@pauljpastor Just gonna brush the dust off this one, too. Marshall McLuhan: “The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.”
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Copy of tweet here: Yup. Take exponentially augmented upgrades in persuasive generative AI and the tools to massively amplify it, add bad faith state and tech actors with untold resources on tap, and manipulative media abruptly crosses an authoritarian threshold at the planetary level. Then again... Nick_routledge "...the backstage fusion between human and machine authority....modes of governance normalised by digital platforms...algorithmic level of governance as an increasingly key field of political struggle...digital post-democracy...‘swarm governance’..." @johnrobb @nils_gilman Nick_routledge 1/ Why stop at polls? With the fusion of military and corporate functions in a single, conjoined mediasphere, vast resources - increasingly, at a machine level - aimed at dominating perception of reality itself, now define planetary war at the level of total consciousness.
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Copy of tweet here: Bingo. *Choice* excerpt, Nils. Peculiar, isn't it, the evolutionary ontology of a noospheric, algorithmically-supercharged claim upon the private soul, and the planetary harvest of consequence, consciousness and disclosure it radically enhances, remaining, as a rule, unobserved. "World War III will be a guerilla information war, with no division between civilian and military participation." That's Marshall McCluhan headlining a 2017 Atlantic Council report on the radically enhanced capabilities of AI-driven computational-propaganda for mind manipulation. Copy of tweet: 3/ Martin Gurri: “That was me at the global media analysis section of CIA...And I was not alone. A group of us were obsessed with the same drama...We all asked the same question: Why? What does information technology have to do with politics?”
@mchlmorelli @trippfuller @HomebrewedXnty 1/2 It's all One Media Picture, of course, along with a Unitive Ecology defined, of late, by a radically-accelerated harvest of consequence, consciousness and disclosure characterizing a Media Event of epochal proportions as one planetary paradigm crashes and another replaces it.
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What if the dark, mercenary genius of algo-supercharged, exploitative media-ecology's claim upon the private soul is ultimately checked only in recognizing its larger, evolutionary role delivering us to a sunburst of revelation overturning the tables of history itself? Military-grade cyberweaponry and the ubiquity of algo-supercharged repression? "Impacts have been particularly keenly felt by those advocating on behalf of minority communities or disseminating information perceived as critical of government." An algo-supercharged vortex of mimetic contagion and a momentum the prophets universally anticipated would deliver us to the very threshold of suicidal, planetary cataclysm. Hobbes’ ‘war of all against all plus nukes. What next? Eschatologically speaking, the web era initiated the arrival of an algo-supercharged parsing mechanism which, ultimately, can only be understood apocalyptically, i.e., from a point of view revealing a meaning different from its literal sense.