You've read the books. You've watched the films. You've sung the songs. They were powerful once. Transformative. Inspiring. Then it all gets co-opted, commercialized, and turned to crap.
Whatever happened to the anarchists, rebels, revolutionaries, outlaws, bards, bohemians, beatniks, hippies, punks, rappers, ravers and memelords who spoke truth to power, manned the barricades, challenged the orthodoxy, shook their booty, and danced, danced, danced?
They got co-opted, transfixed and turned around. This is the revaluation of all values Nietzsche warned you about.
How did they do it? How did they hijack the culture of "this machine kills fascists" and drive it into the dumpster fire of "this disinformation campaign brought to you by Macedonian content farms"? Mass hypnosis. Mass hypnosis is real. No, I don't mean in a conspiracy of pedophilic lizard-people controlling the governments, the banking system, Hollywood, weather and media kind of thing. But in a long-term, consistent, microdosing propaganda program. It's in the groundwater, my friend.
How can you change things? How can you flip the script?
Let your enemies bring the weapons to battle. The weapons are threefold:
-
Campaign Finance. In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission the US Supreme Court ruled that the government cannot limit political spending by US individuals, corporations and unions. The decision established the principal that money is speech and that restrictions on spending would violate the First Amendment's protection of free speech. Citizens United changed the political landscape by allowing corporate interests to flood the airwaves, dominate the discourse and overwhelm the conversations between elected officials and their constituents that are essential to a functioning democracy.
-
Mind Control. Major works such as Four Arrows' (Donald Trent Jacobs) The Bum's Rush, George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant, Chomsky & Herman's Manufacturing Consent, Naomi Klein's No Logo, and Benkler, Faris & Roberts' Network Propaganda have documented and established the psycholinguistic techniques dominating political discourse since the advent of mass media. Sometimes subtle dog whistles, often bombastic viral memes, these pervasive signals ranging have reprogrammed large swaths of the American mind to erode trust, deny reality and weaponize social media.
- High Tech. Pervasive computing, mobile apps, immersive games, cryptocurrencies, social media and AI are used together and independently to reify the hegemonic worldview of nationalism, militarism and colonialism. The algorithms at the core of centralized search, social and shopping platforms, cross-optimized for engagement and profit, continually reinforce the water, materials and energy distribution pathways carved by empires past and present. Today, corporate interests have subsumed nation-states to fully-integrate the war machine as a decentralized, networked, monetized, fits-on-a-credit-card, on-demand SaaS solution.
Corporate media brought these weapons to the battle. Forget Machiavelli. Screw Sun Tzu. Now it's your turn to master the art and science of political power in the present age.
