If anyone reading/listening to this report thinks like the author of Black Label Media does, they'd probably wonder very often about how and why advanced technology has irreversibly transformed human society in the few years that we've come to know it.
After all, thirty or forty years ago, computers necessitated dedicated rooms and could only spit out coded pieces of paper that were only usable/understandable for scientists and mathematicians. Now, your average five year old knows how to navigate an iPad to watch Grand Theft Auto videos; the technology it possesses, which, unbelievably, has 100,000x more processing power than the Apollo 11 rocket that got humanity from Earth to the moon. In the same time period, if you wanted to talk to a friend in a place like Lebanon for example, not only would it take several weeks or more for your friend to receive your message, but it'd probably also be stupidly expensive to maintain a close connection with them. Now, through free messaging apps, all someone has to do to chat with a friend or family member at great distances is sync up their time zones to wait for a good opportunity and proceed to shoot them a text or give them a call.
If any reader/listener out there is the blissfully ignorant optimistic type, you'd most likely see these developments in tech as proof that we live in a society profoundly more prosperous and wonderful than the generations that came before us. The reality, however, is that just as these technologies have enabled us to reimagine our world as a freer place, the powers who have control over these devices and applications have been crafting these new technologies to ensure that their "tools" are only used as intended by their creators.
To suggest that technology can be used as a method of soft social control, by now, comes off as a well-known and tired trope. In the editorial opinion of Black Label Detroit however, this publication would encourage it's viewership to not brush this implication off so swiftly...
There exists no better example of how powerful technology is as an agent of social control than the Cambridge Analytica (C.A.) 2016 election scandal, a political soap opera which, gained mainstream attention as a part of the media paranoia and hysteria surrounding "Russiagate", a time when the media and political classes were scared sick of the prospect that a "hostile foreign government" helped get Donald Trump elected as the 45th president. Instead of Trump landing in the White House due to the collaboration of a foreign government (which, it should be noted, is a practice that the American government has been doing since the end of WWII), the real secret ingredient that helped Trump achieve the biggest rupture in global politics since the start of the Cold War was the help his campaign received from two men: Alexander Nix & Steve Bannon. They would boast about C.A.'s data info capabilities to the Trump team, and, satisfied with what they saw, Trump's election campaign would hire them to head an online advertising operation dubbed "Project Alamo", where, the program would be coordinated by C.A. to help micro-target the Trump team's massive $1 million a day campaign war chest on Facebook ads.
If there's a doubt that lingers in the minds of any reader/listener of this report as to the effectiveness of this practice, there's no need to express such a viewpoint; As targeted big data collection has been proven to work time and time again. Part of C.A.'s strategy on behalf of the Trump campaign was to target groups of people they described as "persuadables", these non-ideologically inclined individuals would be targeted with personalized newsfeeds and ads aimed at passively persuading them into doing what the company wanted by adopting behaviors that favored Donald Trump. The most insidious yet successful campaign of C.A.'s was by far the dirty work they carried out in the Trinidadian election. There, since the island country's population is split between descendants of Indian and African ancestry, The ruling party primarily (composed of Indian ethnic voters) would sign a contract with C.A. to start the "Do So" campaign that would suppress turnout among the opposition's African ethnic party's voter base. It actually turned out to work so well that the program even spawned an organic cultural movement. If you're ingesting all of this information and wondering to yourself how a glorified advertising company was abled to achieve such success, C.A.'s malicious methods were initially crafted when the company started out as Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), a contractor that worked in tandem with the UK & US security services to conduct psychological operations.
If that doesn't scare any reader/listener of this report, this author has some unfortunate news to break: the social effects of these weaponized technologies go far beyond the political world, in fact, it's byproducts can be seen on social media every single day. Plastic surgeons have invented a term called "Instagram dysmorphia" to describe the unease young women feel from constantly comparing themselves to each other on their timelines. Engineers, despite crafting apps that are so subtly addictive to their users that it's easy to find yourself reopening an app that you just closed, have admitted to the fact that they don't really understand how their own algorithms operate. And, in some societies, the theory of "social credit" is being rolled out to ensure the public act as closely to the role of "model citizens" as possible, or, if they show any dissent against their government, they run the risk of being cut off from social services.
Again, if you have a similar consciousness to the author of this publication, you have to wonder how is it possible that people can just accept the invisible cage that "surveillance capitalism" seems intent on drawing around us? Often times there'll be comments on social media clowning on people who express discomfort with any new products, services, or technologies that could potentially cement this constant digital supervision in our lives forever. Their rationale is usually something like this: "They're already watching us anyways, so why do you even give a fuck?" The feeling being expressed by this intentionally blissfully ignorant demographic of social media is a concept that's been discussed by radical theorists since the 1940's, which is to say, is a long ass time. The term "Cultural Hegemony" was first coined by the writer, and Italian dissident Antonio Gramsci, who, used the term to try and analyze how and why his society would willingly allow itself to knowingly, or unknowingly, agree to allow Mussolini's fascism to come to power in Italy country during WWII.
According to Gramsci's theory, the ruling class only has to gain public consent to achieve domination. That consent is achieved by manipulating society through social institutions such as language, culture, morality, & even the public's concept of what "common sense" even is. Once they gain control of your ability to use logic & reasoning, they've successfully gained your consent to do whatever the hell they wanna do to you. Governments have known this fact for as long as nations have waged war with each other. That's why the term is nothing more than the realization that illustrates how weapons aren't really all that powerful. What's "stronger" than the weapons being used, is the mindset of the flesh wielding those same weapons, and, with enough persuasion, that flesh can be influenced to accept a state of affairs or even lay down their life for a cause that they don't truly understand. Even though the theory suggests a "hands off" approach to social control, hegemony is impossible to be held if it isn't backed up by coercive force (the police or military for example). That coercive force can come from a company, a government, or even another coerced citizen.
It's upon reflection of these various revelations that any reader/listener of this report may be saying to themselves: "What the hell are we gonna do about this? Where do we go from here?" It's to questions such as this where it must be desperately emphasized that your humble author couldn't be considered a quality writer if he assumed that he knew definitively what the answer to this query even is. Since, after all, this is a question that has haunted humanity since the dawn of time. However, Black Label Detroit can direct it's readers and listeners toward a specific orientation where, eventually, you folks may be able to find some definite answers that'll conclude the existence of these seemingly everlasting questions. So, where do we look for a different vision of technology? Well, we'll start with the conclusion that one of it's harshest critics came to, and work backwards from there:
Which brings us to the man who's gone down in history as the most notorious techno-pessimist to ever live, popularized by the title of his FBI file to document his activities: the "UNABOMBER" but, known better by his real name, Ted Kaczynski. In any other time in history, Kaczynski's multi-decade long guerilla terror campaign would be considered a random, malicious act of sadism, a plot which had no broader political intentions or goals to achieve. However, what Kaczynski did in the year of his capture would not only cement his name in the popular conscious among technophobes, but also give birth to a completely new ideological landscape of thought, Anarcho-Primitivism. In his manifesto, "Industrial Society and it's Future" Kaczynski would portray technology and it's impacts on society as a hellish, dystopian, and cynical process. The 35 thousand word rant asserted that not only would the further advancement of technology go on to secure the means of enslaving humanity, and that the Left and it's "affinity groups" were too weak/dumb to confront this issue, and finally, that the political and technological order our time would ultimately collapse if control wasn't able to be secured away from the powers that be.
Off rip, it should go without saying that Kaczynski's conclusions and methods of fighting against technological domination and climate breakdown were dead-wrong. The valid analysis that he authored on the subjects were ultimately diminished by his inability to imagine a different way of using technology for social/political transformation (and the whole "blowing up innocent people" thing didn't really help him out either). Regardless of his very apparent and glaring ideological shortcomings, Kaczynski's ideology has more or less become an insurgent idea among internet circles populated by pessimistic, disaffected, and alienated individuals. If you ever come across a seemingly benign image of an ape with the caption almost playfully suggesting that society "return to monkey", then that's an example of a meme quite literally inspired by Kaczynski's conclusions about the world. Internet circles have even taken to dubbing the rabbit hole that they've been able to throw unsuspecting "normies" down: the "Tedpill".
It's actually quite humorous that the believers of Ted's "true reality" suggest that adopting his outlook on life is an allegory to swallowing the Matrix series' "red pill", for which they dub it the "Ted pill". What's so ironic about referring to this supposed "liberation" is the fact that, according to plot of the Matrix trilogy itself, the series might just be the ultimate allegory of false consciousness to ever have been put into film.
Without giving away too much of the lore: Thomas Anderson (played by Keanu Reaves and who goes by the online alias of "Neo") has lived a relatively boring and uneventful life for as long as he can remember, it's only his activities as a part-time hacker that actually bring out his curiosity about the world. Upon finally meeting up with his idols in the hacking underground, he takes the red pill, which allows him to get kicked out of the artificial simulation that he's called home for his whole life and sees, for the first time, the world as it actually exists, which turns out to be in incomprehensible hell scape where humans are enslaved by machines. The rest of the first movie and the subsequent sequels that follow after the original film show the struggle Neo has to grapple with upon thinking that he is some prophesized savior of humanity only to have that assertion smacked down in his face by higher beings inside of the Matrix's artificial reality. Both of those characters ("the Oracle" and "the Architect") illuminate to Neo that his actions don't show some "new path forward", instead, his acts of rebellion and revolt are exactly what the cold calculations of the system enslaving him expects from him. What film could possibly be a better metaphor for Kaczynski's fruitless attempts to bring about his own twisted sense of revolution?
While it's good enough to solidify the fact that Kaczynski was an idiot, trashing him or his ideology still doesn't present any coherent alternatives to the primitive ideas that he popularized. So... the big question still confronts us: If technology as it exists can't continue without driving us as a species to disaster... what's the alternative?
Fleshing out a different dimension of technological advancement is a gigantic question, one that radicals have attempted to get a handle on for decades now. This author (like many of those same radicals) has his own ideas of what an alternative tech-based utopian future might possibly look like, but, in the context of this report, a piece of media that would be insanely helpful in acting as an adequate answer to the ideological dead-end that the Matrix leave us in is a game that, on the surface, aims to enslave it's players in it's system and software only by using it's dark seductivity alone:
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