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Belly of the Beast
When I was young, fearless and following what I thought was my dream, I got a glimpse into the grunt-level underpinnings of this machine and into my own personal hell. The corruption grew denser the further up the ladder. It wasn’t perfectly coordinated but it was moving in tandem along a similar path of self-interest and what ‘sells.’
Money controlled the news, and the bulk of money wasn’t coming from the readers. They appealed to our most basic human instincts and drive for social inclusion, food, safety, sex, power, and a sense of purpose.
The sinking feeling of being trapped in a mass delusion wasn’t something I could exactly describe or tell anyone about until #FakeNews became a hashtag decades later. Now, there is little dispute that it exists but merely the scope of it that defies imagination.
The lack of any real identifiable coordination between everyday white-collar workers is the barrier people often encounter when considering the scope of the operation.
Everyone can’t be in on it. The problem is that we don’t know if we are in on it.
Editors pull from a set of stories on the wire, subscribed to by media corporations across the world. Beyond local news, the daily itinerary features the same stories, though they appear with some variations in content and length. Higher-ups who have meetings with other higher-ups slate lead stories in advance. Editors piece together related material out from the same pot. Aside from some uncontrollable minor improvisations, the narrative holds.
The relationship between the general populace, including those who graduate to media vocations and the pounding narrative that surrounds them both is akin to a hierarchy of narcissists and the abused.
It involves heaps of gaslighting, the projection and coerced adoption of the abuser’s negative traits onto and by their victims by producing an artificial pulse in order to align our reality closer to theirs.
It is a hierarchy of bureaucratic slaves, and their most potent driving force is the replication of fear incongruent with reality, abstracted and redirected from actual experience, not much unlike the way actors conjure emotion in a play.
It is not beyond the present frontier that the system selects candidates for certain roles and influence. Some are clearly bought off or blackmailed, but the vast majority of those on the lower ranks are influenced indirectly, polarized and emotionally manipulated in tech silos by messages that conjure up delicate histories and their own need to overcome these, even if superficially.
This is true of the general population as well.
Astroturfing
A significant portion of the population has self-ejected from mainstream narratives, finding cover in yet another layer of information matrices with independent and alternative media.
These spaces, too, are infiltrated.
Grassroots creative and alternative info markets have been subject to the same controls, reduced to despotism through spec work and globalized markets, software monopolies, astroturfing, honeypots, selective boosting and suppression.
As an example, consider the context and complexity of the connected entities surrounding WikiLeaks.
Two of the architects of SecureDrop, the whistleblower software deployed after WikiLeaks’ Tor submission system went offline, namely Reddit founder Aaron Swartz and James Dolan, both died of apparent suicide. The third SecureDrop founder can still be found lightly covering aspects of these connected platforms and their misadventures as editor for Wired Magazine.
Snowden, who was first forged in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) prior to his rendezvous with the National Security Agency (NSA), now sits at the end of the table of the board of directors of Freedom Press Foundation (FPF), which once funded WikiLeaks.
Hollywood directed our attention to the far-reaching capabilities and abuses of government surveillance. Although eye-opening, Snowden’s narrowed focus tends to leave unrestrained and poorly regulated corporate data collection and big tech with a comparatively free pass.
In 2013, Freedom Press Foundation, affiliated with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which aimed to remove the final barrier — ISP gatekeepers’ ability to stall the advance of media monopolies, calling it “Net Neutrality” — took over the development of SecureDrop.
EFF hosts hackathons for the software and has received multiple six-figure contributions from George Soros and his Open Society Foundations.
Billionaire Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, also held significant shares with PayPal, the company that withdrew the funding mechanism for the WikiLeaks platform. FPF then organized to raise funding for WikiLeaks, before they too eventually abandoned support.