This is a post about the impact of “deepfake” AI on the public mind. It is, like so many of my ideas, treasonously optimistic.
In it, I explain why AI simply refines to the point of self-defeat a system of consent manufacture that is a century old.
I also show that its creation led to the “rules based order”, and the real meaning of this mysterious mantra.
There are also menes. xDDDD
CONTENTS
Walter Lippmann and the management of democracy
The Function of Mass Belief
The Impact of Doubt
Opiate Naive - Why we do not believe we are decieved
Hypernormalised normal people
The Rules Based Order Explained At Last
Universal Incredulity and its effect on power
For a long time we have been used to the idea that the algorithm is mining our data to make itself more like us.
Now the idea is more common that the algorithm makes us more like it, being embedded into almost every online interface.
Yet social patterning by an image machine has been going on for a hundred years.
As online “reality” collapses into confusion, the effect will be worst on a system of power based on placing the right pictures in the minds of its public.
WALTER LIPPMANN AND THE MANAGEMENT OF DEMOCRACY
Walter Lippmann is described as a publicist. People think this means he wrote about advertising. In fact, he was a student of “the public” -and a sort of engineer of its opinion.
Lippmann helped to invent the model of Liberal Democracy we inhabit today: a system designed to replace overt coercion by force with the placing of the right pictures in the heads of the public. This would form their opinions, and guide their feelings and therefore their actions.
Chapter one of his 1922 book “Public Opinion” was titled
“The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads.”
Who decides what pictures we are to entertain in our heads? That, said Lippmann, is the role of the elite - experts, specialists, bureaucrats - making up
“…a specialized class whose interests reach beyond the locality.”
Lippmann was a founding member of one such elite group dedicated to producing your head movies.
This group was called the Council on Foreign Relations. Founded a little over a century ago, it has continued to frame the Overton Window of acceptable debate, in partnership with other technological and government bureaucracies.
Together, this system broadly provides the grist to the media mill, the curds of churnalism.
THE FUNCTION OF MASS BELIEF
The production of the popular mind has been described by our friends on the left as the Culture Industry.
People like Herbert Marcuse wrote about “repressive desublimation” - how mass media and consumer societies created desires it could satisfy, to obscure the ones it could not.
The result was not liberation, and does not stop at repression. It is annihilation, a means of pacification through the prism of choices which turn out to have been contrived.
Horkheimer and Adorno spoke of the “Enlightenment as Mass Deception”, touching on the promises of reason liberated. This would elevate Man, through his rational choices, to a superior mode of being.
In fact, men choose things not because they are rational or true or even good - but because they are driven by feeling. Neither the revolution of the Left nor the reaction of the free market Right can make men rational. To describe him as such is simply another form of flattery. It is a picture, put into your head, to appeal to your self esteem.
DOUBTFUL DECISIONS
What does deepfake bring to this system, refined for a century in producing the illusions of freedom, of an informed citizenry, and of a democratic system?
It disrupts the central mechanism of the liberal democratic system itself. If the acceptance of the pictures is shaded with doubt, no one can believe in any of them as they used to.
It was pointed out to me once by a barrister that trial by jury does not exonerate on the establishment of innocence, but the presence of doubt.
Sufficient doubt is enough to acquit the guilty.
If people can no longer rely on the imagery they take to mean the world outside this is a good thing. It is my view that most of it is essentially fake anyway. This has passed without notice because populations in the West are naive.
OPIATE NAIVE
People who have never taken opiates are described as “opiate naive.” This means they are not accustomed to the effects such as euphoria, nausea and constipation whose relative intensity varies with prolonged use.
After a long time, the user becomes inured to the reward of the drug, requiring an increased dose to stave off withdrawal “sickness” - which is really the beginning of recovery from the drug.
At this point, stool softeners are likely necessary to allow the user to void themselves, with peristalsis depressed by opiods. The process of elimination is inhibited, the user literally filling up with excrement.
To an addict at this stage it is bewildering to suggest they might halt the use of their medicine, which has made them so sick. This is because the user sees their use as a form of therapy.
This is the most honest description of therapy I have ever encountered.
HYPERNORMIES
The people of the former Soviet Union are accustomed to incredulity towards the Grand Narrative of the State. Having lived through a heavily propagandised regime, they are aware of the distance between the message and the product, which is measured in experience of reality.
It is ours which is the most heavily propagandised population in history. Our news is fake, the ruling ideology itself an argument with everything else that it can never hope to win. This losing battle, with its enormous human casualty rate, is fought on Netflix and the nightly news, in humourless comedy, in sterile novels and derivative dramas.
Its messaging is echoed in advertising and online. No institution, save those traditionally religious ones, are immune.
The whole issue of the culture wars misses the point of their origin:
the liberal idea cannot survive outside a controlled environment.
The basic differences between people, peoples, and between utopian ideology and the facts are erased in a concerted effort to enchant the population with fairytales.
If you would like to know more about the foolhardy division of politics between fairytales and “fascism”, see here:
At the present moment the hypernormalised normal people - the hypernormies - are struggling to reconcile the unreliable narrative with the story of their lives. Things are not working. Politics, which most would sensibly prefer to ignore forever, now intrudes in the most obnoxious manner everywhere.
Compulsive indoctrination and rising taxation combine to produce a sense of resentment. The results of this amalgam is to fill the cavity with dross. What is gained by this system is a net loss for everyone who is not in charge.
The economic crisis created by the politics of fantasy is making its loyalty system unworkable.
What does this all have to do with AI generated deepfake videos? If you cannot manufacture reliable propaganda you cannot manufacture consent. The media scare over deepfakes is simply an attempt to capture total narrative control.
“You can trust only us,” say the people who told you Russiagate was real, Russia was losing, and the “vaccines” were safe and effective.
To frighten the public away from the profound significance of this change is to attempt to turn back the tide.
Deepfake means the end for reliable propaganda. Propaganda was the rule of the rules based order, which itself was invented in wartime over a century ago.
THE RULES BASED ORDER
Lippmann, Bernays, John Dewey and others really learned about “public opinion” through attempts made by the Committee for Public Information to engage the US in the First World War.
This was not a noble cause outside the aim to replace the British Empire, which American action went on to consolidate in the Second Great Unpleasantness.
That the manufacture of consent came about in wartime helps to explain its continuing relation to a now permanent state of war.
Lippman himself invented that phrase in one of his books.
Both Lippmann and Dewey believed that the rules themselves did not matter to the public, only that there were rules.
This is the reason you hear so much of the “rules based order”, whilst the rules are never explained. There are no rules, only these words, which enchant the audience with the comforting belief that theirs is a just and morally superior world.
The exception of deepfake proves the rule of rules. It will make mass belief not impossible, but difficult to secure on the same scale and with the same degree of compliance. In this case, guilt will not be excused but suggested by doubt.
UNIVERSAL INCREDULITY
Belief is bleeding out of the system.
The algorithm’s final lesson is that it was never about us, this liberal democracy - only about the right to rule by the wrong people, for reasons they will not explain.
They do not need to do so, as they are now obvious. This is the Great Disenchantment, and if you want something to believe in, it is at least real.
I think general incredulity towards screen based reality is long overdue.
It will commend the merit of real life, human scale relations, making everything distant somewhat dubious. The impact of AI on the management of democracy is an object lesson in how mass societies become so complex as to be no longer dirigible.
We inhabit real life effects of this complexity, as if we witness the spectacle of a parasitic system which has killed its host. Without make belief, no one will believe in the fairy tales any more.
Despite, and also because of the production values, reality makes the best argument.
I have conducted the interview with the man who came up with SCALE, and will be reproducing it in digestible parts here. very soon.
Meanwhile, if you like this sort of thing, do consider supporting me.
My heartfelt thanks to those who have.
If you have sent me an email to get in because you have no money, I have been too busy writing about genocidal Zionism to answer it.
I will not forget you and will get to you soon. Sorry.
Thralls, the lot of us. Thralls, to the mind-vampires who offer us comfort and security in exchange for blood and obedience.
https://argomend.substack.com/p/vampire-society
Solid white pill, but the collapse of the propaganda machines might seem ominous to some.
We need a modern version of Augustine's City of God, just as the good bishop calmed down a populace horrified by the destruction of Rome, we need something to calm normies about the collapse of "trustworthy news" culture. Something that shows history of its rise, the role of people like Ed Bernays, and Lippman played, the role the media ecology played in its conception and as you are stating, its death. Most importantly it must hit a point you made here, that this regime of "news" is young, life worked before it and worked well.