I wrote last week about the link between marketing and Fascism, and how these links have been modified to adapt to an age of almost limitless technology. The language of marketing is used to encourage people to give up masses of personal information to their governments, via online companies like "Facebook", who willingly co-operate with the surveillance state.
This is an example of how Fascism operates in the 21st century: where surrendering privacy is transformed by marketing language into an "opportunity" for the individual, rather than a (very real) threat. Mussolini's Fascist state was contemporaneous with the rise of "marketing" as an institution in the West; to an extent, this was then extended after the Second World War in post-war USA, as consumerism was equated with patriotism and helping to preserve the "American way of life"; technological advances in the late '90s and early 21st century have enabled the kind of mass surveillance, with the consent of the individual, that was impossible before.
Politics has always had a difficult relationship with facts, and all politicians are guilty of manipulating the facts for their own purposes, at one time or another. However, the rise of propaganda in politics and the manipulation of language for political purposes occurred in tandem with the rise of marketing as a "science". The manipulation of facts and language for the purpose of propaganda became almost a science, with a philosophy in its own right; although began by Mussolini, Hitler's Nazi regime, under the guidance of Joseph Goebbels, were the real pioneers in manipulating language for political purposes in the modern era.
Using one example, the word "fanatical" became manipulated in meaning in the early days of the Nazi regime; from its previous (widely-understood) negative meaning, "fanatical" was transformed into a positive attribute - Hermann Goering, was described as a "fanatical" animal lover, for example. The Nazi regime talked of "fanatical" beliefs as being a positive asset, rather than a sign of ideological extremism. Al-Qaeda would surely recognise and agree with such a sentiment today, and Political Islam in general shares much of this ideological thinking. In other words, the strength of your beliefs is is manipulated into being more important that the realism of your ideas - this is in the crux of Fascist psychology.
"I believe I am right"
Bringing this up-to-date, the manipulation of language and a disregarding of "facts" is seen in Conservative politicians in the UK Coalition government.
The five most dangerous words that can come out of a politician's mouth are "I believe I am right"; words spoken recently by government minister, Iain Duncan Smith. His portfolio is "Work and Pensions", which includes government policy towards distribution of government benefits for the needy. In spite of him being told by official statistic agency, the ONS, that he is abusing statistics in an dishonest way for political purposes, and that his ideas were essentially lies, his response was "I believe I am right". In other words, faced with the facts, he was able to simply ignore the truth and state that he was no longer bound to reality, and that reality is what he said it was. Such behaviour would easily be found within the Nazi regime.
These five words are so terrifying because it means that a politician can make his own reality, unbound by rules. Hitler also believed what he was doing was "right"; Osama Bin Laden also believed what he was doing was "right". It is the signature of an authoritarian, and a Fascist who uses the language of morality to equate himself with God.
Austerity in the UK and Europe is also explained using the language of marketing and Fascism. Hitler said that if you repeat the lie long enough, people will believe it. Psychologically, the bigger the lie is, the more difficult it is to dispel, because the reality of a "big lie" becomes so horrifying for people that it is much easier not to think about it.
So there is a reason why Cameron says "There is no alternative!". If you repeat this enough times, people will believe it: it is a marketing strategy of carpet-bombing a product's slogan. Also, it gives people an easy answer to having to think of another economic strategy (such as the successful growth-led strategy of the Obama administration, or a long-term production-led strategy of Germany's government).
George Osborne does the same, as combined economic government strategist, and electoral strategist for the Conservative Party. The language he uses is even more nakedly divisive and compelling: that of "strivers versus skivers", implying (without any facts to support it, of course), that the economy's ails are a result of the government giving too much money to the "undeserving" poor. The massive bank bail-out (that effectively created the new concept of "Corporate Socialism") is not mentioned. Neither is it mentioned that by far the largest amount of public spending goes on pensions, rather than benefits on the "undeserving" poor; but the government doesn't want to declare war on the elderly - the defenceless poor are a much easier scapegoat. But scapegoating is a very well-worn Fascist strategy as well.
Confidence is the key to holding power. If a politician appears confident in his beliefs, then regardless of the facts, he has the ability to hoodwink the electorate very convincingly. George Osborne's confidence in the growth of the British economy goes against all the facts, when you compare it to other countries' experiences. But the government has been able to ignore sensible comparison.
David Cameron may be the most incompetent premier that Britain was seen for years, but the fact that he exudes self-confidence, makes people have confidence that he knows what he is doing.
This is why the opposition seem to have an incoherent strategy compared to the Conservatives; it's difficult to be coherent when you're fighting against a self-confident opponent that doesn't follow any rules.
Showing posts with label Facebook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Facebook. Show all posts
Saturday, July 27, 2013
Monday, July 22, 2013
Cameron's war on pornography, and the strange destruction of privacy in the 21st century
I wrote a few months ago about the misconception of humanity living in an unprecedented age of freedom. Censorship and the restriction of freedom of speech is alive and well, and is used extensively by the state, the private sector, and the religious fanatics when they can get away with it (which is often).
That misconstrued sense of freedom is further destroyed when you think about the erosion of individual privacy that has taken place over the last twenty years. You need look no further than David Cameron's recent declaration of war on pornography. Here the British Prime Minister wants to introduce control over what British individuals watch on the internet; effectively have people "tagged" as porn users, and ban all forms of child pornography and "violent" pornography.
I'm not here to make a blanket defence of all forms of pornography; instead I'll simply state there being no proven causal link between porn and sex crimes (violent crime has gone down in recent years, and there has never been a coinciding rise in sexual violence with the massive surge in available online porn; besides, if you are going to ban porn, then why not violent movies, and so on). This is just another example of intrusion into individual privacy for the sake of it.
More cynically, it is a blatant piece of opportunist populism for the purposes of diversion. More seriously, it is another weapon of control against the individual. As a classic tactic of Fascist propaganda, it fits the bill, as Cameron's "war on porn" is a) superficially-popular b) gives greater powers to the government, and c) has only a negligible effect to the actual target of the policy.
Propaganda as a political tool was mastered by the Fascists in the 1920s (which coincided, not coincidentally, with the rise of marketing and advertising as a social tool - more on that later). Fascist tactics are to concentrate power to the central government, while at the same time appearing popular, and having a useful scapegoat. Using "moral panics" about phantom social threats is recurring theme in authoritarianism.
Ever since the widespread use of CCTV across the world began twenty years ago (The UK being the worst offender), privacy has become so eroded in so many ways it's difficult to remember.
CCTV is trumpeted as a great weapon against crime: well, it is true that it theoretically should make it easier for the police to catch criminals after the event, it does little to actually prevent crimes from happening. Even so, most of the cameras installed around the world are not even really used for crime prevention purposes, let alone used by the police. The vast majority of cameras are not owned by the state, but by private companies, who are therefore much less accountable to the public, and the technology much more open for abuse. The fact that we take all this for granted is simply a sign that people have learned to mentally block out the fact that their every move is recorded on cameras mostly owned by private companies.
Apart from the surveillance society, we know that the internet is watched by governments around the world. The Edward Snowden scandal showed us that there are no limits to what the US government is capable of if it is given unchecked power to watch humanity online. The British government is little better. These days, it's better (and more accurate) for people to assume that everything they do online is recorded somewhere, regardless of how trivial or utterly useless the data is. As cynicism has increased as we entered into the 21st century from a more idealistic 20th century, people are no longer surprised that governments flout the law and any individual's rights: as true cynics, many people assume that the worst will happen, most of the time.
While governments around the world gather data on people en masse simply for the sake of it (in case it is useful later), it is private companies who are the some of the worst offenders of all.
Technology has allowed people to communicate as never before; it has therefore also allowed technology companies to gather masses of an individual's communications and data as never before. The most obvious example is "Facebook".
What's worse about this is that private (online) technology companies like Facebook use marketing techniques to gain more and more information on people, to allow individuals to "customise" or "tailor" their personal webpages. People are encouraged to add more and more data to these companies' records for the supposed purpose of giving these individuals a "more complete service"; this is Orwellian Doublespeak at its best, and encourages individuals to freely give information to an unaccountable private company that they would never dream of giving to their government.
This is what makes this erosion of privacy so dangerous. Governments are at least (theoretically) accountable. Private companies are only accountable to their shareholders; no one else. Even worse, the information that individuals do give to these private companies is often shared with government anyway, as the Snowden scandal has exposed. So this makes the whole charade even more absurd.
But the strange erosion of privacy in the 21st century seems to snowball ever larger. The Orwellian dystopia he predicted in "Nineteen Eighty-Four" in many ways already exists. Technology has been used for the purposes of greater and greater surveillance, and people are happy to shrug their shoulders and continue to freely offer up the contents of their lives to private companies like "Facebook"; myself included!
Teenagers and children now raised in the "Facebook and Twitter Generation" think nothing of sharing every thought in their head online, to be recorded for all eternity. Technology and data retention online means that "Facebook" has an even greater hold on your life after your death that even the government; when you die, you no longer exist on the tax records, but you'll always be on "Facebook". You are never dead on the internet.
On a psychological level, part of this generational shift in the attitudes towards privacy may well come down to a more narcissistic attitude of the newest generation - I've said more about this elsewhere. "Facebook" is the kind of online service that appeals to anyone with a weakness for self-promotion. As Individualism has increased in society, especially over the last thirty years, these advances in technology and communications are now being used as vehicles for gathering unprecedented amounts of information on humanity, while at the same time indulging post-modern humanity's joy of Individualistic Narcissism. It is a clever ploy.
As I said earlier, marketing as a social tool coincided with the rise of Fascism. The clever "marketing/propaganda" behind "Facebook" is that feeds the perception of granting people greater scope to express their Individualism/Narcissism, while at the same time sucking masses of data from individuals to a central database, which can be transferred onto government on demand. The Snowden scandal has put meat to the bones of this theory. So this is how Fascism and marketing have fused in the 21st century, through the advances in technology. Whereas Communist/impersonal regimes find it difficult to obtain individuals' data without using coercion, Fascism's symbiotic link to the unregulated private sector means that individuals can be easily persuaded of their own free will to give up their own right to privacy. The Neo-liberal world we are living in is one where Fascism has morphed into something bigger, smarter, and more adaptable than its pre-Second World War origins.
"Privacy" has almost become a dirty word; that is certainly the suggestion implied by Cameron's "war on pornography", and the mass use of technology for sharing information.
If you want to have a private life, it means you must have something to hide!
That misconstrued sense of freedom is further destroyed when you think about the erosion of individual privacy that has taken place over the last twenty years. You need look no further than David Cameron's recent declaration of war on pornography. Here the British Prime Minister wants to introduce control over what British individuals watch on the internet; effectively have people "tagged" as porn users, and ban all forms of child pornography and "violent" pornography.
I'm not here to make a blanket defence of all forms of pornography; instead I'll simply state there being no proven causal link between porn and sex crimes (violent crime has gone down in recent years, and there has never been a coinciding rise in sexual violence with the massive surge in available online porn; besides, if you are going to ban porn, then why not violent movies, and so on). This is just another example of intrusion into individual privacy for the sake of it.
More cynically, it is a blatant piece of opportunist populism for the purposes of diversion. More seriously, it is another weapon of control against the individual. As a classic tactic of Fascist propaganda, it fits the bill, as Cameron's "war on porn" is a) superficially-popular b) gives greater powers to the government, and c) has only a negligible effect to the actual target of the policy.
Propaganda as a political tool was mastered by the Fascists in the 1920s (which coincided, not coincidentally, with the rise of marketing and advertising as a social tool - more on that later). Fascist tactics are to concentrate power to the central government, while at the same time appearing popular, and having a useful scapegoat. Using "moral panics" about phantom social threats is recurring theme in authoritarianism.
Ever since the widespread use of CCTV across the world began twenty years ago (The UK being the worst offender), privacy has become so eroded in so many ways it's difficult to remember.
CCTV is trumpeted as a great weapon against crime: well, it is true that it theoretically should make it easier for the police to catch criminals after the event, it does little to actually prevent crimes from happening. Even so, most of the cameras installed around the world are not even really used for crime prevention purposes, let alone used by the police. The vast majority of cameras are not owned by the state, but by private companies, who are therefore much less accountable to the public, and the technology much more open for abuse. The fact that we take all this for granted is simply a sign that people have learned to mentally block out the fact that their every move is recorded on cameras mostly owned by private companies.
Apart from the surveillance society, we know that the internet is watched by governments around the world. The Edward Snowden scandal showed us that there are no limits to what the US government is capable of if it is given unchecked power to watch humanity online. The British government is little better. These days, it's better (and more accurate) for people to assume that everything they do online is recorded somewhere, regardless of how trivial or utterly useless the data is. As cynicism has increased as we entered into the 21st century from a more idealistic 20th century, people are no longer surprised that governments flout the law and any individual's rights: as true cynics, many people assume that the worst will happen, most of the time.
While governments around the world gather data on people en masse simply for the sake of it (in case it is useful later), it is private companies who are the some of the worst offenders of all.
Technology has allowed people to communicate as never before; it has therefore also allowed technology companies to gather masses of an individual's communications and data as never before. The most obvious example is "Facebook".
What's worse about this is that private (online) technology companies like Facebook use marketing techniques to gain more and more information on people, to allow individuals to "customise" or "tailor" their personal webpages. People are encouraged to add more and more data to these companies' records for the supposed purpose of giving these individuals a "more complete service"; this is Orwellian Doublespeak at its best, and encourages individuals to freely give information to an unaccountable private company that they would never dream of giving to their government.
This is what makes this erosion of privacy so dangerous. Governments are at least (theoretically) accountable. Private companies are only accountable to their shareholders; no one else. Even worse, the information that individuals do give to these private companies is often shared with government anyway, as the Snowden scandal has exposed. So this makes the whole charade even more absurd.
But the strange erosion of privacy in the 21st century seems to snowball ever larger. The Orwellian dystopia he predicted in "Nineteen Eighty-Four" in many ways already exists. Technology has been used for the purposes of greater and greater surveillance, and people are happy to shrug their shoulders and continue to freely offer up the contents of their lives to private companies like "Facebook"; myself included!
Teenagers and children now raised in the "Facebook and Twitter Generation" think nothing of sharing every thought in their head online, to be recorded for all eternity. Technology and data retention online means that "Facebook" has an even greater hold on your life after your death that even the government; when you die, you no longer exist on the tax records, but you'll always be on "Facebook". You are never dead on the internet.
On a psychological level, part of this generational shift in the attitudes towards privacy may well come down to a more narcissistic attitude of the newest generation - I've said more about this elsewhere. "Facebook" is the kind of online service that appeals to anyone with a weakness for self-promotion. As Individualism has increased in society, especially over the last thirty years, these advances in technology and communications are now being used as vehicles for gathering unprecedented amounts of information on humanity, while at the same time indulging post-modern humanity's joy of Individualistic Narcissism. It is a clever ploy.
As I said earlier, marketing as a social tool coincided with the rise of Fascism. The clever "marketing/propaganda" behind "Facebook" is that feeds the perception of granting people greater scope to express their Individualism/Narcissism, while at the same time sucking masses of data from individuals to a central database, which can be transferred onto government on demand. The Snowden scandal has put meat to the bones of this theory. So this is how Fascism and marketing have fused in the 21st century, through the advances in technology. Whereas Communist/impersonal regimes find it difficult to obtain individuals' data without using coercion, Fascism's symbiotic link to the unregulated private sector means that individuals can be easily persuaded of their own free will to give up their own right to privacy. The Neo-liberal world we are living in is one where Fascism has morphed into something bigger, smarter, and more adaptable than its pre-Second World War origins.
"Privacy" has almost become a dirty word; that is certainly the suggestion implied by Cameron's "war on pornography", and the mass use of technology for sharing information.
If you want to have a private life, it means you must have something to hide!
Monday, November 1, 2010
Friendship in the 21st century
According to a definition I recently found through Wikipedia (the source all misinformation, say some), "Friendship" can be traditionally defined as having the following common characteristics:
This is the ultimate irony of social interaction in the 21st century: anyone you "know" can be your "friend". I think it´s hilarious that, through Facebook, a complete stranger can see your photo then ask to be your "friend". The real-life equivalent would be a complete stranger walking up to you on the street and asking the same question. In other words, social networking, and the "distance" that technology creates, allows people to behave in a way that they would never consider in real life. The same for Twitter: people write things (insults in particular) on there that they would never tell somebody in the flesh - or not if they didn´t expect to get a good beating afterwards!
The nature of social networking is by nature schizophrenic: having more than a hundred "friends" is unrealistic in the real world; you would never have time to see them all enough to have "quality" relationships. So this means "relationships" become sanitised to the point of being cosmetic adornments. I think anyone who uses social networking on a regular basis can identify with this point.
What does this mean for real "friendship" then? Going back to the points listed at the beginning, there was a time before "social networking "existed when people had a number of close friends that they kept in regular touch with. These were not necessarily colleagues (usually they may have been school friends or neighbourhood friends). "Social networking" is a useful tool; but it should not be confused with physical "contact" friendship.
There are the other, more obvious, reasons why the traditional idea of "friendship" is dying a slow death, and it´s not because of social networking. Facebook and other networks are symptom of the social disconnect, not a cause of it.
The cause is the changing nature of society; through increased work hours; through increased demand for worker flexibility and movement; and so on. Friendships are no longer the result of years of bonding as they were before; they are "products", "connections", whatever buzz word you choose to call it. But having a "connection" to somebody is not the same as a real "relationship". The trap is thinking that they are the same thing.
This is due to lack of time due to the contraits of modern living; an intellectual way of saying that we longer have time for each other that we did before (i.e. before the 21st century). I can cite many personal examples of this; we all can, I'm sure. Like in my earlier posting about "Progress", the real meaning of "friendship" is becoming lost in the age of Facebook, Twitter and the like. These networking sites have become substitutes for the "real" friendships we have all lost due to the sheer pace of life. Am I as guilty as anyone of this? Of course. The face that I am sharing this with people through networking is a sign of that disconnection. But I am not judging; just observing.
Humanity is caught in the middle of all this: everything is in flux, and the the connections between people become all the more confused and fragmented. Society as a whole sees itself as a mass of lost individuals. No wonder, then, that we don´t know where this is leading.
- sympathy and empathy
- honesty
- mutual understanding and compassion
- trust in one another
- equal give and take
This is the ultimate irony of social interaction in the 21st century: anyone you "know" can be your "friend". I think it´s hilarious that, through Facebook, a complete stranger can see your photo then ask to be your "friend". The real-life equivalent would be a complete stranger walking up to you on the street and asking the same question. In other words, social networking, and the "distance" that technology creates, allows people to behave in a way that they would never consider in real life. The same for Twitter: people write things (insults in particular) on there that they would never tell somebody in the flesh - or not if they didn´t expect to get a good beating afterwards!
The nature of social networking is by nature schizophrenic: having more than a hundred "friends" is unrealistic in the real world; you would never have time to see them all enough to have "quality" relationships. So this means "relationships" become sanitised to the point of being cosmetic adornments. I think anyone who uses social networking on a regular basis can identify with this point.
What does this mean for real "friendship" then? Going back to the points listed at the beginning, there was a time before "social networking "existed when people had a number of close friends that they kept in regular touch with. These were not necessarily colleagues (usually they may have been school friends or neighbourhood friends). "Social networking" is a useful tool; but it should not be confused with physical "contact" friendship.
There are the other, more obvious, reasons why the traditional idea of "friendship" is dying a slow death, and it´s not because of social networking. Facebook and other networks are symptom of the social disconnect, not a cause of it.
The cause is the changing nature of society; through increased work hours; through increased demand for worker flexibility and movement; and so on. Friendships are no longer the result of years of bonding as they were before; they are "products", "connections", whatever buzz word you choose to call it. But having a "connection" to somebody is not the same as a real "relationship". The trap is thinking that they are the same thing.
This is due to lack of time due to the contraits of modern living; an intellectual way of saying that we longer have time for each other that we did before (i.e. before the 21st century). I can cite many personal examples of this; we all can, I'm sure. Like in my earlier posting about "Progress", the real meaning of "friendship" is becoming lost in the age of Facebook, Twitter and the like. These networking sites have become substitutes for the "real" friendships we have all lost due to the sheer pace of life. Am I as guilty as anyone of this? Of course. The face that I am sharing this with people through networking is a sign of that disconnection. But I am not judging; just observing.
Humanity is caught in the middle of all this: everything is in flux, and the the connections between people become all the more confused and fragmented. Society as a whole sees itself as a mass of lost individuals. No wonder, then, that we don´t know where this is leading.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)