The Killing Joke - Chapter 10 of 25
Not so crazy as you look.
By the summer of 2007 the Nexus had gained full control over both America’s communications infrastructure and its collective unconscious. All that was needed now was a super convenient, very hip, must-have, always accessible, ever present, hand carried lifestyle accoutrement to facilitate the constant input of revealing and compromising personal information into the Nexus machine. So the burgeoning digital music industry got merged with that ubiquitous 2G telecommunications infrastructure, the production of those must-have lifestyle accessories got offshored to China where slave labor conditions made it affordable to everyone on American Homeland soil, and – Prego! The core components of the American security state envisioned by the Patriot Act were erected. And everyone loved it because constant surveillance had never been so stylish, chic, and entertaining.
And that unholy Trinity of hardware, telemetry, and software began to conjure up a good portion of America into believing it could hold every aspect of a functioning society within the palm of its grasping hand. For a growing number of delusional actors, this initial Summer of Endless War marked the ontological point where who these people were within the real world began to dissolve away and become an impediment to the facsimile of what they were becoming within their perfect virtual worlds. These actors quickly discovered they could blot out the happenings and consequences of their actions and inactions within the real world surrounding them, and instead immerse themselves in the ever nurturing narcissism and self-aggrandizement of their manufactured iWorlds.
More and more of each collective waking hour for these American actors became dedicated to the cultivation and curation of their places within this burgeoning virtual iSociety. And less and less collective American concern was given to how things were actually going in that real world. So the lines between reality and illusion started to blur once social media use exploded. The real world realities of Endless War, rampant corruption, exploding debt accumulation, deteriorating race relations, institutional decay, and all manner of societal dysfunction could rage unabated as all these actors now cared about was the latest tally of “likes” and “shares”.
So it was not the American social media end user that got its smartphone, but the smartphone that got its American social media end user.
The Summer of Endless War was a phenomenological crossroads for the American people that few perceived through the interminable television coverage of all that Endless War. And besides, Osama bin Laden was still on the loose. Who could think straight with Osama bin Laden on all those television screens? There he was everywhere, in glowing plasma high definition, hanging from all those walls, ubiquitous, all at once, and all the time.
Since the first broadcasting licenses were issued in 1941, the stock in trade televisions had been programmed to immerse its mass viewing audience into a uniform, unambiguous, and ready to consume translation of the collective American experience. Millions came home from work each week day, grabbed a six pack, and sat in front of their televisions with a fuzzy opinion of the day’s experiences. And six empty cans later, those same millions went to bed with their perceptions and opinions about their experiences all wrapped up for them in a pseudological emotive bow. Much of their workday experiences constituted discussions about contrived social situations or “current events” – those pseudoevents strategically seeded over several weeks of television viewing that wormed their way into the public consciousness and discourse.
Each pseudoevent was presented over several weeks to its television viewing audience in an unsophisticated Hegelian dialectic where a melodramatic thesis and an emotive antithesis both culminated into a “self-evident” synthesis that resolved its competing logical and emotional components. These “obvious” answers to problems that did not yet exist were delivered to form a homogenous and subliminal public opinion. And the dilemma the pseudoevent solved was nothing more than predictive programing manufactured to prepare the American people for the eventual release of the real event of which they had been conditioned to respond according to the wishes of those early social engineers. So the next morning as America congregated for work, they more or less arrived having the same common perceptions and opinions about the same common things they had all been exposed to over the television. As the day progressed, each person shared these common perceptions and opinions, and this sharing reinforced and codified the previous night’s programming conclusions. Dissenters were brusquely scolded and ridiculed back into the American Way. Questions were answered according to the previous night’s synthesis. And the process of absorbing new programming started anew every evening, week by week, month by month, six empty cans after six empty cans.
So television was much more than just chewing gum for the mind. It was a life-long “continuing education” program for the American adult. It was the great societal homogenizer, the subliminal glue that held the national collective unconscious together. And both Apollo 11 and 9/11 were its crowning achievements.
But if television was the invisible epoxy that bonded American society together into a cohesive unit, then anti-social media would be that same society’s dismemberment.
It was some time back in the 1990s when the Philosopher Kings decided that the uniform American Way had to be broken because it was a fractured and disunited America that would best hasten the End of History. America would never willingly go down as a single entity, but if it could be picked apart at its racial, economic, religious, and political affiliation seams, and if enough individual pieces were detached, demoralized, and defeated, then a critical “hollowing out” of American society could be achieved and the remaining edifice would implode as the debt piled up to an insurmountable level. Once imploded, the remains left standing could be dealt with by a Crushing Democracy, armed with militarized police and partisan courts, all operating legally under the Patriot Act with its network of FEMA camps to finish off those who stood against the imposition of the End of History.
To achieve that implosion, America’s social hardwood had to first be infested with termites. The Great Society and its forced racial integration hadn’t worked. Unimpeded non-western immigration and European cultural dilution hadn’t worked. Nor did the expulsion of Christianity from all civic affairs and cultural events implode American society. Youth alienation, rock ‘n roll, hippies, feminism, pornography, drugs – the American Way took a licking and kept on ticking. So since August 15th of 1971 the Philosopher Kings were left waiting for technology to advance to the point where it could be fused with psychology and used as a fast and effective weapon against the American people where they would not be destroyed by the likes of terrorism from without, but instead would destroy each other and themselves from the likes of a smartphone held in the palms of their grasping hands.
That’s why it is called the smartphone. It is the smartest and cheapest and easiest way to destroy American society and usher in the End of History.
The psychological basis for control of the modern individual mind had been developed long ago by the CIA with black book projects like MK Ultra, Monarch, and Mockingbird. Universities filled in the gaps with experiments like those performed by Milgram, Calhoun, and Richter. But the digital technology to quickly and irreversibly splinter the American Way was slower in development than the aspirations of the Philosopher Kings, so they had to keep the façade of the American Way going until they could burst the dotcom bubble, work their 9/11 black magic, and gather up all the communications infrastructure at rock bottom prices under the Nexus. And it was there where those televisions saw their zenith as a means of uniting the country for one final denouement to be led down the road of Endless War towards inescapable and permanent bankruptcy.
As far back as the early 1970s, DARPA had developed ARPAET with its wide-area packet-switched network, distributed control, and TCP/IP protocol suite. Then came Usenet in 1980 with its UUCP dial-up network architecture, but that too was distributed and could not be centrally controlled. And both systems could only display text, so until the digital termites could be conjured up at command onto personal mobile devices it was television and its three measly networks broadcasting the American Way in synchronicity. It wasn’t until 1991’s Hypertext Transfer Protocol was adapted a few years later into Hypermedia could the internet accommodate the Flash and Splash multimedia software needed to distribute both the sounds and images required to emotively influence those uncritical and destructive elements within American society. But the whole of the American networks and hardware and software was a patchwork of techno-anarchic ownership with divergent competing objectives. It all had to be crashed and burned in March of 2000 so the Philosopher Kings could retool its entirety into the world wide web of conjuring to repurpose it to serve the march towards the End of History.
9/11 had finally ushered forth the age of unquestioned Endless War abroad. But the Endless War at home was a highly entertaining affair, an invisible, incremental, and imperceptible 5th Generation War fought in exabytes over the high speed centrally controlled networks owned now by the Nexus. And this unseen war’s grand prize was central control over the hearts and minds of the American people. Because only when the Philosopher Kings controlled the hearts and minds of the American people could they use that American military to garner up the last of those central banks that remained free of the Nexus. And once they had every central bank in the world to themselves, the Philosopher Kings would have no more use for the American people and could then use that internet to conjure up the psychic animosity to set them at each other’s throats and destroy themselves.
The modern internet was thus like a neutron bomb in the hands of the Philosopher Kings. It destroyed the fabric of the American Way and collapsed American society yet left the buildings and the corporate state framework standing, ready to be filled with a never ending stream of replacements pouring across the vanishing American borders.
The Philosopher Kings could not launch their psycho-technological war against America using traditional means as television would not accommodate alternatives to the American Way. It was a high cost transmission enterprise and heavily regulated, so subversive voices could always be erased using the FCC bureaucratic apparatus. An alienated audience could always just turn off the television and go do something else equally useless. Cable television stayed away from contrived original content except for its one prominent CIA operated 24/7 news channel cheerleader for Endless War. Those few subversive voices demanding their right to access over public television’s UHF bandwidth were simply relegated to the 3:00 am insomniac time slot. Fewer and fewer people read newspapers as the American freeways clogged with more and more traffic that ate into the leisure time available for adsorbing written propaganda. Talk radio messaging contrary to the American Way was promptly cancelled out once the listener got home from work and turned on their televisions. Television, by an accident of design, was the Gordian knot of propaganda that had been pulled so tightly into the American Way that there was no conventional means to unravel it.
The problem with using the early internet as a psychological warfare platform was the distributed nature of the hosted content. Anybody and his dog with a server and a logical inkling could produce and distribute content that supported and maintained the American Way. And with the development of Hypermedia and hand held recording devices, all manner of atrocity, corruption, and degeneracy perpetrated anywhere in the world by agents of the Philosopher Kings was easily captured, distributed, and viewed by a scrutinizing public. Freedom of expression was everywhere on the early internet and something had to be done to reign in this techno-anarchy.
So in 1998 a DARPA alumnus who had worked to develop ARPANET was commissioned to create ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. ICANN was, and through a managed third party still is, the internet kill switch - it controls the servers that store the databases that are used by the DNS root zone. Disconnect these databases and internet search queries don’t work. Go against the Philosopher Kings and your Uniform Resource Identifier disappears. And the IP addresses of the origin and destination of every search query in the world is logged and stored by this supposed non-profit. And it was no coincidence that in the year before 9/11 the ICANN database management services were moved from their original Southern California beachside residence to a more convenient location a mere twenty minute drive from the CIA’s Langley headquarters.
Thus the original design flaws of the early internet with its free flows of genuine information were resolved by crashing the tech sector prior to 9/11 and resurrecting it afterwards, under the guise of the Patriot Act, into a tool of the Nexus. The key to this resolution lay in the decision not to curtail network traffic through ICANN, as it was this traffic that provided the intelligence bonanza and fed the relational analytics. Instead, as much traffic as possible was routed through a handful of Nexus controlled mega-host intermediaries, and that intermediary control was not achieved until the decks were cleared by bankruptcies in the dotcom crash and interest rates were slashed after 9/11 to allow a plethora of venture capital cut-outs to utilize nearly free money to build an illuminated tech sector with an interlocking ownership and control structure. And as “private” concerns operating under an immunity interpretation of Section 230 of Title 47 U.S.C. (1996), these mega-hosts throttled information exchange that did not contribute to the destruction of America and the End of History. So what had begun as an idealistic mechanism for the unfettered exchange of information and ideas had, by the initial Summer of Endless War, mutated into a Nexus tool for surveillance, debt accumulation, and psychological warfare dissemination as entertainment to the American people.
And the crowning achievement of the modern internet that no one ever noticed was that the entire world was left without an othernet.
Succinct, insightful and very informative, as always!
Awesome