[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader examines further angles of how we are more and more made a product of what they want us to be. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
—It is in the brain that the main battles of the present and the future will take place. (Sergio Rodriguez G.)
1. The current conviction is that the great battles of the 21st century will not take place in the territory of countries to be occupied, but in the human brain, i.e., the real ‘territory’ to be conquered by the powerful to impose on us their truth and reason.
2. Lies we are exposed-to are no longer subtle; on the contrary, today they are vicious, vulgar, unscrupulous and malignant. Hence the importance of not believing in the ‘information’ emanating from the enemy since it leads to accept the false truths it builds. (S. Rodriguez G.)
A) Let us then start with the internet
3. At the global level, there is an ongoing tension between three camps to regulate the internet: First, multinational companies believe they are prepared to self-regulate and develop rules that will suit their users better than anything governments may employ. Second, China, Russia, and others (not the US) argue that the UN ought to take a more active position in establishing global rules for the internet through a multilateral forum in which governments negotiate solutions. Third, the US, the EU, and additional counted countries are interested in a multistakeholder model where governments, technical actors, corporations and civil society engage in conversation and advance consensus-based solutions. This model has been the default for most of the internet’s decades-long history leaving the pursuit of human rights (HR) in an indeed precarious position. (Juan Ortiz Freuler et al)
Our internet addiction fosters our collective anxiety, it saturates our conversations thus propagating itself further
—Phones and other electronic devices require little effort, so children and adults often turn to them as a way to soothe our feelings of boredom.
4. We all know it is happening. You are actually reading this on the internet, most likely because some news aggregators or social media platforms know you are anxious about news aggregators and the internet and how much time you spend on your phone, and they are surely pushing you into this.
5. At all times, I understand that the internet is using-data-I-somehow-gave-it (give it), and that those processes and technologies are now too complex for me to track.* But it feels aggressive to me, in the way it would feel aggressive if suddenly every kind of advertisement everywhere you went in the world was designed only for you. This begs the question: Is the internet (as falsely claimed) the people? Or is it everything we the people see and hear and know and make-up, without the people? (Merritt Tierce) …Is this then a violation of my rights?
*: Not only that, we are giving that data for free while some internet barons are milking our data AND profiting from their use… AI feeds on this data as well –and already ‘someone’ is profiting in doing so.
6. Often unknowingly, we are faced with a paradox of choice: Algorithms play tour guide through our ever-crowded online world. Interacting online today means being besieged by system-generated recommendations. Do we want machines to tell us what we want? (Kyle Chayka)
7. Add insult to injury: A growing right-wing alternate universe of misinformation and conspiracies is geared to identifying real problems, but opportunistically exploiting them to advance a hateful and divisive agenda. (Naomi Klein) Not being facetious, authoritarian regimes treat the public like a mushroom farm: keeping it in the dark and feeding it with manure.
B) To follow with the more traditional media
–“I took control of the newspapers, and so I became the master of the public mind…” (Minister of Police Joseph Fouché. Memoirs. 1824).
–In a state there is always a small minority opposed to the adoption of a certain legislative measure. This measure would satisfy the aspirations of the great mass of the citizens, but the adverse minority takes possession of the press, works through its mediation of the sovereign public opinion and succeeds in preventing the promulgation of the projected law. (Sigmund Freud, 1925) (Just about the same a century later, no?)
8. We are all familiar with the three classic powers of the State developed by Montesquieu (1753–1794): legislative, executive and judicial. The fourth, which has been established worldwide, is the free and independent (?) printed press –not to be confused with the ever-obsequious Western media (including the printed press) and with the press in dictatorships put to the service of spurious economic interests. (Fernando Ayala)
9. No surprise, then that the crisis of journalism has been talked about almost since the beginning of newspapers with large circulation. As early as 1919, Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) published ‘The Brass Check’, a devastating critique of the powers of capital to corrupt the press and journalists in America. But this critique has grown in tone since the beginning of the new millennium, when it became clear that the manipulation of the media was aimed not only at the interests of capital, but also at the interests of the national security state. It was with the invasion of Iraq (2003) that a new type of journalist emerged, the ‘embedded journalists’, i.e., reporters attached to military units involved in armed conflicts who, therefore, report only what the military authorities allow, and are thus subject to censorship or self-censorship. This creates a media consensus on wars that is just one dimension of the propaganda war.**
**: You want data on war?: A $100,000 missile, launched by a $20,000,000 aircraft, traveling at a cost of $6,000 per hour, to kill people, destroys families, societies, buildings, crops, the environment, nature and the economy.
10. The manipulation of journalism to serve national security policy began with the Cold War from the 1950s onwards. That American media had surrendered themselves to the new national security state and its various Cold War crusades is now an open-and-shut matter of record. One question stands out: Are Europe and North America today plunged into a new propaganda war, now over the war in Ukraine? I have no doubt that they are. (Boaventura de Sousa Santos) …and are HR catastrophes reported to add sensationalism or to push for restitution to the people…?
But the problem goes back to far earlier
11. The birth and development of the press has always gone hand in hand with the capitalist economic development of the last centuries. For instance, communicating economic facts has been a fundamental leg of the evolution of Capitalism. Newspapers have long been the main tool for disseminating news, but they have also sought to influence public opinion in pursuit of political and economic hegemony. They have shaped our way of thinking, our social imaginary, socio-economic organization, power relations and, therefore, the-world-as-we-know-it. Ergo, the media have become the main actors of power; they have been responsible for tipping the balance of public opinion and influencing the public policies of governments. Moreover, they create speculative bubbles with all the collateral damage they create (including in HR terms).
12. The insistence on presenting the economy as detached from politics by intermingling supposed expert analysis with the self-interest of the newspaper’s capitalist partners is clear. The published narratives consider the free market as the only valid form of social organization. These suggestive narratives underpin the idea of a repressive government protecting the freedom of the individual guaranteed by markets. Views opposed to the free market are infantilized.
Bottom line
13. Corporate and financial power has increasingly spread among all media groups, to the point of controlling them completely. Moreover, do not minimize the fact that, additionally, powerful think tanks have been set up to disseminate these ideas throughout the world.*** (Yago Álvarez Barba)
***: Think of The Economist, The Financial Times, Fortune, Business Week, The Wall Street Journal…, with their strong editorial lines in defense of free trade and a clear tendency to influence political affairs. These media continue to grow and expand. They are still doing the same thing: they have just refined their strategies.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
Postscript/Marginalia
–When I first joined Twitter back in 2010, and clicked on the little bell icon, my initial thought was: I am reading the graffiti written about me on an infinitely scrolling restroom wall. I instantly knew that Twitter was going to be bad for me — and yet, like so many of us, I could not stop looking. So perhaps if there is a message I should have acknowledged, this is it: once and for all, stop eavesdropping on strangers talking about you in this crowded and filthy global toilet known as social media. It is something very specific to our time: a clout chaser. Clout is the values-free currency of the always-online age –a substitute for hard cash… You get more clout by playing the victim. You also get clout by victimizing others. With Twitter, we mine our attention, at a time when attention is arguably our culture’s most valuable commodity. Conspiracies have always swirled in times of crisis, but never before have they been a booming industry in their own right. The big misinformation players may be clout chasers, but plenty of people believe their terrifying stories, however deceptive, to explain a world gone wild. (N. Klein)