Eric writes:
"Naw. Neoliberalism is not really an institution-conceived and -directed thing
like you seem to think. To the extent that the term usefully describes
anything, it would apply to a more or less improvised set of policy and
political responses to both the economic downturn of 1973-82 and worldwide
resistance and refusal. "
I'd say some of the players were institutions, and those institutions were
connected to other institutions, and sources of income. And they promoted ideas
and solutions and panics that were attractive to other institutions and
players. They worked together, and tried to win influence, even if it was on an
adhoc and somewhat fragmented basis.
"I know apres Harvey the left thing to do is draw a straight line from the
Chicago School to Chile et al., as if all 'ruling elites' had to do was devise
a program and administer it on the world. But that's bad history as well as bad
theory and is closer to rightwing conspiricizing ("inter-elite conflicts") than
Marxist analysis."
The history seems to be good, as far as I can see, and there is nothing in
Marxist analysis which says that sections of the ruling elites cannot conspire
together to attempt to reinforce their power (that supposedly is the role of
the State) - they probably won't remove the inner contradictions of capital,
even if they want to, but they have options, and they can strike against those
they consider their enemies. Class struggle is a struggle, and the struggle is
political and ideological, not a simple and inevitable 'plain-sailing'
dialectical movement to revolution.
"Just as the intellectual/philosophical reasonings behind neoliberalism came
only after their policy tenets were implemented, so left conjunctural analysis
tails popular movement, but usually does it poorly and misses the point."
Not sure this is good history either, as far as I can see the ideology of
neoliberalism developed as it won financing, won institutional struggles in
universities and think tanks, and won political sway through capturing
politicians, corporations and reactionaries. This is also what we might expect
from a theory of praxis. It develops, it is not born completely well thought
out.
"It is remarkable, though, that you can write mellifluously about Russia and
Trump and psy-ops etc., but end up not having a single word to say about the
fact that the fascist US president and his coterie are working on many fronts
with the Russian state and its offshoots on reviving a pan-Western
traditionalism that is racist, sexist, antiqueer, and eugenicist. That stuff is
less sexy than brainwashing is, but it hits people where they live and
comprises the actual content that's being whispered into people's ears."
I agree, that these formulations seem to arise from institutions working in
tandem towards similar aims, through a "conspiratorial" control and promotion
of information. In both cases it distracts from the actual policies, and it
would probably be wrong to think this hostile identity politics is accidental,
coincidental or less important.
jon
On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 2:23 PM, Brian Holmes
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Kremlebots roll over:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/video/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-whistleblower-we-spent-1m-harvesting-millions-of-facebook-profiles-video
Voice of Christopher Wylie, the 28 year-old hipster data scientist:
"We spent a million dollars harvesting tens of millions of Facebook profiles,
and those profiles were used as the basis of the algorithms that became the
foundation of Cambridge Analytica itself...
"We would know what kinds of messaging you would be susceptible to, including
the framing of it, the topics, the content, the tone, whether it's scary, that
kind of thing.... what you would be susceptible to and where you're going to
consume that, and how many times do we need to touch you in order to make you
change how you think about something.
"In addition to having data scientists, and psychologists, and strategists,
they also have an entire team of creatives, designers, videographers,
photographers.
"They then create that content, that gets then sent to a targeting team, which
then injects it into the internet. Websites will be created, blogs will be
created. Whatever it is that we think this target profile will be receptive to,
we will create content on the internet for them to find. And then they see
that, they click, and they go down the rabbit hole - until they start to think
something differently.
"Instead of standing in the public square and saying what you think, and
letting people come and listen to you, and then having that shared experience
as to what your narrative is, you are whispering into the ear of each and
every voter, and you may be whispering one thing to this voter and another
thing to another voter. We risk fragmenting society in a way where we don't
have any more shared experiences, and we don't have any more shared
understanding. If we don't have any more shared understanding, how can we be a
functioning society?
"If you want to fundamentally change society, you first have to break it. And
it's only when you break it that you can remold the pieces into your vision of
a new society. This was the weapon that Steve Bannon wanted to build to fight
his culture war."
***
All this was done by a London firm, with money supplied by arch-conservative
algotrading meister Robert Mercer. What's more it was done with data harvested
from Facebook by a Cambridge-based Russian academic who actually does have an
office at some shitty St Petersburg university, and it's not yet known whether
the data or even the algorithms ended up there.
I am aware the above has been partially known for months, yes, I read all that.
It is still not completely known but the above declarations by a core developer
link the major dots and mark a turning point in global history. Either social
media is regulated (see Allan Siegal's post) or we knowingly concede entry into
a post-democracy of continuous psy-ops and civil information warfare. Where the
biggest guns reap all the rewards.
The additional question of whether Trump, Nigel Farage and others can be
directly linked to Russian psy-ops programs and/or prosecuted for the use of
these techniques raises the specter of intense inter-elite conflicts spilling
over into civil unrest, with the further possibility of the US president
launching global-scale shooting wars as a diversionary excuse for
state-of-emergency tactics.
This is the endgame of the neoliberal program for the total makeover of
society, which began in the early Seventies with the Powell memo and the
Trilateral Commission declaration on "too much democracy." I think it will be
defeated and at least partially purged from both the state and civil society.
But obviously nothing assures that outcome.
Also see: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/4/1036 ("Computer-based personality
judgments are more accurate than those made by humans")
And the articles:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/17/facebook-cambridge-analytica-kogan-data-algorithm?CMP=share_btn_tw
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump
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