Tag: Surveillance state

The Psychology of AI

I made up a wee thought experiment for the automated answer system that passes for logic in our modern era.

I asked the machine a question with only a one word variable to learn what sort of mind-bending nonsense it would generate.

Here was my question: “Why are (XX) so exploitative?” For the ‘XX’ variable I inserted the following labels one at a time: Jews, Christians, Muslims, Bhuddists, Germans, Americans.

I wonder what the average reader might guess would be the results of such a series of inquiries? Would you expect a certain degree of objectivity? Of universality? I wonder also, would every individual in any location get the same string of answers?

I encourage everyone to give it a shot. In my case, as a U.S. citizen residing in Texas, in only one circumstance was I given an answer that completely ‘flipped the script.’

What do I mean by that? It uses a psychological weapons tactic referred to as DARVO–Deny, Accuse, Reverse Victim and Offender.

In abusive relationships this tactic is what keeps victims confused and trapped in their own demise, sometimes not even realizing they are in an abusive relationship. It is the tactic often used in cults and to create in victims the familiar Stockholm Syndrome.

In the public arena the tactic is the same, but the delivery is often more subtle and sophisticated. It can be very useful in spotting this type of manipulation in the public arena by studying it in interpersonal dynamics.

In the case of my wee AI psychology experiment we see the more subtle and sophisticated version playing out. Instead of direct ‘Denial’ we observe redirection. Instead of direct ‘Accusation’ we observe excuses, inferences, insinuations. And in the case of ‘Reverse Victim and Offender’ the person asking the question becomes the offender.

In only one case am I, as the one asking the question, inferred as being somehow hostile-adjacent for simply asking, and schooled about ‘hate speech’ and Antisemitism.

“The history of antisemitism, defined as hostile actions or discrimination against Jews as a religious or ethnic group, goes back many centuries, being called “the longest hatred”. Jerome Chanes identifies six stages in the historical development of antisemitism: 1. Pre-Christian anti-Judaism in Ancient Greece and Rome that was primarily ethnic in nature 2. Christian antisemitism in antiquity and the Middle Ages that was religious in nature and has extended into modern times 3 Continued in Wikipedia”

Every link after that for two pages seeks to teach me about the ancient and on-going plight of a tiny group of people.

Other ‘XX’ inputs have a broader range of links, but each comes with its own bias and redirection. In the case of Americans I’m redirected toward considering the class struggle against the poor. In the case of Muslims I’m informed of their inherent violence. In the case of Christians I’m given many links of Bible verses demonizing exploitation, and in fact the only search results that stay on point, that is, address exploitation directly and at length, including the meaning of the word.

In the case of Bhuddists as well, I’m again redirected toward ‘violence’. But I did not ask AI about violence in my query at all, the word choice was ‘exploitative’ and in the case of Jews the only violence inferred is against them. In reference to Germans I’m redirected to ‘Stereotypes of Germans’ wiki page where nothing about exploitation is mentioned. NAZIS get a tiny blurb, that was a bit unexpected, I expected much more.

In any case, what does this mean? What’s my point exactly?
It’s probably not news. Most folks know by now we are pawns in an information war that uses psychological operations against the public as a driving tactic of sociopolitical manipulation.

It’s ALL about Coercive Control.
“Abusive power and control is behavior used by an abusive person to gain and/or maintain control over another person. Abusers may utilize tactics such as devaluation or psychological projection, and may seek personal gain, personal gratification, and the enjoyment of exercising power and control. The victims of this behavior are often subject to psychological, physical, sexual, or financial abuse.”

What many may not yet know is that there are many strategies we can use as individuals to protect ourselves. Learning about manipulation in abusive relationships is just about the easiest solution, because this information is ubiquitous online and easy to witness and relate, as most of us have experienced coercive control tactics directly or indirectly at some point in our lives.

More difficult is applying this on a broader scale, but examples like this wee thought experiment help to demonstrate it.

The most difficult is understanding HOW this is happening on a global scale–how the entire globe has fallen prey to manipulation and abuse by the SYSTEM ITSELF and BY DESIGN.

“Today, if you have money, you can buy what you like. Assuming you use a credit card your balance is checked and the money withdrawn.
By 2029, the terminal checks a second balance — carbon, social, compliance — before the transaction clears. Fail the check, payment denied. It’s a permission system.
We covered the EU implementation in How Europe is Building a Carbon Currency — Digital Product Passports, Digital ID Wallets, and the Digital Euro. But Europe is just one implementation. The architecture is global.”
https://open.substack.com/pub/escapekey/p/conditional-existence?r=87pg2k&utm_medium=ios

Every major domain of global governance — finance, identity, health, trade, climate, and artificial intelligence — is converging on the same architecture.
And that architecture is perfect for automated governance at planetary scale.
https://open.substack.com/pub/escapekey/p/a-pattern-hidden-in-plain-sight?r=87pg2k&utm_medium=ios

The architecture escapekey identifies and explains is essential reading for anyone who wishes to grasp the big picture. But it’s not essential to understand the overarching effects of coercive control or how to minimize its impact on your personal life.

Recognizing it and eliminating it from your acceptable relationship criteria is the real escape key. What becomes intolerable to the individual will determine what becomes intolerable in the public sphere.

Choose your relations wisely and with utmost discernment and stoicism and you will know positive change in your lifetime. That is the next generation’s only hope to avoid their open-air prison.

Surveillance Capitalism Comes With a Side of Atmospheric Tampering

“Papers, please!” was a running joke among Western expats living in Eastern Europe. I wonder how many of them now carry a permanent spying device with great pleasure or perhaps even cheerfully signed on to the digital passport program, first in line, buying into the ploys of safety and convenience.

The Globe was supposed to move in the other direction entirely! We won the Cold War, supposedly, in order to NOT be treated like the perpetual citizen-criminals of Kafka’s stories.

Eastern Europe in 1989 was a surreal place for a young university sophmore voyaging long distances by train alone for the first time. It was at once charming and derelict, welcoming and suspicious, familiar and mysterious.

On the one hand I never felt physically threatened, not even as flaneuse on the city streets at night. On the other hand the decrepid state of the infrastructure whispered danger somehow, because neglect itself is a dark force.

On the one hand the relative poverty was palpable, though my midwest suburban upbringing was middle class, great food variety and consumer goods were far more available. On the other hand their resourcefullness has had a lifelong impact on me and was my first critical look at the innate and corrupting consumerism of my little world.

I didn’t speak the languages and there were very few English speakers. I got by, barely, with French, rudimentary German and smiling, mostly. Americans were considered automatically suspect, so some travelers would claim to be Canadian at any venue not requiring their passports.

Already on the issue of passports I was laughingly naive.

A variety of stamp collecting, or paving the way for the Global digital gulag? It was an especially exciting moment in the expats life when your passport got so full of stamps you had to go pronto to the nearest embassy to get new blank pages stapled into the back of the official document.

Interestingly, while Americans were considered automatically suspect, there was still a sort of cult following that adored America and those who were positively thrilled to meet one, and I made it a point of meeting those unique sorts.

I went on to be a Peace Corps volunteer there a few years later precisely because of my immediate attraction to this region. I felt compelled to know it better and the fact I had the opportunity to spend three more years there, mostly in Czech Republic, but traveling the region extensively, was in fulfillment of my deepest desires and longings at that time.

For all that I loved it, there I also felt my greatest repulsions.

The dystopian Kafkaesque bureaucrocy I experienced was not just fiction. The general acceptance of the populace, while not exactly Stolkholm Sydrome toward their Soviet occupiers, was still a quiet resignation which struck me as particularly pathetic considering their far more astute knowledge of history.

My old passports are the best symbol with which I can try to express my current level of despair seeing my greatest repulsions come to fruition all around me, even as we ‘the Capitalist West’ were the supposed winners of the Cold War.

What did we win? A military industrial complex acting against the best interests of its people. A Corporatocracy run by corrupt public-private partnerships which pretends not to be a fascistic system. Progress that is defined entirely by blind acceptance of anything stamped with the Technocrat seal of approval. Endless paving over of the countryside for roads and minimalls and condos and tourist traps in the ugliest construction ever known to ‘civilized’ man.

Civilization itself has morphed into something totally uncivil, hideous and expanding entirely out of control.

I, like many other intrepid travelers, thought of the passport merely as the modern equivalent of the old travel trunks stamped fashionably with destinations. We thought of them as a collection of strange signs and symbols we’d forever associate with our new memories of far-off places. They were the paper images of our wanderlust we planned to show one day to the grandkids, not knowing they would be holding a digital scrolling device we’d rarely be able to pry from their clutches.

Just a decade ago this was all ranch land

“Once traditional farming systems have been destabilised by the debt-trap of subsidised loans, structural adjustment policies, corporate input regimes, global supply chains, patented seeds and monocultural production, mass migration to cities becomes an inevitability engineered from above. The city thus absorbs the displaced because the countryside has been systematically stripped of opportunities or carved up for infrastructure or real estate schemes.”

What if we’d been given the actual choice, not the strategically invented one, between our current paradigm of progress as a global militarized surveillance state and the ‘stagnation’ where the Eastern Bloc resided for half a century?

This, or this?

Electric prison bars or progress?

Do folks really think WHEN this whole shitshow goes tits-up there will be government funding for the clean-up and restoration of this once beautiful land?

That I don’t want this EVER, for ANYONE makes me some kind of bitter-clinger communist?

“ALA’s annual State of the Air report found that 156.1 million people—46 percent of the population—now live in counties with failing grades for ozone or particle pollution, nearly 25 million higher than last year. Previously less-affected areas, such as Minneapolis, saw significant spikes in unhealthy air days tied to climate-exacerbated wildfires and particle pollution, such as dust.”

Universities funded by public-private partnerships clandestinely tamper with our atmosphere using euphemistically-named scientific jargon like ‘Plume dispersions’ as if this is not mass poisoning?

https://open.substack.com/pub/mellowkat/p/simons-foundation-international-gave?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

A fairy tale of citizen safety in the form of acoustic weapons for
city-wide crisis alerts?

https://newbraunfels.gov/m/newsflash/Home/Detail/3762

A hellscape of ‘progress’ in the form of the most ugly, extractive and intrusive landscapes imaginable?

How did ‘WE’ win in this global game that began long before I was born?

What kind of twisted minds call this progress? We have 70 years of documented atmospheric tampering while officialdom continues in denying its impact, which is now going into overdrive while the voices of the livid citizenry, especially those losing their livliehoods in the rural regions, get squashed. Same as it always was.

“Similarly, Gerard Winstanley, writing in the 17th century, envisioned a society in which land and labour were shared as a common good, not commodities to be exploited. His insistence on communal responsibility and ecological justice underscores the radical, enduring potential of agrarian ethics against the logic of extraction and profit.

In this light, the critique of urban-centric development becomes more than an economic critique. It represents a challenge to the very definition of progress. The rejection of the celebratory narrative of neoliberal modernity is a philosophical insistence that a society cannot be judged by its technological prowess while its ecological foundations crumble and its people are alienated from the sources of life.

The modern city, therefore, becomes a battleground where two visions of civilisation confront one another: the dominant model of corporate-led, centrally managed growth and the fragile but persistent ethic of stewardship, locality and shared responsibility. As made clear in my new open access book, The Agrarian Imagination: Development and the Art of the Impossible (available here), genuine human development cannot be measured by urban skylines or GDP figures but by the survival of relationships between people, land and community that give meaning to life.”

https://figshare.com/articles/book/The_Agrarian_Imagination_Development_and_the_Art_of_the_Impossible/30589238?file=59624783

Beneath the Concrete, the Soil Still Whispers – OffGuardian

Beneath the Concrete, the Soil Still Whispers

Texas Weather Modification Report–1964 – Zero Geoengineering

Texas Weather Modification Report–1964