Thatcher's Poland

My mistake was not waiting to light my cigarette until after I'd passed the pawn shop. The lombard, as they call them here, opened only a few months ago but it's quickly become a favorite hangout for young and old alike. Bizarrely, you're just as likely to see a group of old fogies as a gang of kids ogling the phones in the window, dreaming of the day when they can afford to light up the screens with the slide of a fingertip to signal to the those around them they are worthy while sending and receiving signals from around the world.

As I hit the corner of the main drag, I suddenly remembered I needed cash. Lucky every other building is now a bank while the majority of those in between are oft-time ironically named cheque cashing joints like Happy Credit, mortgage brokers and aptly named kantors (foreign exchange) such as Joker Kantor, so cash was flowing free and easy. Well, apparently not for buddy who was on me like a fly on shit as I waited for the bank machine.

- "Daj mi papierosa" (Give me a cigarette) Came the predictable plea.
- "Jest moj ostatni" (It's my last) I tried to parry.
- "Give me cigarette"
Fuck. Something about my amazing (!?) accent had given me away making me both a prey and a mark.
- "Cigarette!" He barked.
My smoke was now the focus of both our attentions as I raised it to my lips and dropped it to my side. A couple of quick drags and I hand him the butt but he still doesn't budge.
- "One, two beer. How much?" Guess he's thirsty, too. After all it's almost noon.
- "I dunno, depends which" I answer, giving him a shoulder slap to his right shoulder while dodging to my right and slide into the bank machine as the previous customer walks out.

Cash in hand, smoke accoster nowhere in sight, I continued my walk towards first the train and then my work station beyond. As the flow of traffic peppered with the odd late model Porsche and communist era Polski Fiat 126p whizzed by I pass the Golden Arches just in time to see a herd of diabetic fat kids stream out the door, miraculously avoiding the two drunks splayed on the pavement leaning against each other for support as they dream of their next drink. Next up is the wheelchair beggar at his post just past the rail yard and in front of the trade center on the corner where I turn toward the university. Fortunately I'm shielded from his view as I pass by a gaggle of home decor/gardening/fashion enthusiasts clutching their conference bags filled with soon-to-be landfill waste and don't have to respond to his plea for the zloty (cash) he'd need to survive the next 24 hours.

Turning onto the bridge I walked past the newly completed portion of the train station, already covered in grime thanks to the pollution along with the road work and construction of the monstrous mall and even more ginormous parking garage that will be attached to the new Poznan train terminal. Wired gates control traffic at the end the bridge where the roadworks are most intense. Cars jockey for position from all sides as I emerged onto the zebra crossing with my usual contempt for motorized traffic. My second confrontation of the day comes when a car creeps up to my knee and we lock eyes, I point to the crossing and he starts yelling through his windscreen. Flipping him the bird I've already had two opportunities to fight and I haven't been out of the flat for 20 minutes.

That's when I found out Margaret Thatcher had died. I didn't have to wait to read about it in the obituaries or the newspaper, the words accompanied the beep that lit up my cellphone (fortunately I'm still holding onto my decade old Nokia brick and haven't yet needed to join the gawkers in front of the lombard).

"Ding dong, the witch is dead!"

Having come from a British friend that's all that was needed to convey the news. The fraction of a second it took for the impulse to smile to travel from my brain was long enough to allow the guilt for having such a feeling to arrest the curl of my lips before they'd even crinkled. I had to stop and look around. Here I was in Poland about to walk into university to teach a group of students whose parents most likely believe the Iron Lady was at least in part to thank for causing Communist USSR to crumble. The knowledge was more likely than not passed to their offspring subconsciously, like the information transmission of DNA, the kids probably don't even know what they, well, know. The terms Thatcher's Britain and Thatcher's child took no time to enter the lexicon and then the OED, and now standing on the corner with a Beyonce for H&M billboard to my left commanding women to buy her swimsuit or suffer social ostracism, if one's different, one's bound to be lonely, and a Szybcy i Wsciekli 6 (Fast & the Furious 6) billboard to my right reminding me of Thatcher's possibly apocryphal quote "[a] man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure", I couldn't help wonder how much this was Thatcher's Poland.

"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past"
- Orwell, 1984

Upon noticing a book carried by one of my first Polish private students with Ronald Reagan on the cover, I was informed that Saint Ronnie along with John Paul II and Margaret Thatcher were his heroes: the holy trinity of freedom, a triptych of Maggie, Ronnie and JP2 on the mantelpiece of every good home. It's one of those things everyone here just knows just as I knew at that moment that Thatcher's passing wasn't going to go quietly; an information war every bit as deadly as the shooting kind she loved so much was already under way to remake her legacy, reframe the perspective and retard the rest of us.

Had she been a man, Margaret Thatcher could easily have been called Iron Balls as she had conviction in her beliefs if she had anything. Instead, thanks to her power to make most shrink around her, she was ironically given the nickname she came to love by the system she loathed. Accusing her of trying to revive the cold war, the Soviet Army newspaper Krasnaja Zvezda (Red Star) dubbed the then leader of the opposition železnaja dama (the Iron Lady) in January of 1976.

Seems as with everything else about Lady Thatcher, measuring the impact of her role in the fall of the Soviet Union is too subjective to measure, a hagiographic effort at best. Sure, after meeting Mikhail Gorbachev in 1984 she declared "We can do business together" and shortly thereafter the official party policy of glasnost was adopted in the USSR. However a near identical phrase "I think they can do business together" had been uttered in February of the same year by the American Senate Majority Leader Howard H Baker Jr. in reference to Reagan's potential meeting with the then Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko.

Her bold assertions that there was no alternative nor any such thing as society, delivered in a tone both boring and boring, made her seem so decisive and divisive but when examined in context become wishy-washy and banal. Should we celebrate the life or death of a lady who may have had a hand in bringing about a Brave New World order by bringing down the (iron) curtain on our 1984 future? How does one shed a tear for a woman who had no qualms about ordering the death of hundreds of 'Argies' sailing away from a fight, not only allowed the US to station nuclear tipped cruise missiles on British soil to up the Cold War ante but also to use British bases for bombing raids on Libya, and above all, taught us to be selfish and that the pain of others isn't our problem?

But did she help save the Poles and the rest from communism? Unanswerable and doubtful but Poland's neoliberal lackey foreign minister Radek Sikorski eulogized her as a "fearless champion of liberty". We can guess how the Argentinians feel about how she saved the Malvinas. Barack Obama trotted out the obligatory praise saying she was "one of the great champions of freedom and liberty". Why don't we ask a Chilean if she helped or hurt their struggle against her buddy Pinochet by thanking him for "bringing democracy to Chile" by murdering the people's elected representative. I'm sure the tens of thousands murdered, hundreds of thousands tortured and million plus forced to flee Chile under his dictatorship would disagree.

The Economist magazine, bringing the tru to Minitru and where 2+2=5, eulogized "[t]he essence of Thatcherism was to oppose the status quo and bet on freedom", thus doing their part to ensure her support of the South African apartheid regime is lost down the memory hole. Not only did she once refer to Nelson Mandela's ANC as a "typical terrorist organization" while her spokesman said it was "cloud-cuckoo land for anyone to believe" they could run the country, she somehow worked the doublethink trick of projecting opposition to the racist regime while befriending then Premier P.W. Botha. She celebrated her friendship with Indonesia's General Suharto calling hime "one of our very best and most valuable friends" for having killed 500,000 suspected Communists in Indonesia before moving on to invade East Timor in 1975 to massacre around 250,000 men, women and children on the island. Her government helped arm Saddam Hussein, lent a hand to Pol Pot and hailed General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq's work in Pakistan that laid the groundwork for the Islamic radicalization of a whole generation.

Perhaps the greatest paradox of the woman was just that, she was a woman. In 1970, a week after becoming Secretary of State for Education and Science, she was asked if she would she like to become the first woman Prime Minister. "No," she answered emphatically, "there will not be a woman Prime Minister in my lifetime—the male population is too prejudiced." Of the movement and activists which possibly did more to change the 20th century than any other and opened the door to 10 Downing to her, she reportedly told an adviser, "[t]he feminists hate me, don’t they? And I don’t blame them. For I hate feminism. It is poison." In 1982 she said "The battle for women's rights has largely been won" which explains why she never felt the need to speak out against domestic violence, rape, sexual abuse or harassment or how women earned about 60 cents to the dollar of men's wages. She gave the appearance of smashing the glass ceiling while in fact pulling up the ladder, famously promoting only a single woman to a cabinet position preferring instead to surround herself with vegetables. Is it sexist of me to wonder how a mother of two could also become Maggie Thatcher the milk-snatcher by taking away kids' milk? Despite her portrayal as a greengrocer's daughter who had to fight to the top, she seems to have been a daddy's girl who married well which allowed her the luxury to study and hire a nanny.

Apologists rose to Thatcher's defense to claim her actions were a product of the times, the ends justified the means and of course, war is peace. Her sales pitch to a roomful of Saudis, "I'll have one of those!" while stroking a gleaming missile, to seal the $80 billion Al Yamamah arms deal wasn't meant for public consumption as 'batting for Britain' really involved billions in black money to bribe Saudi princes and add to the bottom line of BAE. Poles have learned Thatcher's buddy system well, er, well, the politicians at least, lining up to sacrifice lives and zloty to the alter of American military hegemony. Polish may have recently become England's second language but Polish politicians speak Anglo-Saxon ass-kissing as good as any lapdog. Most Poles are oblivious to the fact they ranked number four on the 'coalition of the willing' casualty countdown and just last month saw their 39th soldier killed in Afghanistan, while four more stand trial for war crimes committed there. Meanwhile the billions to be spent on a useless missile shield that the majority of the people don't want will piss off the Russians and definitely won't end up in the pockets of the locals.

"Non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature...are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation."
- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Thanks to doublethink, the lady wasn't for turning and probably believed in what she was doing but the real trick was to convince not just the people but her own party of the myth that Thatcherism was good for 'ordinary' people and would emancipate the working classes. Attila the Hen found an ally in Rupert Murdoch; she helped him consolidate his media power while he helped her spread the gospel and get reelected twice. The two protestant 'outsiders' who attended Oxford railed against the establishment which they became a part of by helping each other; he by having his tabloid the Sun shift its traditional support for Labour to Thatcher's Tories with a front page editorial arguing Thatcher’s election would be better for the working classes, she by allowing his acquisition of The Times and Sunday Times to avoid scrutiny by the competition authorities thanks to a deal struck during lunch at Chequers. While Thatcherism was tearing the heart out of the industrial heartland and looting the commons to hand it over to a tiny elite of 'wealth creators' who would free up the market and rain wealth on the land, Murdoch helped make sure there would be astonishingly little protest or consciousness by blaming the poor, promoting war and of course giving the people want they really wanted, more football.

The strength of ignorance is both easily built and desperately needed here in Poland. Caught so often on the wrong side of history and geography, convincing the Poles that there is no alternative to the current course has been an easy sell. Football, vodka and the Catholic Church allow the people to imagine they'll get to a better place as long as they keep their head down and work hard. Sure, they have the right complain and the array of choices seems as diverse as anywhere but the media landscape ensures the discourse never strays far off course. German companies like Axel Springer AG spew IngSoc, er, tabloid trash and EU propaganda with their version of the Sun, Fakt, alongside Dziennik and Newsweek Polska, American movies continually revise the past while TV portrays seemingly  possible present from the west or a poor simulation thereof and Radio Maryja spews xenophobic hate cloaked in the hope of redemption. The closest Poland comes to Murdoch is Adam Michnik, editor of the ofttimes leading national daily Gazeta Wyborca who somehow managed the trick of undergoing a conversion from a fearless dissident into a hack propagandist heralding the evils of Islamofascism and convincing women to go shopping on cobblestone streets wearing high heels (er, a forced reference to his paper's women's magazine Wysokie Obcasy - High Heels)

Maggie may or may not have been instrumental in delivering Poland and Eastern Europe from the Soviet Union but it was her amazing electoral success along with that of fellow cold war warrior Rotten Ronnie on the other side of the pond that sped the demise of democracy as we knew it. Yes, the unions they broke had too much influence on Labour and Democrat policy and no, it wasn't her or Raygun's fault those parties ran into the arms of Big Finance but there you are. Poland et al had the misfortune of gaining freedom just as the end of history arrived and democracy became nothing but a choice between  more or less measures of neocon and neoliberal, a lesser of two evil song and dance, a recipe repeated around the world from Ottawa to Warsaw. When asked about her greatest achievement, Thatcher simply replied, "New Labour" and Tony Blair. In Poland the answer would be the ruling Platforma Obywatelska (Civic Platform) and the likes of Oxford educated, husband of Washington Post hack Anne Applebaum, current foreign minister Radek Sikorski (not only did he write this drivel after Thather's death he called for a statue to be erected here in her honour, maybe right next to Reagan's in Warsaw!). Politics have become subordinate to markets and labour to capital, society now serves the economy instead of the other way around.

"All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind."
- Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

It's this last point which is probably the most important connection between Thatcher and life here in Poland, freedom is slavery. Sparked by the Powell Memo in 1971 and lent an aura of intellectual legitimacy by the Chicago Boys, a new economic ideology was propagated through institutional sponsorship: America has the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute while the UK's versions include the Adam Smith Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Centre for Policy Studies founded in 1974 by Thatcher's mentor, Keith Joseph. Despite their benign sounding names, these are radical think tanks with almost nothing to do with the likes of Adam Smith who understood something about Moral Sentiments and the dangers of private monopolies and everything to do with Hayek, Friedman and Rand and their belief in extreme individualism or social Darwinism. Nigel Lawsen, Thatcher's Chancellor of the Exchequer from '83 to '89 summarized their economic philosophy, "Economic planning was both impossible and unnecessary. . . . The price mechanism . . . was a much more efficient means of transmitting consumer wants and needs than the vast bureaucracies of Whitehall and the nationalized industries." Selfishness along with ostentation of power and status was in. Culture was ruled over by money, and the idea that those who win by making more of it do so because they are better was not just permitted but ordained.

Profit and capitalism were good while planning, government and taxes were bad. Conveniently this all worked together as in order to lower taxes, public spending had to be lowered which scaled back government by reducing public services, privatizing whatever was possible and deregulating the rest. Inconveniently most voters viewed the government as subsidizing essential public services, ensuring economic security and helping families in need. The trick therefore was to create a backlash against government waste, resentment against public subsidies to those who were less hard working than themselves and place the blame for inflation on greedy unions. Notice the success as the issue of benefit fraud, which costs the UK about £1.2 billion yearly is a far more emotive topic than tax avoidance, which costs about £70 billion a year. Voters also needed to be convinced that what was taken from the state was being given to them thus enhancing individual economic freedom and unshackling the wealth creators, allowing the wealth to trickle down on everyone. The only valid idealism was to destroy the state by, as Lawson continued, "elevating private actions above public direction and dismissing ‘social justice’ as both vague and arbitrary." Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy.

Thatcher was swept into power on a perfect storm of global inflation emanating from the US pushing up world prices, IMF imposed austerity in exchange for loans to support the value of sterling after Britain's 1976 foreign exchange crisis which made it impossible to finance the modernization of public industries as it would increase the PSBR (Public Sector Borrowing Requirement), and finally, well, strikes and weather, otherwise known as Britain's Winter of Discontent. Yes, a public sector strike during an unusually cold winter ground the country to a halt, literally, as roads went unsalted, hospital patients were denied treatment and garbage piled up in the streets. Labour, who had tied themselves to those striking unions, found themselves with their hands also tied behind their back. Thatcher picked and chose her battles with labour wisely and pursued a step-by-step program of trade union reform before ultimately crushing them in the '84-'85 coal miners' strike. There was indeed no alternative to the monetarist Thatcherism which created an employers' market by imposing chronic under-employment and shifting enterprise out of the unionized public sector to newly privatized, non-unionized enterprises; Marks and Spencer had triumphed over Marx and Engels.

Ironically, or perhaps just calculatingly mercenary, while destroying unions and solidarity at home she was lionized by Solidarność (Solidarity) in Poland, actually being mobbed by dockworkers in Gdynia when she visited in 1988. If you've gotten this far in reading it hopefully means you realize I understand there was a difference between unions in the UK and Poland, after all, in Poland the military used to shoot striking miners dead. Given the trade unions' role in the democratization of Poland it is curious that Poland today has among the lowest unionization rates in Europe as from 1982 until 2005 membership fell from 80% to below 14% (only  2.4% for employees under the age of 25). There are myriad of factors at play here, from the many mistakes made by the unions themselves, a massive shift of the workforce from traditional industries and sectors such as mining and steel, and the privatization of many formerly public, union dominated industries, but it was the pernicious effects of Thatcherism on human psychology that seem the greatest factors. The transformation of the full-employment ideals of post-WWII society to an economic system based on chronic un- and underemployment has made many afraid of forming or joining a union along with the societal appeal to the narrowest self-interest of individuals having gained the upper hand over the feeling of brotherhood and the desire to work for the collective good.

Thatcherism also slowly shifted the balance of power from labour to capital through tax and monetary policy, privatization and deregulation. She managed to destroy more than 2 million jobs in two years, an astonishing figure considering unemployment only breached 1 million in 1978 before reaching 3.5 million by 1983. Her monetarism lowered everyone's taxes a bit and 'simplified' the fiscal system by regressively shifting taxes away from wealth onto consumers via sales taxes, excise taxes and the value-added tax. With public institutions being starved by austerity, privatization was the only way to modernize. "Popular capitalism", spreading ownership as widely as possible, would serve the double purpose of making it difficult to re-nationalize in the future plus giving the public skin in the game, giving workers a stake in preserving the value of the shares they held in these enterprises. The discipline of the market would make British industry more competitive but its effect along with deregulation of the financial industry, the 'Right to Buy' scheme of 1980 and the 'Big Bang' of 1986 simply handed over complete control of the British economy to the square mile in the heart of London, the City.

Privatization, which started tentatively in her first term with British Aerospace and Cable & Wireless, had reached fever pitch by her second reelection: Jaguar, British Telecom, Britoil, British Gas, British Steel, British Petroleum, Rolls Royce, British Airways. Her fourth term (well, John Major's first) saw British Rail hit the auction block. By the time the Conservatives were voted out of office in 1997 by one of the largest margins in history it had become clear to the public that there were some side-effects to the medicine they were being forced to take. Prices hadn't declined along with productivity gains in some areas while they had jumped for essential services like water whose systems were breaking down or shifted against residential consumers in favor of large industrial users in the case of electricity. Services had been cut back, privatized companies were engaging in monopoly practices and to add insult to injury economic inequality had widened with the shrinkage in the industrial labor force and stagnating real wages while profits soared for the privatized companies and the City fleeced the government for underwriting fees and began gambling in earnest thanks to the newfound market freedom. Thatchers reply? "Let us glory in our inequality."

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
- H.L. Mencken, A Little Book in C Major

Pity the Poles for having gained their freedom at the height of Thatcherism, imagine how different the future would look had it been in, say, 1968? As it was, having been tried and tested by Thatcher's buddy Pinochet in Chile, the Chicago Boys idea of "Shock Therapy" came to Poland in the person of Leszek Balcerowicz in 1989 under the guidance of Harvard's Jeffery Sachs backed by the muscle of the IMF. Doubtless, drastic measures were called for to make the huge transition that was complicated by the fact Poland was an economic basket case, with debt of $40 billion and inflation running at 600%. Also doubtless, the Balcerowicz plan was a success when compared to the results achieved in some other Eastern bloc nations. Forgotten though is the doublethink trick achieved of forcing a now 'free' democratic nation to trade off part of the debts incurred by a totalitarian regime it had never voted for in return for selling off state assets at discount prices for the benefit of foreigners and those highly place communists who were quick enough to convert to the new religion. Who cares if it was completely undemocratic, Balcerowicz termed it "extraordinary politics" while Michnik warned that the common people or "rank and file...irrational hotheads [were] incapable of recognizing the limits and realities of the real world". Those in position to do so stripped all the assets they could, a $1 billion stabilization loan (aren't numbers from the olden days quaint?) was arranged, large blocks of shares of privatized assets were placed in the hands of banks and Poland was absorbed into the global slavery debt trap.

The only goal of the IMF/Sachs/Balcerowicz policies was to ensure payments continued to flow west on the $40 billion in illegitimate foreign hard currency debt (what would be called odious debt today). Much of that debt had been incurred in 1979 when rates in London and New York increased 300% under the policies of, you guessed it, Margaret Thatcher and US Fed Chairman Paul Volcker. By the end of '91, Polish unemployment had reached 2 million, industrial production was 66% of the '89 level at the end of '92 and as 1993 closed 2.8 million were unemployed and 50% of families with 3 or more children were living below the poverty line. Little wonder that elections held in September of 1993 saw the the pro-IMF government of Hanna Suchocka replaced by a raft of coalition parties with direct ties to the communist regime. Predictably, as inequality elsewhere surpasses levels unseen since the roaring '20s, the new grand bourgeoisie that has emerged here has combined old bureaucrats, new managers and a burgeoning entrepreneurial class; a situation reminiscent of Poland in the 1920s. Perhaps the best symbols of what Poland got in return for the misery, organized crime, and debt-based slavery brought by the 'reforms' are Galeria Mokotów (Mokotów Mall) in Warsaw and Stary Browar (Old Brewery). The former, a shopping center built in place of a demolished semiconductor factory, cuz, you know, who needs those in a modern economy when you can create another black hole to suck wealth out of the local economy, and the latter a mall built on bribery (Polish link) and murder involving the richest man in Poland.

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
- Anatole France, Le Lys Rouge (The Red Lilly)

Ah yes, the riches and glory promised to Poland are coming but as in the rest of the world more and more disproportionately to those at the top of the income scale. It would take a figure  stronger than Thatcher to convince Poles they are on the wrong course though as they are pumped through the indoctrination centers that are the education system. They emerge believing they have free will and as unquestioning of the free-market god as their forefathers were in the Catholic one unaware that one believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them; soma is simply Christianity without tears. The trains are slow, late and chaotic not because they're being sold off piecemeal on EU orders which is creating the disarray, but because it's not fully privatized like the UK's, who cares about their disastrous experience. The long waits at NFZ have nothing to do with it being underfunded, the public health care system isn't a blessing but a curse as promoting preventative medicine instead of the Americanized version of health for profit resulting in worse health outcomes and higher costs must be better as it's the path the Cameron government is choosing as they privatize the NHS by stealth. Oh, and don't worry Polish kids, it's only a matter of time until the course laid in leads to a completely privatized American-style college system of trillion dollar debt slavery before you've even entered the workforce. Just ask any 20-year-old Brit what it's like. 

Would the UK and Poland be much different if Thatcher had never been? Maybe not seeing as even the EU, the institution that most separates Maggie and Poland, has become nothing more than a glorified debt collector/pusher a fact not lost on most Poles as they become more disenchanted with the concept as their democracy ages just as Thatcher did. Even the Iron Lady, as she mentions in her autobiography, was caught off guard at how much she came to rely on the financial manipulators, how little she was able to control them and the scale of those bankers' greed; she convinced us to sell the family silver for the benefit of the rentiers who perceived the Thatchers and Friedmans as pawns, well-meaning promoters wrapping austerity economics in populist garb. Unfortunately, the deleterious social effects of the inequality caused by growing GDP through financialization of the economy, empowering those banks and other corporations to pursue profit without paying the price for wrongdoing and turning people into consumer zombies takes years to measure and decades to be felt. Trillions in wealth will continue to by siphoned out of the productive economy while we are forced to run faster and faster just to keep up and are convinced that our phone has somehow made us smarter. Yet while there is always time to get off the tracks before the train hits there's not much chance of heeding the warning the more we come to rely on those who profit from us being run over.

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!)