(First published on Kiltr Feb 2017)
Back in July 2015, a study was published by Miguel Nicolelis and his team at Duke University Medical Centre in Durham, North Carolina, which, without saying so, may just hold the key to future human societal organisation. For the first time, the brains of multiple animals were networked to form a ‘living computer’ which could perform tasks and solve problems.
The work is an advance on what have become almost standard developments in brain-machine interfaces, enabling both animals and humans to control machines and things like prosthetic limbs by thought alone. The general principle of a brain-machine interface works by converting the brain’s electrical impulses into signals which can be interpreted by a computing system.
Nicolelis et al wanted to extend the idea by incorporating multiple brains at once, in the same way a network might function. They connected the brains of three monkeys to an interface which controlled an animated screen image representing a robotic arm, placing electrodes onto the brain areas involved with movement. Only by synchronising their thought, and therefore the brain network’s electrical impulses, were they able to move the arm to reach the target, at which point the researchers would reward the subjects.
As the networked monkeys got the hang of simpler, synchronising problems, the research team added more complex ideas to the scenarios, for instance allowing each subject to control the arm in only one dimension. The monkeys learned to cooperate across the network and still completed more complicated tasks. Nicolelis explains: ‘They synchronise their brains and they achieve the task by creating a superbrain – a structure that is the combination of three brains.’ He calls this structure the ‘brainet’.
As the experiments in the study developed, they worked with information storage and retrieval, pattern recognition and parallel processing. Responding to publication of the evidence, Iyad Rahwan of the Masdar Institute in Abu Dhabi pointed out some of the obvious implications in layman’s terms: ‘It will change the way humans cooperate.In order to synchronise, the brains are responding directly to each other... you end up with an input, some kind of computation, and an output, what a computer does’, going on to note that the processing of a task between multiple brains is similar to sharing computations between multiple processors across networks.
Perhaps your failing to see how, interesting though it may be, the work of Nicolelis and his team relates to a post about the President’s brain being missing, or not as the case may be. Well, really, the post was/is about the construction of ‘reality’, our perception of it and how maybe, just maybe, what we need right now are more philosophers (go on, you know you remember them from the start of Pt 1, right?); introducing some of the shadows behind the shadows, flickering across our cave walls, might give you some insight as to how our reality has been constructed for us before going on to show how we might be able to offer alternatives to it. For now I’m just going to come out and say it, humanity’s brainet has been hacked.
Understanding how and by who might offer routes to building genuine resistance. It may seem confusing at times but tranches of corporatist power and dark money are now pulling in the same direction and confusion is part of their battle plan.
Whilst that research was going on in Carolina in 2015, the work of another group of academics, this time hired from Cambridge University, began to step up their influence on US politics. Their work was based on research developed by Michael Kosinski, who joined the psychometrics Centre at Cambridge in 2008, where he then, with his team, developed a profiling system utilising generally available online data, Facebook and social media ‘likes’ and smartphone data. The research seemed to show, even with a limited number of ‘likes’ or relatively basic mining, people can be ‘analysed’ better than they can by friends or relatives.At least in terms of what choices they might make and how they can be influenced to make them.
The researchers went on to prove, at least as far as evidenced through results gained by manipulation of their data, individual and group psychological targeting could be a powerful influencing tool. They had been hired by a subsidiary of a London based parent company, SCL Group, which came to be called Cambridge Analytica in the US, and was formed with the specific intent of influencing American politics.
SCL Group self-identifies as a ‘global election management agency’, associating itself with ‘data mining, data analysis, strategic communication, social media branding and voter targeting’. Their involvement in geopolitics has actualised, in the developing world, where they had been most active before the formation of Cambridge Analytica, as military disinformation, political disruption, manipulation of public opinion and political will and the fomenting of political and military coups.
SCL laid the groundwork for Cambridge in 2013.It was heavily funded by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his family.By 2014 it was involved in 44 US political races.In 2015 it became known as the data analysis company working for Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign, being hired by the Trump campaign when Cruz dropped out. The Trump campaign is estimated to have spent around $15 million in total on Cambridge services during the presidential race.
Whilst some of Cambridge’s data mining techniques are at best questionable, with much of their psychological data derived from Facebook accounts done so without the express permission of users, the mobile ‘app’ used in the initial Ted Cruz campaign, the ‘Cruz Crew’ app, tracked physical movements, invaded contact lists and personal data more than any other similar app, contributing significantly to the situation which led to a bold statement of strength from Cambridge CEO, Alexander Nix in October 2016, stating:
‘Today in the United States we have somewhere close to four or five hundred data points on every individual...So we model the personality of every adult across the United States, some 230 million people.’
Since Cambridge model for psychographic behavioural micro-targeting based on audience segmentation, its management claims to have influenced both the US Presidential race and the Brexit vote in Britain, with a subsidiary also hired by the Leave team, do not have to be based on influencing all or even majority populations.Each campaign has built from a very specific core targeted group with elements of influence spread to others.
Some targeting had to have been for some voters not to vote whilst keeping others motivated to vote in the client’s desired fashion.Despite how massive an influence the new (it’s so difficult to remember sometimes how little time has passed since President Trump was inaugurated, so much happens on a daily basis, and have no doubt that too is intentional!) ‘leader of the free world’ has not only on domestic US politics but world politics too, it is worth remembering he manipulated his way into that position on a twenty year low turnout.
Whatever claims there may be around voter fraud etc, 42% of eligible US citizens did not vote and more than half of those who did, did not vote for the President they got.Cambridge Analytica, just like their parent group SCL, appear fully aware of the faltering nature of ‘liberal democracy’, and are more than happy to exploit it for the benefit of right wing populist employers, in the developed world as much as they are aware of idiosyncracies in voters and coups, when they occur in the developing world.
It probably didn’t hurt too much in the presidential campaign that Steve Bannon, chief strategist in the Trump camp then and more besides now, is on the board of Cambridge Analytica.Likewise it would have been a welcome boon for them to be able to apply and be assured of gaining the Whitehouse data contract back in November based on that dual influence, regardless of questions hanging over privacy and ethics in their methodology.
Privacy concerns over Cambridge’s work in the US are thought to be more likely to raise ethical concerns in Europe, if they were thought employable in the forthcoming electoral races in France and the Netherlands, where far-right groups are gaining prominence.With the Investigatory Powers Act, or Snooper’s Charter as it has become known, gaining Royal Assent at the same time as that data management contract was applied for seeming a little more than coincidence, and with the data accord between the UK and US government firmly cemented, there are likely to be no such reservations for how they continue to act on either side of the ‘special relationship’.
I’ll give you a moment’s pause there, just think, all that ‘unnecessary’ stored data for Bannon and his Cambridge cohorts to get their grubby mitts on.If you were surprised at the rise of the right across the globe, brace yourself for whatever nasty sauce they can cook up from the base they’ve got to start with now...
...Cambridge CEO, Nix, dismisses privacy concerns in general, claiming Cambridge’s methods of data collection and micro-targeting benefits voters and consumers, since they will receive information on issues they are concerned about.It helps Cambridge, SCL and the new arch manipulator Bannon achieve their ends, if everyone stays inside their echo chambers.It is almost as much an admission of defeat to stay entrenched as it is to do nothing.
What is crucial in all of this is understanding how both entrenched and defeatist responses have become central to new and evolving systems of political control.It should not be forgotten at least, and bears repeating here again, should be repeated endlessly, for all the claims of Cambridge Analytica and the willingness of Steve Bannon to assume the role of dark vizier for dark times, it was voter suppression and playing to an outdated electoral system which ultimately allowed the coup in America to take place.
Now political power has been seized the manner of its retention will be where old and emergent shadow networks of corporatist power, barely a step removed, concealed from their Duginist philosophical base, seek to entrench power in non-linear ways.Often resistance will not only seem futile, but confusing and doubly fatiguing for it.To understand how this is happening, how non-linear power works, it is difficult not to look again at Russia, more specifically at a man called Vladislav Surkov
If you aren’t aware, Surkov is one of President Putin's advisers, and has helped him maintain his power for 18 years, and he has done it in a new way. He came originally from the avant-garde art world, and has imported ideas from conceptual art into the heart of politics. His aim has been to undermine perceptions of the world, turning politics into a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theatre.Cambridge and SCL may have used their nefarious methods to manipulate and micro-target opinion towards gaining and retaining power in developing countries, but in the developed world, apparently a more sophisticated playbook was required.Thankfully for them, for Steve Bannon, for Donald Trump, for the new American regime after the coup, a playbook had already been written in many forms by Surkov.
In May 2016, just as Cambridge Analytica shifted allegiance from Ted Cruz to Donald J.Trump and Steve Bannon was appointed the campaign’s chief strategist, a telling statement was released concerning the seminal tactician of non-linear power broking and warfare.The statement, given after some seventeen years consolidating Putin’s power, playing this very old, archetypal role in new and innovative ways, was apt and telling.In defiance of sanctions after the annexation of Crimea, Surkov was found to have travelled with a group of Russian dignitaries, including Putin, to visit the Holy Mountain of Athos in Greece.When asked and presented with clear evidence of his presence, the Kremlin simply stated, ‘That does not correspond to reality.’.What they meant was, it did not correspond to their reality, to the reality they wished to portray.To Surkov’s reality.
If Dugin provides the philosophical base for a cohesive, global rightward drive, Surkov, with apparent relish, delivers the means of its enactment, a blueprint for confusion and reconstruction of reality.He certainly gives Russia a confident edge in the non linear game; Bannon may prove a quick study and, if the first twenty odd days of the new regime are anything to go by, has been consulting the playbook assiduously .Certainly events so far in Trump’s America seem scripted as a Bannon production and he hasn’t been shy in admitting it either.
In many ways, Surkov, one of whose many nicknames among the Russian people is the ‘political technologist of all Rus’ (I know right, they have snappy nicknames in Russia, maybe something gets lost in translation!), as he emerged through the badlands of the disintegrating former Soviet republic to knock at the doors of power, promising to explain the world and whispering of how he could reinvent it, was continuing a long tradition of dark viziers.Always they come from the shadows, advising, whispering, with the most genuinely able to wield influence over power shaping reality anew.
‘I am the author, or one of the authors, of the new Russian system,” Surkov told a gathering of PhD students, professors, journalists, and politicians at the London School of Economics, three years before the trip beyond reality to Athos. ‘My portfolio at the Kremlin and in government has included ideology, media, political parties, religion, modernization, innovation, foreign relations, and ...’, here he pauses and smiles, ‘modern art.’.He offered not to make a speech, to allow questions, open discussion. After the first question, he talked for almost 45 minutes, leaving no time for further questions.It left one journalist from The Atlantic reflecting, ‘It’s his political system in miniature: democratic rhetoric and undemocratic intent.’.
But it was always more than that too. If Surkov was the author of the new Russia, he had a fondness for unreliable narrators and confusing postmodern plotlines. He sponsored all kinds of disparate groups, from neo-Nazi skinheads to liberal human rights activists. He even backed parties opposed to Putin. Crucially though, Surkov let it be known this was what he was doing, until no one was sure what was real and what was fake. One Russian journalist called it a 'strategy of power that keeps any opposition constantly confused.'.
This is exactly what Surkov is alleged to have done in Ukraine. In typical fashion, as the war began, Surkov published a short story, under his assumed pseudonym, called 'Without Sky', about something he called a non linear war. A war where you never know what the ‘enemy’ are really up to, or even who they are. The underlying aim, according to Surkov, is not to win the war, but to use the conflict to create a constant state of destabilised perception, in order to manage and control.
It is as much a disorienting, visceral tactic as it is a metaphor for the increasingly strange mood of our times, where nothing appears to make any apparent sense. A constant contradictory vaudeville of competing narratives, making it almost impossible for any real opposition, any substantive challenge to the new normal to emerge, because the would be antagonists cant seem to counter it with any coherent narrative of their own.
And it means individuals become ever more powerless, apparently unable to change anything, living in a state of confusion, uncertainty, precarity. Unless of course we learn to tell better, more coherent stories, using the same tools, which can’t be absorbed by the weaponization of absurdity. Surkov uses them with all the panache of an accomplished artist and the confidence of the PR man he essentially is. A PR man for a post-everything non-linear world as a veneer for the same old tyrannies.
As the former head of the presidential administration, later deputy prime minister and then assistant to the president on foreign affairs, Surkov has directed Russian society like a grand scale reality TV show (starting to ring any bells?). For street theatre he has created opposing political parties. Oh, and Nashi, Russia’s equivalent to the Hitler Youth, who are trained for street battles with potential pro-democracy supporters and burn books by unpatriotic writers on Red Square. As deputy head of the administration he would meet once a week with the heads of television networks in his Kremlin office and tell them who to attack, who to defend, how to present the president, what language the country should think and feel in. Nothing as direct as the old Soviet propaganda, no claims to truth, only the constant nudge of insinuation and deference only to Russia’s re-alignment of realities.
In the 21st Century, the techniques of the political technologists are both diffuse and centralised, systematised and coordinated from the office of the presidential administration, for Bannon as it has been for Surkov. The ‘brilliance’ of this new authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition, as was the case with the 20th century strains, it climbs inside any and all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd. With one conjur of reality, Surkov would fund civic forums and human rights NGOs, with another he would lend support to nationalist movements accusing the NGOs of being tools of the West. He sponsored lavish arts festivals for the most provocative artists in Moscow, then supported Orthodox fundamentalists who attacked the festivals. The Kremlin’s idea is to own all forms of political discourse, not just set the terms of debate.
In today’s Russia, the idea of truth is irrelevant. On Russian ‘news’ broadcasts, the borders between fact and fiction have become utterly blurred. Russian current-affairs programs regularly feature actors posing as the latest bête noire, like refugees from eastern Ukraine, crying for the cameras about invented threats from imagined fascist gangs. When Alexei Volin, Russia’s deputy minister of communications, was accused of fabrication, he showed no embarrassment, instead suggesting all that mattered were ratings.
“The public likes how our main TV channels present material, the tone of our programs,” he said. “The share of viewers for news programs on Russian TV has doubled over the last two months.”
The Kremlin tells its stories well, having mastered the mixture of authoritarianism and entertainment culture. The notion of ‘journalism,’ in the sense of reporting ‘facts’ or ‘truth,’ no longer exists. In a lecture in 2014 to journalism students at Moscow State University, Volin suggested that students forget about making the world a better place. ‘We should give students a clear understanding: They are going to work for The Man, and The Man will tell them what to write, what not to write, and how this or that thing should be written,” he said. “And The Man has the right to do it, because he pays them.’
The point of this new propaganda is not to persuade anyone, but to keep the viewer hooked and distracted, to disrupt Western narratives rather than provide a counternarrative. Russia has been exporting its reality-reinventing model through the hundreds of millions of dollars it spends on international broadcasters like the rolling, multilingual news channel RT (Russia Today). Domestically, RT helps convince Russians their government is strong enough to compete with the CNNs of the world. And has long also convinced them of the fabricated nature of the reality they too portray. Accusations of ‘fake news’ are nothing new in this arena, they are expected and carry no moral weight, becoming only added perceptual ephemera and confusion.
The United States, meanwhile, has been struggling for some time with its messaging to the outside world. America is in an “information war and we are losing that war,” Hillary Clinton told Congress in 2011, citing the success of Russian and Chinese media. The response was tepid and actions questionable from government. It led to the accord between US and UK administrations on data sharing. It led to Cambridge Analytica becoming heavily involved in US politics. It led to Trump. It led to America’s Surkov, equally informed by the philosophical base of Dugin, Steve Bannon.
As the Kremlin’s international propaganda campaign intensifies, the West is having its own crisis of faith in the idea of ‘truth.’ It’s been a long time coming. Back in 1962, Daniel Boorstin, who would later serve as librarian of the U.S. Congress, wrote in ‘The Image’ about how advances in advertising and television meant, “The question, ‘Is it real?’ is less important than, ‘Is it newsworthy?'". By the 2000s, this idea had moved from the realm of commerce to that of high politics, captured in the now-legendary quote from an unnamed George W. Bush aide in ‘The New York Times’:
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality, judiciously, as you will, we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
The pressure on reality from capitalism and Capitol Hill has coincided with an anti-establishment drive in the U.S. which now, just like in Surkov’s Russia, claims all truth, all fact is relative, a matter of opinion, up for discussion, open to alternatives. And as the consensus for reality-based politics fractures further, that space becomes ever more ripe for exploitation. Now, just twenty four days into a Trump presidency, with Steve Bannon and Cambridge never far away and Putin’s role easily written and rewritten by Surkov, we the world are, with protests playing to the theatre of it all, emphasising the echo chambers, strengthening the base, rendered stunned, flummoxed by the weaponization of absurdity and unreality. It doesn’t have to be this way.
This world of confused perceptions and the techniques of non-linear disruption, constantly pushing at the boundaries of acceptability in service of an obscured agenda, here as much as in the US or Russia, is only made possible by the nature of human perception itself. An invited integrative perspective study, published in January by researchers from Louisiana State University, which set out to understand the nature of perceived reality, reached some interesting conclusions. They pointed out that although often cited, the phrase ‘perception is reality’ is generally not true. They instead concluded, instead, perception must be acknowledged as being only able to cause reality to evolve.
If we perceive our reality as confused and only able to be safely navigated by an authoritarian regime on our behalf, that will become our reality. Despite, rightful and righteous, domestic and worldwide protests against the Trump regime’s ‘Muslim Ban’, a recent poll found some 50% of Americans agreed or strongly agreed with its principles, with more than 30% of those polled saying they felt it made them feel safer; their realities are shifting based on a test run for acceptability of fascism and how their perceptions of that shift have been manipulated.
Whilst the Twitter tantrums of Trump may be proving at times difficult to predict (seriously, just get a cable TV listing and with a little Cambridge like personality data point management, I reckon you could predict what and when ridiculousness will spray forth, like cheap hairspray!) and/or manage for the powers which brought him power, they were always a part of the plan. As a visionary and strategist, Steve Bannon only really has one type of play he can call his own. It was encoded in the DNA of Trump’s Inauguration speech, it was there for all to see in his documentary style film outline written in 2007, during his stint as a Hollywood filmmaker, which charted a US ‘descent’ into the ‘Islamic States of America’: It was there in his remarks regarding vetting refugees on a radio show phone in, when he dismissed calls for a hiatus on refugee intake until stricter betting could be enforced, and interjected, ‘Why even let ‘em in?’.
With Surkov’s playbook in hand though and as much reactionary Donaldism as a system can (van it's?) take, our view of that obvious red flag becomes obscured, all the more so by as much media attention as the great narcissist wants to demand. A new normal of action, reaction, lack of solution while we descend into apoplexy, happens daily.
So what then for emergent small nations amid the hegemony of confusion? Nativism, tradition and ethnicity are managed in for them in the Duginist blueprint and already the eastern fringes of Europe seem to be falling prey to its tactics. In this regard, perhaps Scotland, much like Iceland, has more to teach the world, and ourselves, yet in how to approach the darkening skies gathering at the head of the glen. Let's not go storm chasing yet though.
Contradiction and a surreal absurdity lie at the heart of that almost unique cultural phenomenon known as the Caledonian antisyzygy, the duality of which still informs much of our cultural and political debate. But they are mutually opposing cultural bubbles to be burst; failing to address issues of reinforcing the echo-chambers of the referendum ‘divides’ leaves gaps for exploitation while reactionary , populist forces have their cheerleaders here too.
The spirit of appropriation of stereotypes, as exampled by the wearing with pride of a see-you-Jimmy hat by a tartan army member may be a good wider place to start. So too the inherent defiance of ‘windbaggery’, which led to this section of Samantha Bee’s show, where the world is asked to learn a lesson in how to deal with Trump from Scotland (brace yourselves, there are a few verges on the offensive but it pulls it back in the end, self aware enough to know it):
The bursting of bubbles, the pricking of conscience and a healthy awareness, a sense of the surreal and the absurdity of our place in it, are healthy philosophical outlooks, first principles to start from. And of course, the hearth awaiting after the long journey towards civic nationalism and all it entails, without a bullet fired for the cause, is a lesson in modern democracy. But if its lessons disappear in a world beset by a far more dangerous nationalism and a ‘democracy’ defined by poll driven, data-mined populism, and of course a politically motivated media happy to tarnish the independence movement with any spurious associations it can make, are reduced by it, what will they have been for? As John Maynard Keynes, ironically the early architect of so much rightward drift in economic philosophy to follow after him, wrote:
‘Practical men (sic), who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.’
For now, an emergent political philosophy, drawing on all the lessons of liberal and social democracy as its flame sputters, united against the immediate threat of the Brexit barbarians at the gates and the, at best, wilful sabotage of any social contract those grand plans were thought of as underpinning, may be enough to see us through and beyond a second independence referendum. But, as Loki rightly pointed out recently, we should never presume a monopoly on morality in getting there, whatever our philosophical perspective:
Vigilance is of course required because this is not a world of claymores and plucky underdogs against unjust oppressors, though I may join you in feeling that way sometimes. It is a world of settling sediments amidst new realities.
In a self determining Scotland, where is our new philosophical base to come from, while the world tilts on the axis it is and requires a response? Yes, politically we have been under a right wing British government since 1979 and the heft of the world, particularly in the post 2008 crash period, has intensified a necessary reaction against the increasing democratic deficits it has meant to our lives, our realities. In changing those realities, will we manage to root out all the insidious virus hacked into our collective brainet? For what is to come after, if it is to be truly new and embrace the challenges of the world as is, as it is set to become, is a complete reboot required?
Thinkers, scribblers, philosophers, for the battles to come, the shining prize needs clearer definition, we need to write and we need to write hard. Only by looking to the future, beyond the smoke and mirrors of mired confusion, can we be truly radical. Or what other words will there be.
But then, perhaps, unbeknownst to me, pods of brain-machine interfaced Scots are scattered around an alternate reality, dreaming bigger, sending signals. For fucks sake folks, turn it up, we cannae hear yeez, the noise is deafening out here!
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