Obama: a Corporate Marketing Creation

John Pilger is an Australian journalist and documentary maker. He has twice won Britain's Journalist of the Year Award, and his documentaries have received academy awards in Britain and the US. You can see the rest of the speech here; remember to rate it up.



Please go rate this up on YouTube (click on the picture above). We cannot begin to hold them accountable, until we understand what they need to be held accountable for.

Update on Bringing the Internets to Heel

"Comcast's bandwidth throttling system that slows you down for using too much bandwidth is now fully armed and operational in all markets. Here's how it works, and how to not get stuck on the short bus." More at Gizmodo. (Thanks, Ben!)

UPDATE: Ending the Internet as We've Known It

Sorry to keep pounding this but I can't believe how many people still don't get it.

Via Slashdot,

"Microsoft's vision of your computing future is on display in its just-published patent application for the Metered Pay-As-You-Go Computing Experience. The plan, as Microsoft explains it, involves charging students $1.15 an hour to do their homework, making an Office bundle available for $1/hour, and billing gamers $1.25 for each hour of fun. In addition to your PC, Microsoft also discloses plans to bring the chargeback scheme to your cellphone and automobile — GPS, satellite radio, backseat video entertainment system. 'Both users and suppliers benefit from this new business model,' concludes Microsoft, while conceding that 'the supplier can develop a revenue stream business that may actually have higher value than the one-time purchase model currently practiced.' But don't worry kids, that's only if you do more than 52 hours of homework a year!"

This is an important step in the devolution I've outlined in previous posts that's transforming the internets as we've known them into something controlled centrally from the top down by mega-corps and gummints. I realize that that transformation could yield efficiencies in some areas, but I think they'll mainly benefit the controllers (them), not the controllees (us).

My main concerns relate to the power of those who own or control the more centralized system, which power will be enormously enhanced to do any or all of the following:

(1) To charge us whatever they like for their services, including but not limited to forcing us to pay for and use upgrades that we don't want or that are incompatible with older documents or software that we still want to use;

(2) To surveille us without any "probable cause" to suspect us of wrongdoing, in violation of the U.S. Constitution, esp. the Fourth Amendment; and

(3) To alter or delete any information or data, whether accidentally or intentionally, if they consider it a "threat" or simply inconsistent with their own interests.

As I said in my 6/3/07 post, "effective regulation or oversight over those in possession of that ownership and control [of the devolved system] would become impossible, since they would have the power with a few keystrokes to alter every digital record on the planet . . . ."

The following is from my 10/3/07 post on the subject:

Free speech in general and the internet in particular seem to worry control freaks.

As of 2000, just five megacorporations – Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) – controlled over 90% of the media industry in the U.S., with General Electric's NBC a close sixth (see here, here, here, and here).

In 2003, despite the largest public outcry in FCC history, the FCC adopted rules loosening restrictions on media ownership (stories here, here, and here) . . . .

Certain people have spent a lot of money to gain all that control, and notwithstanding claims of hard times in the media biz, the investment has in fact proved profitable; but one of the main benefits that might have been hoped for – control over the agenda and messages reaching audiences of any significant size – is threatened by the 'net.

* * * * *

In an earlier post, I discussed conservatives' plans to replace the internet as we know it with something called the "Worldbeam" (a.k.a. the "Cloud"), a system in which, instead of storing all your personal docs, files, and software on your own computer at home, everything would be stored on larger computers elsewhere, and you would just have a box that would be little more than a gateway to the Beam.

Instead of buying your own copies of applications, the most basic might (or might not) be provided on the Beam for free, and you'd pay license fees for anything fancy, so vendors could force you to upgrade whenever they liked. Although access to your own data would theoretically be protected by a password or other security, the gummint or others who controlled the Beam could access, modify, or simply delete any or all of your or others' data much more easily than now.

The internet would have been transformed into a massive, top-down surveillance system while conferring virtually unlimited power on those who controlled it to re-write "reality." [As I said in my 6/3/07 post, "[w]ho controls the Beam will control history, and thus will have the power to botch if not completely control the present and future."]

I was worried, but thought it would be some years before the "Beam" replaced the 'net as we know it.

Duh. It's finally dawned on me, there's no need for those desiring Beam-like control to engineer any single, vast switch-over to a new system. They're simply colonizing the 'net little by little – and many of us are unwittingly helping them.

Think MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, MeetUp, LinkedIn, del.icio.us, Ancestry.com, and yes, Blogspot – you upload or create tons of data about yourself and your activities, opinions, social and other relationships, and personal preferences into online facilities that are maintained and controlled by other people. You may or may not even keep copies on your own computer of everything you put on the 'net. Think online banking and investment, every airplane ticket you've ever bought and hotel you've booked, every comment you've ever posted, and every purchase you've ever made esp. from vendors like amazon that keep track so as to make recommendations. Think on-line spam filter services (I realize AT&T is probably already giving the gummint copies of every e-mail that passes through AT&T's "pipes," in direct violation of our constitutional rights -- see here [and here, here, here, and here] -- but hey, we managed to shut that down, didn't we? Oops, guess not [link supplied].) . . .

* * * * *

At least now, of course, we CAN keep copies of our stuff on our own computers. My computer can of course be infected or hacked; but I can fight that in various ways that at least make it more difficult for my privacy etc. to be massively violated by the gummint, etc. Theoretically, I could even put stuff on a computer that has no wireless port and isn't otherwise connected to the 'net, so someone would have to have actual physical access to it in order to alter or delete it [and if you are an activist who opposes gummint policies, I recommend you do this].

(There's a "Search Blog" function at upper left on this page; you can enter "internet" or other terms to find additional, related posts.)

As I look back at what I've posted before, the only thing that's changed is that the devolution is happening even more quickly than I imagined possible.

As I also said in my 6/3/07 post, "I happen to agree that all information is good information. But what needs to be spelled out in no uncertain terms is that because knowledge is power, a balance of power requires a balance of knowledge." Right now, the powerful know a lot more about us than we know about them; that needs to change.

The Death of YouTube as We've Known It?

As reported by ipower, "As of yesterday YouTube has replaced its list of 'Most Viewed' videos on the site's 'Videos' section with a varied selection of sponsor-friendly videos that the site calls 'Most Popular'. Where users normally see videos with high view-counts that have become popular due to viral spreading and community activity, we now see videos like the new MacBook commercial that gets showcased on the 'Most Popular' #1 spot while having very low view-counts and even lower ratings. YouTube will no longer give massive exposure to its community's video productions and instead is now tightly controlling its Videos pages to attract more sponsors and a more mainstream audience." More at the link above.

Help Fight Telecom Immunity for Gross Violations of Your Fundamental Rights

Re-shaping reality is easier and more fun than you may have imagined.

Pls call all your congressional reps NOW and tell them they are NOT authorized to waive your Constitutional rights to be free from governmental searches without probable cause (see here or here for more details).

You can find your reps' contact info here (which link will, by the way, always be available on the sidebar of this blog at left).

Here's a script (don't forget to delete the superfluous quote marks; and feel free to customize):

"I object to any abrogation of the liability of the telecoms for their collaboration with the Bush administration in violating my Constitutional rights.

"As you know, the indiscriminate, warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens began BEFORE 9-11.

"As you also know, the U.S. Constitution is supposed to PROTECT me from searches and seizures not supported by an oath or affirmation "particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized." The government is NOT allowed to go on fishing expeditions indiscriminately violating my privacy for purposes that may or may not be in my best interests.

"If telecoms are given immunity for these flagrant violations of my rights, there's no limit to what may be asked of them by this or future administrations. Moreover, immunity will make it more difficult to investigate and hold accountable those in the Bush administration responsible for this abuse.

"Please honor your oath of office by protecting my Constitutional rights against this and every other attempted incursion."

US Feds Ordered "Assassination City" Police to STOP Screening for Weapons at Obama Rally

Per The Fort Worth Star Telegram, "[s]ecurity details at Barack Obama's rally [in Dallas, Texas] Wednesday stopped screening people for weapons at the front gates more than an hour before the Democratic presidential candidate took the stage at Reunion Arena.

"The order to put down the metal detectors and stop checking purses and laptop bags came as a surprise to several Dallas police officers who said they believed it was a lapse in security.

* * *

"Several Dallas police officers said it worried them that the arena was packed with people who got in without even a cursory inspection.

"They spoke on condition of anonymity because, they said, the order was made by federal officials who were in charge of security at the event."

You can't even get into the Dallas Museum of Art without having your bag inspected.

"The Century of the Self" by Adam Curtis

Below is Part 4 of an excellent BBC series documenting how, beginning in the 1920's, Freudian theories gave rise to public relations techniques that have been used to uncover irrational, often self-centered or petty motivations of whole populations, so as to either cater to or manipulate them.

(Note, this video is nearly an hour long -- wish it moved a bit more quickly -- but the info is fascinating and important, and the visuals and audio are terrific -- well-edited, with lots of cool archival stuff. If you can't spare the time, I'm providing a cursory summary of some of the main ideas below.)



These psychoanalytically-derived techniques have been used not only by businesses in designing or selling products but also by politicians (and, I might add, by religious leaders -- see, e.g., Brands of Faith) in marketing themselves.

Some using these techniques believed they were helping to bring about a more democratic system in which the consumer or voter was "king." But the point of a "focus group" is not to hear our considered opinions on any given topic but rather to discern the more primitive desires and fears we might not admit to if asked but that often, with or without our awareness, drive our behavior.

After decades of immersion in the P.R. resulting from these techniques, we've gone from seeing ourselves as exploited by business interests to -- rightly or benightedly -- viewing the marketplace as a main source of identity support and fulfillment.

But our democracy has to some extent been reduced from an electorate actively undertaking organized action to make the world better for others as well as ourselves to a relatively atomized, passive agglomeration of consumers who secretly feel entitled to prioritize gratification of their every self-centered whim.

We feel we are free, but in reality, we've been enslaved through our unconscious fears and desires. We all kinda knew that, but the documentary provides fascinating details about how it was done, which can help arm us against such efforts in the present, as well as providing insight into the implications for our future.

You can see the other parts of the series on the Internet Archive or Google Video.

On a somewhat related subject, I'd like to recommend the recent New Yorker article, "Twilight of the Books," on the effects of the rise in TV watching and relative decline in reading. Among other things, it describes studies suggesting that proficient readers may think differently than people who rely more on visual communication. While both kinds of thinking are probably valuable, it appears that, generally, visual communication involves thinking oriented toward graphic, functional-narrative or emotional content, while reading facilitates abstract reasoning and an ability to compare and contrast subject-matter based on a wider array of kinds of logic.

Interesting to think about in connection with other studies about TV. As I wrote in a previous post (analyzing the Smith/Cohen cover video of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit"), "We all live in an ever more fully-saturated mass-media environment that continually urges us to consume and invites us to flee consciousness above all. Studies have shown how much TV has in common with both addiction and brainwashing – see here, here, and here. TV is unusual in that on the one hand, the brains of people watching it appear much more inert than usual, with their critical faculties turned almost completely off, while on the other hand, they are nonetheless uncritically absorbing the commercial and other messages being transmitted."

UPDATE Re- Bringing the Internet to Heel

As my three readers know, I'm very concerned that, at least partly through the instigation of right-wing authoritarians but also partly through the more or less semi-witless facilitation by the rest of us, the internet is rapidly being transformed into a potential top-down surveillance and mind-control system easily manipulated by gummints and corps (for more details, see my previous posts on the subject, most recently here).

I never thought I'd see Microsoft as on my side, but in its current battles with Google, that's how it's shaping up. Google is actively promoting its "cloud" model of the internet, in which not only software but most of your data live on the 'net -- i.e., in hardware owned and controlled by others -- while Microsoft continues to favor a distributed model in which most of your software and data live in your PC.

Details at Google Watch and The New York Times, among other places.

Personally, I'm hanging on to my hardware and (better late than never) minimizing the personal info I put on the 'net.

(See my prior post for background.)

UPDATE: With Our Help, the Internet is Being Brought to Heel

Free speech in general and the internet in particular seem to worry control freaks.

As of 2000, just five megacorporations – Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) – controlled over 90% of the media industry in the U.S., with General Electric's NBC a close sixth (see here, here, here, and here).

In 2003, despite the largest public outcry in FCC history, the FCC adopted rules loosening restrictions on media ownership (stories here, here, and here). Although courts ultimately threw out the rules, the FCC is now trying again (stories here and here).

Certain people have spent a lot of money to gain all that control, and notwithstanding claims of hard times in the media biz, the investment has proved profitable; but one of the main benefits that might have been hoped for – control over the agenda and messages reaching audiences of any significant size – is threatened by the 'net.

Internet freedom, neutrality, etc. have accordingly been attacked on a variety of fronts.

In an earlier post, I discussed conservatives' plans to replace the internet as we know it with something called the "Worldbeam," a.k.a. the "Cloud," a system in which, instead of storing all your personal docs, files, and software on your own computer at home, everything would be stored on larger computers elsewhere, and you would just have a box that would be little more than a gateway to the Cloud.

Instead of buying your own copies of applications, the most basic might (or might not) be provided on the Cloud for free, and you'd pay license fees for anything fancy, so vendors could force you to upgrade whenever they liked. Although access to your own data would theoretically be protected by a password or other security, the gummint or others who controlled the Cloud could access, modify, or simply delete any or all of your or others' data much more easily than now.

The internet would have been transformed into a massive, top-down surveillance system while conferring virtually unlimited power on those who controlled it to re-write "reality."

I was worried, but thought it would be some years before the "Beam" replaced the 'net as we know it.

Duh. It's finally dawned on me, there's no need for those desiring Beam-like control to engineer any single, vast switch-over to a new system. They're simply colonizing the 'net bit (so to speak) by bit – and many of us are unwittingly helping them.

Think MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, MeetUp, LinkedIn, del.icio.us, Ancestry.com, and yes, Blogspot – you upload or create tons of data about yourself and your activities, opinions, social and other relationships, and personal preferences into online facilities that are maintained and controlled by other people. You may or may not even keep copies on your own computer of everything you put on the 'net. Think online banking and investment, every airplane ticket you've ever bought and hotel you've booked, every comment you've ever posted, and every purchase you've ever made esp. from vendors like amazon that keep track so as to make recommendations. Think on-line spam filter services (I realize AT&T is probably already giving the gummint copies of every e-mail that passes through AT&T's "pipes," in direct violation of our constitutional rights -- see here -- but hey, we managed to shut that down, didn't we? Oops, guess not.) HuffPo even tells the world how much money I've given to which political candidates.

The fact is, many of us have for some time been eagerly shifting vast portions of our lives into Beam- or Cloud-like facilities that are based somewhere out there and are only nominally under our own control.

At least now, of course, we CAN keep copies of our stuff on our own computers. My computer can of course be infected or hacked; but I can fight that in various ways that at least make it more difficult for my privacy etc. to be massively violated by the gummint, etc. Theoretically, I could even put stuff on a computer that has no wireless port and isn't otherwise connected to the 'net, so someone would have to have actual physical access to it in order to alter or delete it.

So far, a lot of us haven't been terribly concerned about what info we put or allow to be retained about us on the 'net – at the time, it seemed it would probably be convenient, although those of use who've tried have found it's not so easy to delete information from the 'net once we've put it there, if it turned out not to be so much to our benefit as we originally thought.

Maybe we should be more concerned.

To be super-blunt, the internet is a great place to find and share general info or info about public issues or figures. For a lot of reasons, it's a terrible place to entrust valuable info, esp. personal info about yourself or people you care about.

How to Control the Internet (by Transforming It into a Top-Down Surveillance System)

It's not just AT&T you have to watch out for (for more on that, see post and thread here). A variety of efforts are underway to gain control of the only significant remaining independent venue for news and opinion.

David Gelernter, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is working with Ajay Royan, who is employed at a West Coast hedge fund, on another way to control those unruly internets (see article here; you may need to click "skip this welcome" at the top of the page). They want to replace the web with a new system they call the "Worldbeam."

With the Worldbeam, instead of everyone having their own documents stored on their own computers, everyone will access their documents on the Beam through a much simpler box. Not only your current docs, but every doc you ever wrote or viewed -- every e-mail, v-mail, snapshot, every web page visited, etc. -- will be stored on machines maintained elsewhere. You'll be able to access your documents from any box anywhere.

As Gelernter says, "The desktop is dead; all my information must be stored on the Beam . . . ." All your data are belong to us.

Theoretically, only you will have access to your documents, using some combination of biometric identification, a key card, a password or the like, and only you will have the ability to add to or delete your docs.

Mmm-hmmm. As insecure as our individual computers may be now, it's hard to see why our information wouldn't be even less secure if the primary storage is in machines owned and controlled by someone else.

There's no discussion of who would own or control the machines on which all this information is stored. One suspects the system protocols would be secret or proprietary.

How do you segregate your supposedly private docs from those you want to be available to others? "Whenever you create a new document, it's born with the same permissions as previous documents of the same type." (No explanation provided re- how the Beam will determine what docs are of the same type.) Gelernter continues, "Your personal beam contains load [sic] of information about your habits and preferences."

Obviously, the Beam would involve massive centralization of control over all content that might otherwise be available on the Web, plus all documents to which inappropriate permissions are assigned by the system, unless you happen to catch the inevitable errors, plus, potentially, even those docs you successfully designate as private, as well as exhaustive data about your habits and preferences.

You'll no longer own copies or rights to most software. Instead, you'll subscribe to basic service and have the opportunity to lease fancier applications.

The corporations who expect to sell or lease us these subscriptions and applications must regard the Beam with great joy. Among other things, controlling software centrally would enable providers to simply eliminate old applications whenever they liked, forcing customers to "upgrade" to versions they might or might not want. I would no longer have the power to just buy an application once and use it forever if it were continuing to do the job for me.

Gelernter says, "the Worldbeam should strengthen the world's responsible governments against terrorists and criminals and the individual against busybodies . . . . The Internet tells government agencies: You each have a separate information stash and your own network; sharing information requires extra effort. The Beam tells them: At base you all share one information stash: withholding information requires extra effort. . . . no one can plead "technical" reasons for not sharing" (I presume he means, "technological" reasons).

Of course, nothing prevents government agencies from building a unified information system now, other than the cost; and the cost for such a system must surely be vastly smaller than the cost of transforming the entire Internet.

More importantly . . . "responsible governments"? I presume he means the likes of the social democracy of Norway, as opposed to the U.S. government under the Bush Administration? For in the hands of the latter, not to mention even more tyrannical governments, the Beam would make it even easier to spy on innocent citizens for political purposes, etc.

My boyfriend says, don't worry, the Beam won't happen. I hope he's right; but. The Web has become one of few remaining avenues for challenges to the interests that now own and control much of our election process and nearly all of the traditional media. It seems to me the Beam offers a great deal to those interests.

I found Gerlernter's article in the May 7, 2007 issue of Forbes, which featured short articles by "28 Great Minds" on "The Power of Networks." The same issue also contained interesting articles from other authors with a greater appreciation of the virtues of decentralized, distributed ownership and control. In their own words:

"One of the great lessons of the 20th century is that centralized planning and control don't work. . . . Decentralization is fast and flexible. It allows exponential, viral growth." -- Rick Warren, founder of Saddleback Community Church ("The Power of Parishioners").

"The biggest mistake marketers make when they see the power of the consumer network is that they try to control it, own it or manipulate it." -- Seth Godin, marketing expert ("Your Product, Your Customer").

"A command-and-control model, the way one runs an army, is not well suited for new ideas." -- Jonathan Fahey, writing about Nicholas Negroponte's wiki-style project to develop a laptop that could be made for $100 each and provided to children around the world ("The Soul of a New Laptop").

"America can still win the battle for a democratic world. The most important weapon is a free, open, commercially and politically unfettered Internet that empowers ordinary people from across the globe to speak and act in the interests of their own communities." – Howard Dean, DNC Chair ("Wikipartia").

"The Internet functions best when its protocols are available to everyone . . . . there is wisdom in crowds, even – perhaps I should say especially – in crowds of volunteers and amateurs. . . . The great lesson of the Web 2.0 is that to control quality, you don't lock things down; you open them up." -- Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia ("Open-Door Policy").

Another article touched on important, related issues ("Can You Hear Me Now?"). Sherry Turkle, a professor at MIT, mentioned ideas expressed by many people that "'we're all being observed all the time anyway, so who needs privacy?' . . . When the question of political abuse came up, a common reaction . . . was . . . 'All information is good information' and 'Information wants to be free' and 'If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.'" Turkle is clearly concerned that these ideas lead us to acquiesce in government spying on innocent citizens.

I happen to agree that all information is good information. But what needs to be spelled out in no uncertain terms is that because knowledge is power, a balance of power requires a balance of knowledge.

In a democracy, the weight of power should belong to the people; or at worst, the balance should be equal. That means that our government's activities should be open and transparent to us – we should know at least as much about what our government is doing as our government knows about us. That's not the way things have been going lately.

The same goes with respect to corporations, which have all but superseded governments in terms of their power over our lives.

Centralizing ownership and control of Internet hardware and software might result in certain cost efficiencies, but effective regulation or oversight over those in possession of that ownership and control would become impossible, since they would have the power with a few keystrokes to alter every digital record on the planet – even private documents of my own that I never intended to share with anyone else.

Who controls the Beam will control history, and thus will have the power to botch if not completely control the present and future.

It's worth a lot to me personally NOT to have to cede that much control to any centralized entity, governmental or corporate.

But so long as there's so much power and money to be gained by those who seek that control, eternal vigilance will remain the price of Internet liberty.

(Update here.)