In 2013, the American journalist Brad Stone wrote a book about Amazon – the book shop, not the river – called The Everything Store.
He may or may not have then known how apt his title would be as a metaphor for the 2020s’ great challenge. Will the young and coming generations continue to give in to the great scam of the global corporate elites and technocracy?
This is the scam of convenience. We have signed over our freedom, with ultimately end-game consequences, with not the remotest understanding of what we have done. We now live in a tech-dictatorship, and we don’t mind. Not in the least.
In Whitney Webb’s arresting terms, we-the-underclass are being sedated and herded.
Corralled, that is, gathered into confined spaces. Confined. Scammed. Not against our wills, alas. Whitney says we are being enslaved to convenience. Convenience is the carrot. And there are sticks aplenty coming down the road. Worse, they are here already. And the dimwit generation doesn’t even know it. And one day very soon, we won’t like the sticks. No travel. No cars. No climate-free spending. No privacy.
Then, it will be too late.
For years, observers of the new economy (as we innocently called it) constantly referred to “big data”. Most who used the term were yet to grasp its societal significance. Its meaning. It wasn’t so much seen as benign, but rather something of which few had the slightest inkling of its potential for evil. For control. In those innocent days, the members of the emerging “controligarchy” (as Seamus Bruner calls it) were generally seen as geeks, garage-innovators, startup heroes, entrepreneurs. Some, though, had become disciples of an insidious ideology called “effective altruism”. They had bigger, less benign, plans.
https://www.effectivealtruism.org/
We saw them then as philanthropists. They were giving their wealth away. Good Lord! How good are they! (We had no idea that this was an old idea, of John D Rockefeller).
We just loved Silicon Valley. So cool. Entrepreneurial AND progressive!
Innocent about the intentions of the emerging technocracy, we began to hand our private data over to those who would on-sell them for fun and profit. Mainly the latter. Then, those who suddenly had all our private information, realised the opportunities for control afforded by our insanely naïve insouciance.
In wasn’t until 2018 that Yasha Levine wrote Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet. And 2019 saw Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism. By this time, the fix was in.
Quick quiz. Who doesn’t order books from Amazon? Pay for the groceries with “tap”? Use the non-encrypted WhatsApp for personal communications? Google search everything? Download “the app”? Track and trace your way into the supermarket (during Covid)? Think that “who cares what they know about me”?
The retired Federal Court Judge Stuart Lindsay famously explained the relaxed response of Australians to the Covid tyranny as follows:
Netflix, full bellies and a warm place to defecate. That is all most want these days, is it not?
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/free-speech/2021/09/nothing-to-lose-but-chains-and-shame/
It turns out that many of these “garage software engineers” were not so benign, funded as many of them were at the get-go by the national security state, and they have pulled off perhaps the greatest confidence trick in history. They placed their chips on the human addiction to technology and convenience. And they won.
Many of the corporate class had other objectives than simple profit and using government connections for self-corporate protection, it turns out. Crony capitalists wanted to be the masters of the universe that they have now become.
And, for those paying attention, their game plans were hiding in plain sight.
Bill Gates III’s father, Bill Senior, turns out to have been the driving force behind the Gates Foundation in the 1990s. The same Bill Sr who, back in the day, engineered Planned Parenthood, humankind’s greatest eugenics and population control mechanism to date. Follow the links between Gates Jr and Tony Fauci, see the African sterilisation plays. Discover the internecine connections between Big Tech and Big Pharma and the deep state. Between the Central Intelligence Agency and Silicon Valley. Between politicians elected on the back of nefarious donors with agendas. Between the Mob and the intel “community”.
The Rockefellers, who invented Big Oil and now have the gall to fund and support “End Big Oil” and all manner of sustainability causes, got wise early to the program. They saw the way forward to global domination. They created the model for control and power. Gates and the rest of them merely followed the script. Silicon Valley became Wall Street. And Wall Street rules the world. We all thought that was cool, too. The re-imagined left even came on board.
The Club of Rome was around in the 1960s. They were driving the whole sustainability revolution, before the term was even invented, in plain sight. They helped to set up the World Economic Forum, with Henry Kissinger. The Bilderbergs? Yes, they were there, too. The Council on Foreign Relations. Kissinger again. The UN Agenda 2030.
The globalist cabal found the way forward in technological control. The connections between the deep state and Silicon Valley were already there, ready to activate in service of broader, global agendas.
All this had led us to today.
A world of endless and comprehensive surveillance. The crushing of privacy. The active acquiescence of so-called “liberal” parties in the destruction of freedom. The use of AI in silencing dissent. A war on “domestic terror”. That is, a war on us. Contenders for “the everything app”, like Elon Musk’s, to tie us all to a WeChat style surveillance terror. Dissident hunting as the default task of government.
We now inhabit a global convenience store. A store that has consummated the connection between big government and big corporates. The model of public private partnerships, aka fascism. The World Economic Forum’s playbook. Now sold as fake “communitarianism”.
All this has been achieved in the blink of an eye, in the era of the Internet 2.0, without eyes on the target. The underclass has been micro-managed. And we agreed to this! Amazon has become the world. We are now part of a vast, all-encompassing, global convenience store.
It is a cliché to reflect that we live in dark times.
The medievals did. The Germans in the 1930s did. Those crushed under Stalinism, in Russia and across Europe, did, during the awful times of the Cold War. Think the East German Stasi. The Jews have, forever. They still do. The early Christians in Rome did. Any nation ever occupied did. Australian Aborigines and others colonised by the West did. The post 9/11 “war on terror” airport tyranny hit us all. The Chinese people? What can you say? From Confucius to WeChat, they have been suffering subjects, crushed by oriental tyranny.
Dark times are not new.
Perhaps the difference now, dark times-wise, is that we have, seemingly, agreed to it all. Given it the big tick.
The best form of dictatorship is that to which is acquiesced. The best cons are those where the target is still in the dark, long after the con! Just watch any episode of Hustle. The ultimate weapon of the malign ruling class is the knowledge that we all just want to be happy in our private lives. The simple life, as John Farnham once sang. So, we just don’t notice evil. Especially the evil that Hannah Arendt called “banal”. The Germans didn’t notice what was going on (so they said). We don’t, either.
Anyone for Netfix? The latest app? As Faustian bargains go, this one has been a doozy. We will own nothing, and we will be happy, they say. Sadly, they are probably right.
Pennies urgently need to drop.
Paul Collits
5 March 2023
Paul, pleased to see here affirmed that the meeting of big government and big corporates is the definition of fascism
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The Webb interview quite an eye opener. Thanks. Amr