I recently saw Extra Credit’s insightful video about how Chinese corporations and government have successfully turned ideological compliance into a culturally-reinforced game played on social networks, called Sesame Credit.
The presenters of this video seem to argue that this is a proof of concept for a more general principle that could be applied to ANY culture.
I think the authors of this piece have hit on just how easy it probably is for those who control the deployment of new technology and curate its contents (both media and software) to shift the perceptions, influence the opinions, and alter the behavior of entire populations over the course of less than a generation or two.
There’s zero question that Western interests already have an inkling of the initial baby steps necessary to make a similar game out of “ideological compliance” in different Western cultures. An inkling of what they need to do to “steer society” via games, apps, and mass media.
Pokemon Go, for instance.
Meanwhile a quick perusal of the comments on local and regional mainstream US media outlets easily demonstrates the average level of both reasoning ability and empathy in this country to be quite low. And empathy may be the more important factor here: Its been known for decades that people of all levels of intelligence are quite easily “gamed” into behaving in unethical ways. The Milgram Experiment and the Rosenhan Experiment are probably the two best known examples.
Empathy, and the associated ability to identify value in things like human dignity, an unpolluted environment, or humane treatment of animal life (as just 3 more obvious examples), are probably things many of us would agree our entire planet is already sorely lacking, not merely our individual societies.
There’s also no denying that at a higher “meta” level, “ideological compliance” already IS a culturally-reinforced game played via social networks. Its just most of us are oblivious to the scales, both temporal and social, on which these structures work. Though lately leaks like Snowdens and Applebaums have acted in an almost psychedelic manner to reveal shadows and general outlines of some of these structures as they evolve… One example: At first it was only DARPA, but now even medium sized corporations can afford the services of paid “change agents” who work through social media…
Western society may be structured differently than Chinese, but literally every single advance in technology has represented the potential for governments and corporations to mold not only peoples perceptions (the changing sense-ratios of McLuhan) but also to effect total curation of the content allowed on any new medium.
Handheld, mass internetworked multimedia technology has proved to be exceptionally successful in this regard.
Then there is the issue of “disruptive technologies.” There is nothing inherently wrong with disruptive technologies. Many technologies once categorized as disruptive are now considered essential items in most of our lives. Two prominent examples are the automobile and the MP3 player.
Yet clearly the only technological advances that are usually allowed to reach the mainstream are nearly exclusively limited to those that affect existing revenue streams only incrementally. Equally clear that it is those whose existing revenue streams and opportunisms stand to be “disrupted” are the same forces of global capital making the decisions about what direction new technology will be allowed to go.
The freedoms of the existing internet being one of the very few technologies that may have initially “got away” from them. But they have been working overtime to lock this one down ever since.
So for instance, less than a generation ago the paradigm of consumer computing software and hardware was one in which one had legal ownership of ones devices and the software running on them. One could choose to update the software or not. One could modify or extend the hardware with no threat of legal repercussion.
Yet today Windows 10, Adobe Flash, and many other packages now default to update automatically – an experience that is 100% curated by the corporation, as becomes blatantly obvious when they accidentally roll out an update that breaks millions of users devices simultaneously, as occasionally happens.
Besides the consumer edition of Microsoft Windows no longer allowing user intervention in the update process, the paradigm of “Apps” is slowly moving us closer to one where all software is purchased via a subscription. Note that Microsoft has recently begun selling the Microsoft Office product as a yearly subscription. All of this has been accomplished with little resistance from society’s software developers. In New York, it is now a felony to modify a playstation to extend its ability to play legally purchased foreign titles, if such modification also happens to enable one to play computer-copied “pirate” game DVD’s. Caterpillar Tractors speaks openly of changing their business model from the traditional model where they sell outright ownership of their tractors and equipment to one where they instead sell merely a license to use the equipment, and may have already began doing so.
I think the authors of this piece have hit on just how easy it probably is for those who control the deployment of new technology and curate its contents (both media and software) to shift the perceptions, influence the opinions, and alter the behavior of entire populations over the course of less than a generation or two.
It also subtly hints at how our existing societal structures have already “gamed” us to accept the extreme limitations of the consumer technology available in the technocracy as not only normal, but inevitable. Look at how television and radio developed. Originally there was some idea that citizens share ownership of the airwaves. Yet both radio and television developed primarily as corporate and government curated One-To-Many content delivery systems. Two-way television such as interactive blackboards existed in labs for decades, but were never standardized.
More poignantly, WiFi was developed as a system of closed island WLAN’s, when our wireless technology could easily have been designed from the get-go on an entirely open, free-to-access globe spanning MESH architecture.
But that kind of decentralization threatens centralized control. And if the only thing you have to pay for to get on the net is a piece of hardware, that doesnt fill enough pockets fast enough, and might inadvertently empower far too many people to organize at a neighborhood and civic level.
This same problem of technological advances being curated according to the whims of capital applies just as much to basic problems of food, clothing, transportation, communication, you name it. The reason there are hungry people is primarily because profit is valued over human dignity, and it has yet to be deemed profitable to develop food delivery infrastructure to feed everyone.
I’ve repeatedly said the same about extrapolating the likely parameters of near-future implantable computing technology from the trajectory that cell phone technology has taken. Cell phone marketing has people arguing over features like camera resolution, screen size and processor speed.
Meanwhile the user-facing OS is merely a client to a hidden baseband operating system that is rarely spoken of, that takes its primary command and control entirely from the cell towers, and that has full ability to update the user-facing OS without user knowledge. All connections from the user-facing OS to mics and cameras are mediated by the baseband hardware and its hidden OS. And you can forget about hacking the baseband radio to do anything interesting – regardless of chipset manufacturer that part of the cell phone almost always has ZERO public-facing documentation, despite graduate level researchers periodically demonstrating severe vulnerabilities.
So can you imagine when the people who designed that system start making implantable (multimedia) computing? And some dictator decides that in populations he controls, such will be mandatory at birth or early childhood education?
Yet for several years now small “software defined radio” devices such as the HackRF, BladeRF, and others made out of commodity consumer grade hardware using a sparsely populated circuit board little larger than a pack of cigarettes are able to tune huge chunks of the RF spectrum and be protocol-agile, able to function as cell phone, FM radio, television receiver, police scanner, technicians signal analyzer, even function as cellphone repeater aka microcell (such as those sold by AT&T for extending cell coverage inside dwellings, that just happens to be the exact same functionality used in “stingray” man-in-the-middle attacks…) all just by changing their software. Some hackers have already made them portable or linked them to tablets but the real advance will be putting one INSIDE a tablet. When that happens, and it eventually may, expect every spy agency on the planet to dirty their underwear simultaneously… But I digress… Surely it could have happened for quite some time, if industry had been behind it…
I’m no luddite – far from it. But between the TPP, advances in military technology, advances in the technologies of human coercion and control, advances in robotics, advances in the technologies of biopiracy and biological warfare in general, and all of this amid increasing pollution, changing climate dynamics, environmental catastrophes, and food and water shortages, we seem less than a generation or two from the possibility for a “perfect storm” to completely retool the borders, food, water, media, and societies of the planet at a global scale.
And if we’re not careful, it may be something far more totalitarian and globe-spanning than anything our recorded history can hint at.
stimoceiver 