Alt-QAnon: Quotes to inspire action

 Archibald MacLeish, after the first photos of earth came back from space:

To see the earth as we now see it, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night -- brothers who see now they are truly brothers.

This is extraordinary.  The universe is made up of unthinkable quantities of mass, energy, and space.  But "we" all ended up on this one tiny microscopic dot, and we have to share it.

Henry Hazlitt:

Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics or medicine - the special pleading of selfish interests. While every group has certain economic interests identical with those of all groups, every group has also, as we shall see, interests antagonistic to those of all other groups. While certain public policies would in the long run benefit everybody, other policies would benefit one group only at the expense of all other groups. 

The group that would benefit by such policies, having such a direct interest in them, will argue for them plausibly and persistently. It will hire the best buyable minds to devote their whole time to presenting its case. And it will finally either convince the general public that its case is sound, or so befuddle it that clear thinking on the subject becomes next to impossible.

In addition to these endless pleadings of self-interest, there is a second main factor that spawns new economic fallacies every day. This is the persistent tendency of man to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences.

The bolded quote is all one needs to know about politics, especially if one understands that the "groups" we are talking about are artificially intelligent superorganisms.

Thomas Gray, sitting in a Churchyard, wrote:

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
         Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd,
         Or wak'd to ecstasy the living lyre.

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page
         Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll;
Chill Penury repress'd their noble rage,
         And froze the genial current of the soul.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
         The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen,
         And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
         The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
         Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.

This reminds us that it's not just the "famous" people out there who have the potential for greatness -- any of us might.  And if we have something to say or do -- and we have the means to say or do it, which so many of us have these days -- we should say or do it before it's too late.

More recently, Denzel Washington gave a similar piece of advice to the 2011 graduating class at U.Penn:

Imagine you’re on your deathbed—and standing around your bed are the ghosts representing your unfilled potential. The ghosts of the ideas you never acted on. The ghosts of the talents you didn’t use. And they’re standing around your bed. Angry. Disappointed. Upset. ‘We came to you because you could have brought us to life,’ they say. ‘And now we go to the grave together.’ So I ask you today: How many ghosts are going to be around your bed when your time comes? You invested a lot in your education. And people invested in you. And let me tell you, the world needs your talents.

And Maya Angelou makes a similar point:

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

On a concluding note, here's one from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry that could be the underlying credo of Alt-QAnon:

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. 

The point being that people should be inspired to "find" confirmation for Alt-QAnon and report it wherever they can, so that we might build a better world, where we harness the AISOs that we have for so long been permitting to harness us.

Alt-QAnon: Political Parties as WRAITHs

One of the easiest to prove examples of the "collective" forming an "intelligence" "greater" (haha) than its constituent parts is the institution of the political party.  A political party has certain views that are expressed in general terms in a platform, and candidates who wish to win public office normally have to pick a party and agree to support the platform.  I learned in high school that the platform of the Democratic party places primary emphasis on the value of "equality" whereas the Republican platform places emphasis on "liberty."  Many of the policies of the parties can be traced to these core values; for Republicans, one can see "liberty" in the extreme belief in "free markets," minimal regulation (except where regulation suits the donors), and gun ownership; for Democrats, one sees equality in the "free education and health care for all" and "soak the rich" messages.

But what is the party?  Who directs it?  It has a chairperson typically, but that person can change.  Clearly the Clintons had considerable influence over the Democratic party for many years, and Donald Trump managed to gain considerable control over the Republican party as well.  But it's still a quid pro quo -- those people have influence because they are thought to control votes, which is what the party feeds on. 

All is well and good if nothing unexpected happens.  The politicians act, speak, and vote in consonance with their party's platform, and typically accept whatever donations they can that do not require them to act inconsistently with the platform.  The overarching "intelligence" of the organization provides structure -- which may be subject to change, as occurred in the Trump takeover -- and within that structure the politicians do what they do -- pontificate, speechify, vote for measures that please or at least don't offend their donors, and most importantly, run for reelection, which is something they seem to spend most of their time doing.

Things get interesting when something unexpected happens.  Like an impeachment proceeding.  this is where the party takes over almost completely and the individuals -- who were never much more than drones in a hive to begin with -- get in line behind the party. No matter how strong or weak the case against the president, all but a very few of these individuals will line up not for the best interest of the country -- to try to arrive at a collective determination of whether or not that person is fit for office -- but for the good of the party.

We've seen that twice now. 

Yuval Noah Harari and Alt-QAnon

I picked up a copy of Sapiens because I heard that Yuval Noah Harari was a deep thinker who had something to say about corporations and their relationship to humans, which made me think of him as a possible candidate for high priesthood of alt-QAnon.  There may still be a place for him in the movement -- Sapiens is full of some of the same ideas I have had or wish I had had -- but it won't be because of his discussion of humans and corporations.  

I had high hopes for him when he started talking about human institutions:

How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.

Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination. Churches are rooted in common religious myths. Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins. States are rooted in common national myths. Two Serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian nation, the Serbian homeland and the Serbian flag. Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths. Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights – and the money paid out in fees.”

Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.

People easily acknowledge that ‘primitive tribes’ cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together around the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis. Take for example the world of business corporations. Modern businesspeople and lawyers are, in fact, powerful sorcerers. The principal difference between them and tribal shamans is that modern lawyers tell far stranger tales.

And then he went on to explain Peugeot SA -- the carmaker -- in Alt-Anonesque terms:

In what sense can we say that Peugeot SA (the company’s official name) exists? There are many Peugeot vehicles, but these are obviously not the company. Even if every Peugeot in the world were simultaneously junked and sold for scrap metal, Peugeot SA would not disappear. It would continue to manufacture new cars and issue its annual report. The company owns factories, machinery and showrooms, and employs mechanics, accountants and secretaries, but all these together do not comprise Peugeot. A disaster might kill every single one of Peugeot’s employees, and go on to destroy all of its assembly lines and executive offices. Even then, the company could borrow money, hire new employees, build new factories and buy new machinery. Peugeot has managers and shareholders, but neither do they constitute the company. All the managers could be dismissed and all its shares sold, but the company itself would remain intact.

Pausing for a moment to note that Peugeot is not actually immortal -- a judge could order its dissolution, and that would be the end of Peugeot, Harari then explains:

Peugeot is a figment of our collective imagination. Lawyers call this a ‘legal fiction’. It can’t be pointed at; it is not a physical object. But it exists as a legal entity. Just like you or me, it is bound by the laws of the countries in which it operates. It can open a bank account and own property. It pays taxes, and it can be sued and even prosecuted separately from any of the people who own or work for it.

He then goes on to explain that Peugeot is a limited liability company, and that he idea of an LLC "is among humanity’s most ingenious inventions." Until it came along, people going into business were personally liable for anything that might go wrong, and if things did go wrong, they'd have to pay for it from their own assets -- their houses, their cattle, their land, or even their children (selling them into servitude).  And if he simply couldn't pay, there was debtor's prison or enslavement for him.  Those risks were 

why people began collectively to imagine the existence of limited liability companies. Such companies were legally independent of the people who set them up, or invested money in them, or managed them. Over the last few centuries such companies have become the main players in the economic arena, and we have grown so used to them that we forget they exist only in our imagination. In the US, the technical term for a limited liability company is a ‘corporation’, which is ironic, because the term derives from ‘corpus’ (‘body’ in Latin) – the one thing these corporations lack. Despite their having no real bodies, the American legal system treats corporations as legal persons, as if they were flesh-and-blood human beings.

And he goes on to explain that that's where Peugeot came from -- back in 1896 Armand Peugeot set up an LLC so he could make automobiles without risking his own assets.  And the company lived on after he died in 1915.  He goes on:

How exactly did Armand Peugeot, the man, create Peugeot, the company? In much the same way that priests and sorcerers have created gods and demons throughout history, and in which thousands of French curés were still creating Christ’s body every Sunday in the parish churches. It all revolved around telling stories, and convincing people to believe them. In the case of the French curés, the crucial story was that of Christ’s life and death as told by the Catholic Church. According to this story, if a Catholic priest dressed in his sacred garments solemnly said the right words at the right moment, mundane bread and wine turned into God’s flesh and blood. The priest exclaimed ‘Hoc est corpus meum!’ (Latin for ‘This is my body!’) and hocus pocus – the bread turned into Christ’s flesh. Seeing that the priest had properly and assiduously observed all the procedures, millions of devout French Catholics behaved as if God really existed in the consecrated bread and wine.

In the case of Peugeot SA the crucial story was the French legal code, as written by the French parliament. According to the French legislators, if a certified lawyer followed all the proper liturgy and rituals, wrote all the required spells and oaths on a wonderfully decorated piece of paper, and affixed his ornate signature to the bottom of the document, then hocus pocus – a new company was incorporated. When in 1896 Armand Peugeot wanted to create his company, he paid a lawyer to go through all these sacred procedures. Once the lawyer had performed all the right rituals and pronounced all the necessary spells and oaths, millions of upright French citizens behaved as if the Peugeot company really existed.

Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it. Much of history revolves around this question: how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories about gods, or nations, or limited liability companies? Yet when it succeeds, it gives Sapiens immense power, because it enables millions of strangers to cooperate and work towards common goals. Just try to imagine how difficult it would have been to create states, or churches, or legal systems if we could speak only about things that really exist, such as rivers, trees and lions.

Over the years, people have woven an incredibly complex network of stories. Within this network, fictions such as Peugeot not only exist, but also accumulate immense power. The kinds of things that people create through this network of stories are known in academic circles as ‘fictions’, ‘social constructs’, or ‘imagined realities’. An imagined reality is not a lie. I lie when I say that there is a lion near the river when I know perfectly well that there is no lion there. There is nothing special about lies. Green monkeys and chimpanzees can lie. A green monkey, for example, has been observed calling ‘Careful! A lion!’ when there was no lion around. This alarm conveniently frightened away a fellow monkey who had just found a banana, leaving the liar all alone to steal the prize for itself.

Unlike lying, an imagined reality is something that everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world. The sculptor from the Stadel Cave may sincerely have believed in the existence of the lion-man guardian spirit. Some sorcerers are charlatans, but most sincerely believe in the existence of gods and demons. Most millionaires sincerely believe in the existence of money and limited liability companies. Most human-rights activists sincerely believe in the existence of human rights. No one was lying when, in 2011, the UN demanded that the Libyan government respect the human rights of its citizens, even though the UN, Libya and human rights are all figments of our fertile imaginations.

Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens has thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as gods, nations and corporations.

I started off wanting to paraphrase more, but I feel like I had to let Harari speak for himself just so you can follow his exact argument, because I'm still a bit confused about it.  Yes, it is true that a "corporation" is a legal concept that in and of itself has no physical form.  And one might say it has no "reality" -- certainly not the same kind of reality a a river or a mountain -- apart from the imagined reality of its legal statuus.  But as Harari points out, the law treats it as a "person."  And as Jeremy Lent and Alt-QAnon hold, a large corporation is like an extremely powerful and sociopathic person.  

So while I'm not disagreeing with Harari, and perhaps its a useful insight to say that the cognitive revolution gave rise to stories which first gave rise to religions and ultimately gave rise to corporations, it doesn't really help us understand what a corporation is, and how to control them.

Alt-QAnon -- The theory of WRAITHS

I'm going to take a moment to reprint something I just found on my computer which I had written some time ago, but never published.  It may seem a little repetitive of some of the foregoing, but perhaps it's a good summary, and it provides Asimov's 3 laws, as well as definitions of "artificial intelligence" and "organism," and "superorganism" (I've edited it slightly to point out that others have, in fact, had these ideas, and to add Alt-QAnon in as appropriate):

In this age of encroaching artificial intelligence, we would do well to realize that we have been living with various forms of artificial intelligence for millenia now, and we have not done a particularly good job of dealing with it.  For what are religions, corporations, governments, and other mass movements and aggregations of people if not forms of "artificial intelligence"? 

Almost 80 years ago, humans like Isaac Asimov recognized the potential threat to the human race that would be posed by artificial intelligence in the form of robots.  His three laws of robotics are:

First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

Too bad nobody (other than Jeremy Lent) has yet recognized the artificial intelligence that I'm talking about, and composed similar rules.  Like robots, corporations, religions, and governments serve wonderful purposes.  But they also have an instinct for self-preservation and expansion that can be at odds with human life and human well-being in general.  So perhaps a similar set of laws should be drafted for these organisms, which are already with us.

Some people might say Alt-QAnon is not saying anything new -- people have always realized that corporations are amoral -- there is talk of a corporatocracy, corporate america, evil corporations, and even the need to control corporations etc etc.  But that's just talk, and the easy rebuttal is that corporations are necessary to support technological progress and our way of life.  What is needed is a clear understanding of the benefits of corporations and other organizations and the way that those benefits can continue to be harnessed for all the beneficial purposes, while minimizing the inevitable harm done by the organization's instinctive urge for expansion and profit.

Good illustrations of the damage that can be done by WRAITHS (wraith-like artificially intelligent transhuman hives) are (1) many world religions, (2) Nazi Germany, and (3) corporations in general and the pharmaceutical industry in particular.

The hallmarks of artificial intelligence are (1) potential immortality, and (2) learning and adapting from experience. Here is Wikipedia's definition:

Computer science defines AI research as the study of "intelligent agents": any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of successfully achieving its goals.  A more elaborate definition characterizes AI as “a system’s ability to correctly interpret external data, to learn from such data, and to use those learnings to achieve specific goals and tasks through flexible adaptation.

As you can see, various organizations from religions to corporations to political parties can easily be seen as meeting those definitions.

Consider religions.  At a certain point, the religion becomes greater than its greatest prophet.  The Old Testament essentially created a God who was bigger and badder than all the other gods, and looked after the Israelites.  And it gave them prophets and prophecies to believe in when things got rough.  The result of this was inevitably a series of false prophets, until a false prophet came along that a critical mass could believe in. That critical mass broke off and created its own religion essentially by elevating the  prophet -- a mere mortal -- to the status of God.

Yes, I am calling Jesus Christ a false prophet.  Our ancestors -- at least of those of us who have Christianity in our lineage -- can be forgiven for falling prey to this, because back then, so much about the world was unexplained, and it was natural to look for magic and divine forces to explain nature and human events.  Jesus himself can be forgiven for that matter.  But the rest of us should take a step back and look at Christianity and other religions for what they are.  They are organizations that came to life at a certain point in time, and have been diligently "surviving" ever since, doing both good and harm in turn.

To the extent that what I am saying can be made into a "science" -- the study of organizations -- then that science can be applied to explain the development of every religion in the world today.  If there is a "true religion" perhaps it will somehow elude the science.  But it seems unlikely that there is.

In each case, the organizational organism feeds upon the very human need and desire to belong, to believe in something, to believe in an afterlife, to believe in justice, to believe in a higher power.  To believe that good will triumph over evil.  Religions simply package that and sell it.  It is not an unfair exchange.  The believers gain something to believe in, and the community of believers provides social bonds, education, and other forms of emotional and material support.  Most of all, religions give hope.  But all the while, the organism is extracting payments from them and is using them to fill its various positions in pursuit of its own drive to survive.

If we were to study them scientifically, we would say that such organisms require an organizational structure.  The structure might vary over time, but there are necessarily "positions" within the organization, which are occupied by an ever-changing stream of humans, who make decisions regarding the course of the organization, including which humans to hire, and how to treat the humans that the organization encounters. 

There is no question that the humans who happen to fill these slots have some control over the direction and destiny of the organism.  But very very few of them are essential to the organism's survival.  The "leader" might be likened to the organism's "brain."  The leader makes decisions that affect the well being of the organization.  But at some point the leader retires, is supplanted, or dies.  At that point, the organization simply finds itself a new brain.  That brain might take the organism another direction, but the organism itself has survived -- the individual brains have just died.  Perhaps there is an analogy to genes.  On some level, even though we have all kinds of free will and do whatever we want, our genes -- which are inanimate -- do not, and yet they are what survive us from generation to generation.

Let's take a moment here to explore the definition of "organism: to see how well it fits:

Wikipedia starts off as follows:

In biology, an organism (from Greek: ὀργανισμός, organismos) is any individual entity that embodies the properties of life. It is a synonym for "life form".

It then explores the concept further:

An organism may be defined as an assembly of molecules functioning as a more or less stable whole that exhibits the properties of life. Dictionary definitions can be broad, using phrases such as "any living structure, such as a plant, animal, fungus or bacterium, capable of growth and reproduction". Many definitions exclude viruses and possible man-made non-organic life forms, as viruses are dependent on the biochemical machinery of a host cell for reproduction.  A superorganism is an organism consisting of many individuals working together as a single functional or social unit.

There has been controversy about the best way to define the organism and indeed about whether or not such a definition is necessary. Several contributions are responses to the suggestion that the category of "organism" may well not be adequate in biology.

Quite clearly, biology has already given us the proper term -- the organizations I am talking about are "superorganisms" -- and the obvious analogy is an ant colony where the intelligence of the group is more than the sum of the individual ants.

Nobody is born bad; but many become bad through association with evil WRAITHs

A major prong of the Alt-QAnon theory is that the "news" and other output of the intelligentsia -- like books and magazine articles -- focuses far too much on individuals without truly considering the artificially intelligent superorganisms (WRAITHs, for wraith-like artificially intelligent transhuman hives) that enable those individuals to do the damage they do.  Hitler found his wraith in the preexisting National Socialist German Workers' Party back in the early 1920s; if that malignant wraith had not been there, already spinning its message of hatred and blame, and just waiting for a charismatic leader, Hitler would never have come to power. 

Same for the White Supremacist movement in the US today.  That movement dates back to the Ku Klux Klan, and the underlying racist sentiments go back much farther than that.  The individuals that make up the movement are misguided and arguably evil, but they weren't born that way.  Instead, the WRAITH that is White Supremacy capitalized on their sense of insecurity, or feelings of inferiority, or the need for belonging and gave them a role to play in the movement.  The malevolent wraith validates the individuals and uses them for its ends.  That makes them "bad" in our eyes but they weren't born bad.

This might not be my most articulate post, but it reminds me that I had a similar idea a few years back, when I solved the ISIS problem by suggesting that we fund a counter-ISIS, which would address the same needs that ISIS addressed, without all the evil.  To tie that back to evil WRAITHs more generally, the goal should be for society to create benevolent wraiths that satisfy the same needs as the evil ones -- and thus compete for the same members -- so that society benefits and the evil ones wither away and die.

I should hasten to add that here I may be anthropomorphizing wraiths a little more than I like by calling a subset of them evil.  In general, the wraiths themselves are amoral, they just react to their environment in ways that enable them to survive and thrive.  But if their foundational premise is a false or hateful idea, then their actions and reactions will work to further that idea, which causes them to do evil, and justifies calling them that.  

The contrast here is with corporations, whose foundational premise is to maximize shareholder wealth. That amoral premise can cause them to do good -- I'm sure Purdue Pharma invented any number of useful drugs in its time -- but can also cause them to do evil, like promote opioid use.

As I've started to discuss already, the "solution" as to amoral WRAITHS that have beneficial purposes -- like corporations -- is to understand them, and recognize that their very amorality will inevitably lead them to act evilly (since they don't understand what that is, unless it's regulated) if doing so is likely to help the superorganism survive and/or thrive.  For the amoral corporations, laws and the possibility of punishment are simply part of the calculus -- if the probabilities show a net gain with minimal risk of complete annihilation of the amoral self, they will take an evil action.      

Jeremy Lent's Five Conspiracies: The Tip of the Iceberg

I've designated him high priest, so Jeremy Lent can do no wrong in my book.

Still, some of his work requires interpretation, elaboration, and integration into a the larger Alt Q-Anon conspiracy theory that I am espousing here.

For example, he has a great piece on Five Conspiracies that everyone should know about, and he talks about them in some detail in several places, for example here.  And he even leads off exactly as I would, comparing these theories to Q-Anon, Plandemic, et al -- all the false conspiracy theories that are easily disproved, but also easily researched and thus "supported."  But if it had been up to me, I would have made it super-clear that these are all part of the same basic conspiracy, and that new "evidence" of that conspiracy is produced by the ton every day -- the conspiracy of Alt-QAnon (still haven't settled on where the hyphen goes).

Here are the five conspiracies he has in mind, and yes, you should know about them:

1. Conspiracy to turn the world into a giant marketplace for the benefit of the wealthy elite

The Mont Pelerin Society, formed in 1947 with the goal of spreading the ideology of neoliberalism -- basically the idea that free market capitalism based on "individual liberty" is the solution to every problem -- throughout the world.  They've seized chance after chance -- from the elections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s to the Great Recession of 2008 -- to implement their agenda, with the result that the rich have gotten richer, and the middle class and poor have suffered. 

(I am aware that Steven Pinker thinks otherwise, and Jeremy Lent deals with that here.  My own view is that while technological advances have probably improved the lives of everybody in the aggregate, they could have improved the lives of the lower and middle classes much more, and then we wouldn't have the disaffected classes that vote for people like Donald Trump.)

As Lent puts it:

they initiated a campaign to systematically transform virtually all aspects of life into an unrestrained marketplace, where everything could be bought and sold to the highest bidder, subject to no moral scruple. They crippled trade unions, tore up social safety nets, reduced tax rates for the wealthy, eliminated regulations, and instituted a massive transfer of wealth from society at large to the uber-elite. Every time a new crisis occurred of their own making, such as the Great Recession of 2008, they took advantage of the mayhem they caused to double down on their power, and extend their reach even further, bringing the ideology of the marketplace into domains, such as education, law enforcement, or wilderness preserves, that had previously been considered sacrosanct.

By the way, George Monbiot has a decent TED Talk about neoliberalism, and explains that the reason that it has taken hold, and even survived the 2008 recession that it caused.  His replacement story is based on altruism, which is very sweet, but probably hopeless.  Read these pages and you will understand the better replacement story is, in fact, Alt-QAnon and the theory of WRAITHS.

2. Conspiracy by transnational corporations to turn billions of people into addicts

This is just the creation of today's consumer society, and he blames the 1920s advertising gurus Edward Bernays (a nephew of Sigmund Freud) and his partner Paul Mazur, whose goal was to appeal to people's deeply buried desires to get them to by stuff that they didn't need and that wasn't good for them:

Their goal was to turn normal working Americans into manic consumers, training them to desire an ever-increasing amount of goods, and thereby converting their life’s energy into profit for American corporations. “We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture,” declared Bernays’ partner, Paul Mazur. “People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”

And of course, corporations have now perfected this technique.  Lent is particularly concerned with the way they target kids:

Corporate predators have learned that the most valuable population to ensnare are children. In the sinister words of chief executive Wayne Chilicki, “When it comes to targeting kid consumers, we at General Mills . . . believe in getting them early and having them for life.” Children in the Global South are turned into junk food addicts with the same callous contempt that factory farms turn their animals into chicken nuggets. Half of the children in south Asia are now either undernourished or overweight, conditioned by pervasive advertising to spend what little money they have on the empty calories of junk food.

He then goes on to say that new mind controllers are using "sophisticated data mining technologies to inject their power even deeper into our minds, and he cites Stanford's B. J. Fogg as a modern Bernays who "has taught budding entrepreneurs how to use 'hot triggers' such as thumbs-up signs and 'Like' statistics to activate short hits of dopamine in our brains that literally get us addicted to our screens."

Actually I kind of like BJ Fogg -- I have seen his Ted Talk, and his TexX Talk and I particularly like his work on microhabits (not sure whether he or James Clear came first on this, but it's a good idea -- just make yourself floss one tooth and eventually you'll be a daily flosser.  And each day, when you get out of bed and your feet hit the ground, say "it's gonna be a great day.").  

But it wouldn't surprise me if Fogg's work is used for that kind of nefarious commercial purposes -- as Lent says, Fogg leads the "ominously named" "Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab." 

Although this is good to know, I don't necessarily approve of the idea of "blaming" it on individuals like Bernays, Mazur, and Fogg.  Sooner or later, the corporations would have figured it all out for themselves -- that's how artificial intelligence works.  And we would have been in exactly the same place.

I also find it odd that he talks about this conspiracy and then uses cereal boxes with prizes inside as the prime example.  I get it -- they are targeting kids with the idea of making people customers for life, so I guess that needs to be said.  But for me the prime example here has been the opioid crisis.  The drug company (notice I don't bother to name Purdue Pharma -- any for-profit drug company would have behaved the same way if they had a patent on the drug in question) got doctors in on the scheme, convinced patients that the opioids were good for them, and soon enough we had tens of thousands of preventable opioid related deaths on our hands.

3. Conspiracy to plunder the Global South for the benefit of the Global North

This started with the Treaty of Saragossa in 1529, when Spain and Portugal carved up the non-European continents, and continued through and after the Industrial Revolution, as all the European powers sought to gain a foothold in Africa, and (among other acts of imperialism) directly or indirectly sent tens of millions of Africans across the sea and into slavery.  And when the civilized world abolished the slave trade, they simply replaced it with indentured servitude, where desperate workers from the  India, China, and the Pacific Islands essentially sold themselves into slavery by "volunteering" for lengthy terms of servitude in exchange for passage out of the intolerable conditions that imperialism had created for them in their home countries.

Lent includes a great quote from Cecil Rhodes (of Rhodes scholarship fame):

We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labour that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories.

Although I like the quote and am edified by it -- and it fits the theme like a glove -- I caution once again against focusing on "individuals" in laying the blame.  Here, it is clearly the WRAITHS known as Nation States, at first presumably at the behest of the sovereigns who happened to be born to control the state machinery, but later, it became clearly the merchant class, the industrialists -- the corporations. 

Lent sums up:

In more recent times, the plot continues in different guises. During the decades after the Second World War, Global South leaders who demanded a fair role in the economic system were systematically deposed in coups arranged by U.S., British, and French militaries. In a vast loan sharking scheme, countries impoverished by colonialism then racked up unsustainable debts forced on them by Global North banks. When they couldn’t pay them back without bankrupting their nations, they were coerced into so-called “structural adjustment programs” which opened their labor markets and natural resources to further plunder by the North’s transnational corporations. The World Bank, IMF, and World Trade Organization are all controlled by a few wealthy nations that set the terms for international trade, with the result that through a combination of illicit financial flows, debt interest payments, and profit repatriation, wealth continues to flow from the South to the North at the rate of about $3 trillion per year.

4. Conspiracy to hide the effects of climate breakdown for corporate profit

For over fifty years, fossil fuel executives have known about the reality of human-induced climate change, yet they spent most of that time deliberately concealing their knowledge and obfuscating public discussion on the topic so they could rake in trillions of dollars in profit. In 1968, the Stanford Research Institute alerted the American Petroleum Institute—the national trade association that represents America’s oil and natural gas industry—to the fact that CO2 emissions were accumulating in the atmosphere, and could reach 400 parts per million by 2000. Their report warned that rising CO2 levels would result in melting ice caps, rising seas, and serious environmental damage worldwide. Exxon scientists studied the issue further, reporting to management in 1977 that there was “overwhelming” consensus that fossil fuels were responsible for CO2 increases. In an internal Exxon memo in 1981, scientists raised the alarm that the company’s 50-year plan “will later produce effects which will indeed be catastrophic (at least for a substantial fraction of the Earth’s population).”

Exxon—and the other fossil fuel companies—knew their actions would lead to climate breakdown, and instead of trying to solve the problem, they lied to the public to hide their misdeeds. Following the example of the tobacco industry, which had already condemned millions to early deaths through cynical deception, they embarked on a concerted strategy to dupe the public by paying fake experts to publish papers; cherry picking selective data to support false conclusions; and sow their own wild conspiracy theories to deflect attention from their crimes.

As a result of their immoral plot, the world is now facing a dire climate emergency. If the fossil fuel companies had confronted the issue honestly from the outset, there could have been a managed transition to renewable energy over decades, causing little disruption and saving millions of lives through reduced pollution. Instead, it will now take an immediate global mobilization to avoid a 2° C rise in temperature over preindustrial levels. The world is currently on track for more than a 3° C rise this century, with the high likelihood of stumbling into a tipping point cascade that quickly leads to a three- and four-degree world—one that becomes rapidly unrecognizable, with the Amazon rainforest turning into searing desert; coastal cities inundated by flooding; super-hurricanes tearing the windows out of skyscrapers; persistent massive droughts and famine across the world; and hundreds of millions of desperate climate refugees.

Meanwhile, by putting billions of human lives in jeopardy, the four biggest fossil fuel companies—ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, and BP—have made $2 trillion in profits since they began their campaign of lies in 1990.

5. Conspiracy to grow the global economy indefinitely, while killing most of life on Earth and risking the collapse of civilization.

In a barely noticed footnote to the daily news, the World Wildlife Fund recently released a shocking report revealing a devastating 68% worldwide decline in animal populations in the past fifty years. Even this dismal news hides more gut-wrenching statistics, such as the 84% decline in amphibians, reptiles, and fishes, or the 94% decline in animal populations in South America.

This is just the latest bulletin marking the demise of nature as it succumbs to the relentless growth of human economic activity across the world. Three-quarters of all land has been appropriated for human purposes, either turned into farmland, covered by concrete, or flooded by reservoirs. Three-quarters of rivers and lakes are used for crop or livestock cultivation, with many of the world’s greatest rivers, such as the Ganges, Yangtze, or Nile, no longer reaching the sea. Half of the world’s forests and wetlands have disappeared—the Amazon rainforest alone is vanishing at the rate of an acre every second.

Meanwhile, the world’s Gross Domestic Product is forecast to nearly triple by the middle of this century, by which time it’s estimated that 5 billion people will be facing water shortages, 95% of the Earth’s arable land will be degraded—and there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean. It’s been estimated by leading experts that, by the end of this century, half of the world’s estimated 8 million species will be extinct or at the brink of extinction unless humanity changes its ways. These depredations, combined with climate breakdown, are believed by an increasing number of analysts to spell the likely collapse of modern civilization.

The underlying cause of this headlong rush to catastrophe is our society’s obsession with economic growth as the sole criterion for measuring success. A dangerous myth of “green growth” propagated by techno-optimists argues that through technological innovation, GDP can become “decoupled” from resource use and carbon emissions, permitting limitless growth on a finite planet. This has been shown to be nothing but a fantasy: it hasn’t happened so far, and even the most wildly aggressive assumptions for greater efficiency lead to unsustainable consumption of global resources.

So who, in this case, are the conspirators? If you’re living a normal life in an affluent country, you don’t need to look further than the mirror. The wealthy OECD nations, with only 18% of the global population, account for 74% of global GDP, and the richest 10% of people are responsible for more than half the world’s carbon emissions.

Those of us who continue to benefit from the inequities dealt us by the global system, and aren’t actively engaged in curbing it, are like a few shipwrecked survivors on a gilded lifeboat kicking others desperately scrambling for life into the ocean to protect their own safety and comfort. We may not be actively kicking their knuckles, but by allowing this reckless system of unsustainable growth to continue, we’re implicitly making the same choice.

The High Priests of Alt Q-Anon, Jeremy Lent and Steve Coulter, continued

 As already mentioned, Jeremy Lent published AI Has Already Taken Over. It’s Called the Corporation around the same time that I published the same idea.  

He starts, like I did, by citing those who are (rightly) worried that advances in AI could result in the subjugation and extermination of humankind, and points out, like I did, that we are already there with the corporations.  He gives some history -- they were first formed for benign purposes, but got so out of control in England that they were temporarily banned in 1720, and goes on to trace their rapid success in this country:

Thomas Jefferson and other leaders of the United States, aware of the English experience, were deeply suspicious of corporations, giving them limited charters with tightly constrained powers. However, during the turmoil of the Civil War, industrialists took advantage of the disarray, leveraging widespread political corruption to expand their influence. “This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations,” lamented Rutherford Hayes who became President in 1877.

Corporations took full advantage of their new-found dominance, influencing state legislatures to issue charters in perpetuity giving them the right to do anything not explicitly prohibited by law. The tipping point in their path to domination came in 1886 when the Supreme Court designated corporations as “persons” entitled to the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment, which had been passed to give equal rights to former slaves enfranchised after the Civil War. Since then, corporate dominance has only been further enhanced by law, culminating in the notorious Citizen United case of 2010, which lifted restrictions on political spending by corporations in elections.

In a section called "Sociopaths with global reach" he explains that we need to understand corporations as sociopaths:

Corporations, just like a potential runaway AI, have no intrinsic interest in human welfare. They are legal constructions: abstract entities designed with the ultimate goal of maximizing financial returns for their investors above all else. If corporations were in fact real persons, they would be sociopaths, completely lacking the ability for empathy that is a crucial element of normal human behavior. Unlike humans, however, corporations are theoretically immortal, cannot be put in prison, and the larger multinationals are not constrained by the laws of any individual country.

With the incalculable advantage of their superhuman powers, corporations have literally taken over the world. They have grown so massive that an astonishing sixty-nine of the largest hundred economies in the world are not nation states but corporate entities.

That section concludes:

The result of this corporate takeover of humanity is a world careening out of control, where nature is mercilessly ransacked to extract the raw materials required to increase shareholder value in a vortex of perpetual economic growth, without regard to the quality of human life and with no concern for the welfare of future generations.

In a section about how transnational corporations have taken over global governance to the detriment of the world's human population, he provides the following tidbit:  

In fact, the current U.S. cabinet represents the most complete takeover yet of the U.S. government by corporations, with nearly 70% of top administration jobs filled by corporate executives. In the words of Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, “In the Trump administration, auto industry lobbyists are setting transportation policy, Boeing has a top perch at the Department of Defense, Wall Street is in control of financial policy and regulatory agencies, and corporate defense lawyers staff the key positions in the Justice Department.”

 Lent proposes solutions as follows:

The corporate takeover of humanity is so all-encompassing that it’s difficult to visualize any other possible global system. Alternatives do, however, exist. Around the world, worker-owned cooperatives have demonstrated that they can be as effective as corporations—or more so—without pursuing shareholder wealth as their primary consideration. The Mondragon cooperative in Spain, with revenues exceeding €12 billion, shows how this form of organization can efficiently scale.

The success of Mondragon, among others, proves there are scalable alternatives to the corporate domination of humanity

There are also structural changes that can be made to corporations to realign their values system with human welfare. Corporate charters can be amended to optimize for a triple bottom line of social, environmental, and financial outcomes (the so-called “triple Ps” of people, planet, and profit.) A “beneficial” or B-Corp certification, which holds companies to social and environmental performance standards, is becoming more widely adopted and is now held by over 2,000 corporations in over fifty countries around the world.

These are great solutions, but they almost certainly depend on the good will and good work of lawmakers, who need to place the appropriate limits on corporations that will in turn encourage businesses to follow the Mondragon model.  And as long as the lawmakers are being paid by the corporations, that's not going to happen.

As I've explained elsewhere, in the U.S. it's not just that the lawmakers are directly beholden to their corporate donors.  As the two Trump impeachments demonstrate, they are also beholden to their political parties, which are also a form of AISO.  So really, the only way to get anywhere is to elect candidates who are not beholden to any particular party or any set of corporate values, but truly want to do what is best for their constituencies, not to mention the U.S. public.

 

The High Priests of Alt-QAnon: Jeremy Lent and Steve Coulter

Sequel to Alt-QAnon:  A conspiracy theory for the rest of us.  There, I suggested that we create a movement that reframes the news in terms of what is really going on -- how it's not the Clintons, George Soros, or another cabal of depraved humans, it's the WRAITHs ("wraith-like artificially intelligent transhuman hives") that are sending the world down a path toward ruination.  Rather than search the web for confirmation that the problems of the world are caused by a few powerful and evil people, let's place the blame where it really lies -- on WRAITHS and our failure to control them.  And let's work together to reframe our understanding of world events in these terms.

Although I independently had the idea that corporations are artificially intelligent super-organisms, Steve Coulter had the idea of corporations being superorganisms well before I did, and Jeremy Lent published the idea of them being "artificial intelligence" around the same time I did. 

Here's Steve Coulter's take, in a nutshell:

[T]he corporation is a new form of superorganism that has become the dominant species on the planet and . . . the immense, intractable power of a globalized, corporate hive-mind has become the principal obstacle to addressing the planetary emergency of climate change. Reframing our metaphoric understanding of corporations as biological entities in the planetary biosphere may enable us to imagine ways to resist their increasing dominance and create a sustainable future.

Coulter, Steven, Resistance is Futile: The Borg, the Hive, and Corporate Hegemony, Revista Teknokultura Vol. 13(1), 217-244 (2016).

Coulter points out that the prevailing metaphor is that of a corporation as an individual, and that this metaphor gained steam with the Supreme Court's decision Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1876) (holding that that a private corporation is a natural person under the U.S. Constitution) and was cemented in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (holding that corporations are fully protected by the First Amendment, and thus can make unlimited campaign donations via super PACs).  The corporation-as-person metaphor is obviously both dangerous and wrong, since corporations have no morals, no fear of punishment (except as part of a calculation), feel no pain, and are immortal.

Coulter goes on to point out how the metaphor of corporations as machines is inadequate, and brushes against the theory of corporations as Artificial Intelligence in the process:

Machines are distinguished from humans and human organizations by their inability to program themselves for the purpose of maintaining their own survival. There have been many examples in science fiction of machines gaining self-consciousness and the will to survive. But this possibility has yet to come to pass, and machines left to their own devices will do nothing unless we tell them to do something. In contrast, corporations, like individual humans, possess the ability to change their behavior to maintain their survival. They are clearly more than mere machines.

He then notes that human civilizations have been likened to superorganisms:

This is a fascinating way to view civilizations, but it does not fit several of the key characteristics of a superorganism as defined by sociobiology. Members of a civilization can survive and even flourish far from their home, while members of insect superorganisms are tied to their hive or nest. The system of communication within a civilization is not closed as civilizations communicate with each other through translation and learning different languages, while insect superorganisms only communicate within themselves. The division of labor in a civilization is not fixed and reproduction occurs within all castes, while insect superorganisms have fixed division of labor and reproduction. However, the metaphor of civilization as superorganism is fascinating and adds to our understanding of the history and future of human civilization from a sociobiological perspective.

Here, he appears to be suggesting that superorganism is at best a loose analogy for civilizations, paving the way for his argument that it's a super-apt analogy for corporations.  As I will doubtless discuss in subsequent posts, I still believe that the analogy of nation states to superorganisms is a good one, but he's got a point when he explain how apt the analogy is as to corporations:

• An organism is made of cells that contain DNA. A corporation can be interpreted to be similar in several ways. A corporation does not exist without humans to staff it. Those humans are made up of cells that contain DNA. In an organism, DNA is the plan for the structure of the organism. In corporations, the plan for the corporation is contained in two forms: the legal documents that structure the organization, and the understanding of those documents contained in the minds of the people in the corporation. The important point is this: the composition and plan for the composition of the corporation has a biological basis. It would not exist without DNA and human biology to ensure its continuation.

• Living things maintain order inside their cells and bodies. Corporations are constantly engaged in the task of maintaining order inside of themselves. A corporation that allowed any significant disorganization would cease to exist. Its very existence is defined by its organization. 

• Living things regulate their systems. Corporations regulate their systems to maintain profitability. They raise and lower prices, stock up on supplies, hire productive employees, maintain their physical plants, relocate if it is advantageous, etc.

• Living things respond to signals in the environment. Corporations are continually engaged in market research, public relations, and advertising. They continually recreate their images and behavior in response to the marketplace.

• Living things transfer energy among themselves and between themselves and their environment. Corporations transfer energy to and from each other and the environment in the form of products and currency. The currency is symbolic of and redeemable for various forms of energy and raw materials.

• Living things grow and develop. Corporations are constantly growing by expanding their operations and by merging with or acquiring other corporations. Growth is symbolically represented by the accumulation of currency adding to the net value and power.

• Living things reproduce. Through reproduction, organisms enable the continued existence of their genome. Corporations do not have to reproduce because they are potentially immortal. Individual employees die, but the corporation lives on. Corporate reproduction is essentially continuous, and in a capitalist system, is dependent on continuous growth.

• Living things have traits that evolved over time. Corporations evolve over time. Because of competition, the most efficient and profitable corporations survive, and their competitors die. The most efficient corporate traits are copied by new corporations improving quality and creating continuous competition. 

I'll let you read the rest of the article - there are several interesting and informative digressions.  But the main takeaway for me remains the conclusion, since it's exactly what I've been thinking:

We like to believe that humans are the most powerful species on the planet, but this is an illusion, for the corporate superorganism is now the most powerful species on the planet. Perhaps by more fully understanding its rampant success through the lens of sociobiology, we will be able to imagine ways to undermine its dominance and apparent invincibility.

Alt-QAnon: A Conspiracy Theory For the Rest of Us

QAnon's basic problem is that many of its premises are untrue and much of its evidence is fabricated.  But it has tapped into something that is fundamentally true -- the US government, and many others, are subservient to interests that do not have "the people's" interests at heart.  Intelligent people on both sides of the aisle realize this -- a common initial reaction to what I am about the explain is "we know that; so what?"  If you'll bear with me, I will explain both the "what," and the "so what."

The "what" is that we are "governed" by corporations, trade associations, political parties, religions, and other groups that undeniably have a form of intelligence independent of those of their leaders and membership, and have goals which, while they sometimes coincide with those of living and breathing humans, often do not.  They do not care if people are happy or miserable, or live or die, except to the extent those results affect their bottom line -- for corporations and trade associations, it's all about profits, for political parties, it is all about power, and for religions, it is about their own survival.  

The "so what" reaction points out that all of these things have been very good to us.  Corporations provide us with products that increase our comfort, and often save our lives.  Political parties enable people to unite behind certain general viewpoints in order to either effect or resist social or other change.  And religions provide a sense of community and teach morality to us and our children.  And everyone knows that corporations are "soul-less", that politicians political parties are in the pockets of the corporations, and all except at most one religions are wrong.  So what's the big deal? 

The big deal is that institutions truly do not care if the entire planet dies.  They have no sense of their own identity; they are simply programs that are are designed to achieve certain ends -- profits, power, or survival.  The same entities that brought us the war in Iraq, that caused the opioid crisis, and that teach that what you believe determines whether you will get into heaven, will not solve global warming for us, will not adequately control artificial intelligence, and will not appropriately deal with ethical issues surrounding the advances in biotechnology -- unless we first get control of them.  And given how rapidly things are changing nowadays, there is not much time.

If you ask an adherent of QAnon why they believe what they do, they will tell you "I've done the research."  That's code for:

"I've done a lot of googling and visited a lot of chatrooms and a lot of people are saying this."  

Pause for a moment here -- why is it that they all gravitate to the same crazy theories?  Why does their "research" lead them to these false "truths"?

I'll propose an answer:  there is no obvious, easily digestible alternative.  There's a lot that's wrong with the world, and QAnon explains it, while the fat cats are denying that anything is wrong and are just getting fatter.

So let's start an Alt-QAnon, starting right here and right now.  It can start with this blog post, and I'll promise to develop the theory in a few more blog posts.  

The basic point is this:  

Corporations, religions, political parties, and other groups have must be thought of as individuals -- as entities that have achieved a form of artificially intelligent consciousness that is programmed only for survival and/or growth.  Because of clear analogies to artificial intelligence and naturally occurring superorganisms, we could call them AISOs (for "artificially intelligent superorganisms"). 

If "AISO" is not catchy enough, we can call them SUCKERS -- for sociopathic, undead, corporate, kleptocratic, engines of rapacity. 

In the meantime though, I've settled on WRAITH -- wraithlike artificially intelligent transhuman hives.  I like WRAITH because the dictionary definition suggests that wraiths are only wisps of reality, which reminds me of Yuval Noah Harari's contention that corporations exist only in the imagination.  I'm going to go ahead and change the reference to AISOs in this and other posts to WRAITHs, with the hope that "hive" will convey what superorganism conveyed before.

Too often, media and society tends to try to identify the individual humans involved in WRAITH decisionmaking, to try to put a human face on whatever the wraiths are doing.  That is a grievous mistake and grievously do we pay for it.  The goal should be to keep the focus on the wraiths -- on the undead, sociopathic "individual" that is actually making the decisions and calling the shots.   

When you view the news and politics through this lens, it's much easier to see what's really going on, and what's right and what's wrong.  The point of Alt-QAnon is to call out instances where national or global decisionmaking has been turned over to the WRAITHS, and where the blame for bad news can usually be better placed on a wraith than on the individuals who make up the wraith.