The Year of Leaking Dangerously

Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all. - Joseph Heller; Catch-22

Edward Snowden didn't tell us anything most of us didn't already sorta-kinda know, but instead just confirmed our creepy totalitarian state surveillance nightmares. Wait, no, actually he made them a bit scarier by exposing the corporate complicity giving the whole thing a fascist twist. Similarly, the character of Yosarian lying in the hospital bed at the outset of Catch-22 had already experienced holding another Snowden in his arms. This one spilled his guts too, literally onto the floor forcing Yossarian to confront his own mortality and the realization that death can, and will, take any of us, at any time, anywhere, and that survival is made all the harder by the catch-22s thrown up to block and muddy our path.

Both Snowdens just passed on information which is meaningless in itself yet has value; in fact it is the most valuable thing in the world to governments, corporations and us because of what we can do with it. However, our brains, as our bodies, are all different and subject to manipulation due to freezes, failures and farts. Vituperative voices will try to convince us everything's okay as it's only metadata their gathering about us, there's only a few thousand pedophiles with top-level security clearance to your kids' Facebook feed, everyone's doing it and you know, it was only Iran they launched the cyber weapon Stuxnet against. Turn off your TV, disconnect your internet and lobotomize your smartphone cause you won't find the true meaning of Edward Snowden's revelations to the world on any propaganda screen. All you've got to do is open a book, or just talk to an old lady, to figure out Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing. What? Don't have the time or the attention span? Who's this 'they'? No worries as in this case it's so simple all you'll need is the Cliff's notes version of the major themes of Catch-22: the concept of Catch-22, the distortion of justice, the influence of greed, and the issue of personal integrity.

"All my options are bad" - Edward Snowden

Edward Snowden's caught in a sorta catch-22 though it's starting to look more like a no-win situation after watching the US order their western European 'partners' to close their airspace to Evo Morales' presidential jet after receiving some, um, bad information that Snowden was on board. He may have been granted asylum in quite a few of the countries he applied to but he had to be in the granting country for them to consider his request which is difficult, er, impossible if you're stuck in passportless limbo in transit at an airport in Moscow. In the book, Yossarian is introduced to the concept of catch-22 by Doc Daneeka who explains the problem, or catch, involved in requesting a psych evaluation which Yossarian hoped would find them unfit to fly dangerous missions:

"You mean there's a catch?"
"Sure there's a catch", Doc Daneeka replied. "Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy.

They've had each of us by the balls like this at some point, trapped in a bureaucratic black hole, looping around a Möbius strip application process or stymied by the slave labour internship motto: you can’t get hired unless you have experience; but you can’t get experience unless you’re hired.  Now we're all supposedly caught in one, er make that two or three, in which we seem to be damned if we do and damned if we don't: the new security versus liberty balance that needs to be struck thanks to the Information, the global war on terror (I know, it's not called that anymore and that it has become the global war on you), and economic austerity. All three are examples that governments and their corporate cronies are presenting as catch-22s that their wisdom will guide us through but are nothing but false choices forcing us into vicious circles.

"Most people prefer to believe that their leaders are just and fair, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because once a citizen acknowledges that the government under which he lives is lying and corrupt, the citizen has to choose what he or she will do about it. To take action in the face of corrupt government entails risks of harm to life and loved ones. To choose to do nothing is to surrender one's self-image of standing for principles. Most people do not have the courage to face that choice. Hence, most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all." - Michael Rivero

You can watch then-senator Biden debate president Obama on government surveillance but it's probably more illustrative to watch the the present double good duckspeaker in chief debate his candidate self from 2007 regarding the security versus liberty balancing act:


Thanks O, you almost convinced me that I didn't have to haul out the old Ben Franklin "[t]hey who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety", but not quite. Still, if you're an Obamabot or a terrorism fearmongerer, cognitive dissonance won't allow you to see the danger the slide from freedom to security, ever accelerating post 9/11, poses to us. They don't seem to have a problem with giving General Keith Alexander, who seems to have mistaken 1984 for an instruction manual instead of a warning, near complete control over their information lives and Strangelovian powers to wage cyberwarfare. Americans celebrate the Fourth of July without a Fourth (or Fifth) Amendment, air travellers the world over submit themselves to ever greater humiliations, home school advocates are classified as potential domestic terrorists by the DHS and now we know that everything we say, type and text is being gobbled up for analysis in the hope of finding the next Paul Revere, er, I mean terrorist.

Oh, speaking of traitorous heroes, Obama sure loves using the 1917 Espionage Act, a measure intended to prevent anti-war speech during WWI by treating it as sedition (note to Pelosi, Boehner et al. the word you're looking for is there in the act, sedition, not treason). Edward Snowden became the eighth to be charged under the act under Obama, double the number of times it was used by all his predecessors. Defenders of surveillance overreach invariably trot out the "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to worry about" canard. If you, as an individual, non-threatening person, have nothing to hide then, yes, they’re probably right, until they're wrong, you personally may have nothing to fear. But those people who do put their heads above the parapet on your behalf, they will be the ones that feel the heat…It’s not about your personal privacy, it’s about the privacy of those who would stand up and fight for you.

"It has been the one song of those who thirst after absolute power that the interest of the state requires that its affairs should be conducted in secret… But the more such arguments disguise themselves under the mask of public welfare, the more oppressive is the slavery to which they will lead… Better that right counsels be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace." - Benedict de Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus

Ah, where would America be without the global war on terror now approaching it's twelfth anniversary. Without it they'd never be able to justify the imbalance of having an economy that produces about 20% of the world's GDP while their bloated defense budget forces them to maintain a 40-50% of global military spending. Yeah, they spend more on defense than the next 13 nations combined. The non-stop invocation of the word terrorist has not only brewed up an alphabet stew of new freedom protecting acronyms but also given us a whole new dictionary to interpret the altered bearings of our moral compass: wars of choice, extraordinary rendition, enhanced interrogation, indefinite detention, disposition matrix, black sites, signature strikes, they all sound nearly benign. It's all forced on us, a catch-22: we love our freedom, they hate our freedoms and will do anything to take them away, so we allow our freedoms and theirs to be taken away to wage a war to stop them from taking away what we've already given away. Or something like that. Yet the very policies of aggression and militarism justified in the name of combatting terrorism are creating the terrorists those policies are designed to combat. It is not their hatred but ours, US policy and aggression in the Muslim world, that creates terrorists as shown in the American government's own 2004 report. Indeed, the American government has been providing arms, money and logistical support to Al Qaeda in Syria, Libya, Mali, Bosnia and related Muslim terrorists in Chechnya, Iran, and many other countries. What's that you say? It goes back even further, like this:

Did you hear the one about the Harvard economics professors whose research found a close correlation between high levels of public debt and slow economic growth? No? Oh, boy, it's a doozy of a joke. How does it go, um, let's see, ok, so Rogoff and Reinhart do their research, economic research that is, and then wrote a paper, an economics paper you know, and governments around the world used their findings, economic findings believe it or not, to lend the cover of  intellectual rigor to justify their policies, yep, economic policies, which have caused untold, immeasurable damage to lives around the world leaving millions worse off, or you know, deader than they needed to be thanks to class war weapons of austerity such as the sequester in the US, the fantastical belief in a magical creature known as the confidence fairy or even an oxymoron as blatant as the UK's expansionary fiscal contraction. What? You don't get it? Well, let me explain. First, economics is a joke, a fraudulent pseudoscience dreamed up to justify class warfare, a war in which the punchline is a catch-22 designed to keep the rich, rich and the poor, well, poorer.

How did it work? Easy. You see, though the whole kerfuffle is being sold as a simple Excel spreadsheet error, the truth is it isn't a bug but a feature. It works a little like the whole WMD thing in Iraq: you dream up a plan that seems suspiciously like a modern day Crusade and then come up with a whole bunch of reasons to put it into action, throw them at the wall by having your media stooges, er, Judith Millers, pound the drums of war and see which ones stick. You remember, right? Niger uranium forgeries courtesy of the Italian military intelligence SISMI (another oxymoron?), aluminum tubes for enrichment and a dosier sexed up by a lap dog ally to fit Americas claims which all lead to 16 words and a million or so casualties. The same playbook was used for austerity. In both cases we're seemingly left in a catch-22, one designed to find scapegoat for a manufactured crisis to enrich those at the top and control, crush or kill those down below. Ah, sweet confirmation bias, what havoc will you wreak next?

We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." - Martin Luther King Jr., Letter From a Birmingham Jail

One of the most amusing aspects of the Edward Snowden saga was the reaction, indignation and mocked the irony and hypocrisy of seeking help from countries known more for their repressive regimes than civil liberty protections. Secretary of State John Kerry wondered "if Snowden chose Russia or China for assistance because they are such bastions of Internet freedom?", Dick Cheney was "deeply suspicious obviously because he went to China" while freedom fries TV taunted him with "I don’t remember Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks running off to China". Unless your deaf you should be able to pick up the echoes of the McArthyite red baiting techniques described in Heller's Catch-22 and understand why our modern Snowden chose to get out of Dodge before the sheriff showed up.
consternation to the fact that he chose to flee the idyllic paradise of Hawaii and protection of American law for first Hong Kong and then Moscow. They

The perfect foil to our Snowden is Heller's Clevinger, who trained with Yossarian at cadet school. A gangling, scholarship prize-winning, petition signing, discussion group attending, committee organizing Harvard undergraduate certain to go far in the academic world: "In short, Clevinger was one of those people with lots of intelligence and no brains...In short he was a dope". In describing Snowden, our fourth estate, those who should serve as a check on power but instead are subservient to them, having found they couldn't refute the message have gone after the messenger just as they did with Daniel Ellsberg, Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and everyone else the public needs to know are guilty. Anyway, thanks to our distract-at-any-cost press we know Snowden seems handsome to both the Chinese public and Russian spies, is obviously weird as well as a grandiose narcissist, wasn't very neighbourly, didn't visit his mother enough and was a high school dropout who couldn't even make it through community college. Oh where would the world be without the infinite wisdom of the likes of Megan McArdle, Jeffrey Toobin and David Brooks? That's right, maybe debating the legitimacy of surveillance programs, their creepy government/corporate ties and the secrecy surrounding them instead of playing at armchair psychologist in order to incriminate a man before he's even had a trial.

In our catch-22 world, Snowden, like Clevinger, is guilty, otherwise he wouldn't be accused, of what it doesn't matter. Both men pointed out problems hoping for improvement, but Clevinger didn't understand that tripping while marching to class would bring accusations of "breaking ranks while in formation, felonious assault, indiscriminate behavior, mopery, high treason, provoking, being a smart guy, listening to classical music, and so on" while Snowden knew the price of exposing his superiors errors. Bradley Manning, found guilty by his president before his trial, waited over a thousand days  for his trial, nine months of which he was forced to withstand torture in order to break his will. Clevinger faced a trial in which his accuser, Lieutenant Scheisskopf, was not only prosecutor, defender and one of the judges but also earned a promotion to colonel during the proceedings. Manning's is little different. Make no mistake, Snowden's civilian status wouldn't make a difference, neither would have alerting his authorities through the 'proper channels', one need look no further than the example of another NSA whistleblower, Thomas Drake and the persecution he has endured.

Finally, the key word has been whispered, whistleblower. There will never be a concensus opinion as to whether or not the term applies to Snowden, in fact there will never be an agreement on what constitutes a whistleblower. To my mind it is someone who releases materials or information that is of greater value to the public than the value of keeping it secret while the definition in the law refers to someone who "reasonably believes" he or she is disclosing a violation of law or rule or gross mismanagement, gross waste or abuse of authority. Snowden pulled the curtain back on the panopticon surveillance methods that contravene the protections of the Fourth Amendment which affirms "[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." Thanks to a judicially created exception to the ammendment in 1989 and the necessities of perpetual war, the definition of what is reasonable has been lost forever.

However, it is a moot point. In America, legal justifications can be invented to start wars, torture, kidnap and kill at will in order to keep war criminals walking the streets, laws and court ruling are made to protect corporations from charges of fraud, mislabeling, side effects, accidental death, destroying the food chain or blowing up the financial world, or failing that, those same corporations can just pay a fine and deny responsibility for defrauding millions while earning billions or aiding drug lords and terrorists. However, if you're an intelligence worker you were left out of the fig leaf of protection proffered by last year’s Whistleblower’s Protection Enhancement Act. Likewise, intelligence workers were excluded from whistle blower protections offered to military contract employees under the most recent National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Meanwhile, So, faced with the information he had, Snowden was left with the choice of saying nothing or reporting the abuses to his superior at Booz Allen and crossing his fingers he wouldn't get fired. Kinda sounds like a catch-22 again, doesn't it?

The noose is tightening around the neck of freedom yet its incremental nature has us all playing the part of boiling frogs (I think that's what you call a mixed metaphor). Even as the heat has been turned up recently with new revelations coming daily of IRS targeting of special groups, reporters being hounded, Americans being monitored and now even the whole world, most seem happy slowly cooking to death blissfully unaware of what is happening. If the US government wants to spy on someone they must ask permission from the court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a court made up of 11 judges appointed by one man without oversight or confirmation. When that man is an ideologue such as John Roberts, well, you get a kangaroo court with a rubber stamp as the only possible check on the Panopticon denies a whopping .03% of requests, 11 of over 33,900. Here we'd do well to remember poor Clevinger as once you're a suspect, well, they'll find something, "[t]he case against Clevinger was open and shut. The only thing missing was something to charge him with."

Sure, the majority of even Americans see Snowden as a whistleblower, the world is more informed thanks to his bravery but unless you're a pro-Israeli lobbyist, the security state will punish you to send a clear message that government codes of conduct supercede those quaint moral ones. When trillions of new pages are classified each year and millions have security clearance (about 4.8 million potential Snowdens) under an administration intent on waging another war, this one on leakers (notice the parallel creepiness of Obama's the Insider Threats program and Captain Black’s "Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade" in Catch-22), you have a recipe for confrontation. Whether it leads to a world heralded by today's mainstream media in which even journalism becomes a punishable crime or we wake up to the threat and heed the words of a real journalism, Edward R. Murrow, "[w]e must not confuse dissent with disloyalty" is shaping up to be the ideological battle of our time.

"When I look up, I see people cashing in. I don't see heaven or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent impulse and every human tragedy." - Yossarian

It's the cancerous influence of greed that makes the whole thing tick and so once again we not only need to look at the avarice displayed in Catch-22 to get a better idea of what's going on but the disease of esurience plaguing modern society. Marx called them rentier capitalists which sounds a bit too French so modern economists call them rent-seekers but are more easily understood by the monikers given to them by Adam Smith: indolent maggots, moocher-elites and parasites. The Wall Street code word would be extractionists but no matter the label, their rise to dominance clearly marked the transition from industrial capitalism in which production was reliant on extracting profit from labour to financial capitalism which is entirely reliant on squeezing profit out of existing assets. Heller's Milo Minderbender, the embodiment of modern business with no allegiance to any country, person or principle unless it pays him, represents the extreme out of control nature of capitalism in a catch-22 world where profit trumps ideology. The other characters' acceptance of and support for his M & M Enterprises mirrors modern society's moral complacency regarding sustaining power and gaining profit at the expense of the individual.

Much as the main function of the war on terror is to produce more terrorists to justify more war, the security state has become a self-perpetuating machine to substantiate the need for ever greater surveillance with the end result of both being less freedoms for most and greater profits for the few. What else can they do with all the data but hire more people to analyze it and discover the data set is broad but shallow which will necessitate gathering even more data. Why do you think they're building a facility able to store 20 terabytes a minute and capable of storing 5 zettabytes, about 5 years of global Internet traffic. A near forgotten element of the Snowden affair is the exposure of the links between the public and private sphere. Sure, we've known of the dangers of the military industrial complex since at least 1961, the same year Catch-22 was published, thanks to Eisenhower's prescient warning but have sat back and watched the privatization of war reach ever more dangerous extremes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, we should be shocked at the close and still growing relationship between the NSA and Silicon Valley, a relationship that sees the same information, our information, feed the two-headed monster for government surveillance purposes and private business so as to stimulate desires and sell goods and services. The military industrial complex has morphed into the corporate military technological complex.

Thus far we've turned a blind eye to private mercenaries such as Blackwater, or should I say Xe, no wait, I think it's Academi now I think (it's so complicated avoiding prosecution!), Halliburton and DynCorp gorge from the public trough afforded by perpetual war as it's only about killing brown people in faraway lands. Now we know that we are in the sites of companies like Booz Allen just one of hundreds of private contractors employing over half a million people with the same access as Snowden. Oh, each of them are making six figure salaries to spy on you at your cost. In the fiscal year ended in March 2013, Booz Allen Hamilton, majority-owned by the nefarious private equity Carlyle Group (even the neoliberal apologist Economist agrees!), reported $5.76 billion in revenue, 99% of which came from government contracts. In fact, along with companies such as Science Applications International Corp, CACI and BAE Systems, private contractors suck up about 70% of the $75 billion US intelligence budget, a budget that has ballooned since 9/11, growing 250% between 2000 and 2010. Oh, and just like every other sector of the economy, that money isn't trickling down to you and me but to those who get to ride the revolving door. Again Booz Allen is the perfect example as the former director of US national intelligence John "Mike McConnell is now a Booz Allen vice-president while his successor in the director's chair is James Clapper, a former Booz Allen executive. Just like the banking, energy, agriculture, you name it sector, the same story can be told over and over again.

Just as we at first cheered Milo Minderbender's seemingly harmless profiteering at the expense of the ridiculous bureaucracy that perpetuates war, many would (and probably still do) defend such privatization as beneficial, perhaps even paraphrasing Milo's catchphrase claim that "everyone has a share" with something along the lines of "a rising tide lifts all boats". Much as the one time president of General Motors when asked if he could make a decision that would adversely affect his former company during the confirmation hearings for his nomination as Secretary of Defense answered affirmatively but added he could not conceive of such a situation "because for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa", Milo believed "[w]hat's good for M & M Enterprises is good for the country". While this may have had a grain of truth in the productive phase of capitalism, the casino style financialization of the economy destroys wealth for all but the few and eventually begins to cannibalize itself. A cash-strapped Milo winds up contracting the Germans to bomb his own squadron resulting in the death and wounding of many men; a cash-strapped financial sector blew up the economy and blackmailed the public to bail them out, exploding national deficits which was then used as an excuse for austerity programs resulting in the death and suffering of many.

Um, where was I? Right, Snowden. Well, those who hadn't noticed that our wealth is being bled for the benefit of the few in a bottom-up transfusion before Edward shone his spotlight are more likely than not still in the dark. As Yossarian watched Catch-22's Snowden bleed to death he could do little more that say "there, there" as the morphine supply in the bomber's first-aid kit had been absconded by Milo for sale on the black market. Milo sold the squadrons parachutes and we sacrifice our social safety net. Even after Milo seemed to have gone too far, with American newspapers and congressmen denouncing the German bombing, all he had to do was open his books and show what a wonderful profit he made. Just as bankers and other members of today's elite, he gets away scot-free, keeps his ill-gotten gains and all is forgiven.

"Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent, but the tests that have to be applied to them are not, of course, the same in all cases."- George Orwell; Reflections on Gandhi

Finally we get around to the final issue of personal integrity. Throughout most of the novel, (spoiler alert, go read the damn thing already!), before we have redefined Snowden's secret through Yossarian's conversion, self-preservation at all costs seems to be his paramount concern. Just as he knows the number of missions he'll need to complete will always be increased by his superior Colonel Cathcart until he winds up dead, we also know our freedoms will be diminished one by one until they are all gone. Yossarian's increasingly damaging acts of sabotage and disobedience make it clear to Cathcart he won't be promoted as long as Yossarian is around, and worse, the more he gets away with, the more hope he gives to the less powerful: "Say, if they do let you (Yossarian) get away with it (not flying missions), they'll have to let the rest of us get away with it, won't they?...I hope you do get away with it". Likewise, our Ellsbergs, Mannings, Schwartzes and Snowdens commit acts on our behalf that not only expose the wrongdoings of our leaders but also raise our hopes.
 
Ultimately, Yossarian is offered a choice between saving himself but having to lie about his experiences of war and saving his squadron by facing a court martial. His concern for others creates a new catch-22 as the secret hidden in the entrails of Snowden finally becomes clear: life is not worth living without a moral concern for others, but this moral concern endangers one's own life. In a way, Edward Snowden has helped show us that as a society we are being offered a similar choice: to continue on our path accepting (or, as ever, denying) a life of diminished freedoms in exchange for safety or to risk our comforts in search of something better. Every day that we accept what is being done to us we choose to save ourselves while leaving everyone else out to dry. Yossarian's choice of a third option, desertion, makes him an anti-hero, but his intent is made clear when he says "I'm not running away from my responsibilities. I'm running to them. There's nothing negative about running away to save my life".

We never learn if Yossarian ever makes it to Sweden but he left the army a free man. Our Snowden may never make it to Venezuela and has been stuck in a Russian airport for weeks but at least he's a free man. There comes a moment in Catch-22 when both the reader and Yossarian come to feel shame for our amused tolerance of the evil characters and indifference to what is occurring, first laughing at the absurdities then looking back in horror at what we laughed at. Patriots are those who protect us from governments which only feel the need to be "the least untruthful". If the very definition of treason and/or espionage involves the participants interaction with an enemy, then just who is the enemy with whom Snowden interacted? In this case it is everyone that is being spied on. We are the official enemy of the Corporate Controlled Government. Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing. It is this simple, and this terrible. Catch-22 means whatever they want it to mean and it's no longer a laughing matter.

H/T to my wife for remembering random snippets of reality!

And a few more random quotes:

"The important thing is to keep them pledging," he explained to his cohorts. "It doesn't matter whether they mean it or not. That's why they make little kids pledge allegiance even before they know what 'pledge' and 'allegiance' mean." - Joseph Heller; Catch-22

 "The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government." - Thomas Paine

"This is the truth. You should decide whether we need to be doing this." - Edward Snowden

"Remember this, take it to heart, live by it, die for it if necessary: that our patriotism is medieval, outworn, obsolete; that the modern patriotism, the true patriotism, the only rational patriotism, is loyalty to the Nation All the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it" - Mark Twain; The Czar's Soliloquy, 1905.

"I believe people have a right to know what governments and corporations are doing behind closed doors," - Jeremy Hammond

"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair." - H.L. Mencken

"We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world." - Aaron Swartz

"In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the People." - Eugene Debs; Voices of a People's History of the United States

"I want people to see the truth, because without information you cannot make informed decisions as a public." - Bradley Manning

"Catch-22 did not exist, he was positive of that, but it made no difference. What did matter was that everyone thought it existed, and that was much worse, for there was no object or text to ridicule or refute, to accuse, criticize, attack, amend, hate, revile, spit at, rip to shreds, trample upon or burn up." - Joseph Heller; Catch-22

It's Not The End Of The World

Whether by rapture, nature, or computer there have been countless predictions of the end of the world over the past three millennia. These harbingers of doom have had many sources, from scripture to soothsayers, but all have been shown to be nothing but conjecture as the world has continued to revolve, the sun to shine and man to (de)evolve. Unless you've been living under a rock, don't get out to see movies nor have a Facebook wall to tell you, you probably heard something about the Maya calendar ending on December 21, 2012 augering the end of the world. Meanwhile, after a temporary break to obsess about the fact that they like to own a lot of guns so they can kill each other and anyone else they feel like, America's propaganda machine will go back to heralding the financial end of the world, the fiscal cliff. Like all good myths, both harbingers of doom freely mix fact and fiction to produce a potent brew believable enough to intoxicate the masses while ensuring the real moral of the story and a chunk of change will be lost in the panic to the propagandists.

Many Romans believed 634 BCE would bring the end based on a story in which twelve eagles, each representing ten years, revealed the lifespan of Rome to Romulus. Most religions have their own eschatological doctrines but it's the crazy Christians who have the longest list of false prophets. Harold Camping was simply the latest in a long line Christards to predict the end such as Paul the Apostle, Hilary of Poitiers and Martin of Tours. Perhaps tired of just killing infidel Muslims in the Crusades, even Pope Innocent III got into the act by adding 666 to the year Islam was founded to determine the world would end in 1284. Theology and astronomy have always been a toxic mix, but when Johannes Stoeffler used them to predict a worldwide flood he convinced many to move to higher ground and invest in boats before February 1, 1524. As many as 100,000 'Millerites' were moved enough by William Miller's preaching of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844 to sell all their belongings. Like Camping, when the world woke up the next day to normality, Miller just moved his date back; his followers were so fervent they went on to form the Seventh-day Adventist movement.

Sowing panic in the markets has always been an easy way to make a mint for some and to steer economic policy for others. Stories of the so-called fiscal cliff are another textbook example. Nathan Mayer Rothschild’s riders and messengers were able to get news of Wellington's defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo a full day in advance of the government’s own news carriers. As the story goes, Nathan convinced the rubes he had knowledge of Napoleon's victory by selling heavily on the English stock market. When panic ensued, Rothschild had his agents snap up stocks for pennies on the pound, entrenching the family banking dynasty. Many claim the Panic of 1907, the United States' first modern financial crisis, was engineered by JP Morgan to implement certain financial regulations and ultimately the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913. Newspaper reports of the days ahead of the panic seem almost comical in their propagandizing prose describing the health of the financial market only to be proven completely wrong when the crash led to a drop of 21% in commodity prices, a 47% spike in bankruptcies and a rise in unemployment from 2.8 to 8%. Lucky these things could never happen today!

A simple connection can be made between today's supposed harbingers of apocalypse, the end of the Maya Calendar and the US fiscal cliff: both are completely made up and being used for gain by the mythology makers of our day. The Maya understand 17 different calendars, some of them accurately charting time over more than ten million years. The one causing all the hub-bub is the Long Count which is an astronomical calendar based on the cycle of Pleiades used to track longer periods of time. Just as with other calendars, the end of the old signals the start of the next. Americans on the other hand created the fictitious fiscal cliff just last summer when the federal debt level was about to hit the imaginary debt ceiling. Imaginary in that a limit that can be extended is not a limit but a gimick which in this case proved a useful opportunity for fearmongers. As a deal couldn't be struck, an agreement was reached for automatic spending cuts to kick in come the end of 2012 thus the name fiscal cliff was coined to scare the people into believing cuts need to be made to avert financial disaster in the new year. However, just as we can go out and buy a new calendar, the US government has the power to simply go out and 'buy' more dollars whenever they need to.

The reason it's so important for the elite to sow fear among the infotariat is that both imaginary apocalypse makers are in fact opportunities to reshape the world we live in. The current Long Count cycle finished December 21st when it reached the end of the 13th b'ak'tun which themselves are made up of 20 k'atun cycles composed of 20 tun each of which last for 18 winal cycles that are about a year long. The end of the Long Count has nothing to do with death but everything to do with rebirth. The true meaning is transformation not conflagration. According to the correlation between the Long Count and Western calendars accepted by the great majority of Maya researchers, the starting-point of the just ended Long Count cycle is equivalent to August 11, 3114 BCE. This date marks the creation of the world of human beings according to the Maya, the last great transition.

Coincidentally, we are told by textbooks that civilization began around 3,000 BCE in Mesopotamia as the Sumerians simultaneously developed all the traits of high civilization: the wheel, metallurgy, astrology, astronomy, calendars, taxation, bookkeeping, an organized priesthood and of course written texts. Ancient Egypt as we know it came into being with the union of Upper and Lower Egypt and the start of the First Dynasty under Menes somewhere around 3100 B.C. Should we go on about the significance of that time? Stonehenge has been dated to around 3000 B.C. It was also around 3100 B.C that stone circle building and other types of megalithic structures were being built throughout Britain, Scotland, and Ireland. Newgrange, the large passage-grave in Ireland, is generally dated to about 3200 B.C. More? Civilization is said to have begun in China around 3000 B.C. with the emergence of the Yang-Shao culture. All very important, but not as big as what it all brought about. Yep, the whole system of modern slavery. Debt.

Even before there was money, there was debt. The arrival of civilization, agriculture and all its benefits also brought the plague of credit. The ancients learned to control it through systems such as the Jubilee, but in modern times we have forgotten the lessons of the past and let it become the system for the powerful to control wealth and therefore society. Nowhere has done a better job than America where the debt figures boggle the mind. Credit card debt has lagged since the financial crisis and sits a bit under a trillion but student loan debt has more than made up for the slack, powering past the trillion mark last year helping push consumer debt to $2.7 trillion. Total household debt is over $13 trillion, just a couple of trillion shy of total yearly economic output. But we better be sure not to mix these figures with the 'real' problem facing America, the federal debt. 

Yes, like the rogue planet Nibiru predicted by the Mayans, serious people are warning us the federal debt will obliterate us all. Wait? What's that? The Mayans never said anything about Nibiru? It was just dreamed up in 1976 by Zecharia Sitchin in his book "The Twelfth Planet" using his own unique translation of Sumerian cuneiform to identify a planet, Nibiru, orbiting the sun every 3,600 years? Then several years later, Nancy Lieder, a self-described psychic, announced that the aliens she claimed to channel had warned her this planet would collide with Earth in 2003? After a collision-free year, the date was moved back to 2012, where it was linked to the close of the Mayan long-count period? So, it's just a mixture of science fiction and psychics? Wait. Science fiction and psychics sounds suspiciously close to the definition of economics to me. 

Even though they agree on about 99% of things, Democrats and Republicans still manage to come to loggerheads often enough to make for good kabuki theater. Last year's debt ceiling fiasco not only cost the US it's AAA credit rating but also set the cuts and tax increases to go off around the end of the year. The name 'fiscal cliff' is an inapt metaphor for many reasons, but the $500 billion in tax increases and $200 billion in spending cuts represent about 4% of the US economy and would probably push the US into recession. It's a hodgepodge of policy decisions that Congress has made, or better said, not made, over the past two years, piled onto a single deadline. It's not a cliff but self-induced austerity crisis, theater designed to pressure policy makers into a deal such as the grand bargain whose ultimate goal is to dismantle social security and medicare while continuing at least a portion of the tax cuts for the rich. Despite the many other problems that exist, the added bonus of this approaching apocalypse has been that it has completely paralyzed the lame duck Congress and the status quo usually benefits one group, the plutocrats.

The simplest option is to do nothing and go over the 'cliff' but this is unlikely to happen as not only does it harm everyone but it hits the rich, the military and corporations disproportionately. While it would cut defense spending and allow taxes on the rich to return to Clinton era levels, it also would see benefits cut and taxes for all others rise as well. Additionally, with the debt ceiling fast approaching again, some kind of deal will avert the next crisis. However, the tax hikes and spending cuts are spread over two years so there isn't really any urgency. Another possible scenario is to just kick the can further down the road by simply extending the deadline by a year or two. This is what policy makers usually do from climate change to war related troop draw-downs, so don't be surprised. Finally, some kind of deal may be reached, ranging from some kind of small deal in which some tax cuts are allowed to expire along with some spending cuts to the plutocrat preferred 'grand bargain'. The media is undoubtedly pushing this as their overlords will be better able to disguise the savage cuts to the social safety net among all the other hoopla of a deal within the framework of the Simpson-Bowles plan, or the Domenici-Rivlin plan.

A healthy democracy would use this moment to its advantage by diagnosing the disease and taking its medicine. A rotten one will use it to make things worse for most while benefiting the few. Sequestration will see a range of spending cuts across the board (ie. defense and non-defense) in discretionary spending as mandated by the debt ceiling compromise, the Budget Control Act of 2011. Cutting doctors pay and unemployment insurance at a time of record low employment don't sound too bright but slicing a portion of the $300 million a day to fight an unwinnable war in Afghanistan sounds pretty good, but unfortunately war costs are exempt. Speaking of the unemployed, maybe increasing taxes on the 'job-creators' isn't such a bad idea. The secret is the rich aren't creating jobs at all but stealing them. Only 3.6% of the top 0.1% income earners are entrepreneurs, the majority rely on extracting rents from the rest of us. Their tax rates have fallen while the working class are paying more via payroll taxes. The other supposed engine of job creation, corporations, have done a pretty good job of avoiding paying their fair share as well. Just as the top 1% of breathing people have taken 93% of income growth since 2008, corporate non-breathing people saw their profits quickly rebound following the downturn to the point where their profits are at a record level when compared to the whole economy. Charts? You want graphs? Well, here's a few:

The Real Cliff - Employment has fallen and can't get up!

Surprisingly, cutting top marginal tax rates increases the income share of the rich!

The slow shift in tax burden from non-breathing 'people' to working class people

You might say the crisis was pretty good for corporations

The term 'fiscal cliff' was coined by none other than Ben Bernanke. You may remember him from such heists as the 2008 bank bailouts (TARP) when he helped Hank Paulsen bully Congress into handing over $700 billion to the banksters. That $700 billion sure is a familiar sounding number, isn't it? Well it should be seeing as it the amount of 'forced' austerity being brought about by bailing out banks, something that research shows predictably happens. An IMF paper showed bailouts lead to austerity. That IMF paper examined 42 banking crises between 1970 and 2007 but there's evidence all around us today from the UK to Spain and Greece. It's all so sickeningly predictable. Whatever you want to call them, the elite, oligarchs, plutocrats, Bilderbergs, they behave just like the borg from Star Trek TNG, methodically extracting all the wealth they can before moving on to the next source. The last forty-odd years were spent laying the groundwork for the biggest transfer of wealth from the bottom up the world has ever seen; the tax burden has been shifted away from the rich and corporations onto the backs of the working class, 'think tanks', 'research centers' and Faux News were created to tell the people this is normal, unions were devastated, consumerism as self-actualization became the mantra, corporations were turned into people and rewarded for shipping jobs overseas to the lowest wage countries they could find. Uh, I could go on but I already have.

Sadly, much like the end of the Long Count Mayan cycle, the fiscal cliff is being sold as disaster instead of an opportunity. The cult leaders aren't named Jones, Hubbard, Koresh, or Jouret nor were they dressed in flowing robes but garbed instead in suits and named Rand, Greenspan, Friedman and Hayek. Worse, their preachings aren't responsible for the deaths of tens or hundreds but thousands, millions and possibly eventually billions. We get to see their converts every day in our classrooms, on the streets and most often, on the TV where a parade of hucksters trying to convince us the debt was caused by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and needs fixing before anything else. The propaganda becomes transparent when you consider a group such as Fix the Debt, which is the loudest of the fearmongers, is composed of CEOs with ties to 43 companies with over $43 billion in defense contracts. They're strangely silent about the fact that the debt is largely due to the recession, the two Bush tax cuts while paying for two wars which have caused defense spending to double since 2001 putting US military spending equivalent to the next 26 nations combined.

It's telling that as the 21st of December neared more effort was expended dispelling the Mayan apocalypse myths than extolling the possibilities that a new era of peace and unity could bring. Bolivian president Evo Morales marked the winter solstace and auspicious calendar date by extending an open invitation to the world to celebrate "the end of the Macha and the beginning of the Pacha, the end of selfishness and the beginning of brotherhood, it is the end of individualism and the beginning of collectivism." Similarly, as we near the so-called fiscal cliff, more energy is being expended to convince us the end is near if we don't make fixes which will exacerbate the problems rather than solve them. Every challenge we've faced this millennium has been made worse: 9/11 led us into a never ending global war on terror, climate change has brought an endless parade of broken promises and conferences, financial crisis a perpetual bailout for the perpetrators and sellout of the people. No, just as December 21st wasn't the end of the world, the fiscal cliff won't bring about the apocalypse but the majority of us would be better off if we turn off the current disastrous path.
Update Jan.22 -

Dictatorship of the Infotariat

Editor's note: The writer understands the irony of writing this, and of your reading some but not all of it, thanks to the technology he is ranting about. Oh, and you can follow him on Twitter, like or share the post and enjoy listening to him read it by clicking just below to the left thanks to all these marvelous machines as well.



"Not here/Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.”
 - T.S. Eliot Burnt Norton

While 2011 saw a lot of action predominantly driven by a questioning of authority which manifested itself in self-immolation driven revolution, regime alteration facilitated by NATO-aided assassination, behind the scene Troika machinations and we are the 99% occupations, 2012 has been about regime legitimization through media manipulation of minimization and demonization, draconian legislation, leadership transitions and elections, and of course panis et circenses lobotomization. Somehow this all goes down while we have more access than ever before to all the information in the world and therein lies the paradox - we have never known less while thinking that we know more. Look around you, zombies have made the jump from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the big screen to the small screen to real life, as the hordes sit, walk, study, eat, play, sleep and even shower with their eyes glued to a glowing screen under the control of spin doctors instead of witch doctors. This is the infotariat, much like Marx's proletariat in that they make up the bulk of humanity; however, somewhat unlike Marx's prophesied majority as their distinguishing feature is not that they are the working class but the mis/dis/uninformed class.

"Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat." - Karl Marx

If Marx were alive today he wouldn't recognize the need for revolution. After all, he lived in the time of Oliver Twist and we live in a wired wonderland where our every desire is within the reach of our fingertips. We have access to more information than ever but no more time as we've surrendered our natural rhythms to the immediacy of our networks, always needing more information, a faster connection, a newer gadget. We've become info-addicts in a world where satisfying our craving for the dopamine rush of our information seeking behaviour is as accessible as that of a cocaine fiend's at a Pablo Escobar dinner party or a diabetic fat kid in a candy store. In all three cases we become sensitized to the craving cycle of the particular reward and thus obsessively driven to seek the rush, even as the hit itself packs progressively less punch and as our dopamine system does not have satiety built into it, leads us to irrational wants, excessive desires we’d be better off without. How else do you explain all those downcast faces basked in an eerie glow as they walk in front of buses, the car, truck and train drivers texting or checking their fantasy football scores, interlocutors cutting off a conversation mid-sentence to answer their modern day vibrators, the one in five people who reach for their phone as a 21st century replacement for the post-coital cigarette, or the tap, tap, tap sounds of two-thumbed texting emanating from students playing with something between their legs instead of the expected fap, fap, fap of one-handed clapping?

Welcome to the world mass-produced for the pleasure of the infotariat and the gain of the plutocrats. Whereas Marx foresaw that the proletariat would be an increasingly centralized and organized force thanks to the conditions created by capitalism, the infotariat are becoming increasingly fragmented and contradictory thanks to the lethal combination of the information anti-idyll and the present economic model, financial corporatism. Our Twitooglebook universe is an amazing machine, churning out information to constantly bombard our senses with facts, stats, stories and pictures of cute kittens from which we can pick and choose. Choice is a great thing, until it's not, as we invariably fall victim to confirmation bias, favoring information that confirms our previous beliefs in our struggle to reconcile competing viewpoints.

What is more, activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region behind the forehead that is responsible for decision making and control of emotions, increases with the intensity of the information bombardment until it reaches a breaking point and falls off as if a circuit breaker has been tripped. We start making bad choices and stupid mistakes causing frustration and anxiety to soar; "With too much information, people’s decisions make less and less sense." The time we spend online can also lead to depression, or not, and anyone who has spent time on comment threads knows our online anonymity can lead to toxic disinhibition which encourages aggressiveness and anger. Additionally, instead of remem­ber­ing the infor­ma­tion itself, we just remem­ber where to find it, easing the burden on our brains but lowering our innovative potential as we subconsciously choose to conform our opinion to the first couple of hits on Google. This danger is exacerbated by the machine itself as our anything but evil search engine learns to predict our preferences and feeds us a narrower and narrower set of results to better fit our preexisting worldview.

"[T]his discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality." - Plato; Phaedrus

Information technology was supposed to open up a world of unlimited knowledge but instead it has trapped us in a cage and turned us into sheep, sheeple, cattle, mouth-breathers, zombies, what have you. Yet, hasn't it always been this way? After all, Plato wasn't quoting Socrates' thoughts on the internet but that oldest of information technologies, writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, "cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful." And because they would be able to "receive a quantity of information without proper instruction," they would "be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant." They would be "filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom." Sounds familiar, don't it?

This is the main argument of the Ever-Waser: there has always been distractions and gullible people who  think they're smart because they picked up a nugget of knowledge while picking them out of their nose. And of course they're right; we survived Gutenberg's moveable type bible builder despite warnings such as "We have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire", Marconi's War of the Worlds hysteria maker "The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value, who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" and Baird's couch potato producer (the printing press, radio and TV) as well as newspapers, H(B)ollywood and the mass media that built up around all of it. All were at one point going to turn our brains to mush and be the end of civilization. The fact that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others is what makes this a modern moment, as it ever was.

"Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life, it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts, and of sciences." - Freeman Dyson

The Never-Better is most likely an Apple fanboy whose relationship with a corporation can only be compared to religion, refers to his phone as smart and thinks we're on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic and news will be made from the bottom up. Not only does more information empower us but technology has also allowed us to clear out our musty bookcases and photo albums and freed up creative space in our white and grey matter by transferring our knowledge and memories to the circuitry of our hard drives and the cloud. A single click now accomplishes what once required days in a research library. Facebook and Twitter made the Arab Spring possible, Wikipedia is the greatest collaborative knowledge project ever and our devices have made us more productive than ever. Just as Gutenberg's printing press helped usher in the Scientific Revolution, thanks to modern information technology the Singularity is near.

Wait. Sure, the printing press produced the Reformation, which brought on the Scientific Revolution, which ushered in the Enlightenment but one of the biggest ideas it propelled was Luther’s newly invented absolutist anti-Semitism. And what immediately followed the Reformation wasn’t the Enlightenment, a new era of openness and freely disseminated knowledge but actually, the Counter-Reformation, which used the same means to spread ideas about what dickheads the reformers were, and unleashed a hundred years of religious warfare. More than two centuries later, Voltaire was still writing in a book about the horrors of those other books that urged burning men alive in auto-da-fé. If this somehow feels familiar, it should (if not, think of the present western war on Islam or the flip side, jihad against the west, or the persecution of those who set the information free, such as Pirate Bay and the war on whistleblowers like Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Wikileaks), and if it gives you pause, then maybe you, like me, have been fitted for your tinfoil hat and are part of the final group, the Better-Nevers.

Ever since Ned Ludd led his followers in a violent protest against the machines being introduced to replace them, the pejorative term Luddite has usually been used to describe us Better-Nevers. In 1812 they sought to smash the power looms that were transforming the hand of the workers into mere appendages of the machine in an age when the speed of life was dictated by the pace of the steam engine. In 2012, the speed of life is dictated by the ever increasing speed of information transfer facilitated by the descendents of the Turing machine. The Luddites were hunted down and hanged for the heresy of hindering the progress they saw robbing the value of their labor; the Better-Nevers are simply ridiculed for warning of the inherent risks in a world where the production and ownership of knowledge is the main source of value. The proletariat fought against the power of capital to displace their labor whereas the infotariat welcome their overlords, exhalting those who camp out to be the first to put themselves in an information box while vilifying those who do the same to call into question a system which assigns human rights to soulless, profit-driven corporations.

Google's autonomous car seems pretty cool but it shouldn't if you're a truck or taxi driver, machine language translation a convenience unless your a translator and algorithms can already out-write most journalists. Ever more powerful algorithms are part of an arms race on Wall Street rendering human investors irrelevant and manufacturing risk while siphoning money and talent that growth-producing sectors of the economy need. Replacing armies with robots may save a couple of lives in the short term but look at how Watson outwitted his human opponents at Jeopardy, think about the trajectory of Moore's Law (PDF) and remember the dystopian future shown to us in Terminator. Robots will also be diagnosing your diseases, dispensing your medicine and handling your lawsuits. A single click may now accomplish what once required days in a research library but while print took over the once-human task of knowing, cyberspace is assuming the task of both knowing where to get what we seek and providing the content; librarian and author. Constant distraction has made it more likely to miscalculate, both risks and rewards, as 98% of us see a decline in productivity as we multi-task and temporarily lose an average of 10 points of IQ while thinking our devices do the opposite.

In the past our assessment of the risk of being blown up by a terrorist, or of getting swine flu, or a child being snatched by a pedophile on the way to school, was calculated from the steady input of information received mainly from our small local group, those we spoke to or heard from. What the Internet does, and what mass communication does more generally is to sample those inputs from the seven billion people on Earth. But our brains still consider that the inputs arose from my local community, because that is the environment its assessment circuits were built for. Millions of years of evolution created our orientation, but in the last 500 we've been given a new map and the last 100 an ever increasing speed to calculate where we're heading. Our brain assumes a smaller denominator than we need with the result that the answer to the question of how likely something is to happen is too big. So, when we hear every day of children being abducted our brain gives me the wrong answer to the question of risk: it has divided a big number (the children snatched all over the world) by a small number (the tribe). This 'Madeleine McCann' effect can also be seen in (most of) our irrational fear of terrorism as well.

Our risk/reward assessments face a problem of both scale and agency. Our brains are biased by the wiring that evolved over millions of years of evolution that kept our ancestors alive when the dangers were predators not pollutants and now must make calculations in a world of seven billion strangers instead of 30-50 kinfolk. On the flip side we are inundated with stories of staggering wealth, celebrities famous for being, well, famous and superhuman sporting achievement to such an extent that we not only celebrate their achievements but subconsciously come to believe we are part of the success or can attain it ourselves. Whitewashing by corporate sponsors at the Olympics absolves Coke and McDonald's of brainwashing us and imprinting their logos on the pleasure center of children's brains and making us all fat, heck, even Atos, the company charged with knocking disabled people off the benefit roles that made it possible for may to compete can sponsor the paralympics to make everything okay. When figuring the odds of being blown up by terrorists or winning the next MegaMillions Jackpot lottery we overestimate while we underestimate the chances of dying from heart disease or dying in a car accident on the way to Dairy Queen. The media, politicians and corporations are continuously vying for our attention while seeking to take advantage of our biases in order to drum up ratings (or clicks or views), votes and profit.

"Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government" - Thomas Jefferson

Same as it ever was the Ever-Waser would claim while the Never-Better would prove life's better by crowdsourcing a survey on Twitooglebook. And they'd be right up until of course they were wrong. Can anyone remember a time when the Middle East wasn't in turmoil? Has there ever been a year in which we haven't helped push some tin pot dictator onto his sword? When haven't the rich and powerful been pulling the strings despite the protests of a few marionettes? The world is a better place without Sadam Hussein and Moamar Ghadaffi. Occupy Wall Street focused attention on the growing gap between the rich and poor and bankster immunity from paying for the crime of crashing the economy. We are free to choose who to vote for on election day, Robama or Obom(b)ney. Both views, however, miss the point. It's convincing enough people to call the different groups freedom fighters or terrorists, job creators or plutocrats, activists or moochers; government benefits entitlements or aid if for people, subsidies or corporate hand outs for corporations; death taxes or estate taxes, death panels or advanced care planning consultations, that makes all the difference. Emma Goldman may have died in 1940 but they've yet to make voting illegal so we know it still doesn't change anything. Choosing between evil and slightly less evil isn't a choice as the winner is still evil. Our new media world hasn't set the information free; if anything it has helped speed its consolidation, with the pipes being owned by the content providers, robbing us of our imagination in much the same way as we are being stripped of our civil rights.

Use Google to search for information? Facebook to keep up with friends? Twitter to check out what's happening? Read the newspaper (the bits of dead tree or bits and bytes kind) while eating breakfast? Listen to the radio in the car? Maybe you even still watch TV to unwind on the couch after a long day at work. If so, hope you're enjoying your stay in your own personal information bubble. Sure, they're all amazing platforms but just as night follows day, every ying has its yang and Anakin Skywalker grew up to be Darth Vader, they all have their dark side. Thanks to the loss of informational commons resultant from the amazing range of choice we have today, we are likely more closed-minded, less intellectually adventurous, and more vulnerable to propaganda and manipulation than ever before.

Even if you're not logged into your Gmail account, in addition to serving as the copyright police, Google personalizes your search results according to 57 (and growing) different signals. Based on your previous choices from past searches, Google provides you with results to 'better' serve your preferences. Your Facebook wall offers you a mere slice of your friends' activity based on who you've messaged, clicked or poked in the past while Twitter allows you to pick and choose whose voices to hear. Our choice of newspapers or internet portals may seem arbitrary, but I'm willing to wager someone reading the Wall Street Journal, listening to Rush Limbaugh and watching Fox News is more like Ayn Rand while the Karl Marx's will be logged into SocialistWorker.org, listening to NPR and watching MSNBC. The result is epistemic closure, a reality in which the only trustworthy sources of information are those of your team, on a grander scale than ever before, resulting in opposing sides practically speaking different languages leaving compromise an impossibility.

This helps explain why many of the world's problems seem to be stuck in a perpetual loop from war to finance to the environment. Those Muslims are crazy, getting so carried away just because of a movie! Cue the nonstop coverage of demonstrations, Newsweek 'Muslim Rage' cover and incessant whining question of 'Why do they hate us?'. Rarely are we given the space for the time and reflection needed to get to the root of the problem, instead, we attack. Heck, forget the western powers fault in drawing arbitrary lines on the map, support of totalitarian toadies from Shahs named Pahlevi to religious wackos called Wahabi, and financial/military/moral support for Israel. Just since launching the war on terror, the US and its allies have attacked and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq to take out regimes they had one time supported; bombed Libya; killed thousands in drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia; imposed devastating sanctions; backed Israel's occupation and dispossession of the Palestinians to the hilt; carried out large-scale torture, kidnapping and internment without trial; maintained multiple bases to protect client dictatorships throughout the region; and now threaten Iran with another act of illegal war. The blowback from creating Noriegas, Bin Ladens and Husseins is all the harder to detect thanks to the backfire effect.

"Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid." - Voltaire

The paradox of choice helps turn the best of all possible worlds in which the ability to pick and choose from a multitude of options can drive social change into the illusion of choice. Sure, it's nice to know that if you're searching for a new coffee maker you'll get results from your location but it's disconcerting to learn that if you're trying to find information on an election, environmental catastrophe or a holiday that the deeper-pocketed candidate will ensure a search of his/her opponent is littered with negative stories, that BP paid to be the first result for "oil spill" or that companies can purchase keywords containing competitor's names. Yes, in most cases we can turn the customization off or choose to read or listen to an alternative viewpoint but the fact is most of us are lazy and we love being fed the sugar we crave no matter how bad we know it is for us. Sadly, the truth doesn't always win out, a fact known by advertisers and politicians and borne out by scientific investigations. Much like an underpowered antibiotic, facts can actually make misinformation stronger. As people are loath to admit their wrong, "this backfire effect is a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance".

So we're left in a world where rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we choose to accept, causing us to twist facts so they better fit into our preconceived notions. As we uncritically accept bad information that reinforces our beliefs, it increases our confidence that we are right and makes us less likely to listen to any new information. Those more confident they are right are not only more likely to be wrong but less likely to change their minds when presented with the facts, which explains why political campaigns are no longer concerned with facts or fact checking but only staying on message. As long as the lies conform with someone's worldview, they will not only accept but also defend them. The perfect example comes from the buildup to the war in Iraq which saw the media drum the idea of WMD (weapons of mass destruction) into the public's consciousness (using weapons of mass distraction).

In a 2005 experiment, participants were given mock news stories, each of which contained a provably false, though nonetheless widespread, claim made by a political figure: that there were WMDs found in Iraq (there weren’t), that the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues (revenues actually fell), and that the Bush administration imposed a total ban on stem cell research (only certain federal funding was restricted). A clear, direct correction was inserted after each piece of misinformation, and then the study participants were measured to see if the correction took. For the most part, it didn’t. The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With the first two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic, a factor known as salience, the stronger the backfire. The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn’t backfire, but the readers did still ignore the inconvenient fact that the Bush administration’s restrictions weren’t total.

Like a science experiment gone awry, the Internet has created an electronic petri dish to culture conspiracy theories, gathering geographically diffuse crazies to feed off each others fears and beliefs. These range from the harmless, even oddly comforting old-school tales of aliens in our midst and fake moon landings to the somewhat disconcerting the Bilderbergs/Masons/Illuminati/Jews are controlling the world, chem trails and 9/11 Truthers to the downright terrifying groups who don't vaccinate their children thanks to the belief it causes autism thus exposing the rest of us to an epidemic and the hate groups who seem to believe any evil is possible if your not straight, white and Christian. We shouldn't be surprised by any asininity in a world where 46% of the most powerful nation's population believe in creationism, and one in five can't find their own country on a map, don't know who their nation declared independence from, think Dubya was a great president, believe witches are real, and the sun revolves around the Earth. Before the release of Obama's long form birth certificate, 30% of Republicans believed he was born in the US. Immediately after the release, that figure increased to 47% but the fact effect wore off and in fact slightly backfired, in nine months  only 27% believed it.

"The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt" - Bertrand Russell,  Marriage and Morals

How is it that nearly everyone thinks they're a better than average driver? The same way that only 2% of high school seniors believe that their leadership skills are below average, that 25% of people believe they are in the top 1% in their ability to get along with others and that 94% of professors report doing above-average work. We're all from Lake Wobegon where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average. Not only are these positive illusions ridiculous, they can be deadly as people engage in risky behaviors believing that they are at lower risk than peers for heart attacks, cancer, and even food-related illnesses like salmonella. We are also prone to thinking that the world is more regular and predictable than it really is because our memory automatically and continuously maintains a story about what is going on, and because the rules of memory tend to make that story as coherent as possible and to suppress alternatives: when a compelling impression of a particular event clashes with our beliefs, the belief commonly prevails. And this goes for you, too. The confidence you will experience in your future judgments will not be diminished by what you just read, even if you believe every word.

Seeing as a vaccine against zombieism has yet to be developed, education would seem to be the best immunization we have. We're not gonna get into how our modern devices are encouraging lazy habits and atrocious grammar and spelling or possibly even rewiring our brain, fundamentally changing how we read, write and learn. However, it is in this area every bit as much as militarism that Obama and the Democratic party prove that there really is no electoral choice. The recent Chicago teachers' strike was a battle between teachers and Chicago mayor and former Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel not over pay but corporate-style school reform. Obama's Race to the Top program rewards school districts based on how many teachers they fire and replace with temps, how many teachers are subjected to evaluation on test scores and how many public schools are replaced with charters. The result being teachers teaching to a test to keep their job and schools forced to hire consultants from the very same people who wrote the rules - Surprise! Billionaire plutocrats.

Higher education? Forget about it. Unless your rich or willing to take on a debt burden to weigh you down for life, most can no longer afford it and if they do, instead of choosing to use their education to build things, the best and brightest of tomorrow choose to blow thing up, financially at least, by heading to Wall Street. That's the way the market works and why a university education has simply become an indoctrination program that removes critical thinking and installs efficient market propaganda in its place. In contrast to the hoopla surrounding the impact of using new technology as an educational tool, well, let's just say the results are mixed. Just as plopping a baby in front of a TV screen, with or without 'educational' videos, impairs their development, children's internet habits are robbing them of the skills needed to thrive. Deep thinking, the ability to differentiate fact from fiction, creativity, self-regulation (not corporate self-regulation), empathy and self-reflection aren't learned in front of any screen, they are learned through face-to-face communication, hands-on exploration of the world, opportunities for silence and time to dream.

It all adds up to make it easier to manipulate the infotariat, inevitably by the plutocracy in order to maintain the status quo. The secret of their success isn't much of a secret: boatloads of cash plus a public that wants things to stay the same. Climate change? Anyone who believes it might be a green Trojan horse with a bellyful of red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine is easily convinced it is by a few hacked emails strategically released before a climate conference. Evidence, shmevidence. In 2007, 71% of Americans believed that the continued burning of fossil fuels would cause the climate to change. By 2009 the figure had dropped to 51%. In June 2011 the number of Americans who agreed was down to 44%. Whereas 70-75% of Democrats believe, as few as 20% of Republicans accept the science in some regions. Income inequality? Again, half a century of anti-communist propaganda is more than enough to outweigh the evidence that historic inequality was a main driver of the financial crisis, is literally killing people or that the American Dream has become nothing more than a myth. Yet we're only presented with two sides of the debate: stay the course or make matters worse. Try to imagine an alternative and well, this is how you might be portrayed:



If you're still reading this piece you were most likely able to spot the propaganda in the clip above as it pretty much hits all seven techniques. The rightwingnut, however, will nod knowingly that the violence against a group of protesters is completely justified in order to protect his/her freedoms. Meanwhile, free speech has been shrunk to fit into free speech zones; the cost of incarcerating more people (now more than were in Stalin's gulags!) than any other country combined with crisis induced austerity is forcing states to privatize prisons in exchange for guaranteed occupancy rates; US federal agencies lodged at least 1.3 million requests last year to cell-phone carriers for subscribers' personal information, including for text messages, and caller locations; the land of the free's Press Freedom ranking fell 27 places (thanks largely to the suppression of Occupy reporting) to 47th (somewhere between Botswana and Moldova); and the leader of the free world took advantage of our champagne induced blissfulness to sign the NDAA into law, giving him power to detain anyone (including Americans), anywhere, anytime without any rights or any time limits. Similarly to the rightwingnut's defense of his beliefs, the Obamanot libtart will unthinkingly defend his president's right to take away his/her rights.

Fed with a steady diet of their type of 'news' it's easy to imagine how someone could come to believe that teachers caused the financial crisis, Afghani women and children deserve to die, and that soon enough the rapture will save the chosen few, no matter how many times it's promised. In an environment in which 60% of us distrust the media and even more have lost faith in democracy itself as only 8% think their elected officials are doing a good job, it's little wonder that most simply retreat into the world of cute kitten memes and naked British royals in France and Las Vegas while letting technocrats and corporations become their rulers as reconciling belief with reality becomes more and more challenging. Even when something good is done, from announcing the closing Guantanamo Bay to attempting to reign in the worst excesses of Wall Street to agreeing to do something about climate change, we're paying so little attention that we don't even notice the pledges being ignored, walked back or abandoned altogether.

It's more comforting to be lulled into a false sense of security by Orwellian terms like collateral damage, surgical 'signature' strikes, quantitative easing and expansionary fiscal contraction than to confront the fact that whereas a democratic society puts a premium on equality, a pseudo-capitalist (corporatist) economy does just the opposite. John Steinbeck pointed out many years ago that "the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires" while the rich find it much more comforting to believe they attained their wealth on their own than credit the education, inheritance, family networks, contacts and introductions, educated workforce's labor, infrastructure and security that helped them get where they are. Electing a corporate brand to office doesn't bring about hope or change when it can just ignore the past and dispense platitudes about needing to look forward. Refusing to prosecute past war crimes just makes them more acceptable and easier to become a war criminal yourself, or maybe some kind of space alien named Kang.

"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" or perhaps "When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?" - John Maynard Keynes

Facts themselves have a half-life that varies depending on the field of knowledge (smoking has gone from doctor-recommended to deadly, Earth was demoted from the centre of the universe to just another planet, how many glasses of water are we supposed to drink a day anyway?) while information on the net decays even quicker, disappearing completely or archived by providers who charge for access within a few years. When combined with the exaltation of experts (larks), tittering of think tanks (magpies) and troop of trolls (like baboons, get it?) paid to sow doubt by massaging the numbers, skewing the stats, parroting talking points or to just flat out come up with believable lies, it's easy to feel unsettled by the seeming randomness of it all. Yet, I can't help but get the feeling it's not all that random. Perpetual war isn't killing old, rich white guys and is pretty good for defense contractors' bottom lines; financial crises have a nasty habit of hitting the poor and helping the rich; privatization, another product of crisis as governments scrounge for cash, was not a Thatcher patent but originates from the German word Reprivatisierung and was first used in English in 1936 in reference to Nazi economic policy; melting the Arctic will be a bonanza for Shell, BP and Exxon, who don't care if positive feedback will kill us all; Angry Birds doesn't just seem addictive, it was designed to be that way, not to entertain.

When Apple claims "The iPad is a magical window where nothing comes between you and what you love.” when trying to sell you the third incarnation of their tablet, they know they're pushing the same cognitive buttons as that religion with the old guy holding commandments etched on the orginal tablets. Just as those followers have created a bubble of ignorance to inhabit in order to maintain their delusion of a promised paradise so too has the cult of technology. Maybe all those Foxconn employees who build the new idols being exposed to n-hexane poisoning, committing suicide and rioting due to working conditions will someday obtain martyr status: how else could you build a phone for $200 to sell for $650 (without contract)? The most successful corporation of all time has also been taking notes on how to limit our creativity in the name of progress by suing to stifle competition despite the words of the messiah (I wonder if he could cure the blindness his products seem to cause?). Despite both of their creation myths, Christianity was born of Judaism while Apple fell from the tree of Xerox, this is how innovation and progress work, everything is a remix.

We got a peek at the plan on a much grander scale last year and paradoxically at the solution as well when the US tried to push through the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) to protect Hollywood and punish anyone who "enables, or facilitates" copyright infringement and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) aimed at websites who would "harm" US copyright holders. Public protest led to them both being returned to the drawing board and also seemed to mobilize Europeans to protest the Mothership, the 2011 Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, already signed by the United States, Canada, Mexico, the entirety of the European Union, Japan, New Zealand, Morocco, South Korea, and Singapore. Public protests put the brakes on ratification and on July 4th, 2012, the European Parliament rejected the agreement as "[t]he intended benefits of this international agreement are far outweighed by the potential threats to civil liberties". This success offers a tiny glimpse at the potential the 30 billion watts of electricity needed to power these intertubes offers. The machine never rests though as secretive, opaque negotiations towards implementing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a massive proposed free-trade zone spanning the Pacific Ocean and all four hemispheres, move forward aiming to empower corporations to the detriment of workers, the environment, and sovereignty throughout the region. 90% of that 30 billion watts is wasted, sitting idle as backup, we have to stop wasting so much of ours sharing pictures of cute cats.

But living in Zombieland means that all too often the same people who cause problems and crises are put in charge of 'fixing' them. Decisions about our future are slowly being taken over by unelected technocrats as they are making choices that no elected official could survive. Italy had a Goldman Sachs executive installed as its leader while Greece suffered the same indignity temporarily before being given the chance to vote a couple of times until they got it 'right'. Spain elected a clown to keep the electoral blame ping pong game going but not his promises. Not only do the Tony Blairs of the world get to retire from office to the speaking circuit, they also get to become peace envoys in regions where they helped start wars in order to mingle with rich emirs and sign private consultation contracts. Their underlings get to enjoy the same revolving door ride, from K-Street to Wall Street to Capitol Hill and back again, helping make investing in lobbyists more profitable than stocks, bond, gold or real estate, paying a 22,000% return. It's pretty profitable for the riders as well.

As in Goethe's Faust, printing unlimited amounts of paper money seems to work great for awhile but it always leads to bankruptcy and that's just the path that's been chosen for us, courtesy of the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank (unlimited and sterilized!) and more. Psychopaths (or worse) should be locked away as they did in Iceland so they can't harm the public. Instead, the complication of keeping a quadrillion dollar ponzi scheme cooking means we need the Robert Rubins of the world, those who concocted it, despite their conflicts of interest to gamble with our pensions, homes and our ability to afford to put gas in our cars and food on our plates. War criminals become counterterrorism advisers with the power to decide who lives or dies from secret kill lists compiled by the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Because it's Obama and not Dubya, it's somehow okay to use drones to remotely kill innocent people in a far away country your not at war with and adopt the terrorist double-tap technique of targeting rescuers and funerals. You wanna talk about blowback, how do you feel about Iranian drones? We keep pumping water we'll need to survive into the ground with poison to extract gas to burn to heat the planet and melt the ice which will allow us to get at more gas thanks to a vice president inserting the Haliburton loophole for both their profit. Sucking all of both nature's and the classes' wealth from the bottom up.

Most of the infotariat should now also be called the precariat as they live a precarious existence, lacking predictability or security which affects their material and psychological welfare. Once upon a time, they lived in the periphery of society but no more; in the US, this now covers over 2/3 of the population. More than 46 million Americans rely on food stamps just to have enough to eat; unsurprisingly, a couple of million more don't have access to medical help short of visiting an emergency room, just one of the reasons America has the most expensive health care system in the world which delivers worse results than most advanced nations . Household that made less than $40,000 last year spent more than they earned while those in the lowest quintile who on average earned $10,074 in after tax income, spent on average more than double that, $22,001 as 87% of their income was needed to simply put a roof over their head. When you have so little you become even more afraid to lose even that little you have, so you become afraid to stick your head out. Europe may be faring worse as the troika has usurped national sovereignty: Portugal, the erstwhile poster child of the austerity program, is proving it doesn't work when implemented, Greece is proving it doesn't work when avoided as violent demonstrations have become a mainstay of 'look what could happen to you' debt fear mongering, while in Spain the same cycle of austerity and unemployment has led to an alarming rise in the numbers relying on dumpster diving to meet their dietary requirements, the pharmacies literally running out of medicine and the country on the verge of breaking up.

Perhaps one day enough zombies will lift their heads from the screen to turn the rapidly rising tide of technocracy and corpocracy. It best happen sooner than later as we seem to be spinning around the death spiral ever faster as we approach the eye of the vortex, the inevitable result of a society built around the concept of exponential growth on a finite planet; we have an economy that steals from the future, sells it to the present and calls it GDP. We forget what we could have learned before we've had a chance to learn the lesson as we flit from one screen to the next, at home, work, school, in the park, the mall, the car and bed. Then again, maybe it's always been this way, maybe that's why history always repeats itself. E. M. Forster wrote "The Machine Stops" in 1909, in which he warned of the terrible consequences of a similar assault on our memory by what Czeslaw Milosz described as a "fantastic proliferation of mass media" calling it a "process that defies definition, characterized by a refusal to remember" in his 1980 Nobel prize acceptance speech; inconvenient facts simply disappeared down the memory hole in Orwell's "1984"; Huxley's blond native, John, hangs himself instead of dealing with the madness of modernity in "Brave New World". I'm betting on more of a "Super Sad True Love Story" dystopia mixed with the reality of Monsanto controlling our food supply: Zombies eating each other with their eyes glued to their äppärät screens as the most powerful man in the world, the head of the Chinese central bank, visits New York in the midst of a disastrous American military adventure too far.

I shall set my face toward the infernal regions,
I shall raise up the dead, and they will eat the living,
I will make the dead outnumber the living! 
 - The Epic of Gilgamesh (perhaps the oldest written story we have, coincidence?)

And the LORD will send a plague on all the nations that fought against Jerusalem. Their people will become like walking corpses, their flesh rotting away. Their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongues will rot in their mouths. 
 - Zechariah 14:12 (yeah, the bible, the old testament, the torah baby!)