@samfbiddle Thank you, Sam. McLuhan saw it, of course: “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.” It's World War III, not as we anticipated it, but exactly as he prophesized.
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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Double Down News analytics screenshot Recovered pictured passage; not a claim to the full source. Passage boundary: Source: archive.nickroutledge.org/post/1960048438781092347 Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. Minutes viewed 7 Oct 2023 – 24 Jan 2024 20,769,515 Organic 0 Paid Vertical scale: 0; 833.3K; 1.7M; 2.5M Dates: Oct 7; Oct 22; Nov 7; Nov 22; Dec 8; Dec 23; Jan 8; Jan 24
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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Nick quoting McLuhan Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: Source: archive.nickroutledge.org/post/1877001347779698726 Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. @johnrobb 2/ Final Computing Solutions. "World War III will be a guerilla information war, with no division between civilian and military participation." McLuhan in a 2017 Atlantic Council report on radically enhanced capabilities of AI-driven computational-propaganda for mind manipulation t.co/Av13EyDav5
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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Double Down News Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: Source: archive.nickroutledge.org/post/1960048438781092347 Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. Double Down News Follow Post Gaza Genocide, we went from tens of millions of views per week on Facebook to zero. Hopefully, Facebook's 180° turn towards 'free speech' and promoting political content applies to journalism that holds Israel's crimes against humanity to account. We won't hold our breath. Last edited 10:18 AM · Jan 7, 2025 · 35.5K Views 50 781 1.8K 94 Relevant View quotes
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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Nick Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: Source: archive.nickroutledge.org/post/1875703515613724902 Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. @MrEwanMorrison And, sadly, child's play relative to, say, the massive acceleration of vast, machine-driven resources of dominative structures of power and consciousness deliberately shaping universal attention span in their psychotic image. A World War, suddenly centered upon perception itself. t.co/PhCKRpAegR
Open original document@Watson_School @CostsOfWar Benjamin knew. Authoritarian 'storms' aren't accidental as much as constitutive to 'progress' itself—the logical culmination of a system fusing profit with techno-modern governance. In an AI-supercharged growth economy, sacrificing the public at scale was baked in from the start.
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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Nick Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: Source: archive.nickroutledge.org/post/1950560649274159500 Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. @lukeburgis 9/ This isn't capitalism supporting war. It's capitalism generating war. Algorithms don't just mediate rivalry—feeding on desire, they _incite_ it. The sacrificial mechanism runs on autopilot, scaling contagion far beyond human capabilities and comprehension. t.co/F4dZzCasu9 Retained uncertainty: [{"passage": "Embedded backstage-fusion quotation", "reason": "No author credit in image or exact saved source; @johnrobb/@nils_gilman are addressees, not established quotation authors. Same attribution boundary as89."}]
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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Nick; three nested bodies plus embedded backstage-fusion quotation Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: Source: archive.nickroutledge.org/post/1951384372046864437 Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. 23/ Indeed, the breadth of AI’s epistemic capture now runs far beyond nuclear or even military categories, braiding civilian and commercial streams into a mediated picture "shaping what's real" that destabilizes the center long before anything even nears a nuclear launch circuit. And, sadly, child's play relative to, say, the massive acceleration of vast, machine-driven resources of dominative structures of power and consciousness deliberately shaping universal attention span in their psychotic image. A World War, suddenly centered upon perception itself. 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. Nick Routledge 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?” 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’..." 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. Retained uncertainty: [{"passage": "Embedded backstage-fusion quotation", "reason": "No author credit in image or exact saved source; @johnrobb/@nils_gilman are addressees, not established quotation authors. Same attribution boundary as89."}]
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