Dictator States Documentary Series

Inside North Korea's bubble in Japan

Art and Politics: This is what democracy looks like

In a quest to make sense of the political environment in the United States in 2017, lawyer and ACLU executive director Anthony D. Romero turned to a surprising place — a 14th-century fresco by Italian Renaissance master Ambrogio Lorenzetti. What could a 700-year-old painting possibly teach us about life today? Turns out, a lot. Romero explains all in a talk that's as striking as the painting itself.

Transcript

Capitalism, Manipulation, and Overprotected Children

Today I read an article called The Fragile Generation.

It's well-worth the read - but the idea presented in passing early in the text that economic problems may be blamed in part on [the results of overprotection of children] needs discussion. Yes it is a factor, but only as a symptom that contributes to the continuation of the illness.

When we raise kids unaccustomed to facing anything on their own, including risk, failure, and hurt feelings, our society and even our economy are threatened.

This thought sparked my imagination, and led me to ponder how economic problems and the problem of overprotection both stem from a common root. Clearly, the lack of regulation of capitalism occludes any other perceived contributor to economic problems. What's not so clear is how overprotection also stems from unregulated capitalism.

Capitalism and Economic Problems

All other factors in the precariousness of our economic situation are occluded by the problem of [lack of regulation of capitalism]. Though not its perceived purpose, the main effect of capitalism in its current form is to advance the flow of wealth upward. This is made evident by the increasing disparity of wealth distribution among the nation's (an, in fact, the world's) population.

In a functioning democracy regulation could be used to enforce both sustainability and social justice in the broadest sense of the terms, but despite surface appearances, the United States is not a functioning democracy. It is, rather, a plutocratic oligarchy in which politics has been made subordinate to the set of ideas, institutions, and entities that we refer to as "capitalism".

According to a Princeton study, public opinion has little or no influence on American politicians. If this is so, then the sole apparent influence over government regulation seems to be the lobbyists, who provide money to individual politicians' campaigns. The politicans who receive this money are well-aware that there will be no more of it if they fail to support the interests specified by the lobbyists.

The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.

This state of affairs renders the United States unable to implement laws that would protect against future misuse of the system by the powerful in their pursuits of great profit, despite the risk of additional economic crashes (not to mention a plethora of other undesirable events and conditions).

Overprotection of Children

Overprotection is an engineered trend (one of many) that has been instigated purposefully to bolster the phenomenon Jung called "the mass man". It's part of making people compliant, incapable of critical thinking (and so rebellion), and therefore dependent on "The State".

If Carl Gustav Jung could be said to have "believed in" a sacred principle, that principle would probably be the importance of the individual. Not only was individuation - his formula for wholeness - predicated upon the same etymological root, but in his later writings his strong emphasis on culture and society was inextricably bound to the concept of the individual. Jung's training as a physician and as a psychiatrist is reflected in his observations upon both the individual and society.

Concerned as he was about the psychological ramifications of "mass man in a mass society," Jung never lost sight of the fact that both the causal and curative agents of all social ills lay in the individual.

~ William Wilson Quinn

The history of capitalist manipulation of public thought is long and sordid. Edward Bernays used Sigmund Freud's psychology to profoundly change capitalism, which led to his huge wealth. The lesson hasn't been lost on those that followed; psychological manipulation is the backbone of the current power structure. I wish the Let Grow Foundation great success in their efforts to "see kids outside again", but I fear The State won't allow them much.

Conclusion

Capitalism as an institution understands that "both the causal and curative agents of all social ills lay in the individual", and has strong motive to prevent the individuation that would restrain it. A glance at the Forbes list of billionaires should convince anyone that money (and therefore power) is in the hands of capitalists who control the direction of society. This power (wealth) provides the opportunity and the means for manipulation of public perception and for control of government by the horribly unethical but perfectly legal method of "throwing money at it".

In many cases, the effect of "psychological manipulation" may be validly argued to be coincidental. For example, prolific publication of stories (both real and fictional) involving harm to children can make for gripping fiction or relevant news, as the case may be, and so constitutes a profitable niche for publication in various forms. Such pieces may be, regardless of manipulative consequences, argued to fall under First Ammendment protection along with Campaign Finance, the unregulated use of AI to target ads, and a variety of other potentually manipulative communication techniques currently in use.

In support of a functioning human society, we must consider the valid limits of Freedom of Speech and the consequences of exceeding those limits. The effects of some manipulators (regardless of intention) surely belong under the category of "Shouting Fire in a Crowded Theater", and the general welfare requires they be regulated in appropriate ways. This may be a legal path to curtailing such manipulation of individuals and government processes for the benefit of humanity.

References

• The Fragile Generation
• Shouting Fire in a Crowded Theater
• Carl Jung
• Edward Bernays
• Sigmund Freud
• The Century of the Self - Part 1: "Happiness Machines"
• The long Jung quote.
• William Wilson Quinn
• Forbes Billionaire List
• Princeton Study
• Tufekci, AI
• HyperNormalism BBC Documentary

Wealth Distribution References

• https://www.thenation.com/article/20-people-now-own-as-much-wealth-as-half-of-all-americans/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States
• https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/01/18/rich-people-own-much-money-half-world-report-says/y6az3Wtasd5TIf9Q6k3I4K/story.html
• https://www.thebalance.com/american-net-worth-by-state-metropolitan-4135839
• http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/02/the-costs-of-inequality-when-a-fair-shake-isnt/

Postscript

Given the above, we might take a second meaning from the following term, taken from the article:

Today many kids are raised like veal.

We're Building a Dystopia Just to Make People Click on Ads

We're building an artificial intelligence-powered dystopia, one click at a time, says techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci. In an eye-opening talk, she details how the same algorithms companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon use to get you to click on ads are also used to organize your access to political and social information. And the machines aren't even the real threat. What we need to understand is how the powerful might use AI to control us - and what we can do in response.

Outline:

1. Terminator AIs are a distant threat and 1984 is not the correct dystopia for the 21st century.
2. The present threat is not in what AI will do to us on its own, but in how it will be used by [the people who control AI] to manipulate us in extremely negative ways.
3. AI is a jump in category - it's "a whole different world". It's not just 'the next thing'. 
4. With prodigious potential come prodigious risks.
5. We "roll our eyes" at online ads, but "persuasion architecture" works. Huge collections of data allow AIs to very accurately guess who will respond to what kinds of persuasion.
6. The data is far to complex for humans to understand. Tufekci says "It's giant matrices with... maybe millions of rows and columns". (I'd expect significantly more than 2 dimensions).
7. "It's like we're not programming anymore, we're growing intelligence that we don't truly understand."
8. This only works with immense amounts of data. Deep surveillance on all of us is encouraged.
9. Ethics in targeting is an issue. "What if the system targets people who are bipolar and about to enter the manic phase?" Such people are prone to overspending and compulsive gambling. There's no way to determine whether this is the result of AI targeting.
10. A lot of this stuff is "off the shelf".
11. YouTube auto-play follows increasing order of extremism. "It's like you're never hard-core enough for YouTube.
12. With nobody minding the ethics of the store, these sites can profile people to find people susceptible to more extremism. It's cheap and easy to target any category.
13. Trump's campaign used Facebook to demobilize people, strictly targeted. "Dark Posts", privacy guaranteed.
14. Facebook - multiple election manipulation experiments proved workable; what if they decided to support a candidate?
15. "Little by little, public debate is becoming impossible," because the most-used systems for public debate only let you see what you already believe.

Conclusions:

1. We're building this structure of surveillance authoritarianism merely to get people to click on ads, but what if it gets worse? If authoritarianism is using overt fear to terrorize, we'll be scared, but we'll know it. We'll hate it, we'll resist it.
2. If the powers that be are quietly watching, judging and nudging, predicting and identifying "troublemakers", using personal individual weaknesses/vulnerabilities...
   ... if they're doing it at scale through our private screens so we don't know what others are seeing...
   ...That authoritarianism will envelope us like a spider's web, and we may not even know that we're in it.
3. The structure of the architecture is the same whether you're selling shoes or politics. The algorithms don't know the difference. 
4. Social media is great in many ways. It's not that people are maliciously and deliberately trying to wreck the world, but the structures and business models are still very dangerous. There's no simple solution.
5. Restructuring is needed. We have to face lack of transparency, the structural challenge of machine-learning capacity. These structures are organizing how we plan and function; are controlling what we can and can't do.
6. We have to mobilize our tech, creativity, and politics so we can build AI that supports human goals but is constrained by human values. 
7. We need a digital economy where our data and our attention is not for sale to the highest bidding authoritarian or demagogue!

We do want the prodigious potential of artificial intelligence and digital technology to blossom, but for that we must face this prodigious menace open eyed, and now.

For a more holistic view of this topic, see the Hypernormalization BBC Documentary.
Here are my notes/outline on that.

Hypernormalization BBC Documentary

There's always a balance, isn't there?
Here's a link to the YouTube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aLQPNPlK5M

My notes/outline appear below.

Opening Remarks

Extraordinary events continue to undermine the stability of our world. Nobody has a vision for a better/different future.

Those in control can't seem to deal with our problems: Over the past 40 years politicians, financiers, and tech utopians rather than face up to the real complexities of the world retreated... constructed a simpler version of the world in order to hang on to power.

People went along with this because the simplicity was reassuring?

System attackers (radicals, artists, counter-culture) failed; they became part of the trickery - they, too, had retreated into the make-believe world; their opposition has no effect; nothing changes.

Outside, forces are growing and beginning to pierce our fake world.

1975 - New York and Damascus

Two ideas were emerging about how to run the world without politics

1. New York city was on the verge of collapse.
2. Damascus, Syria - Henry Kissinger vs. Hafez al-Assad

New York

1. New York on the verge of collapse
2. 30 years of increasing debt (borrowed from banks to finance welfare and services)
3. Then the middle class fled the city
4. Banks continued lending; debt grew; banks stopped lending.
5. Banks took control of the city; President Ford refused to help.
6. 8/9 members of the committee to manage NYC Finances were bankers.
7. Financial Institutions took power from politicans and started to run society themselves. Enforced austerity. Fired teachers, police, and firemen.
8. Nobody opposed the bankers
9. The revolutionaries had retreated and shacked up in abandoned buildings doing fry-brained art.
10. Individualism. They didn't try to change it, they just experienced it. Everything was going to shit and they just watched.
11. Their art/music/self-expression tried to change what was in peoples' heads, but I guess they were too stoned or something.
12. By detatching themselves, they began to lose touch with the reality of power. "It was the mood of the era. The revolution was deferred indefinitely and, while we were dozing, the money crept in".
13. Trump. Saw a scheme to scam $$ from the state. Started buying up derelict buildings. Negotiated 160M tax breaks. Banks sprang with loans. Trump transformed NY into a city for the rich; made fortune off the situation; paid practically nothing.

Damascus, Syria

1. Damascus, Syria - Henry Kissinger vs. Hafez al-Assad
2. Using politics to change the world vs Run the world as a stable system.
3. Assad was ruthless. Killed/Imprisoned; had a vision to unite arab nations
4. Kissinger felt it was a threat. He was a creep; inconsiderate, tempermental; saw himself as a "hard realist"; thought history was a struggle for power. Saw the world as an interconnected system. Wanted to maintain a balance to prevent chaos - really, he helped cause the chaos we now live in
5. Kissenger thought strengthening the arab world would destabilize his balance of power; he betrayed Assad; broke the arab alliances. Egypt + Israel. Palastinians were ignored.
6. Kissenger's first thoughts on structural (global balance of power) Kind of ignored humanity.
7. Assad raged (controlled fury) about treachery; demons from below; retreated. Lost hope in his transformation of arab world; became brutal, vengeful.

1980s

1. Soviet dream had failed. No food. No "belief". No vision of future.
2. Technocrats pretended everything was OK. Everyone knew - could see - that their world had fallen apart; they pretended all was OK because what else could they do?
3. The "fakeness" was "Hypernormal".
4. SyFi - stalkers; the zone; Nothing is what it seems; reality changes minute-by-minute; hidden forces change the way you think and feel. Reality had become shifting and unstable. (Roadside picnic)

Reagan

1. Wanted to make the world moral. Fight evil. make the world a better place. "Into the hands of America, God has placed the destiny of an afflicted mankind." *BLARGHHHH*
2. ...but Reagan had to deal with Kissinger's mess... and didn't.
3. Instead, he used Ghadafi as a scapegoat.
4. Massacres. Christian/Lebanese slaughtered Palastinians. Israel let it happen.
5. Reagan sent Marines as neutral "peacekeeping force". Assad didn't believe a bit of it; ended up using suicide bombers.

Ayatollah Khomeini

1. Taught people that suicide was OK if you took enemies with you.
2. Took 10s of thousands of young boys from school to walk through mine fields so the army could pass through unharmed.
3. Assad took the lesson.
4. Oct 1993 - Marines killed by suicide bombers. 241 dead.
5. Regan mourned "the loss of those splendid young men," promised to respond, but instead turned and left. Assad thought he was hot for forcing the Americans to leave the middle-east.
6. Syria and Iran thought they could control it.

Mid-80s

1. Banks had risen. Banks were taking control of the nation, but in a hidden way.
2. Gibson: book about powerful information networks; Raw brutal corporate power.
3. Hippies tried to make a hippieish cyber space; an alternative reality; Acid-heads.
4. by 2000, computers were really making cyber-space worlds. ( This bit seems a bit fluffy to me; not sure these guys weren't still dropping acid )
5. Hackers thought so, too. Hacked the hippies and published stuff.
6. Hacked TRW, too (military computers, then big business); stole and publiched hippies' (barlow's) credit history.
7. Showed the emergence of "a new and growing power that was way beyond politics".

Reagan Again

1. He became desperate to show America struggled against evil.
2. Framed up Ghadafi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muammar_Gaddafi
3. He became a fake criminal mastermind; he liked it for the fame.
4. Ghadafi thought he was a revolutionary, fated to take on the west.
5. Third Universal Theory - Green Book - Nobody read it. He was crazy. Had no power/global influence.
6. Dec 1985 - Syria started suicide bombing in Europe.
7. Reagan blamed Ghadafi and Ghadafi took credit, despite that the Europeans knew it was really the Syrians. America insisted it was Ghadafi and pressed it. Ghadafi loved it - insisted it was him. Shot his mouth off all over the place.
8. Ghadafi pretended to be pretending NOT to be getting into missile development, WMDs. Journalists pushed the idea. Ghadafi became a "global supervillian" at the head of "a rogue state".
9. More terrorism in Europe; Reagan wanted to bomb Libya; analysts were being pressed to come up with evidence against Ghadafi. The Americans and Ghadafi were generating a false narrative; phony evidence.
10. Europe insisted it was Syria, but America was to scared to face Assad. Less support (arab, soviet) for Ghadafi. America attacked Libya - killed a bunch of men, women, children. Ghadafi basked in the supposed sympathy. American bombing was hugely inaccurate.
11. IT WAS ALL BULLSHIT.

UFO Craze

1. UFO theory vs Secret military technology theory.
2. Fueled wide-spread belief that governments would lie.

Perception Management

1. A bluring of fact and fiction.
2. 1980s Perception Management became a central part of the American government.
3. Tell dramatic stories that grabbed the imagination - middle-east, central america, etc... Distraction from intractable complexities of the real world.
4. How to manipulate people; reality is not important - just something that you "handle".

Soviet Empire Imploded

1. Nobody (politicians, think tank, journalists, academics) saw it coming.
2. Can't do anything about the world - it's too complicated.

Managed Outcomes

1. "The System" became [management of a post-political world]
2. Runaway world; Impossible to predict outcomes; Try to predict dangers and avoid risks.
3. Extra-political systems forming to predict and manage the world.
4. 1992 - Aladin; prediction tool, monitoring world, comparing to events in past; moves investments from dangerous areas;
5. Incredibly successful. Controls 15T assets (7% of world)
6. Prozac, Eliza; REPEAT BACK TO PEOPLE WHATEVER THEY'RE SAYING.
7. "Everybody is kind of brainwashing each other into being happy."

In an age of individualism, what made people feel secure was having themselves reflected back on them, just like in a mirror.

AI Changed Direction

1. We started creating systems that "reflected people", but on a gigantic scale; Intelligent agents;
2. Intelligent agents work by monitoring individuals, gathering vast ammounts of data about their past behavior, looking for patterns of correlation from which they could predict what they would want in the future.
3. It's a system that orders the world around "you"; Reassuring in an age of Anxious individualism, frightened of the future, like Eliza. Puts people in a "safe bubble", protected from complexities of the world.
4. Profitable applications;

A New System

1. A New System promised to keep world safe
2. Finance controls unpredictability of free market
3. IAs online predicted what people would want; how they would behave
4. Politics became part of a wider system that's managing the world.
5. Voice of the weak against the powerful was eroding; cracks forming around the edges of society.
6. Dangerous Flaw: In the real world, not everything can be predicted by reading data from the past.
7. ...boring story of trumps losses in las vegas...

Back to Assad - Dec. 1988

1. Pan Am plane bombed over Scotland; Evidence pointed to Syria.
2. Then there was a change and it was said to be Libya because America and Britain needed Asad as an ally in Gulf War.
3. Gadaffi became the scapegoat again.
4. Assad's terrorist power had betrayed him; Hamas caught on, and took it to civilians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas
5. Everyone went nuts, and the peace process was over; more and more violence.

In America, Focus on Future Dangers

1. Pessimism spread; from technocrat world and across the country.
2. Dark Forboding, spread through violent, horrific disaster movies. ("Dream Baby Dream" sequence)
3. 9/11
4. Bush and Blair blah-blahing about WMDs that didn't exist; They made yet another show about Ghadafi
5. "...and the line between reality and fiction became ever-more blurred."
6. Sept 2002: WMDs stolen from the 1996 movie "The Rock"; which, for technical reasons, no real nerve gas would be packaged like.
7. IT WAS ALL BULLSHIT.

2000 - Assad Died; Son took over.

1. He tried to bring back his dad's old tricks; It quickly got out of his control, of course.
2. Al-Qaeda formed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda
3. This made Bush and Blair look bad, so they made a show of turning Ghadafi "turn over a new leaf" and be a good guy.
4. Engineers of a Fake World; a huge group of people and professions. In reality, Ghadafi had no WMDs.
5. MORE! Libya was caused to confess to the Scotland plane bombing.
6. New lies being constructed on top of old lies.
7. Ghadafi's son: "It was their (USA) game, not our game."
8. Reframe the narrative: Ghadafi is now a "modern world figure". They brought other "modern world figures" and tv people to meet with Ghadafi (who was still the same buffoon he always had been).

A World Without Power

1. People began to turn from politics; People felt they'd been lied to and that whatever they did or said had no effect.
2. People went into cyberspace.
3. Bayes Networks; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_network Behavior prediction with incomplete information.
4. Rational agents; mimiced human behavior; based on economics. Only a vague representation; "It will never be clear who they are working for - you or someone else."
5. The web began to look like the real world, but in fact, no matter what you're doing, it's just the same thing - it's reflecting you back at yourself.
6. "They only heard and saw what they liked, and the newsfeeds increasingly excluded things that might challenge peoples' preexisting beliefs."

It's reflecting me back at myself.

1. Behind the superficial freedoms of the web were a few giant corporations with opaque systems that controlled what people saw, and shaped what they thought.
2. More mysterious is how they made their decisions about what you should like, and what should be hidden from you.

2008 - Financial Crash

1. Politicans saved the banks but did nothing about massive corruption. Public anger burst out; Occupy movement took over Wallstreet, and the Senate in Washington.
2. Arab Spring began.
3. Internet played key organization role.
4. People everywhere were rising up; When there was an uprising in Libya, America and Britian proclaimed Ghadafi to be the bad guy again. Libya soon descended into chaos.
5. The uprisings (occupy, arab spring) ended unsatisfactorily because nobody had come up with a way forward.
6. Muslim Brotherhood took over arab springs; Spring 2013, Military took over.
7. Occupiers went home.

2008 - Financial Crash

1. After the Revolutions (Occupy, Arab Spring, etc...)
2. Nobody had any idea how to change the world
3. Politicians had given most of its power away to finance and managerial bureaucracy, that they'd become managers themselves.
4. Abroad, all their adventures had failed; their simplistic views of the world had been exposed as dangerous and destructive.

Political Technologists - Key figures behind Putin

1. In russia, some had seen how the situation (dark uncertainty about the future) could work to their advantage
2. Politics had been turned into a strange theater, where nobody knew what was true and what was fake;
3. Some of these Politica Technologists had been fans of the science fiction (stalkers/roadside picnic); After communism they took control of the media; used it to manipulate electorate "on a vast scale". Reality was just something to be manipulated - shaped into whatever you wanted it to be.
4. Surkov Ideas from theater -> heart of politics; Not just manipulation, but undermining of peoples' perception of the world so that they're never sure what's really happening.
5. Directs Kremlin money to a wide range of groups (the full range... neonazis to liberal human rights groups who then attack government... even whole political parties that were opposed to Putin... Everyone!) AND - He let it be known that he was doing this. Nobody could know what was real in Russia.
6. "It's a strategy of power that keeps any opposition constantly confused; a ceasless shape-shifter that is unstopable because it is indefinable"
7. The real power was "hidden behind the stage, excercised without anyone seeing."

Then the same thing seemed to start happening in the west.

1. It was evermore clear that the system had deep flaws:
2. Every month brought new revelations - of banks involvement in global corruption; of massive tax avoidance by all the major corporations; of secret surveilance of everyone's emails by the NSA - yet noone was prosecuted except at the lowest levels;
3. The massive inequality kept on growing; The structure of power remained the same.

Then the shape-shifting began.

1. Trump's shape-shifting; "when they call, I give; when I call them..."
2. He pushes peoples' fears into the open.
3. He lied a lot, but his supporters rarely (if ever) cared.
4. Defeated journalists, who are to expose lies.
5. "Angry people click more."
6. Liberals were outraged, but they expressed their anger in cyberspace, so it had no effect; "the algorithms" made sure they only spoke to people who already agreed with them.
7. Their waves of angry messages and tweets benefited the large corporations who ran the social media platforms.
8. The fury that came like waves across the internet no longer had the power to change the world; it was becoming a fuel to feed the new systems of power.
9. Liberals never believed Trump could win, but...
10. The version of reality that politics presents is no longer believable; The stories politicans tell the people about the world have stopped making sense.
11. In the face of this, you can "play" with reality; constantly shifting and changing; further undermine old forms of power.

Syria and Destabilized Perception

1. Civil war in Syria. Suicide Bombing came back around to bite them; tearing the arab world apart - the opposite of what Assad wanted.
2. AmeriBritain bombed Isis to help Assad *eyeroll*
3. Russians started making freaky unexplainable moves; the idea is Nonlinear Warfare: Use conflict to create a constant state of destabilized perception. in order to manage and control.
4. March 2016, the russians announced they were leaving Syria; They didn't. They're still there - nobody knows why.

NOTE: There was some stuff I didn't catch about "Al-Sury". It looked like they were implying some kind of connection between him and brexit and i don't know what all. I guess I need some help with that bit.

---

A parting thought...

How to Fix America's Corrupt Political System

This video begins by asserting that, due to lobbying and various other forms of legalized corruptions, most people feel that there's nothing that can be done to change things for the better.

Here are a few of the terms used to describe such "legalized corruption":

• Lobbyist Fundraisers
• Revolving Door
• Bundlers
• SuperPacs
• Antitransparency
• ..."literally dozens" of other ways...

The obvious solution is to "make corruption illegal". A proposed "Anti-Corruption Act" has been written and is available at https://anticorruptionact.org/. This site lists three main goals:

1. Stop political bribery so special interests can't use job offers and donations to influence politicians
2. End secret money so people know who's buying political power.
3. Fix our broken elections so the people, not the political establishment, are the ones in control.

To bypass the obvious conflict of interest, such laws might be passed (at state and local levels) by means of Ballot Initiatives, a process by which citizens can force proposed legislation to appear on local and state ballots by gathering enough signatures.

There are more then 22,000 cities in America where we can use the ballot initiative process to pass locally tailored anti-corruption acts.

Here's a link to What's in the Act.