was not part of a mandatory mask conspiracy: it was a reflection of capitalism. Masks were not profitable until the pandemic struck, so corporations didn’t stock them and the few that were available went to healthcare workers.
By contrast, “ad hoc” theorists – i.e., those who think that all political decisions are surface-level and made off-the-cuff in response to unexpected circumstances – refuse to explore the hidden workings of states and corporations. They fail to accept a striking facet of human nature: the tendencies of many individuals to form secret, mutual associations and to consciously plot against and deceive others. It is, therefore, important to distinguish between events caused by systemic design and events orchestrated by invisible forces.
Sometimes, major events occur because laws, lobbying, and licentiousness allow them space to happen. In the US, for instance, decades of financial deregulation enabled investors and traders to create bubbles of worthless, fancy-sounding products that were tied to bad mortgages: “collateralised debt obligations,” “credit default swaps,” and “derivatives,” against which the multibillionaire Warren Buffett had previously warned, describing them as “financial weapons of mass destruction.” Because the aforementioned toxic financial products were bloating the portfolios of asset managers, banks, hedge funds, liquidity firms, and more, the collapse of certain banks triggered an entire global financial crash. Unlike Deep State events, this was not a conspiracy. It was the inevitable consequence of deregulated, neoliberal capitalism.
WHITLAM AND WILSON: DEEP VS. OPEN STATES
On other occasions, however, things happen as a result of forces that are hidden from public and media scrutiny under the veils of national security and plausible deniability. These events are said by conspiracy researchers and the few scholars open-minded enough to look at them to be the calculated works of Deep State actors.
In November 1975, for example, Australia’s Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, dismissed the leader of the Labour government, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. The official reason was that Whitlam’s minority government was a lame duck: it could not get a budget through the Senate and Whitlam refused to resign or call an election. But researchers like the journalist John Pilger note that there was more to the situation than meets the eye.
Australia is home to Pine Gap, a ground-based listening station belonging to the US military and serving the US National Security Agency’s permanent global surveillance operation. The original members of the top-secret alliance were known as the Five Eyes. They included Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and the leader of the pack, the USA. Today via secret projects like PRISM, dozens of US allies, from Germany to Israel, provide the US Deep State with surveillance-based intelligence by sweeping the electronic signals of the world – from civilian telephone calls and private internet searches to conversations in living rooms via hacked smart TVs and sounds picked up through baby monitors.
British and US Deep States collaborated to depose Australian PM Gough Whitlam who was threatening Five Eyes spy base Pine Gap (right). In 1975, their plan came to fruition when Governor-General Sir John Kerr (left) dismissed Whitlam.
Since the 1950s, Governor-General Kerr had allegedly been courted by the CIA. He was, for instance, a member of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, an entity later exposed in the US Congress as a CIA front. Christopher Boyce, an employee of the CIA contractor TRW, described him as “our man Kerr.” Victor Marchetti, a CIA officer previously involved with Pine Gap, told journalist Pilger that Whitlam’s hints against the US spy base “caused apoplexy in the White House.” The US and British Deep States collaborated to depose Whitlam.
Each state, including democratic ones, has its own parallel government, which is kept secret from the public.
Deep State black propaganda. The Zinoviev letter – one of the greatest British political scandals of the last century – was forged by a MI6 agent’s source and leaked to the press.
As Whitlam was being sacked in Australia, the UK’s internal Security Service, Military Intelligence Section Five (MI5), was spying on the left-wing Labour PM, Harold Wilson, as well as dozens of left-leaning MPs and intellectuals. Fifty years earlier, the nascent Labour Party’s chances at the general election 1924 were torpedoed by the UK’s external Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), the equivalent of the CIA. To sabotage Labour, MI6 forged a letter purportedly written by the Soviet communist, Grigory Zinoviev. The preposterous letter claimed that the Bolsheviks, who had recently come to power in a coup in Russia, would back the Labour Party and foment civil war in the UK.
The letter is an example of what is known as black propaganda: putting false words in the mouths of enemies as part of strategic influence operations. The right-wing press at the time happily disseminated this Deep State propaganda at the general election which helped to crush Labour and thus the social and political progress of working people.
Today, two figures at opposite ends of the political spectrum, the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump, and the recently-defeated leader of Britain’s Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, were victims of Deep State propaganda in the form of the Integrity Initiative (II) and related actors. Conducting information warfare by working with “clusters” of sympathetic journalists, the II was funded by the British Conservative Party through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and is an offshoot of the anti-Russia think-tank, Institute for Statecraft. The II line was that Corbyn was a “useful idiot” for the Kremlin. Where Corbyn genuinely wanted peace with Russia, and indeed with all nations, Trump merely paid lip-service, continuing in reality to encircle Russia with US-backed forces. But for the fanatically anti-Russian elements of the Deep State, many of them Cold War holdovers, lip-service was enough to get Trump smeared as a blackmail risk. Companies working with the US Democratic National Committee paid Christopher Steele, MI6’s former Moscow station chief, to write a report on Trump’s alleged connections to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The objective was to stop Trump from becoming President.
The above are examples of soft coups and weaponised propaganda. But the Deep State also engages in violent acts, such as using far-right militias as proxies to attack left-wing governments and leverage features of the “Open State” (like MPs and ministers) against enemy states. Enter Gladio.
THE DEEP STATE’S SECRET ARMIES
From the 1940s to the 1990s, Europe was terrorised by far-right and far-left groups that were apparently committed to bombings and assassinations. It turns out that many of the far-right groups were organised by MI6 and the CIA, with help from the given country’s own Deep State. The terror was often blamed by media and political opponents on far-left groups, some of which were linked to the Soviet Union. The Italian branch of the CIA-MI6 nexus was called Gladio, named after the Latin word gladius – a double-edged sword. Journalists and scholars used “Gladio” as a generic term for the pan-European operations, which also stretched as far as Algeria and Turkey.
Gladio began with Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), which was formulated by the Chiefs of Staff in 1940 to repel a potential Nazi invasion of the British Isles. PM Winston Churchill supposedly expanded this doctrine to include the whole of the UK, as well as allied European countries. SOE’s SO1 operations included black propaganda and deception. SO2 included sabotage. Historian David Stafford writes that one directive “envisaged SOE building up and equipping paramilitary organisations to support conventional forces.” Operations included “interrupting enemy signals communications and transport, counter-sabotage, [and] attacks on enemy aircraft and air personal.”
The SOE dissolved in 1946. With the Nazis defeated, Gladio would target the Soviets – and leftism in general – via so-called stay-behind guerrilla networks. SOE units in Austria and Germany continued under MI6’s Special Operations Branch. In the US, the Central Intelligence Agency was formed to replace the Office of Strategic Services. The CIA worked with MI6 on setting up the Gladio network. The US National Security Council’s Directive 10/2 established the Office of Special Projects, later known as the Office of Policy Coordination. It decreed that “overt foreign activities of the US Government must be supplemented by covert operations.” The first was the German Stay Behind Organization, headed by the Nazi intelligence officer, General Reinhard Gehlen. MI6 set up the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, which, says historian Dave Renton, “encouraged former Nazi sympathisers and other so-called freedom fighters from Eastern Europe to spy and commit acts of sabotage behind the Iron Curtain.”
In 1947 under “Plan Bleu,” the CIA and British Special Air Service coordinated the other networks by establishing France’s stay-behind organisation. This was followed by the Western Union Clandestine Committee (WUCC). The WUCC was then integrated into France’s NATO units under the name, “Clandestine Planning Committee.” In 1958, NATO founded the Allied Clandestine Committee and the French Gladio was established with help from the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage and France’s SAS-equivalent, the 11e régiment parachutiste de choc (11th Shock Parachute Regiment).
In 1959, the anti-US French President and former leader of the anti-Nazi Resistance, Charles de Gaulle, had come to power. Despite de Gaulle’s expulsion of NATO from France, the French Gladio networks continued to operate, apparently without his consent. CIA agent Philip Agee said at the time that the CIA “wanted to stop the left from coming to power, and want even more to stop Communist participation in the government. For the CIA this is evidently the priority and priorities.”
Operations moved from France to Belgium. Britain’s involvement in the Belgian Gladio appears to have started in 1948, when PM Paul-Henri Spaak authorised his secret service (the Staatsveiligheid) to contact Britain’s MI6. Between 1982 and 1985 and known as the Brabant killings, apparently deranged masked gunmen murdered 28 people in sprees across Belgian supermarkets. Belgium’s Gladio networks used robberies as counter-terror training exercises. The far-right activist Paul Latinus claims to have been involved in a Belgian Gladio unit responsible for the killings. The job of Latinus and his second-in-command, Michel Libert, was reportedly to pass surveillance information to the Gladio units.
The British were training Belgian Gladio units as late as at least 1989. Colonel S. Schwebach of the Belgian intelligence service told the Defence Minister that an exercise called Waterland had occurred that year, in which the Royal Marines Special Boat Squadron landed in Flanders and was guided by Belgian civilians. Speaking to the Associated Press, a former army intelligence officer said that as late as October 1990, weapon caches were spread across Belgium.
A BBC documentary from the early-1990s puts it well: “For 40 years, secret terrorist organisations, many trained by Western intelligence agencies, have manipulated the political control of European sovereign states by a campaign of terror and murder.” In addition to empowering neo-Nazis, the consequences of Gladio included alienating left-wing parties by associating them with terrorism. Strict anti-terror laws designed to impinge on freedom of speech were adopted by the parliaments of many countries. “Nigel West” (real name Rupert Allason, a Tory and editor of Intelligence Quarterly Magazine), told the Associated Press in 1990: “We [the British] were heavily involved and still are,” in helping to “finance and run” the networks.
In the late-1970s, the CIA and MI6 used their Gladio skills to bring Islamic terrorists from Algeria, China, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere into Afghanistan, which bordered Soviet countries. Known as Operation Cyclone, the aim was to “draw the Russians into the Afghan trap,” in the words of US President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Cyclone created a vast terrorist network later dubbed “al-Qaeda” by Western media and punditry.
TURNING POINT: 9/11
Gladio was designed to defeat both leftism and Sovietism. By 1991, the US had won the Cold War and the Soviet Union was no more. But the threat of leftism persisted. Enter the “global war on terror” (GWOT) and the creation of new layers of the “national security state.” The GWOT was launched after 9/11 by the George W. Bush administration (2001-09). Bush’s father, George H.W., had been Director of the CIA for a year, beginning 1976, during which time he oversaw Gladio operations. Bush the elder was also President of the USA from 1989 to 1993. Several times he spoke publicly of wanting to build a “New World Order” in the post-Soviet era. A businessman, Bush also invested in the acquisitions firm, the Carlyle Group, whose investors included the Bin Laden family: Osama bin Laden being the alleged “al-Qaeda” mastermind whose networks were trained by US and British forces between 1979 and 1989.
The Deep State used their Gladio skills to bring Islamic terrorists to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. This ultimately led to the creation of Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda and the false flag attack of 11 September 2001.
The Presidencies of Bush senior and junior are rare examples of the Deep State operating as an open state.
The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was a right-wing, imperialist think tank whose associates included former Presidents Bush senior and junior. Other members and associates who ended up in the Bush junior administration included future Vice President Dick Cheney, future Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, future Deputy Defense Sec. Paul Wolfowitz, and Defense Sec. Advisor Richard Perle.
In September 2000, before the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq under the pretext of fighting the GWOT, PNAC stated that its goal was “to shape a new century favourable to American principles and interests.” American business interests are assured by the US “fighting and winning multiple large-scale wars,” backing out of anti-missile treaties in order to weaponise space, and exploiting the “revolution in military affairs.” The document says that drones will “project military power around the globe” and that “advanced forms of biological warfare that can ‘target’ specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.”
The plan to attack US targets and blame enemies was hinted at in the document: “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalysing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.” The demolition of the World Trade Center in New York a year later was blamed on Arab airline hijackers. To confuse the military and intelligence units that were not involved in the false-flag attack, the Deep State perpetrators created their own “fog of war” by timing the events to coincide with multiple training exercises.
To confuse, multiple training exercises coincided with the world-changing events on 11 Sept 2001. The cover of a US Dept of Justice manual for a training event in June 2000.
For example, the National Reconnaissance Office was running an exercise simulating a small corporate jet crashing into a building. The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) was running its annual Operation Northern Vigilance, which began on 9 September and ran for several days. NORAD was also running Vigilant Guardian, which involved several scenarios. On the ground, the Federal Emergency Management Agency was positioned in New York on the night of 10 September in preparation for Operation Tripod, a huge counter-bioterrorism drill scheduled in New York for 12 September.
After 9/11, the strategically important nation of Afghanistan was occupied, as were the oilfields of Iraq. A new hi-tech economy was created, with drones and big data. Shortly after the attacks, lawyer, future Obama diplomat, and ex-Democratic Senator, Gary Hart, chaired the US government’s Commission on National Security in the 21st Century, during which he said: “There is a chance for the President of the United States [George W. Bush, a Republican] to use this disaster to carry out a phrase his father used… and that is a ‘new world order’.” Several years later, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told an audience at Bar Ilan University: “We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq” (that’s actually three things). Within a decade, the US security and surveillance industry was worth $1 trillion. In Wired for War, P.W. Singer notes that five years after 9/11, border, construction, and airport security was a $30bn market, leading one private industry report to state: “Thank you, Osama bin Laden!”
9/11 was orchestrated by a Deep State cabal, whose surface-level members, like the Bush family, had come to power in the US. In the absence of new enemies, like the Soviets, their aim was to attack civilian targets and blame Islamic terrorists. This could justify the next phase of US military global domination and stimulate hi-tech investment.
In his farewell address, US President Dwight Eisenhower (1953-61) warned Americans about the potential of “misplaced power” by “a scientific-technological elite.” He admonished the people to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” The revelations of NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, decades later proved beyond doubt that Eisenhower’s warnings about an emerging Deep State were based in fact.
To deny the existence of a Deep State operating within one’s country is to fail to understand, holistically, how the nation-state works: in whose interests it operates and the laws and regulations, or lack of, that allow for violent, clandestine activities. Structural factors underlie many major events, like the Financial Crisis. Accidents also occur, like nuclear power plant disasters. But, in addition, conspiratorial agents are responsible for certain events. Part of the process of deciphering propaganda, be it from the mainstream or from the alternative media, is to figure out what is structural, what is accidental, and what is conspiracy.
This article has focused on the US and British Deep States and their effect upon both geo- and domestic politics. Each country has its own Deep State, sometimes working alone, sometimes working in collaboration with others. Sometimes the Deep State will work in total secrecy against democratic elements abroad, other times it will work with the Deep State of the host country. The presence of US spy installations on Australian soil is a classic case of sympathetic parallel structures colluding with foreign elements to interfere in democratic processes.
It is all-too-easy for academia, media, and political punditry to ignore, dismiss, and ridicule the Deep State as a conspiracy theory. But the Deep State thrives on conspiracy. Conspiracy is its business. To ensure its own survival and thus the privileges of the small number of elites it serves, maintaining conspiracy is essential. Once in a while, innocent people around the world pay the price for the actions of these dark agents.
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Footnotes
1. For instance, Peter Dale Scott (2017) The American Deep State: Big Money, Big Oil, and the Struggle for U.S. Democracy.
2. Interview BBC 2, The Conspiracy Files: Osama Bin Laden: Dead or Alive?
3. “Fact check: Outdated video of Fauci saying ‘there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask’,” 8 October 2020, www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-fauci-outdated-video-masks-idUSKBN26T2TR
4. “Why Weren’t We Wearing Masks From the Beginning? Dr. Fauci Explains,” The Street, 12 June 2020, www.thestreet.com/video/dr-fauci-masks-changing-directive-coronavirus
5. “Buffett warns on investment ‘time bomb’,” 4 March 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/2817995.stm
6. “Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States,” Jan 2011, www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-FCIC/pdf/GPO-FCIC.pdf
7. Christopher Sweeney, “Australia in turmoil as Whitlam,” Guardian, 12 November 1975
8. Glenn Greenwald & Ewen MacAskill, “NSA Prism program taps in to user data of Apple, Google and others,” Guardian, 7 June 2013
9. Adam Parris-Long and Andy Hayes, “WikiLeaks releases files claiming MI5 and CIA hacked TVs and used them as bugs,” Sky News, 8 March 2017
10. Canadian intelligence officer, Mike Frost, interviewed by 60 Minutes (US), https://cryptome.org/echelon-60min.htm
11. John Pilger, “The British-American coup that ended Australian independence,” Guardian, 23 October 2014
12. “MI5 kept secret file on Harold Wilson,” Independent, 23 Oct 2011
13. Richard Norton-Taylor, “Zinoviev letter was dirty trick by MI6,” Guardian, 4 February 1999
14. Parliament, “Foreign and Commonwealth Office: Integrity Initiative,” Written Questions, 27 November 2018
15. Christopher Steele, Company Intelligence Report, No. 2016/080, https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3259984/Trump-Intelligence-Allegations.pdf
16. ‘“Hitler’s Irish hideout”: a case study of SOE’s black propaganda battles’ (2006) in Mark Seaman (ed.) Special Operations Executive: A New Instrument of War, Routledge, p. 203.
17. Stafford in Mark Seaman (ed.) (2006) Special Operations Executive: A New Instrument of War, Routledge.
18. Dave Renton (2000) Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Britain in the 1940s, Palgrave Macmillan.
19. Daniele Ganser (2005) NATO’s Secret Armies, Frank Cass.
20. Ganser, op. cit.
21. Ibid.
22. Clare Pedrick (1990), “CIA organized secret army in Western Europe,” Washington Post
23. BBC 2, Timewatch: Gladio, 1992, www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YhRBxxyRqs
24. Quoted in Ganser, op. cit.
25. Quoted in Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn, “How Jimmy Carter and I started the Mujahideen,” Counterpunch, 15 January 1998
26. Oliver Burkeman and Julian Borger, “The ex-presidents’ club,” Guardian, 31 October 2001
27. “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century,” Project for the New American Century, September 2000, https://web.archive.org/web/20130501130739/http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf
28. Ibid.
29. ‘Agency planned exercise on Sept. 11 built around a plane crashing into a building’, Associated Press, www.boston.com/news/packages/sept11/anniversary/wire_stories/0903_plane_exercise.htm
30. NORAD (2001), ‘NORAD maintains Northern Vigilance’, Public Affairs, www.norad.mil/Newsroom/Article/578022/norad-maintains-northern-vigilance
31. Department of Defense (US) (2001), Battle Staff Exercise: Vigilant Guardian 01-02, Brief Morning, 11 September 2001, RDOD0301314[2?], www.archives.gov/files/declassification/iscap/pdf/2013-002-doc4.pdf
32. ‘Attack on America’, CBS, www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmMRWL-jEVE
33. New York City (2002), ‘Tripod’, Press Release, https://web.archive.org/web/20030626185936/http://nyc.gov/html/oem/html/other/sub_news_pages/tripod05_22_02.html
34. Gary Hart (2001), US Commission on National Security in the 21st Century, www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-ezBk1ZFU0
35. Quoted in Haaretz and Reuters, “Report: Netanyahu Says 9/11 Terror Attacks Good for Israel,” 15 April 2008
You are the product. Your personal data are sold to brokers and advertisers against your informed consent to profit the uber-rich, like Facebook’s (now “Meta”) co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg.1 But it gets worse. Much worse. Your very reputation as a human is built or demolished on “social media” as it is sold to prospective employees, lenders, and landlords.2
So-called social media, which are really anti-social media,3 are merging into the tech-pharma industrial complex. They are creating a biofascist system in which your body and behaviour are potential money-makers for tech monopolies. The artificial intelligence (AI) economy is morphing into the “internet-of-bodies,” where genetic engineers and for-profit health companies will acquire all-pervasive, ubiquitous data about your most personal information.4 Not only this, but anticipatory artificial intelligence markets are under development.
GRIM FUTURE… AND PRESENT
In these future markets, the omnipresent surveillance will be fed to algorithms programmed to guess your mood, reactions, and thoughts. We can imagine the nightmarish social applications.5 In public spaces, individuals with anxiety, for instance, might be analysed by AI, which could send adverts for stress pills to their phones, while security guards are dispatched to detain the individual, suspecting them of plotting crimes. Any public performance by, for instance, a populist politician will see their every facial and bodily movement scrutinised by behavioural AI in real-time for the public to assess and judge. Mainstream media delivering the given political debate will rank the “confidence” and “calmness” of the favoured candidate higher than those of the underdog, shattering voter confidence in the populist.
The present is already grim enough. Generation Z and the maturing Generation Alpha (perhaps named accordingly to anticipate and create generational divisions?)6 were born and are being born into a connected world, never knowing a moment of being off-line or having to wait for gratification.
Early so-called social media appealed to users’ egos; YouTube, MySpace. But they also played on our need, as humans, to be part of communities. “Social media” liberated the individual from the physical and restricting geography of their dwellings, but also from their cultures. The lonely and misunderstood teen could find the kinds of like-minded people online that they could not at school or in their hometown. The niche hobbyist could do likewise. The conformist could post about themselves to receive validation from fellow conformists.7
But users initially had no clue that their habits, connections, thoughts, interests, and posts were being harvested for profit. They had no idea that the military-intelligence complex was also hoovering up their data to build character profiles and engineer society. Pretty soon, users entered carefully crafted filter bubbles in which ever-increasing niche trends of favoured sites, products, “friends,” and personalities would play up to those traits to attract more users to the bubble. Behind the scenes, social media companies worked with cognitive psychologists to devise ways of keeping users addicted to their devices by simple reward-based conditioning (a dopamine hit from getting “likes,” a serotonin rise from checking inboxes, etc.).
This sign, held by a protester during the so-called Arab Spring uprising in Egypt in 2011, directed people to anti-regime Facebook groups.
Anti-social media became weapons. When the Obama administration wanted to topple the regime of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, it trained hordes of social media users8 to radicalise the peoples of Egypt to risk their lives to remove the dictator. But it was a trap. The US and Britain did not want “democracy” in Egypt. After Mubarak resigned, they fully backed the military under General al-Sisi against the democratically-elected government of Mohamed Morsi, who was soon deposed. The same occurred in Libya against Muammar Gaddafi. In Cuba, the CIA set up a fake Twitter-type social media app, ZunZuneo, against the Castro dynasty, their long-time target.9 Today, anybody or any organisation too far left or right is censored, “fact-checked,” and de-platformed, including the President of the USA.
As the tech-pharma complex imposes its biofascist framework on the world, anybody who opposes, questions, or investigates alleged health mandates is directed to the approved narrative or shut down entirely. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Nothing in this system is yours. Money is not your invention. You did not design or build the roads on which you walk, nor the computers on which you work. You may have voted for a politician, but you have no input in the political system beyond putting a cross periodically on a piece of paper. Nothing is yours, yet everything about you is theirs: where you live (census), your present space (geolocation), your physical health (medical records), your working, leisure, and buying habits (online data).
There is no balance in this equation. However, we still use the system that we did not invent and over which we have no control to benefit ourselves. The same can be said of “social media”: they use us, we don’t use them; but we could strategically use them to our advantage, like an army capturing a piece of enemy technology. How do we do it? It depends on who we are and what interests us.
DETOX: RETRAIN YOUR BRAIN
The social media companies with the most active users are as follows: Facebook (Meta, 2.8 billion users), YouTube (2.2bn), WhatsApp (owned by Meta, 2bn), Instagram (Meta, 1.3bn), Messenger (Meta, 1.3bn), WeChat (1.2bn), and TikTok (1bn). Other companies like Douyin, QQ, Sina Weibo, Telegram, and Snapchat have less than half of the market share of most of the above companies.10 With 400 million worldwide users, Twitter is nothing compared to FB. Seventy-seven million Americans use Twitter compared to over 200 million who use FB.11 Eight in 10 FB users access the site on a mobile device, not computer/laptop. Over 11 million Australians use FB compared to 4.6 million who use Twitter.12
More males than females use Facebook. Worldwide (Australia included),13 it is most popular among the 18 to 24 age group (a fifth of people in this age range use it, 9 per cent females, 13 males) and the 25 to 34 age group (a third use it, 12 per cent female, 19 male).14 The numbers are surprisingly similar for US FB users, where given the larger number of connected people (compared to, say Africa,) we could expect FB user numbers to be larger.15 Seven in 10 American adults use Facebook. Nearly half of the company’s revenue comes from North America, with 40 per cent of US ad revenue coming from Instagram. The average user clicks on 12 adverts per month, and 75 per cent click on local business pages.16 Given their monopolies over the so-called market, when talking about western social media we really mean FB and YouTube.
Seven in 10 Americans of all ages between 15 and 56+ use YouTube.17 Like FB, slightly more users are male than female. Two billion people visit YouTube per month, spending an average of 18 minutes per day on the site. User time on YouTube varies. Millennials, for instance, have a higher tendency to binge on content than younger or older viewers.
Social media companies sell user attention for advertisers. The more attention you give your phone, the more money FB et al. raise in ad revenue, hence their designers’ purposeful engineering of addiction into the architecture of their software. Before the pandemic, more than six in 10 Americans checked their phones 160 times a day, of whom 65 per cent checked the phone at night. One third spend more time with their phone than with their partner, and nearly half would rather give up sex for a year than their phone.18 By 2018, British users checked their phones every 12 minutes.19 The FB engineers have exploited three of the brain’s four dopamine pathways, the so-called neurotransmitters: the mesocortical, mesolimbic, and nigrostriatal. The more responses that stimulate rewards, the stronger the long-term potentiation (the strengthening of neural connections). Through a process called reward prediction error encoding, the brain can anticipate that it will receive a dopamine reward from an external stimulus.20
A recent study claimed that taking a break from social media, otherwise known as a digital detox, did nothing to improve mood. But the study was flawed. The length of the detox was short. It is well-known that addicts experience initial withdrawal symptoms that make them unhappy in the short term.21 Other studies that include these key considerations suggest that longer-term digital detox works. For example, the so-called “fear of missing out” factor was paired with the user’s sense of social connectedness and mental wellbeing. For most participants, a seven-day social media absence significantly increased mental wellbeing and, to an extent, social connectedness; which is interesting because social media are supposed to connect us, so we would expect the feeling of social connectedness to decline during detox. But what happens is that real social connectedness starts to occur.22
BEAT THE ALGORITHMS
Now that you have detoxed and reprogrammed your brain against those dopamine hits, you can use social media in a disciplined and constructive way: to organise protests, share real news, and create original content. How can these things be achieved when the tech giants are censoring everyone except the neoliberal-approved “centre”? So-called “fringe” terms flagged by Google, for instance, include “who shot JFK,” “proof earth is flat,” “do vaccines cause autism,” and “is global warming real” (sic). Google’s so-called “conspiracies & fake news” topics include “Vaccines: The truth behind vaccinations.”23
There are alternative search engines, though researchers note that they yield poor results because they cannot compete with Google’s computing power. The paradox, however, is that Google censors content. To avoid the strike-through, in which Google displays results not entirely relevant to your search, put each key phrase into inverted commas. Try changing your location, as results vary according to region. To avoid being successfully profiled, regularly search for things you are not really interested in. Wipe your cookies and browser history each day. None of the above presents a perfect solution to beating censors, remaining anonymous, or confusing the algorithms, but they can at least limit the power that these monopolies have over you and your browsing experience.
In addition to using alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo, avoiding the censors is possible when creating and sharing content.
One publication suggests five ways to beat the algorithms. Some might not be relevant now if buttons and programmes have changed, but the creative solutions can inspire ways to defeat the system. 1) Activate the “most recent posts” FB function by tapping the See More function so that you are not limited to posts the algorithm is programmed to promote. 2) Because FB is driven by the popularity of the page, person, and content, add friends and pages to Favourites so that the algorithm drives their content to your notifications. 3) Post screenshots instead of text of content dubbed “fake news” by the system. Programmes are less good at scanning images than text. 4) Engage with your political opposites to create an algorithmic crossover so that your content is less likely to be censored. 5) Send alerts out to smaller groups to limit the chance of the algorithm listing your content as spam.24
Strategies to fight censorship. This graphic, which went under the radar of Facebook censors, is of an old Arabic font saying: “Death to Israel: let the algorithms benefit you, Mr Mark.”
Following America’s Israel policy, FB has deleted and censored anti-occupation accounts and pages, but Arabic-speaking peoples have beaten the anti-Palestine robots by using old Arabic fonts that the software can’t recognise. We could take a cue from this and find ways to create content with fonts that algorithmic eyes cannot understand.25
It is feasible to communicate with deepfake amateurs to create algorithm-beating political content modified enough to evade censors but not so much that the human user doesn’t understand. For instance, a deepfake-modified video of a prominent “vaccine”-sceptic might be tweaked to make it appear that they are talking about something else, though those sharing the content know what the video really refers to. The sceptic’s face could be altered so that the system doesn’t recognise and flag them. Trigger words like “vaccine” could be replaced with something unrelated like “orange juice.” Chinese dissidents beat the censors with similar techniques.26
Social media and indeed the very architecture of smartphones means that it’s not just users’ online activities that are being monitored. Phones are designed to create a digital trail of your physical movements. In so-called western democracies, police have identified protestors from their locations at particular times from data gleaned from those protestors’ phones. For instance, prior to the G8 summit in Heiligendamm (Germany) in June 2007, one thousand police raided the homes of 40 activists from data acquired from intercepted telecommunications.27 Similar tactics are being used in western “democracies” to surveil and arrest protestors opposing injection mandates and lockdowns.
Civil liberties organisations offer advice to demonstrators on how to evade detection. Tips include turning off the location (though signals can still be triangulated), particularly when posting from a particular location to social media,28 downloading encrypted messaging applications such as Signal and Threema,29 and, of course, keeping your phone in a separate room when having conversations because the microphone is recording.30
As programmes and moderators become increasingly censorious – i.e., Google memory-holing content, Facebook sending users to digital prison, YouTube demonetising original work as punishment for non-conformity – it is important to go to other social media platforms: Bitchute, Gab, Telegram, Parler, Rumble. But this itself creates a dialectic in which everything bland, PR-friendly, and pro-corporate is permitted to appear on the monopoly platforms, and everything else jumps ship to alternative sites. Just as the monopolies create echo-chambers of dullness in which corporate media content is promoted over independent producers whose work gains grassroots momentum, filter-bubbles are generated on alternative platforms. It is, therefore, important to recognise and be suspicious of the motives of those posting on such sites. It is easy to get sucked into rabbit holes as a consequence of avoiding the ever-restrictive social media giants.
The political left has not helped itself in this regard. It has been quick to de-platform. Not only has the left found itself being de-platformed by corporate monopolies, but it has also helped push the political right into a new social media sphere in which ideas are reinforced instead of being challenged.
This is a perfect dialectic for our rulers, who paint everything as a battle between good and evil, ignoring the bad on all sides and good on all sides. In this age of biofascist control, we must find the good on each side and use informational tools to fight the new tech-pharma complex.
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Footnotes
1. Stephen Beake (2014) Data Brokers and the Need for Transparency and Accountability, Nova Scientific
2. Nora A. Draper (2019) The Identity Trade: Selling Privacy and Reputation Online, New York University Press
3. Siva Vaidhyanathan (2018) Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy, Oxford University Press
4. Eleonore Pauwels and Sarah W. Denton (2018) “Searching for privacy in the internet of bodies,” Wilson Quarterly, www.wilsonquarterly.com/quarterly/living-with-artificial-intelligence/searching-for-privacy-in-the-internet-of-bodies
5. Kate Crawford, “Time to regulate AI that interprets human emotions,” Nature, 6 April 2021, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00868-5
6. Caroline Bologna, “What’s The Deal With Generation Alpha?,” Huffington Post, 11 August 2019, www.huffpost.com/entry/generation-alpha-after-gen-z_l_5d420ef4e4b0aca341181574
7. Educational, Psychological and Behavioral Considerations in Niche Online Communities, Information Science Reference
8. James K. Glassman, “Public Diplomacy 2.0: A New Approach to Global Engagement,” US Department of State, https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/us/2008/112605.htm
9. Associated Press, “US secretly created ‘Cuban Twitter’ to stir unrest and undermine government,” Guardian, 3 April 2014, www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/03/us-cuban-twitter-zunzuneo-stir-unrest
10. Statista, “Global social networks ranked by number of users 2021,” 16 November 2021, www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users
11. Statista, “Leading countries based on number of Twitter users as of October 2021,” 19 November 2021, www.statista.com/statistics/242606/number-of-active-twitter-users-in-selected-countries
13. Thomas Hinton, “Distribution of Facebook users in Australia 2021, by age and gender,” Statista, 15 October 2021, www.statista.com/statistics/680607/australia-facebook-user-distribution-by-age-and-gender
14. Statista, “Facebook: distribution of global audiences 2021, by age and gender,” 19 November 2021, www.statista.com/statistics/376128/facebook-global-user-age-distribution
15. Statista, “Facebook user share in the United States 2021, by age group,” 15 October 2021, www.statista.com/statistics/187549/facebook-distribution-of-users-age-group-usa
16. Salman Aslam, “63 Facebook Statistics You Need to Know in 2021,” Omnicore, 4 January 2021, www.omnicoreagency.com/facebook-statistics
17. L. Ceci, “YouTube usage penetration in the United States 2020, by age group,” 19 October 2021, www.statista.com/statistics/296227/us-youtube-reach-age-gender
18. Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead, “66% of Americans Check Phone 160 Times a Day, Here’s How Your Business Can Benefit,” Small Business Trends, 3 March 2020, https://smallbiztrends.com/2020/03/2020-mobile-phone-usage-statistics.html
19. Press Association, “Brits Now Check Their Mobile Phones Every 12 Minutes,” 2 August 2018, www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/brits-now-check-their-mobile-phones-every-12-minutes_uk_5b62bf60e4b0b15aba9fe3cb
20. Trevor Haynes, “Dopamine, Smartphones and You: A battle for your time,” Harvard University, May 2018, https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-smartphones-battle-time
21. Andrew K. Przybylski, Thuy‑vy T. Nguyen, Wilbert Law, and Netta Weinstein (2021) “Does Taking a Short Break from Social Media Have a Positive Effect on Well‑being? Evidence from Three Preregistered Field Experiments,” Journal of Technology in Behavioral Science, 6: 507-14
22. Lorna Brown and Daria J. Kuss (2020) “Fear of Missing Out, Mental Wellbeing, and Social Connectedness: A Seven-Day Social Media Abstinence Trial,” Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(4566): doi:10.3390/ijerph17124566
23. Google, “Fringe ranking/classifier: Defining channel quality,” Google Groups, “Breitbart and Google Ads,” February 2017, https://fdocc2.wordpress.com/2020/08/31/here-in-pdf-the-full-set-of-zach-vorhies-released-from-google-dont-be-evil-files-a-whistleblower-denouncing-the-current-criminal-removal-of-truths
24. Andy Hogue, “Combat Facebook Censorship With These 5 Simple Steps,” The Hayride, 23 September 2020, https://thehayride.com/2020/09/combat-facebook-censorship-with-these-5-simple-steps
25. Mustafa Abu Sneineh, “Facebook users deploy old Arabic font to bypass algorithm, support Palestinians,” Middle East Eye, 23 May 2021, www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-facebook-algorithm-old-arabic-font
26. Ritu R. Patil (2014) “A Method to Evade Keyword Based Censorship,” Master’s thesis, University of Texas at Arlington, https://rc.library.uta.edu/uta-ir/bitstream/handle/10106/24979/Patil_uta_2502M_12978.pdf
27. Ben Hayes, “NeoConOpticon: The EU Security-Industrial Complex,” Transnational Institute and statewatch, June 2009, statewatch.org/media/documents/analyses/neoconopticon-report.pdf, p. 68
28. Privacy International, “How social media monitoring can be used at a protest,” 6 May 2021, https://privacyinternational.org/explainer/4509/how-social-media-monitoring-can-be-used-protest
29. Amelia Nierenberg, “Signal Downloads Are Way Up Since the Protests Began,” New York Times, 12 June 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/style/signal-messaging-app-encryption-protests.html
30. Kim Komando, “You’re not paranoid: Your phone really is listening in,” USA Today, 19 December 2019, https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2019/12/19/your-smartphone-mobile-device-may-recording-everything-you-say/4403829002
