From Matt Taibbi's latest postings ("Twitter Files Extra: How the World's "No-Kidding Decision Makers" Got Organized"):
DFRLabs was chosen in 2018 to help Facebook "monitor for misinformation and foreign interference," after the platform came under intense congressional scrutiny as a supposed unwitting participant in a Russian influence campaign.
It begins to seem more plausible that the Russiagate thing wasn't even about electoral politics at all. That was probably just icing on the cake.
The cake, in this case, would have been to corral the "social" platforms into the surveillance state.
Nobody in the government gave a damn if the Clinton campaign made it all up or not; the idea would have been to arouse the public with a scary cloak-and-dagger story and create an issue. Congress only needs the flimsiest excuse to get up on its high horse and thunder on about what The American People Want, and start throwing its weight around to little effect.
It worked like a charm. Half the crowd yells "Yay!" and the other half "Boo!" And in the confusion, the struggle for the real sources of power enters a new phase: the sometimes-recalcitrant private search engines had developed so much more access to and influence upon the public mood. And we act on emotion much faster than information, and without a moment's thought.
The destruction of public trust has rendered us easily herded. That would never do, unless the surveillance state was driving.
There are those who can squeeze a little more advantage out of Russiagate. The media that went along with it from the beginning can continue to ride it without any consequences, certainly none to their reputations, since trust is a thing of the past. That's a lot of free political energy still ripe for the plucking. Who cares if it was true or not?
Meanwhile, in a supercharged atmosphere of self-righteous indignation, against Russia, against Hilary, or The Hill, or 45, or Mueller, or the intelligence "community," or Elon, or Taibbi, or Mickey Mouse (take your pick), far from reigning in the wild abuses of Constitutional rights, no Church Committee redux, no Iran-Contra hearings will ensue.
Instead, new A.I.-laced algorithms can be added to that same already-pervasive surveillance and control system, baited with the promise of social connectedness and belonging. The public remains confused and polarized.
If this does nothing but render society incoherent, that was the whole point. Society doesn't hold still very long for that, so the algorithmic refinements enhance the advantage of the surveillance state over both the "social" platforms and the public.
There is no way any problem-solving organization can solve the problem of proliferating problem-solving organizations. We're back to what we came in with: our own sensibilities, our tendency to project our own traumas on others, our automatic snap-judgments, our ulterior motives, our hidden agendas. All the mechanisms we evolved for mere survival in a world full of large predators, that got us this far.
It has never been more true that you can't con an honest person. And the entire marketing industry is and always has been based on the confidence game: find out the mark's winning formula, and turn it on them. With surveillance capitalist momentary-aggregated-attention mining, the scale of profits soared; with A.I.-enhancement, the public is converted in to one enormous cash cow.
Governments don't control markets, it's the other way around. Now, government is going for monopoly in the dominant attention market. It's the logical conclusion of the movement to run government like a business, the very definition of fascism (well, running government as a business, close enough).
As the ancient strategists knew, only one who has no hidden motives is immune. Or as they would put it, the desire to have no desires is still desire. We're toast. Sorry.
