Alex Jones is one smart cookie. The man understands the internet better than a good number of journalists; just witness the way he gives away all (that's all, as in all 18) of his movies away for free on google video, and winks at copies being traded over bittorrent. He knows the corporate media will never, ever promote his work, because every person who encounters it is smacked awake like a hungover frat boy who's sleeping in on an exam day. Sure, he sells his wares through his various websites, but once again he understands that what you're really paying for isn't the information per se, it's the quality with which it's presented and the speed with which it's available.
And now, he's launched a new website that's built along social networks, social.infowars.com. It's got all the bells and whistles, with groups and friends lists and blogs and messaging, a veritable petri dish for the revolution. Go on over, sign yourself up, and stop just reading shit and pounding at your keyboard with tears of frustration stinging your eyes: put that anger to use and get involved! I'm already there, of course (taking my own advice, naturally) and I'll be cross-posting much (not all, but a lot) of what I post here at my new infowars blog.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Leveraging Social Networks for Liberation
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Bringing Democracy to the Corporatocracy
Watching John Perkins - author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman - giving a speech from about a year ago, he starts talking about changing corporations to make them open, transparent, and democratic. The reason for this is simple: modern governments around the world and especially in the United States are little more than puppets of large corporations, a form of government he calls the corporatocracy. This corporatocracy serves as the true government of the planet, and so long as corporations remain organizationally identical to, say, the Roman Army or feudal Europe, real freedom and democracy are impossible.
Democratic corporations. That's an interesting idea. I remember coming across it for the first time in Bruce Sterling's 1998 cybperpunk novel Islands in the Net, a volume I read many times as a teenager. The main character is a member of just such a democratic corporation, as are most people around the world - except for a few small rogue zones, the islands referred to in the title. Corporations in the novel did not specialize. Each was basically a massive economic cooperative, in which members assigned executive power during open elections, had rights as well as responsibilities, and the freedom to choose what kind of work they would do for the company rather than simply a set of assigned tasks. Of course, they weren't guaranteed to get what they asked for; a large part of the management's job was to review proposals made by those lower in the hierarchy, and decide whether or not to grant them. The longer and better one's record, the more resources one could muster for a given task. It wasn't a perfect deal, but it was a lot better for the people involved than what they'd had before.
The management class and their pet economists will claim that corporate democracy would be a business liability (which it will, to a degree: the rich will not be quite so rich). The reasons for why it's bad will vary. One claim might be that management talent will be lured away from any company that adopts the principles (then again, employees would probably be attracted to such companies, and employee talent can be far more important than management.) Some might claim that it would lead to bad decision making (but, why they should expect closed management hierarchies to be immune to the problems that plague closed societies?) My own feeling is that a truly democratic corporation would be a much leaner, much more efficient economic machine than anything built on the current model, generating far more wealth for far more people, and distributing that wealth with a much more even hand.
Initiatives like this are what give me hope for the future. A global revolution in favor of corporate democracy would be a wonderful thing.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
The Red Pill's Bitter Aftertaste
Back in June, I flew for the first time, back to Canada. Made a transfer in Atlanta, where I was greeted, as soon as I got off the plane, with a giant banner saying 'Welcome to America, Land of Freedom!' or some shit like that, all in gold letters with a photo-quality American flag fluttering in the background. Later, while I was waiting to take off my shoes and have my bag pawed through by a surly, ill-educated trailer-park spawn, I couldn't help but think of this website (while, admittedly, listening to the album it's associated with, but then again, Year Zero was appropriate. Regarding the website, you might have to wait a bit for it to load. Once it does, just click and move your mouse around. You'll see.) At one point I made eye contact with a random traveller from the Middle East, inevitably getting far more thorough treatment than the petty humiliations of security theatre I and every other traveller was forced to endure. Nevertheless I felt an instant empathy with the plight of this man; a part of my brain that hadn't really sparked in years sputtered for life, however pathetically and briefly.
I think that was the moment, for me, when the shell that had been built up around my brain finally began to crack. It didn't spread very quickly, not at first. This was back in June, after all, and I can't honestly claim to have woken up any earlier than, well, last week. But then that is the way of crumbling dams: at first a small crack, which spreads, slowly ... until all at once, the flood.
Watch this. Over a million other people have. It was the cold shower that woke my ass up, and maybe it'll do the same for you.
Waking up is a funny thing. I was walking through Shinjuku station on my way to work, and all at once I felt tears in my eyes, because for the first time in years it really hit me that this time it was my people - the Anglo culture of which I am deeply proud, the culture that has given so much of freedom and science and technology and wealth to the world, that has taken civilization to the greatest heights it has yet achieved - this time, it was my people who housed the evil. That we were the bad guys, and that the Muslims, bless their bewildered, confused, hateful little hearts, were right to fight against us with every ounce of their strength.
I remember when 9/11 first happened (well, yeah, we all do.) At the time I'd never really considered that the government could be behind it, but still, a few days later, after the networks had been full of nothing but collapsing towers and broken five-sided geometry, I had enough savvy to tell my girlfriend at the time "Whatever happens, don't let me fall for the propaganda. Don't let me do anything stupid." Well, I didn't join the army or become a weapons scientist, so I have my ex to thank for that much at least (hell, if I hadn't dated her I'd've still been in the militia when the towers went down), but I still bought the propaganda, drinking deep of the kool-aid, letting the fever take over my brain. Then again, we broke up a couple of years after that, and it wasn't until later that I really started to buy into it, to really believe the lies and the halftruths and the misdirections and the perverted logic that's been shoveled so liberally into our mouths over the past several years. Hell, I remember getting into an argument with David Brin on his blog, where the guy tried his best to convince me with logical argument that the current pack of criminals was far worse than the muslims or the crazier elements of the left ... I couldn't defeat the logic, so I just left. Still, the propaganda kept it's hold on my brain.
It's not that I'm stupid. I am, if not a genius, certainly well above the herd. But intelligence can be as great a curse as stupidity when it comes to well-crafted webs of lies, because once the lies start to settle in and make themselves at home as part of one's self-image, an intelligent mind is much more adept at the doublethink required to keep it all in place.
I'll give this to the evil shits responsible for this nightmare: they are masters of memetic engineering, on a par with Mohammed and Marx. They know just how to get past all the mental defenses, how to manipulate human psychology with inter-related (and contradictory) complexes of memes. Hell, they've been setting memeplexes up against each other. 'Left' and 'Right' are just arbitrary camps full of manufactured ideas designed to be mutually antagonistic (thus keeping the politically motivated parts of the population at daggers drawn) while being supportive of the overall engenda (tax, control, and eventually, enslave.)
Basically, it works like this. The Left believes Bush and his court of grand viziers and sycophants are a bunch of evil fucks, and their war a complete sham. They think the real threat is environmental degradation generally, and global warming specifically. The Right, on the other hand, thinks global warming is a crock of steaming bullshit, and that terrorism generally, and the rise of an Islamic caliphate specifically, is the most dire threat facing Western civilization. Thus the Left is led to believe that those on the Right are criminals against the environment and duped supporters of an evil war, while those on the Right see the Left as either blind or traitorous when it comes to the war, along with being brainwashed victims of the new Gaianist religion with it's apocalyptic fairy tales of climate change.
Let me set you straight, in case you hadn't already figured it out. Terrorism is bullshit. So is global warming. Both are there to keep you scared (The terrorists might nuke us! The ice caps might melt!). Not only does this make it easier to control you - hysterical people instinctively look to authority figures - it also makes it easier to bleed you dry of resources. Carbon taxes limiting how big your house can be, how much electricity you can use, how big and fast a car you can have and how far you can go in it, how much you're allowed to fly ... all of these come directly out of global warming. It keeps you immobile, keeps you poor, and lets the government soak you like never before (income tax might be a tax on your label, but carbon tax? That's a tax on your existence. Because your very existence is a threat to the entire biosphere, awful, filthy human creature that you are.)
Terrorism keeps you scared of other people around the world, and keeps those people scared of you, which if you're trying to build a global empire is a very useful trick as it acts as a firewall against the formation of a global resistance. It justifies wars, and - more to the point - serves as an excuse for a steady ratcheting increase in 'security' regulations at home (security, not to protect us from terrorists, but to protect our would-be masters from us.)
For the last several years I came down on the right: global warming bullshit, Islamic terrorism dangerous! That's embarrassing, a little. But no more shameful than falling for the global warming line. Left and Right are more psychological predispositions than well-thought-out political positions, and the twin lies that have been endlessly repeated by the media are designed to appeal to one or the other (environmental catastrophe for the caring nurturer type, shadowy foreign threat for the watchful protector type.) Damn near everyone fell for one or the other and sometimes even both; few have been those who fell for neither, but then wisdom is precious because it is rare.
The wannabe emperors that are settling into power now, in this the time when the culmination of their scheme approaches, forgot to take one thing into account. Fear can be used to control us, yes, but only for a while. At first we look to our leaders; that is our instinct, as social animals evolved for life in a complex hierarchy. But alone among the social mammals, we have the ability to think; we look for leadership not just to our governments but to our thinkers, not just to the powerful but to the wise. And as time goes on, it is the wise that have the greatest influence, for even the most foolish of men - so long as he retains a soul - knows the truth when it is properly explained to him, and the finding and teaching of truth are the great strengths of the wise.
The nearer their plan comes to fruition, the more obvious it will be, and the more the truth will start to take hold. Those on the Right will realize that terrorism is a sick practical joke of awesome proportions, perpetrated by their own government against them; those on the Left will come to see that global warming is nothing more than a willful misrepresentation of science. They'll get to talking together, and together, they'll tear down the edifice of lies like the Berlin Wall.
Make no mistake, we are not out of the woods yet. Things are going to get much, much worse before they get better. I'm talking biowarfare (my guess: smallpox, say in Oregon.) Martial law. Maybe a nuclear exchange or two (not a planet-buster, just turning a country or two into wasteland.) Disappearances, concentration camps, secret police, conscription, the whole nine yards of the classic militarized fascist police state, updated for the 21st century, scarier than anything that's come before, like something out of the Book of Revelations. This particular generation of homo demonicus is playing for all the marbles this time, and as always they mean to win.
Hell, I'm not sure if I'm going to survive this. I'm not sure if you will. I'm deeply frightened for the future of my family, and my friends. I look at the faces of the children in my kids' classes, and I wonder.
One thing I am sure about. The people will wake up, and when they do there will be a revolution. Much blood will be spilled leading up to it, and rivers will flow by the end. But when the dust settles, it will be the heads of the would-be neo-aristocracy that are impaled on pikes and set on display as an eternal monument to the greatest depths of evil yet plumbed by the human soul, as an eternal reminder to any who might plot to follow their path into darkness, and seduce others into following them down it.