The Internet and digital media are the greatest propaganda tools ever invented. They have come to us on the wings of numbers. They are insidious in the extreme, as the etymology of “insidious” tells us – Latin, insidere, to sit on, occupy – for over the last few decades they have acted as an invading army occupying our minds with numbers in a cunning attempt to mathematize our lives for techno-scientific, financialized neo-liberal capitalist purposes. To prepare us for the Great Reset when people and machines will be indistinguishable, Artificial Intelligence (AI), 5-G ultra microwaves, and Agenda 2030 will be fully established, and when human life has become part of The Internet of Things.
That, at least, is what the builders of the new Crystal Palace intend. At the moment, their Digital Palace seems like a stone wall that is here to stay, but as Fyodor has said, people are strange creatures and will sometimes refuse to be reconciled to the impossibility of “stone walls if it disgusts you to be reconciled to it.” I am disgusted.
The construction of the Digital Palace is the long goal that has been underway for decades. To erase lived time and space, flesh and blood humans, and by transfixing people with numbers, to create an abstract and ephemeral reality through a constantly evoked sense of emergency. Living the machine/Internet life would never be acceptable if people had not been subjected to an onslaught of numbers/statistics/data that has accustomed them to think like computers.
The great Jacques Ellul made it clear in his classic work, Propaganda, that propaganda is much more than the waving of a magic wand and lying, although it is that. It is a long process. He writes [emphasis added]:
It is based on slow, constant impregnation. It creates convictions and compliance through imperceptible influences that are effective only by continuous repetition. It must create a complete environment for the individual, one from which he never emerges. And to prevent him from finding external points of reference, it protects him by censoring everything that might come in from the outside. The slow building up of reflexes and myths, of psychological environment and prejudices, is not a stimulus that disappears quickly…
The mathematization of our thinking has been the essential first step in addicting people to the internet complex where mind-control is so effective. I say first step, yet it has been concomitantly accompanied by daily litanies of lies about world events through what Ray McGovern aptly terms the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MICIMATT).
In his usually masterful way, the great journalist John Pilger has recently pointed out so many of those grotesque lies about US wars of aggression around the world. Their numbers are legion, but not the kind of numbers you will find in the mainstream media. We are drowning in lies and numbers produced by a nihilistic elite in love with power, money, mayhem, and murder.
It is no accident that instrumental logic has replaced deep thought for so many people and the poets have been replaced by intellectual pimps. The emphasis on STEM subjects has paralleled the rise of the Internet with its drumbeat of numbers, statistics, and data. Let me offer just a few examples, which may seem innocuous unless seen in their larger context.
- The switch from analog to digital clocks and watches and their omnipresence.
- Referring to the week as 24/7 and the writing of dates as numbers such as 08/30/2023.
- The use-by-date numbers on all products, soon to be applied to commoditized people.
- The use of the term 9/11 to refer to the events of September 11, 2001.
- The listing by numbers of the best colleges, mascara, underwear, corkscrews, etc.
- The hilarious dating of the earth’s age to the current 4.4 billion as if that meant anything to anyone.
- The computer generated weather forecasts with their 10 and 30 day forecasts with precise numerical percentages for rain, snow, etc.
- The analytics that dominate the world of sports, the posting of numbers for everything from the speed a ball leaves a baseball bat, a tennis ball a racket, and in golf the speed, height, curve, apex, carry, and launch angle when a ball is driven – all these numbers changing as a computer measures the ball in flight.
- The “helpful” messages on restaurant receipts where the tips are recorded in descending order and exactitude from 18% to 20% to 25%.
- Manipulated statistics for everything under the sun, such as Covid cases and deaths, Ukrainian military casualties, unemployment numbers, etc.
- 6 feet social distancing and 15 days to flatten the curve – real science
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