Compliance.
The core operation of government – of any and every government – is to obtain the compliance of the masses. Without that, no government can stand, no matter how fearsome they may be. As Manuel Castells writes in Communication, Power and Counter-power in the Network Society:
While coercion and fear are critical sources for imposing the will of the dominants over the dominated, few institutional systems can last long if they are predominantly based on sheer repression. Torturing bodies is less effective than shaping minds.
The purpose of lèse-majesté is the maintenance of compliance. And that, in the 21st century, is the primary role of the state. As we'll examine in Chapter Three, the state no longer transmits power as it once did. It does, however, enjoy the confidence (indeed the emotional dependence) of the masses.
Remember, please, that however jarring these concepts may seem (most of us, after all, are villagers, and the children of villagers), we are taking the view from the castle here... and what we're describing is that view.
Readiness to fight and die.
Any good castle-master must be able to mobilize the villagers to fight and die. Knowing that the other castle-holders are his competitors, and knowing that he can't fight them alone, the intelligent castle-master knows that he needs willing fighters. Since several thousand years B.C., this fact has led the castle class to promote continuous themes: The sanctity of the homeland, independence (under the castle-holder, of course), unity, and so on. Furthermore, the other castle-dwellers must be seen as threats; why else would the villagers fight them?
Control the narratives.
In order to keep villagers compliant, nothing is more important to control than the stories they live by. Every serious castle-dweller realizes this. That's why kings have always kept a closely aligned intellectual class. It's why they authorized priesthoods and made deals with religions. And it's precisely what we've seen in our times, from the CIA's Operation Mockingbird to the 2016 Clinton presidential campaign with its scores of helpful “journalists.”
The stories that feed the minds of the masses (or at least most of the stories) must remain aligned with the interests of the castle. There was, perhaps, no greater proponent of such tactics in the 20th century than the author of this passage, Edward Bernays (the founder of modern Public Relations):
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society... Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.[2]
This is, further, something that the serious historian comes to recognize, as is seen in this passage from Will Durant's Our Oriental Heritage:
The state, in order to maintain itself, used and forged many instruments of indoctrination – the family, the church, the school – to bind in the soul of the citizen a habit of patriotic loyalty and pride. This saved thousands of policemen, and prepared the public mind for the docile coherence which is indispensable in war.
Rubes and yokels.
This characterization – hearkening back to the quote at the head of this chapter – is what castle-dwellers think of villagers, whether they say it publicly or not. Indeed, it's what their incentives almost force them to think. Whether it's to see them as “unwashed,” “ignorant,” “the people of flyover country,” or whatever, the incentives of castle-life, as we've outlined here, require the villagers to be treated as nameless masses... as stupid, collective entities.
Furthermore the relationship between the ruled and the rulers in a mass-media society is additionally shaped by the “Stalker asymmetry”: Rulers make headlines daily, leading to those consuming the media to actually know the rulers and have a relationship with them. But this is not mutual, since the ruled have almost no encounters with the rulers. This leads the two groups to have conflicting perceptions about their relationship. The ruled become “stalkers” that are rejected by the rulers... the same phenomenon that can be seen with Hollywood stars and their fans.We see, then, that power corrupts because of strong and persistent incentives. This will never change so long as the ruler/ruled divide exists. All other possibilities are dreams in defiance of reality... and such dreams are for the peasants in the villages, never for the rulers in the castles.
As we enter the 21st century, these things are as true as they ever were. As we were preparing this book, another little evidence popped up in the Podesta emails, where we see this[3]:
… we've all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry.
The view from the castle is always thus. It behoves the villagers, in our opinions, to face up to it.
2
Intel, The New Top Dog
Google is getting WH [White House] and State Dept. support and air cover. In reality they are doing things the CIA cannot do.
– Fred Burton, former State Dept. security official
The passage above, from a recent Wikileaks revelation[4], shows the way things are now. Again, the 20th century is gone; “the way things have always been” has changed. And the way they are now is that data-based intelligence is the new power in the castle.
Google, very obviously, has been grafted into the ruling class. And with good reason: Google knows who's doing what – and why – for literally billions of people, and more every day.
Facebook[5], for the same reasons, is also a new member of the ruling class, save that they sit some rungs below Google, whose boss, Eric Schmidt, has spent a lifetime among the ruling class and has carefully brought his company to the top position. Facebook's boss had fewer skills of this type.
Consider the power of Google: Being a nearly universal search engine (three billion searches per day), combined with deep surveillance of their users, they know everything each of the users (personally) search for. They keep records, or summaries of such records, more or less forever, building up long histories. They've employed professionals (psychiatrists, analysts, data scientists and so on) to build evaluation programs.
They also operate YouTube, where 800 million surveilled users watch more than fifteen billion videos per month, often as a substitute for television.
On top of that, Google runs Gmail, another “free” service that deeply surveils its users. In this case, Google stores and analyzes every email their users send and receive – including drafts they don't end up sending – keeps track of all their contacts, the contacts of those contacts, and so on, several layers deep. And Gmail now has one billion users.
Furthermore, Google delivers custom content to each of its users. What you see when you log into YouTube and what your neighbor sees are different; each sees a personally customized page.
Google, then, doesn't just know everything about its users. It's also able to guide their thinking by delivering customized content.
So after considering the stunning power of Google, consider this as well: Any castle-dweller who didn't incorporate this into their power structure, prominently, would be an abject fool.
And so, this is precisely what's been happening for some years. And it was seen in emails obtained under a 2014 Freedom of Information Act request[6]. In these emails, it can be seen that Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin of Google were on a first-name basis with General Keith Alexander, then the Chief of the NSA. And in one passage Alexander calls Brin “a key member of the Defense Industrial Base.”
Google then, in the eyes of encastled, is a key factor in their ability to use power... including violent military power.
Google, of course, is not alone in surveilling internet users. The US National Security Administration – the NSA – stands alongside them; more effective in some ways, and perhaps less effective in others.
The NSA has been gathering up raw internet traffic, in bulk, since at least 2004. We know this because a whistle-blower revealed it. But the associated trial was brought to nothing, George W. Bush gav
e immunity to all the cooperative telecom companies, and even Edward Snowden's unmistakable proof changed nothing. (Laws are for villagers, not for castle-dwellers.)
The NSA, however, unlike Google, is a division of the US Department of Defense, just like the Army or Navy.
The Power of The 21st Century
The castle is always concerned about power; where and how it is used is always the first consideration. And so, in a new century with a very different power-structure than the one previous, the castle will major on the new power and leave the old ways of power to idle.
The power of Google, Facebook, the NSA and a flock of others is a new one, and a very potent one. It allows them to see and control the minds of the masses.
Consider, if you will, the ubiquitous smart phone. No matter where you go in the modern West, you'll find people pecking away at their little hand terminals. Convenient, they are... status symbols, they are... but they are also something else: They are surveillance machines... persistent and deep surveillance machines. Android phones, now the top sellers, feed directly into Google, and indeed cannot be used otherwise, save perhaps by a few hackers.
Furthermore, the entire cellular communication system is built so that a user's location is always known and recorded. Who they call and when are also permanently recorded. These things are not add-ons to the system, they are central components of the system.
On top of that, nearly all of those smart phone “apps” harvests data from the user in a steady stream. How else could such complex programs, requiring tens of thousands of dollars to create, be distributed for free, or nearly free? So then, as has been rightly said by others, a smart phone is a surveillance device that also lets you make phone calls.
The amount of data that comes from such devices is awesome: Who you are, where you are, who you talk to most, whats on your mind, what's on their mind, what are your financial plans, what are you work and family plans, and more... all that is “you” is sent, promptly and completely, to the people who have software on your phone.
And so, the raw material for deep, personalized manipulation is already in the hands of the castle's new partners in power. And make no mistake on this:
A party that has an informational advantage over other parties can use it with minimal consequences.
“Informational advantage,” therefore, is the power of the 21st century.
Information has always been a valuable commodity, but never has it risen anywhere close to the 21st century level. And while the intentional use of information as a weapon seldom makes it to public discourse, it has not been forgotten by intelligence agencies and criminals. Such aggressive uses of information include:
Discredit and impersonate people to change their course of action and the actions of others.
Attack people via “nerve war” and/or subversion.
Falsification of public perception by false evidence and false leaks.
Falsification of public perception by selective and incomplete presentation of evidence and leaked material. (Intentional “leaks.”)
Changes of perceived time order. Did someone behave in a hostile manner before an action or after an action?
And if you're tempted to doubt that such things are actually done, remember that there were multiple slides in the Snowden documents, teaching surveillance operatives how to destroy the reputations of individuals[7].
Is The Manipulation of Billions Possible?
This is the place where denial kicks in. Denial in this case is understandable of course – the picture we're painting has ominous implications, and some path around them would be most welcome. Indeed, we walked that path ourselves for a brief time.
Alas, yes, this level of manipulation is possible, and for a simple reason: it is automated. As we all know, the prices of both computing power and storage have been falling, steadily and precipitously. It's affordable for anyone with a job to store many terabytes of data, and less than a measurable expense to a mega-corp or a government. Neither is searching through that data difficult or expensive.
The bottom line is this: So long as it's computers deciding who to manipulate and how, it can be obtained dirt cheap.
And we do have confirmation on this. Facebook, for example, ran a large experiment[8] in early 2012. This experiment, run on 689,000 of its users, sought to determine whether they could tweak the news feeds these people saw (the headlines in particular) and purposely change their emotions. And it turned out that they could… and that those emotions spread to their friends.
And as to whether these new powers are actually doing this, first consider that question from the vantage point of the castle: Is there anything that would restrain them from doing this? Wouldn't it greatly increase their power? Wouldn't the other castles do this without hesitation?
We all know what the answers are. If such things can be done, they will be done, and almost certainly are being done already. We only hesitate before the the obvious conclusion because it is troubling. Again, this may be understandable, but denial leads us to dark places.
We suppose that nearly every reader of this book will be familiar with the NSA's Utah data center. To get a sense of its scale, consider that its electric bill comes to about $40 million per year, and that it uses 1.7 million gallons of water per day[9].
This photo (courtesy Wikimedia), shows just one of Google's many data centers:
So, while seeing the world as it is requires courage, that's something we assume you wish to do... or else you wouldn't have purchased this book. And so, we will proceed.
Clearly, shockingly detailed knowledge is available on several billion people, and especially on Westerners. Furthermore, computing machines capable of storing and using this information are not only possible, but are already in place and functioning.
The question then, is how effective they are. The answer is “very effective,” but before jumping to that conclusion, it's important to point out that the manipulations we're talking about are merely the automation of things that have been done since the inception of government. Let's take just one, fairly modern example: The Gulf of Tonkin affair.
Based upon two supposed attacks by the North Vietnamese Navy, Lyndon Johnson, then President of the United States, interrupted national television to make an announcement in which he described an attack by North Vietnamese vessels and requested authority to undertake a military response. Americans were furious that “our boys” were attacked, unprovoked in international waters. Johnson was given wide authority to wage war without the constitutionally mandated declaration. As a result, the Vietnam war went from a relatively small thing to a major event.
But it was one large fraud. While there may have been some small level of truth about the first “attack” (one bullet hole was found on a US ship), the second was fabricated of whole cloth, as the former United States Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara later admitted[10]. But a large portion of Americans believed the Gulf of Tonkin story even after McNamara admitted the fraud.
So, manipulations from the castle work, and only too well. Adding massive new capabilities to them, then, is highly unlikely to generate less effective results.
Furthermore, the Facebook experiment noted above proved the efficacy of cyber-manipulation. A far larger set of proofs, however, are simply Facebook and Google's ad-revenues, which currently run at about $100. billion per year. That's a lot of proof, none of which comes from their users of their flagship products.
The simple truth about manipulation is this:
If we know enough about how you see the world, we can change your perceptions of our actions. And then we can manipulate what you do.
Every con man operates on this premise – he or she first seeks to know your patterns of perception, and then uses that knowledge to manipulate you.
Manipulation is about shaping your environment. If I know what motivates you, I can change your environment based upon that knowledge and induce predictable actions.
If you know wh
at I'm doing to you, and for what purposes, you will be able to adapt to the manipulation and undermine it. And that's why the people who know about this subject aren't talking.
To be very blunt about it, to manipulate well is to hijack another person's free will. When perception is shaped by a manipulator he will, through it, shape your reaction to it. And, sadly, this is what's now being done to nearly every person in the West. The new world of data-based intelligence has delivered this capability, and no castle-dweller worth the name would ever disregard such power, or fail to use it above all other powers.
This is why we've maintained that it is crucial in our time to willfully create yourself. Because if you don't, someone else will do it for you.
The War of All Against All
Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher, famous for his book Leviathan, in which he claimed that life without government would inevitably lead to a “war of all against all,” and that life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
This kind of dark world doesn't actually exist between individuals, but it does exist between power-based hierarchies, like castles and castle-dwellers of all types.
Furthermore, this dark model has been taking over the field of intelligence in the 21st century. In economic terms, we would say that intelligence is turning into a zero-sum game: There are only so many pieces of pie, and for me to get more, you have to get less.
Here's why this is happening:
Certain actions can only be taken by a certain number of people at certain times. For example, buying stocks at the current price. When I buy, I am also changing the market, altering the price the next buyer will pay. This is why it becomes so very important to assure that valuable information is known only to a certain few; any use of that information lessens its power.
So, if we have information that others don't have, as well as the means to make sense of it, our actions are more likely to be successful. But if everyone knows the same things we do and has the same sense-making capabilities, there's much less profit in that information.
The New Age of Intelligence Page 2
