FTR #952 Be Afraid, Be VERY Afraid: Update on Technocratic Fascism

One of the illu­sions har­bored by many–in par­tic­u­lar, young peo­ple who have grown up with the inter­net, social net­works and mobile technology–sees dig­i­tal activ­i­ty as pri­vate. Noth­ing could be fur­ther from the truth. Even before the cyber-lib­er­tar­i­an poli­cies advo­cat­ed by indi­vid­u­als like John Per­ry Bar­low, Eddie Snow­den, Julian Assange and oth­ers became man­i­fest in the Trump admin­is­tra­tion’s were imple­ment­ed by the Trump admin­is­tra­tion and the GOP-con­trolled con­gress, dig­i­tal affairs were sub­ject to an extra­or­di­nary degree of manip­u­la­tion by a mul­ti­tude of inter­ests.

We begin our exam­i­na­tion of tech­no­crat­ic fas­cism with a look at the cor­po­rate foun­da­tion of Poke­mon Go. Infor­ma­tion about the back­ground of Poke­mon Go’s devel­op­er (Niantic) and the devel­op­ment of the firm is detailed in an arti­cle from Net­work World. In addi­tion to the for­mi­da­ble nature of the intel­li­gence agen­cies involved with gen­er­at­ing the cor­po­rate foun­da­tion of Poke­mon Go (Key­hole, Inc.; Niantic), note the unnerv­ing nature of the infor­ma­tion that can be gleaned from the Android phone of any­one who down­loads the “app.”

Poke­mon Go was seen as enhanc­ing the “Cool Japan Strat­e­gy” of Prime Min­is­ter Shin­zo Abe. The “Cool Japan Pro­mo­tion Fund” was imple­ment­ed by Abe (the grand­son of Nobo­suke Kishi, a Japan­ese war crim­i­nal who signed Japan’s dec­la­ra­tion of war against the U.S. and became the coun­try’s first post­war Prime Min­is­ter) to “raise the inter­na­tion­al pro­file of the country’s mass cul­ture.”

The Finance Min­is­ter of Japan is Taro Aso, one of the enthu­si­asts of Nazi polit­i­cal strat­e­gy high­light­ed below. The “Cool Japan pro­mo­tion Fund” would have been under his admin­is­tra­tion, with Tomo­mi Ina­da func­tion­ing as his admin­is­tra­tor for the pro­gram. Now serv­ing as Japan’s Defense Min­is­ter, Ina­da is anoth­er advo­cate of Nazi polit­i­cal strat­e­gy.

Next, we turn to anoth­er man­i­fes­ta­tion of Poke­mon Go. The “Alt-Right” (read “Nazi”) move­ment is using Poke­mon Go to recruit kids to the Nazi cause. Con­sid­er this against the back­ground of Niantic, the Cool Japan strat­e­gy and the pro-Nazi fig­ures involved with it. Con­sid­er this also, in con­junc­tion with the Naz­i­fied AI devel­oped and deployed by Robert and Rebekah Mer­cer, Steve Ban­non, Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca and the “Alt-Right” milieu with which they asso­ciate.

A recent “New York­er” arti­cle by Jane May­er con­cern­ing Robert Mer­cer keys some inter­est­ing thoughts about Mer­cer, Ban­non, the Alt-Right Wik­iLeaks and the Naz­i­fied AI we spoke of in FTR #‘s 948 and 949. In FTR #946, we not­ed this con­cate­na­tion’s cen­tral place in the Face­book con­stel­la­tion, a posi­tion that has posi­tioned them to act deci­sive­ly on the polit­i­cal land­scape.

We note sev­er­al things about the May­er piece:

She writes of Mer­cer’s sup­port for the Alt-Right–Mercer helps fund Ban­non’s Bre­it­bart: “. . . . In Feb­ru­ary, David Mager­man, a senior employ­ee at Renais­sance, spoke out about what he regards as Mercer’s wor­ri­some influ­ence. Mager­man, a Demo­c­rat who is a strong sup­port­er of Jew­ish caus­es, took par­tic­u­lar issue with Mercer’s empow­er­ment of the alt-right, which has includ­ed anti-Semit­ic and white-suprema­cist voic­es. . . .”

Mer­cer is racist, feel­ing that racism only exists in con­tem­po­rary black cul­ture: “. . . . Mer­cer, for his part, has argued that the Civ­il Rights Act, in 1964, was a major mis­take. Accord­ing to the one­time Renais­sance employ­ee, Mer­cer has assert­ed repeat­ed­ly that African-Amer­i­cans were bet­ter off eco­nom­i­cal­ly before the civ­il-rights move­ment. (Few schol­ars agree.) He has also said that the prob­lem of racism in Amer­i­ca is exag­ger­at­ed. The source said that, not long ago, he heard Mer­cer pro­claim that there are no white racists in Amer­i­ca today, only black racists. . . .”

His work at IBM was fund­ed in part by DARPA, strong­ly imply­ing that the DOD has applied some of the Mer­cer tech­nol­o­gy: “. . . . Yet, when I.B.M. failed to offer ade­quate sup­port for Mer­cer and Brown’s trans­la­tion project, they secured addi­tion­al fund­ing from DARPA, the secre­tive Pen­ta­gon pro­gram. Despite Mercer’s dis­dain for ‘big gov­ern­ment,’ this fund­ing was essen­tial to his ear­ly suc­cess. . . .”

In a 2012 anti-Oba­ma pro­pa­gan­da film fund­ed by Cit­i­zens Unit­ed, Steve Ban­non bor­rowed from “The Tri­umph of the Will: “. . . . Many of these [dis­il­lu­sioned Oba­ma] vot­ers became the cen­tral fig­ures of ‘The Hope & the Change,’ an anti-Oba­ma film that Ban­non and Cit­i­zens Unit­ed released dur­ing the 2012 Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Con­ven­tion. After Cad­dell saw the film, he point­ed out to Ban­non that its open­ing imi­tat­ed that of ‘Tri­umph of the Will,’ the 1935 ode to Hitler, made by the Nazi film­mak­er Leni Riefen­stahl. Ban­non laughed and said, ‘You’re the only one that caught it!’ In both films, a plane flies over a blight­ed land, as omi­nous music swells; then clouds in the sky part, augur­ing a new era. . . .”

Next, we return to the sub­ject of Bit­coin and cyber-lib­er­tar­i­an pol­i­cy. We have explored Bit­coin in a num­ber of programs–FTR #‘s 760, 764, 770 and 785.

An impor­tant new book by David Golum­bia sets forth the tech­no­crat­ic fas­cist pol­i­tics under­ly­ing Bit­coin. Known to vet­er­an listeners/readers as the author of an oft-quot­ed arti­cle deal­ing with tech­no­crat­ic fas­cism, Golum­bia has pub­lished a short, impor­tant book about the right-wing extrem­ism under­ly­ing Bit­coin. (Pro­grams on tech­no­crat­ic fas­cism include: FTR #‘s 851, 859, 866, 867.)

In an excerpt from the book, we see dis­turb­ing ele­ments of res­o­nance with the views of Stephen Ban­non and some of the philo­soph­i­cal influ­ences on him. Julius Evola, “Men­cius Mold­bug” and Ban­non him­self see our civ­i­liza­tion as in decline, at a crit­i­cal “turn­ing point,” and in need of being “blown up” (as Evola put it) or need­ing a “shock to the sys­tem.”

Note that the Cypher­punk’s Man­i­festo (pub­lished by the Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion) and the 1996 “Dec­la­ra­tion of the Inde­pen­dence of Cyber­space” writ­ten by the lib­er­tar­i­an activist, Grate­ful Dead lyri­cist, Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion founder John Per­ry Bar­low decry gov­ern­men­tal reg­u­la­tion of the dig­i­tal sys­tem. (EFF is a lead­ing “dig­i­tal rights” and tech­nol­o­gy indus­try advo­ca­cy orga­ni­za­tion.)

The libertarian/fascist eth­ic of the dig­i­tal world was artic­u­lat­ed by Bar­low.

Note how the “free­dom” advo­cat­ed by Bar­low et al has played out: the Trump admin­is­tra­tion (imple­ment­ing the desires of cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca) has “dereg­u­lat­ed” the inter­net. All this in the name of “free­dom.”

In FTR #854, we not­ed the curi­ous pro­fes­sion­al resume of Bar­low, con­tain­ing such dis­parate ele­ments as–lyricist for the Grate­ful Dead (“Far Out!”); Dick Cheney’s cam­paign man­ag­er (not so “Far Out!”); a vot­er for white supremacist/segregationist George Wal­lace in the 1968 Pres­i­den­tial cam­paign (very “Un-Far Out!”).

For our pur­pos­es, his most note­wor­thy pro­fes­sion­al under­tak­ing is his found­ing of the EFF–The Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion. A lead­ing osten­si­ble advo­cate for inter­net free­dom, the EFF has endorsed tech­nol­o­gy and embraced per­son­nel inex­tri­ca­bly linked with a CIA-derived milieu embod­ied in Radio Free Asi­a’s Open Tech­nol­o­gy Fund. (For those who are, under­stand­ably, sur­prised and/or skep­ti­cal, we dis­cussed this at length and in detail in FTR #‘s 891 and 895.)

Next, we present an arti­cle that brings to the fore some inter­est­ing ques­tions about Bar­low, the CIA and the very gen­e­sis of social media.

We offer Ms. Sun­der­son­’s obser­va­tions, stress­ing that Bar­low’s fore­shad­ow­ing of the com­mu­ni­ca­tion func­tions inher­ent in social media and his pres­ence at CIA head­quar­ters (by invi­ta­tion!) sug­gest that Bar­low not only has strong ties to CIA but may have been involved in the con­cep­tu­al gen­e­sis that spawned CIA-con­nect­ed enti­ties such as Face­book.

In FTR #951, we observed that Richard B. Spencer, one of Trump’s Nazi back­ers, has begun a web­site with Swedish Alt-Righter Daniel Friberg, part of the Swedish fas­cist milieu to which Carl Lund­strom belongs. In FTR #732 (among oth­er pro­grams), we not­ed that it was Lund­strom who financed the Pirate Bay web­site, on which Wik­iLeaks held forth for quite some time. In FTR #745, we doc­u­ment­ed that top Assange aide and Holo­caust-denier Joran Jer­mas (aka “Israel Shamir”) arranged the Lundstrom/WikiLeaks liai­son. (Jer­mas han­dles Wik­iLeaks Russ­ian oper­a­tions, a point of inter­est in the wake of the 2016 cam­paign.)

It is a good bet that Lundstrom/Pirate Bay/WikiLeaks et al were data min­ing the many peo­ple who vis­it­ed the Wik­iLeaks site.

Might Lundstrom/Jermas/Assange et al have shared the volu­mi­nous data they may well have mined with Mercer/Cambridge Analytica/Bannon’s Naz­i­fied AI?

We con­clude with recap of Microsoft researcher Kate Craw­ford’s obser­va­tions at the SXSW event. Craw­ford gave a speech about her work titled “Dark Days: AI and the Rise of Fas­cism,” the pre­sen­ta­tion high­light­ed the social impact of machine learn­ing and large-scale data sys­tems. The take home mes­sage? By del­e­gat­ing pow­ers to Bid Data-dri­ven AIs, those AIs could become fascist’s dream: Incred­i­ble pow­er over the lives of oth­ers with min­i­mal account­abil­i­ty: ” . . . .‘This is a fascist’s dream,’ she said. ‘Pow­er with­out account­abil­i­ty.’ . . . .”

We reit­er­ate, in clos­ing, that ” . . . . Palan­tir is build­ing an intel­li­gence sys­tem to assist Don­ald Trump in deport­ing immi­grants. . . .”

In FTR #757 we not­ed that Palan­tir is a firm dom­i­nat­ed by Peter Thiel, a main backer of Don­ald Trump.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Wik­iLeaks’ con­tin­ued prop­a­ga­tion of Alt-Right style Anti-Semit­ic pro­pa­gan­da: ” . . . . Now it is the dar­ling of the alt-right, reveal­ing hacked emails seem­ing­ly to influ­ence a pres­i­den­tial con­test, claim­ing the US elec­tion is ‘rigged.’ and descend­ing into con­spir­a­cy. Just this week on Twit­ter, it described the deaths by nat­ur­al caus­es of two of its sup­port­ers as a ‘bloody year for Wik­iLeaks.’ and warned of media out­lets ‘con­trolled by’ mem­bers of the Roth­schild fam­i­ly – a com­mon anti-Semit­ic trope. . . .”; assess­ing all of the data-min­ing poten­tial (cer­tain­ty) of Wik­iLeaks, Poke­mon Go and the (per­haps) Bar­low-inspired Social Media world against the back­ground of the Mercer/Bannon/Cambridge ana­lyt­i­ca Naz­i­fied AI.

FTR #852 “Think Different”–The Foxes Aren’t Guarding the Henhouse, They ARE the Henhouse: Update on the Adventures of Eddie the Friendly Spook

In addi­tion to a fur­ther explo­ration of Big Tech and the remark­able advances they are bring­ing to fruition, this pro­gram cements the polit­i­cal and ide­o­log­i­cal con­ti­nu­ity between the polit­i­cal ele­ments inspir­ing Dylan Roof and the Charleston shoot­ing and the polit­i­cal forces embod­ied in Ron Paul (Edward Snow­den’s polit­i­cal idol) and Glenn Green­wald, Snow­den’s leak­ing jour­nal­ist of choice. Just as Cit­i­zen Green­wald worked pro bono (as an attor­ney) to pro­tect Nazi orga­ni­za­tions from civ­il judg­ments against them for advo­cat­ing may­hem, Ron Paul helped to set the polit­i­cal and ide­o­log­i­cal tem­plate for Dylann Roof’s mas­sacre. We note that the very “lib­er­tar­i­ans” who are sup­port­ive of Snowden–such as Ron Paul financier Peter Thiel–are also deeply involved with sur­veil­lance of cit­i­zens. A Koch Broth­ers-fund­ed orga­ni­za­tion, Stu­dents For Lib­er­ty, recent­ly hon­ored Edward Snow­den and Ron Paul. Much of the pro­gram high­lights why we are strong­ly sup­port­ive of NSA, warts and all. Facial recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy devel­oped by pri­vate firms like Microsoft, Google and Face­book are more accu­rate than any­thing the gov­ern­ment has devel­oped. Who is reg­u­lat­ing the deploy­ment of this tech­nol­o­gy? The pro­gram explores the abil­i­ty of hack­ers to use smart­phone tech­nol­o­gy to hijack air­craft in flight. Much of the con­clu­sion of the broad­cast high­lights the stun­ning advances in health-mon­i­tor­ing tech­nol­o­gy under devel­op­ment by Apple and Google. Google also helped finance the Com­pet­i­tive Enter­prise Insti­tute, as did the Koch broth­ers and Face­book. The CEI was one of the dri­ving forces behind the most recent [defeat­ed] chal­lenge to the Afford­able Care Act. Would you trust Google, or Face­book, with your most inti­mate health infor­ma­tion? The pro­gram con­cludes with a warn­ing that hack­ers could inter­dict some of this health-mon­i­tor­ing tech­nol­o­gy, with poten­tial­ly mur­der­ous results.

FTR #851 Technocratic Fascism and Post-Reaganoid Political Dementia: Update on the Adventures of Eddie the Friendly Spook

Updat­ing “L’Af­faire Snow­den,” this pro­gram ana­lyzes the fun­da­men­tal political/ideological prin­ci­ples that unite Eddie the Friend­ly Spook (Snow­den) with the cor­po­rate enti­ties com­pris­ing “Big Tech.” Tak­ing advan­tage of the notion that “gov­ern­ment is bad, but cor­po­ra­tions are good” (“post-Reaganoid polit­i­cal demen­tia”), many of the indi­vid­u­als and com­pa­nies in the tech world are pur­su­ing and achiev­ing goals that are fun­da­men­tal­ly anti­thet­i­cal to demo­c­ra­t­ic prin­ci­ples. Fun­da­men­tal to the dis­cus­sion is a bril­liant analy­sis by David Golum­bia in “Uncomputing.org” that dis­tills the essence of “tech­no­crat­ic fascism”–the polit­i­cal and social phi­los­o­phy that unites “coders”–Snowden, Assange and hack­ers of all stripes–with the cor­po­rate giants of Big Tech. Build­ing on a view­point sim­i­lar to that expressed in “The Decline of the West,” by Oswald Spen­gler (a text fun­da­men­tal to much of 20th cen­tu­ry fas­cism), they con­tend that soci­ety is bro­ken, the polit­i­cal process is bro­ken, and there­fore they have the right–expressed as “nat­ur­al law”–to do what­ev­er they think is best. Demo­c­ra­t­ic poli­ties are to have no say in their actions, regard­less of the poten­tial con­se­quences for the mem­bers of those poli­ties. They do not feel that they need “the con­sent of the gov­erned.” Pro­gram high­lights include: the pres­ence at the exclu­sive elite gath­er­ing of the Bilder­berg­ers of key Sil­i­con Val­ley techies includ­ing Peter Thiel and Alex Karp of Palan­thir; review of the rela­tion­ship between Ron Paul–Snowden’s polit­i­cal idol–and Thiel; the pres­ence of Third Reich alum­ni in the Bilder­berg­er gath­er­ings; the anti-labor prac­tices of Big Tech; the role of Big Tech in financ­ing extreme right can­di­dates like Ted Cruz; the dri­ve by the Indi­an gov­ern­ment of Naren­dra Modi (whose elec­tion was aid­ed by EBay’s Pierre Omid­yar) to under­mine Indi­a’s laws against child labor, a syn­op­tic overview of the key ele­ments of our analy­sis of The Adven­tures of Eddie the Friend­ly Spook.

FTR #829 Fireside Chat about Eddie the Friendly Spook and the Ukraine Crisis

A con­tro­ver­sy ensued when it emerged that House major­i­ty whip Steve Scalise had attend­ed a meet­ing of David Duke’s Euro­pean-Amer­i­can Uni­ty Orga­ni­za­tion. The new­ly-seat­ed GOP-dom­i­nat­ed con­gress which Scalise will help to guide began attack­ing Social Secu­ri­ty on its very first day. Specif­i­cal­ly, the GOP began attack­ing the Social Secu­ri­ty dis­abil­i­ty pro­gram. These devel­op­ments serve as a point of entry into our dis­cus­sion. Snow­den is an advo­cate of elim­i­nat­ing Social Secu­ri­ty and the OUN/B fas­cists run­ning Ukraine are engag­ing in a sim­i­lar pro­gram to force those in East­ern Ukraine to stop their attempts at seces­sion. The ele­ments of the Snowden/WikiLeaks “op” are net­worked with Duke, as well. Snow­den’s leak­ing jour­nal­ist of choice, Nazi fel­low-trav­el­er Glenn Green­wald, has been financed by Pierre Omid­yar of Ebay, who has also financed the Ukraine coup. The pro­gram notes many oth­er ele­ments of con­flu­ence between the Snowden/WikiLeaks “op” and the Ukrain­ian coup. The Snowden/WikiLeaks helped to deep-six Oba­ma’s “reboot with Rus­sia” and also alien­ate many of the young, ide­al­is­tic vot­ers who had sup­port­ed him in 2008, there­by help­ing to elect the 114th Con­gress.

Update on Eddie the Friendly Spook’s Economic Warfare against the U.S.

Snowden–whom we think is being direct­ed by BND (as well as by an ele­ment of CIA)–engaged in his “op” in order to jus­ti­fy a pre-arranged eco­nom­ic offen­sive against the Amer­i­can IT sec­tor. As we not­ed in our series on Eddie the Friend­ly Spook, the Snow­den “op” is an act of eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal war­fare against the Unit­ed States. Now, we note an arti­cle that chron­i­cles seri­ous dam­age to the U.S. high-tech econ­o­my as a result of Snow­den’s “op.”

Update on The Adventures of Eddie the Friendly Spook

Updat­ing our long, detailed dis­cus­sion of The Adven­tures of Eddie the Friend­ly Spook [Snow­den] aka “The Peach Fuzz Fas­cist”, we note a num­ber of things, includ­ing: more infor­ma­tion that Snow­den’s so-called “dis­clo­sures” were actu­al­ly intend­ed to jus­ti­fy a pre-arranged Ger­man, EU and Brazil­ian IT eco­nom­ic war­fare offen­sive against the Unit­ed States; Snow­den’s con­sum­mate hypocrisy in dis­clos­ing infor­ma­tion to Nazi fel­low-trav­el­ers Glenn Green­wald and Julian Assange that nei­ther should pos­sess; Green­wald’s flack­ing for the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood; Ger­man pro­tege and Lux­em­bourg EU Com­mis­sion­er Viviane Red­ing’s cham­pi­oning of an EU intel­li­gence agency designed to do exact­ly what the hyp­o­crit­i­cal EU com­plains about when done by the NSA and GCHQ; the recent (declined) offer of inclu­sion of Ger­many into the Five Eyes Club; Palan­tir’s role in spy­ing on Face­book users for the mil­i­tary.

Knock, Knock? Who’s There? Either a Strongbox or a Wall Safe. It’s Undecided.

In this post we’re going to take a look at the recent Supreme Court rul­ing on 4th amend­ment rights and smart­phones and how this rul­ing could impact the ongo­ing debate over NSA spy­ing. We’re also going to look at the oth­er side of the coin: the 5th Amend­ment right against self-incrim­i­na­tion dur­ing a time when encryp­tion tools strong enough to thwart law enforce­ment and the NSA are becom­ing increas­ing­ly main­stream. Is encryp­tion like a strong­box or a wall safe? You might be sur­prised by just how impor­tant that ques­tion has become.