This is a remarkable snapshot of the history of a war many don’t know we are in. Thank you for pulling all of this information together in one place. I will share this with a very good friend who lives in England. She and I are both concerned about the mental health challenges faced by her society in the UK and my society here in America. My own solution short term is to ignore all mainstream media so as to not allow the “flooding of the zone with shit” to encroach on my world, any more than necessary. This allows me to look for allies in the quest to formulate a response that follows the principles laid out decades ago by Buckminster Fuller. In essence, he said you do not fight forces of destruction on their battlefield. You design a new system that makes their socioeconomic political world view obsolete. Buckminster Fuller was a massive global thinker who believed innovation was the pathway to a better future. Well, I do not think it is adequate to merely create an alternative conversation around sustainable technology, which was his specialty. I think it is possible to create an alternative conversation around Issues of morality and ethics and community versus division. I think the future depends on us fighting for the positive mental health reality that exists in a supportive community. I think any attempt to divide us must be denied agency… Must be ignored. Do not obey in advance as Professor Timothy Snyder says. I applaud those who are going to fight these forces of destruction head on. They do obviously represent a threat given talk of locking up opposition leaders. But I think it’s essential that we recognize the existing system is broken and cannot be repaired. It must be replaced. I recommend studying human history to understand how world views have been replaced in the past. My favorite teacher of that historic process is British historian James Burke. His 10 part documentary The Day The Universe Changed is a landmark in educating people to take the long view of human history. apologies if I appear to be rambling a bit . But I am convinced we must not just offer to fight, but also offer people hope by letting them know a better future is possible if we detach ourselves from the destructive system currently in place.
Thanks, Carole. I read your wonderful interview with Yanis a while back and was also inspired by the webinar you recently hosted on the film 2073. Having studied the metacrisis for the last 5-6 years I find myself now searching for solutions based in hope and reality. On that basis, can I share with you and your followers this powerfully insightful and deeply practical call to alliance and a way out of the meta crisis by Andrew Slack ?
You’re welcome! Developing that new system’s design and devising a plan for getting it implemented is my focus for 2025! Happy to imagine you will come along for the ride!
I applaud your bold ambition in devising such a plan, Steve. Do you listen to Manda Scott's Accidental Gods podcast? It focuses on this very thing, creating a world we'd be proud to leave to future generations. Her recent book Any Human Power also sets out a bold vision of how we do this. It's kind of in the sci-fi, fantasy genre but informed by many brilliant thinkers she's spoken with on the podcast. Storytelling and imagining together kinder ways to live and be in community are keys to breaking the spell/trap/grip of Technofeudalism, I believe
Ms Cadwalladr: i find it astonishing that, despite the fact that zuckerberg's empire is 2/3rds male, he's busy whinging about how it has "too much feminine energy."
Ps. Do you know the Canadian publication Adbusters? They’re pretty radical but also the only others I know who are fighting the good fight against the Tech Bros
no i don't! i'm looking at their twitter now and just followed them. they even have a vegan shoe, blackspot, they have created. wow! they seem like good people.
It's not about being "probably right", it's a matter of fact, which anyone can -- before Musk destroys information -- can check: Trans people in USA 1 in every 250 adults.
Zuckerberg acts like a beta or even gamma man. The moment Musk and Trump pushed, he conceded and is ready to suck their members for free or even pay them for sucking.
You continue to provide clarity and coherence in the vile swirl of techno feudalism. Total information collapse at the mass market scale is well underway. We are in a real pickle.
The way any organised opposition has melted away is the scariest thing.
We had the faux-almost-balance 48.5/51.5% Brexshit, but now the unbridled lust for absolute power - backed by the technical ability to size it and the nefarious intent of those wielding and seeking it - spell doom for anything left of Ghengis Khan.
There has been no organised resistance since the Lincoln Project managed to keep Dump out in 2020.
In the UK,14 years of government disguised as fascism in a suit, followed by a brief sigh of relief (until you realised the incumbents were just mild-mannered bespectacled fascists in sweaters) has left us unready for the scale of the fight required.
I’ve been trying to get ‘progressives’ to altogether since 2015.
You can’t.
As well-meaning as many people are, they just don’t get it. At all.
What you are describing, Carole, is every bit as bad as what I’ve been trying to explain to people for nearly a decade. And worse. The sheeple probably won’t notice for another 6 months or so.
By then I wonder if we’ll still be allowed to be having these conversations.
> The sheeple probably won’t notice for another 6 months or so.
that sounds extremely optimistic. personally i'm not convinced they will ever notice barring some kind of Major Event (e.g. 1929 style economic collapse, nuclear war, etc).
Surely it's clear that the FT published that extraordinary text by Peter Thiel to show how weird it was. It reads as if he was on drugs. It was self-evidently bonkers. Look at the comments. They were holding up some of this deranged conspiracy advocacy to people who don't normally see it.
Peter Thiel thrives on media oxygen...and knows how to manipulate it. Even though an "opinion" too many acolytes treat such commendatory as necessary "facts" for action.
@Carole Cadwalladr and others: of inteest will be the FT’s latest on the (deranged, in my view) Peter Thiel text. Sorry for long link: I hope it’s readable.
“From the “truth and reconciliation” headline downwards, his goal was to ruffle feathers, not to convert. As I have underlined before, the German-born Thiel spent a chunk of his childhood in Namibia, which was formerly called South West Africa under apartheid South Africa’s colonial rule.
His father was a senior engineer at a uranium mine in the coastal town of Swakopmund which was supplying Pretoria’s clandestine nuclear weapons programme. The management was white; the labour force was black. According to Thiel’s biographer, Max Chafkin, the workers were semi-indentured. They were reportedly unaware of the radiation risk from the uranium they were mining in highly unsafe conditions. Their wages were handed to them from behind a glass screen so that the white clerical staff could avoid contamination.
To say the least, it takes gumption for Thiel to link his thesis on the death of liberal democracy’s “ancien regime” to post-apartheid South Africa’s truth and reconciliation commission. I suspect he thought he was being ironic. Thiel, along with South Africa-raised Elon Musk and David Sacks, Donald Trump’s incoming “crypto tsar”, is a product of the world’s last legalised system of racial segregation. Far from distancing themselves from that portion of their biographies, they seem to be embracing it. To wit, if I see Musk’s mother on TV one more time, I might lose my will to live. Perhaps in another note I will delve into Musk’s own family biography (his maternal grandparents moved after the war to South Africa where they supported the apartheid government). Given his priors, it was rash to say the least for Musk to give what looked like a Nazi salute in DC last Monday.”
Thankyou Carole, here's what I think. You have been my light in the tunnel. I was in a cave in Santorini(!) in 2016 when the Referendum result came in. I could not believe we wld be so stupid. Your investigations provided some reasons, if not the solution. Now we see Bannon, (he who masterminded Cambridge Analytica with Thei)l, and Zuckerberg (who illegally stole data and used it to psychometrically analyse those most likely to flip from undecided to Yes in both Brexit Ref and US election (Trump), in order to flood them with millions of lying false ads,) aligning to change the direction of our world.
It worked then (2016) and it is working now. We now have almost supra Governmental entities with incalculable wealth flooding the information space with falsehoods so that no one can tell truth from lies, just as Bannon said. In this environment far R oligarchs and the Figureheads they fund (Trump and Putin) can say and do anything they want. What they want is deregulation so they can make yet more money and pay no taxes while ordinary folk are collateral damage. No Government should allow this. You are the only reason we know all this.
And yet we remain wholly unprepared particularly here in the UK where a Brexit blindspot mentality shackles Labour to libertarian Freeports and SEZs covering vast areas. The blindingly obvious is the UK must link closely with EU while it survives the onslaught of Populism, and must fight to preserve the Int'l Rules Based Order or there will simply be no rules, no truth, and ultimately, as Climate Change is sidelined, no planet.
Thanks Carole. I appreciate your straightforwardness. We don't need "hope peddlers" (term courtesy of Chauncey DeVega) right now - if ever. We need the truth.
So much to take in in one hit, but grateful for the information base start point, Carole. Particularly like your use of the word "infodystopian". Everything is happening so fast, that new language is required around it. How about omniclustershamblesfuck?
There is no doubt that what is happening is deliberate and planned. What those of us standing up against this need is a foundation from which to resist, and trustworthy, credible news and information is that foundation. Thank you once again for taking the responsibility to provide us with the basis to understand what is going on.
In 1985, I was 29 years into a career with the most significant player in the computer industry, IBM. Because I was a manager who also kept up with the industry ( a rare bird in the computer industry), I was invited to the yearly conference to talk to 2000 industry managers about who would be the biggest threat to the company in the next 10 years. They expected the talk to be on technology but started it by drawing a large circle with a small circle labelled “IBM” in the upper left quadrant - and the rest of the large circle labelled “Content”. I explained that I believed the future would be controlled by those who distributed the news, and we had to provide some way of moderating their output; otherwise, we would be the “1984” of the future. So, the future for IBM would have to be services and applications that would enable the management of data.
At that point, my boss came onto the platform, applauding and thanking me for my thoughts but informing us that we had run out of time.
As he led me off the stage, he whispered in my ear, “That was the most career-limiting speech he had ever heard”.
Players at that time were Murdoch, Maxwell and a host of small news distributors. There was no Google, Meta or X.
I left IBM the following year before the social media giants turned up, and IBM began their slide.
So, some of us saw this coming. It used to be called "propaganda"
Hahaha, thanks for the story, John. As a past master in 'career-limiting speeches' I appreciate it...IBM is one of the classic cases that gets cited, also, in terms of tech 'disruption' and how old 'legacy' companies fail to adapt...
I was working in the mid noughties in a maritime comms company but moved to an established b2b publisher that was moving its content online. This was professionally produced accurate information.
Someone from that company had already left and moved to the third world to “copy” its model and content using cheap labour.
However the Google ranking marked down the other sites who licensed the content from our reputable sources so the push came for “unique” content and the industry we were part of as a whole became besotted with Web 2.0 when suddenly any Tom, Dick or Harry could leave fake information.
Then someone said check out this Facebook site!
Fast forward to today and a Guardian article about George Orwell being commemorated on a £2 coin got entirely wrong the circumstances of his time in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War.
Ironically mass misinformation was used to destabilise the Spanish Republic.
TODAY, 8:00 PM: Webinar “How tech billionaires are breaking down our democracies & what the EU can do”
Dear friends, dear interested parties!
Our first webinar 2025 starts tonight at 8:00 p.m. and already 3,000 of you want to be there. What a brilliant start to the new year!
Why is this important? Because the EU Commission, in the person of Vice-President Virkunen, has declared today that it will not do anything else against X, Facebook and Co., but to wait and see. Quite a few people call this refusal to work. The more people there tonight, the stronger the signal to the Commission: Do something!
Therefore my request: Share the invitation below directly with your contacts - or directly this link on Whatsapp, Signal & Co: https://t1p.de/4ejix
With determined greetings,
Max and everyone at Europe Calling e.V.
-
INVITATION TO FORWARD
Europe Calling “Hostile takeover? - How tech billionaires are breaking down our democracies & what the EU can do” - Monday, 01/13/2025, 8:00 PM - 10:00 PM CET
It is unmistakeable: The richest man in the world, Elon Musk, has bought a megaphone with Twitter and holds it directly to the world's ear. He is not only interfering in US policy, which he will steer as a de facto member of Donald Trump's government.
In Germany, Musk calls for the election of the far-right AfD, in Great Britain he supports convicted right-wing extremists and in Canada, the now resigned Prime Minister Trudeau was in Musk's and Trump's crosshairs.
Musk is not the only tech billionaire who interferes in democracy:
Billionaire Mark Zuckerberg has announced that Meta will discontinue its fact-checking carried out by independent journalists on Facebook, Instagram and Co. and rely on the X-variant "Community Notes", which gives free rein to hatred, incitement and disinformation.
Amazon billionaire and Washington Post owner Bezos has prevented the newspaper's traditional election recommendation and critical reporting and donates 1 million dollars for Trump's inauguration, as have Zuckerberg and OpenAI boss Sam Altman.
Billionaire Peter Thiel wants to replace democracy with a rule of rich entrepreneurs and has made student JD Vance US vice president.
Reason enough to take a closer look at the tech billionaires, their platforms, algorithms and strategies in the first Europe Calling in 2025. We also want to talk about freedom of expression and censorship and what the EU can and should do now.
Our guests are:
Professor Shoshana Zuboff | Renowned economist and author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”
Robin Berjon | Technology expert in Brussels specialising in governance and standards and deputy director of the IPFS Foundation
Markus Beckedahl | Network politician activist and journalist in Berlin, founder of netzpolitik.org & co-founder of Re:Publica
Jakob Hanke-Vela | Journalist, head of the Brussels office of the German newspaper "Handelsblatt" and former author of the POLITICO Brussels Playbook
Alexandra Geese | Digital expert and MEP for Bündnis90/Die Grünen, co-negotiator of the EU Digital Services Act and Europe Calling board member
Moderation: Maximilian Fries | Managing Director of Europe Calling e.V.
Date: Monday, 13.01.2025, 20:00 - 22:00 CET (Berlin/Brussels)
The webinar will be interpreted simultaneously in German and English.
Come and invite others!
With European greetings,
Maximilian Fries from Europe Calling e.V.
You are receiving this email because you participated in a webinar, supported Europe Calling or subscribed to the newsletter. Of course, you can revoke this consent at any time.
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You’ve accurately described our predicament today! We’ve literally shot ourselves in the foot with our unawareness and sleepwalking! What now is the question!
Saddened beyond belief by the state of information in the world. We should’ve known better. I am a 73 year old baby boomer and part of the largest generational group on the planet. We opted for comfort and safety. We should have known better . We should have fought harder. We should be ashamed that this is the world we leave out kids and grandkids.
I use Facebook because it connects me to people I love. I have quit twice before and always returned because of those connections, but this time I leave for good, (though it won’t make any difference at all , at all.)
Thank you, Carole, for a clear-eyed analysis and brilliant articulation of the extent of perfidy we have allowed to infect our information culture. I am frightened and enraged. And so heartbroken.
My thoughts? Keep up the good work for starters. My only concern is that you're currently preaching to the converted, so I'd put some effort into how we can "drown the zone" in love, surely the only unarguable response to the impending post-truth apocalypse and dystopia accelerationism being thrust upon us.
this is the issue that gets missed over and over again. The people who need to know this stuff are not substack readers. They are not Guardian readers etc. They dont know how tariffs work or who controls the cost of groceries. Our biggest concern is to find a way to connect without coming across as the elitist know it all's they think we are
Yes, I think about these things all the time. Finding ways to storytell to audiences outside the bubble is key. That was the thinking behind doing the Sergei & the Westminster Spy Ring podcast...at least it hits a different audience from the Guardian...it's just the scale of what's happening now is hard to reckon with
I think there's a difficult paradox at play here because of the relationship between journalists and the 'platforms'. I believe that social media is inherently antagonistic to healthy democracy; that it's not just a question of who controls them right now, but that they are destructive of trust no matter who is setting the agenda. The brief era when social media censorship was decided by a limited progressive agenda (the era when Zuckerberg's hand was forced by external actors) was extremely destructive -- to the Left. I think a lot of people were radicalised *towards* Trumpism in that time because of the overreach of 'fact-checking'. It's not a rational response, at all, but it's real for all that. Journalists and activists are, in my experience, among the most chronically online people there are, and generally hate the suggestion that we need to ignore or destroy all of it, the whole shebang, that there is no such thing as a 'better' Facebook or a 'better' Twitter, that they will always be corrosive. The greater part of Musk's political power comes from journalists who don't like him, and who obsess over what happens on X; the average person does not know or care until journalists cover it.
Storytelling via creative media, film, TV, cartoons, music, rap, TikTok, YouTube shorts ... I think a good way to reach people is through story, via all the different media channels they consume. But presumably the algorithms will increasingly block non-mainstream, or radical narratives? I don't understand enough about how algorithms and tech work. I'm trying hard to keep up.
Also, telling stories of how it is and what we can do to resist/bypass/create alternatives in person, in community, locally and building strong mutual support networks is surely now more essential than ever.
We can't take for granted our ability to network online, across nations and distances. I fear the plug may be pulled (for some of us at least, the ones that question and disobey). I hope that's just fear speaking, but it seems a plausible possibility in a technofeudal regime
This is a remarkable snapshot of the history of a war many don’t know we are in. Thank you for pulling all of this information together in one place. I will share this with a very good friend who lives in England. She and I are both concerned about the mental health challenges faced by her society in the UK and my society here in America. My own solution short term is to ignore all mainstream media so as to not allow the “flooding of the zone with shit” to encroach on my world, any more than necessary. This allows me to look for allies in the quest to formulate a response that follows the principles laid out decades ago by Buckminster Fuller. In essence, he said you do not fight forces of destruction on their battlefield. You design a new system that makes their socioeconomic political world view obsolete. Buckminster Fuller was a massive global thinker who believed innovation was the pathway to a better future. Well, I do not think it is adequate to merely create an alternative conversation around sustainable technology, which was his specialty. I think it is possible to create an alternative conversation around Issues of morality and ethics and community versus division. I think the future depends on us fighting for the positive mental health reality that exists in a supportive community. I think any attempt to divide us must be denied agency… Must be ignored. Do not obey in advance as Professor Timothy Snyder says. I applaud those who are going to fight these forces of destruction head on. They do obviously represent a threat given talk of locking up opposition leaders. But I think it’s essential that we recognize the existing system is broken and cannot be repaired. It must be replaced. I recommend studying human history to understand how world views have been replaced in the past. My favorite teacher of that historic process is British historian James Burke. His 10 part documentary The Day The Universe Changed is a landmark in educating people to take the long view of human history. apologies if I appear to be rambling a bit . But I am convinced we must not just offer to fight, but also offer people hope by letting them know a better future is possible if we detach ourselves from the destructive system currently in place.
Thanks for this informative and wise post Steve. For what it’s worth here is an Australian news article on technofeudalism which presents a potential future direction at the end of the article. From the work of Greek Australian economist Yanis Varoufakis. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-05/what-is-technofeudalism-and-are-we-living-under-it/103062936?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=link
Good pointer. Here's an interview I did with Yanis on exactly that subject, also...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/24/yanis-varoufakis-technofeudalism-capitalism-ukraine-interview
Thanks, Carole. I read your wonderful interview with Yanis a while back and was also inspired by the webinar you recently hosted on the film 2073. Having studied the metacrisis for the last 5-6 years I find myself now searching for solutions based in hope and reality. On that basis, can I share with you and your followers this powerfully insightful and deeply practical call to alliance and a way out of the meta crisis by Andrew Slack ?
https://substack.com/@scottabbott108/note/c-87160603?r=4chz6u&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Scott,
The link is not available (?)
Thanks so much for the link. I’m happy we’re both thinking about this! I will read your interview with Yanis!
Thanks for the link! I’ll watch this video!
Thank you Steve, I couldn't agree more
You’re welcome! Developing that new system’s design and devising a plan for getting it implemented is my focus for 2025! Happy to imagine you will come along for the ride!
I applaud your bold ambition in devising such a plan, Steve. Do you listen to Manda Scott's Accidental Gods podcast? It focuses on this very thing, creating a world we'd be proud to leave to future generations. Her recent book Any Human Power also sets out a bold vision of how we do this. It's kind of in the sci-fi, fantasy genre but informed by many brilliant thinkers she's spoken with on the podcast. Storytelling and imagining together kinder ways to live and be in community are keys to breaking the spell/trap/grip of Technofeudalism, I believe
Ms Cadwalladr: i find it astonishing that, despite the fact that zuckerberg's empire is 2/3rds male, he's busy whinging about how it has "too much feminine energy."
Are a third of those males trans women, do you think?
extremely unlikely, considering how few trans women exist in the USA.
Ps. Do you know the Canadian publication Adbusters? They’re pretty radical but also the only others I know who are fighting the good fight against the Tech Bros
no i don't! i'm looking at their twitter now and just followed them. they even have a vegan shoe, blackspot, they have created. wow! they seem like good people.
You're probably right. What about feminised, beta men? Do you think they might be contibuting to all this "feminine energy"?
It's not about being "probably right", it's a matter of fact, which anyone can -- before Musk destroys information -- can check: Trans people in USA 1 in every 250 adults.
Zuckerberg acts like a beta or even gamma man. The moment Musk and Trump pushed, he conceded and is ready to suck their members for free or even pay them for sucking.
Bigoted bullshit. Just take a day off eh?
I mean, who has been setting the culture at that organisation?
You continue to provide clarity and coherence in the vile swirl of techno feudalism. Total information collapse at the mass market scale is well underway. We are in a real pickle.
The way any organised opposition has melted away is the scariest thing.
We had the faux-almost-balance 48.5/51.5% Brexshit, but now the unbridled lust for absolute power - backed by the technical ability to size it and the nefarious intent of those wielding and seeking it - spell doom for anything left of Ghengis Khan.
There has been no organised resistance since the Lincoln Project managed to keep Dump out in 2020.
In the UK,14 years of government disguised as fascism in a suit, followed by a brief sigh of relief (until you realised the incumbents were just mild-mannered bespectacled fascists in sweaters) has left us unready for the scale of the fight required.
I’ve been trying to get ‘progressives’ to altogether since 2015.
You can’t.
As well-meaning as many people are, they just don’t get it. At all.
What you are describing, Carole, is every bit as bad as what I’ve been trying to explain to people for nearly a decade. And worse. The sheeple probably won’t notice for another 6 months or so.
By then I wonder if we’ll still be allowed to be having these conversations.
> The sheeple probably won’t notice for another 6 months or so.
that sounds extremely optimistic. personally i'm not convinced they will ever notice barring some kind of Major Event (e.g. 1929 style economic collapse, nuclear war, etc).
Surely it's clear that the FT published that extraordinary text by Peter Thiel to show how weird it was. It reads as if he was on drugs. It was self-evidently bonkers. Look at the comments. They were holding up some of this deranged conspiracy advocacy to people who don't normally see it.
And yes, it is very worrying.
I guess so. The Guardian published an op ed by Osama Bin Laden that got resurfaced a few months ago also...
https://open.substack.com/pub/anthonyhicks/p/the-hidden-alliance-how-the-us-israel-5fd?r=2brqv7&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Peter Thiel thrives on media oxygen...and knows how to manipulate it. Even though an "opinion" too many acolytes treat such commendatory as necessary "facts" for action.
@Carole Cadwalladr and others: of inteest will be the FT’s latest on the (deranged, in my view) Peter Thiel text. Sorry for long link: I hope it’s readable.
https://ep.ft.com/permalink/emails/eyJlbWFpbCI6ImMzNTkwZTkxNzVjZTVmZjJiZDcyZTM3ZjkwNjEzMzAwZjc4ZDQzIiwgInRyYW5zYWN0aW9uSWQiOiJlNTY4MmFkYi1mZmU4LTQ0MmEtYmEyNS05MDU5NjhkMDYwZjgiLCAiYmF0Y2hJZCI6Ijk1NzRhZDdlLTYzNzctNGI3NC04MzI0LWQ1MjY2ZTY0OTM5MiJ9
Note in particular these two paragraphs:
“From the “truth and reconciliation” headline downwards, his goal was to ruffle feathers, not to convert. As I have underlined before, the German-born Thiel spent a chunk of his childhood in Namibia, which was formerly called South West Africa under apartheid South Africa’s colonial rule.
His father was a senior engineer at a uranium mine in the coastal town of Swakopmund which was supplying Pretoria’s clandestine nuclear weapons programme. The management was white; the labour force was black. According to Thiel’s biographer, Max Chafkin, the workers were semi-indentured. They were reportedly unaware of the radiation risk from the uranium they were mining in highly unsafe conditions. Their wages were handed to them from behind a glass screen so that the white clerical staff could avoid contamination.
To say the least, it takes gumption for Thiel to link his thesis on the death of liberal democracy’s “ancien regime” to post-apartheid South Africa’s truth and reconciliation commission. I suspect he thought he was being ironic. Thiel, along with South Africa-raised Elon Musk and David Sacks, Donald Trump’s incoming “crypto tsar”, is a product of the world’s last legalised system of racial segregation. Far from distancing themselves from that portion of their biographies, they seem to be embracing it. To wit, if I see Musk’s mother on TV one more time, I might lose my will to live. Perhaps in another note I will delve into Musk’s own family biography (his maternal grandparents moved after the war to South Africa where they supported the apartheid government). Given his priors, it was rash to say the least for Musk to give what looked like a Nazi salute in DC last Monday.”
Thankyou Carole, here's what I think. You have been my light in the tunnel. I was in a cave in Santorini(!) in 2016 when the Referendum result came in. I could not believe we wld be so stupid. Your investigations provided some reasons, if not the solution. Now we see Bannon, (he who masterminded Cambridge Analytica with Thei)l, and Zuckerberg (who illegally stole data and used it to psychometrically analyse those most likely to flip from undecided to Yes in both Brexit Ref and US election (Trump), in order to flood them with millions of lying false ads,) aligning to change the direction of our world.
It worked then (2016) and it is working now. We now have almost supra Governmental entities with incalculable wealth flooding the information space with falsehoods so that no one can tell truth from lies, just as Bannon said. In this environment far R oligarchs and the Figureheads they fund (Trump and Putin) can say and do anything they want. What they want is deregulation so they can make yet more money and pay no taxes while ordinary folk are collateral damage. No Government should allow this. You are the only reason we know all this.
And yet we remain wholly unprepared particularly here in the UK where a Brexit blindspot mentality shackles Labour to libertarian Freeports and SEZs covering vast areas. The blindingly obvious is the UK must link closely with EU while it survives the onslaught of Populism, and must fight to preserve the Int'l Rules Based Order or there will simply be no rules, no truth, and ultimately, as Climate Change is sidelined, no planet.
Douglas, of course the presence of these Freeports / SEZs will make it almost impossible to rejoin the EU since they fall foul of EU state aid law.
Thanks Carole. I appreciate your straightforwardness. We don't need "hope peddlers" (term courtesy of Chauncey DeVega) right now - if ever. We need the truth.
I like this
So much to take in in one hit, but grateful for the information base start point, Carole. Particularly like your use of the word "infodystopian". Everything is happening so fast, that new language is required around it. How about omniclustershamblesfuck?
There is no doubt that what is happening is deliberate and planned. What those of us standing up against this need is a foundation from which to resist, and trustworthy, credible news and information is that foundation. Thank you once again for taking the responsibility to provide us with the basis to understand what is going on.
Thanks so much, Steve
In 1985, I was 29 years into a career with the most significant player in the computer industry, IBM. Because I was a manager who also kept up with the industry ( a rare bird in the computer industry), I was invited to the yearly conference to talk to 2000 industry managers about who would be the biggest threat to the company in the next 10 years. They expected the talk to be on technology but started it by drawing a large circle with a small circle labelled “IBM” in the upper left quadrant - and the rest of the large circle labelled “Content”. I explained that I believed the future would be controlled by those who distributed the news, and we had to provide some way of moderating their output; otherwise, we would be the “1984” of the future. So, the future for IBM would have to be services and applications that would enable the management of data.
At that point, my boss came onto the platform, applauding and thanking me for my thoughts but informing us that we had run out of time.
As he led me off the stage, he whispered in my ear, “That was the most career-limiting speech he had ever heard”.
Players at that time were Murdoch, Maxwell and a host of small news distributors. There was no Google, Meta or X.
I left IBM the following year before the social media giants turned up, and IBM began their slide.
So, some of us saw this coming. It used to be called "propaganda"
Hahaha, thanks for the story, John. As a past master in 'career-limiting speeches' I appreciate it...IBM is one of the classic cases that gets cited, also, in terms of tech 'disruption' and how old 'legacy' companies fail to adapt...
I was working in the mid noughties in a maritime comms company but moved to an established b2b publisher that was moving its content online. This was professionally produced accurate information.
Someone from that company had already left and moved to the third world to “copy” its model and content using cheap labour.
However the Google ranking marked down the other sites who licensed the content from our reputable sources so the push came for “unique” content and the industry we were part of as a whole became besotted with Web 2.0 when suddenly any Tom, Dick or Harry could leave fake information.
Then someone said check out this Facebook site!
Fast forward to today and a Guardian article about George Orwell being commemorated on a £2 coin got entirely wrong the circumstances of his time in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War.
Ironically mass misinformation was used to destabilise the Spanish Republic.
La lucha no es negociable.
Best wishes
Tonight:
TODAY, 8:00 PM: Webinar “How tech billionaires are breaking down our democracies & what the EU can do”
Dear friends, dear interested parties!
Our first webinar 2025 starts tonight at 8:00 p.m. and already 3,000 of you want to be there. What a brilliant start to the new year!
Why is this important? Because the EU Commission, in the person of Vice-President Virkunen, has declared today that it will not do anything else against X, Facebook and Co., but to wait and see. Quite a few people call this refusal to work. The more people there tonight, the stronger the signal to the Commission: Do something!
Therefore my request: Share the invitation below directly with your contacts - or directly this link on Whatsapp, Signal & Co: https://t1p.de/4ejix
With determined greetings,
Max and everyone at Europe Calling e.V.
-
INVITATION TO FORWARD
Europe Calling “Hostile takeover? - How tech billionaires are breaking down our democracies & what the EU can do” - Monday, 01/13/2025, 8:00 PM - 10:00 PM CET
Register right here: https://t1p.de/4ejix
Dear friends, dear interested parties!
It is unmistakeable: The richest man in the world, Elon Musk, has bought a megaphone with Twitter and holds it directly to the world's ear. He is not only interfering in US policy, which he will steer as a de facto member of Donald Trump's government.
In Germany, Musk calls for the election of the far-right AfD, in Great Britain he supports convicted right-wing extremists and in Canada, the now resigned Prime Minister Trudeau was in Musk's and Trump's crosshairs.
Musk is not the only tech billionaire who interferes in democracy:
Billionaire Mark Zuckerberg has announced that Meta will discontinue its fact-checking carried out by independent journalists on Facebook, Instagram and Co. and rely on the X-variant "Community Notes", which gives free rein to hatred, incitement and disinformation.
Amazon billionaire and Washington Post owner Bezos has prevented the newspaper's traditional election recommendation and critical reporting and donates 1 million dollars for Trump's inauguration, as have Zuckerberg and OpenAI boss Sam Altman.
Billionaire Peter Thiel wants to replace democracy with a rule of rich entrepreneurs and has made student JD Vance US vice president.
Reason enough to take a closer look at the tech billionaires, their platforms, algorithms and strategies in the first Europe Calling in 2025. We also want to talk about freedom of expression and censorship and what the EU can and should do now.
Our guests are:
Professor Shoshana Zuboff | Renowned economist and author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”
Robin Berjon | Technology expert in Brussels specialising in governance and standards and deputy director of the IPFS Foundation
Markus Beckedahl | Network politician activist and journalist in Berlin, founder of netzpolitik.org & co-founder of Re:Publica
Jakob Hanke-Vela | Journalist, head of the Brussels office of the German newspaper "Handelsblatt" and former author of the POLITICO Brussels Playbook
Alexandra Geese | Digital expert and MEP for Bündnis90/Die Grünen, co-negotiator of the EU Digital Services Act and Europe Calling board member
Moderation: Maximilian Fries | Managing Director of Europe Calling e.V.
Registration here: https://t1p.de/4ejix
Date: Monday, 13.01.2025, 20:00 - 22:00 CET (Berlin/Brussels)
The webinar will be interpreted simultaneously in German and English.
Come and invite others!
With European greetings,
Maximilian Fries from Europe Calling e.V.
You are receiving this email because you participated in a webinar, supported Europe Calling or subscribed to the newsletter. Of course, you can revoke this consent at any time.
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Europe Calling e.V.
Dr. Maximilian Fries (Managing Director)
Https://europe-calling.de
Data protection
Knowledge is power. The truth. Thank you, Carole.
Thank you, Carole. Very valuable writing.
You are a beacon of hope. I follow you in the hope that I can break through the noise and find ways to help resist authoritarianism.
You’ve accurately described our predicament today! We’ve literally shot ourselves in the foot with our unawareness and sleepwalking! What now is the question!
Saddened beyond belief by the state of information in the world. We should’ve known better. I am a 73 year old baby boomer and part of the largest generational group on the planet. We opted for comfort and safety. We should have known better . We should have fought harder. We should be ashamed that this is the world we leave out kids and grandkids.
I use Facebook because it connects me to people I love. I have quit twice before and always returned because of those connections, but this time I leave for good, (though it won’t make any difference at all , at all.)
Thank you, Carole, for a clear-eyed analysis and brilliant articulation of the extent of perfidy we have allowed to infect our information culture. I am frightened and enraged. And so heartbroken.
My thoughts? Keep up the good work for starters. My only concern is that you're currently preaching to the converted, so I'd put some effort into how we can "drown the zone" in love, surely the only unarguable response to the impending post-truth apocalypse and dystopia accelerationism being thrust upon us.
this is the issue that gets missed over and over again. The people who need to know this stuff are not substack readers. They are not Guardian readers etc. They dont know how tariffs work or who controls the cost of groceries. Our biggest concern is to find a way to connect without coming across as the elitist know it all's they think we are
Yes, I think about these things all the time. Finding ways to storytell to audiences outside the bubble is key. That was the thinking behind doing the Sergei & the Westminster Spy Ring podcast...at least it hits a different audience from the Guardian...it's just the scale of what's happening now is hard to reckon with
I think there's a difficult paradox at play here because of the relationship between journalists and the 'platforms'. I believe that social media is inherently antagonistic to healthy democracy; that it's not just a question of who controls them right now, but that they are destructive of trust no matter who is setting the agenda. The brief era when social media censorship was decided by a limited progressive agenda (the era when Zuckerberg's hand was forced by external actors) was extremely destructive -- to the Left. I think a lot of people were radicalised *towards* Trumpism in that time because of the overreach of 'fact-checking'. It's not a rational response, at all, but it's real for all that. Journalists and activists are, in my experience, among the most chronically online people there are, and generally hate the suggestion that we need to ignore or destroy all of it, the whole shebang, that there is no such thing as a 'better' Facebook or a 'better' Twitter, that they will always be corrosive. The greater part of Musk's political power comes from journalists who don't like him, and who obsess over what happens on X; the average person does not know or care until journalists cover it.
Storytelling via creative media, film, TV, cartoons, music, rap, TikTok, YouTube shorts ... I think a good way to reach people is through story, via all the different media channels they consume. But presumably the algorithms will increasingly block non-mainstream, or radical narratives? I don't understand enough about how algorithms and tech work. I'm trying hard to keep up.
Also, telling stories of how it is and what we can do to resist/bypass/create alternatives in person, in community, locally and building strong mutual support networks is surely now more essential than ever.
We can't take for granted our ability to network online, across nations and distances. I fear the plug may be pulled (for some of us at least, the ones that question and disobey). I hope that's just fear speaking, but it seems a plausible possibility in a technofeudal regime