It’s Getting Harder And Harder To Preserve Our Mental Sovereignty

The following is written, and published with permission by Caitlan Johnstone.

It was hard enough to form a clear perception of reality when all we had to deal with was the propaganda of plutocrat-owned media corporations and the indoctrination of our power-serving education systems. Now on top of those still-persisting obfuscations we’ve got things like Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, imperial information ops like Wikipedia, and an exponentially growing field of AI perception management to work through.

I remember watching Julian Assange give a talk way back in 2017 where he described a future in which artificial intelligence is able to harvest the data of individual internet users and then manipulate the information they see online in a custom-built perceptual prism designed to manipulate their thinking at a level far too subtle to be noticed. He compared it to the way a computer program can play chess with strategies looking 20 to 30 moves ahead at a level the human brain just can’t keep up with, saying that we’ll one day have artificial intelligence that can manipulate public perception with a similar degree of sophistication.

That future is a lot easier to imagine now than it was back in 2017. To be sure, the ruling class is not pouring trillions of dollars into AI so that we can all have free Studio Ghibli-style illustrations of ourselves. There is an understanding that major returns on investment will come largely in the form of these new technologies being deliberately knit into every part of our civilization, driven by the official and unofficial power structures that we live under, and that this will happen in a way that benefits the rich and powerful.

We’re on a trajectory where soon all our information will be stored and analyzed by artificial intelligence controlled by governments and billionaire megacorporations who can then use that information to surveil, manipulate and oppress us. All our medical and financial information. Whole psychological profiles based on what we view and say online. A far more thorough assessment of our personalities than we could ever create on our own.

This information can then be used to determine what sort of advertisements for which products would be likely to work on us, or maybe even produce a custom-made ad on the spot just for us. It can be used to determine what type of power-serving news media or punditry is likely to appeal to our confirmation biases and then make sure it crosses our line of sight at some ideal moment in our day. It can be used to determine how likely we are to oppose the imperial machine in any way, from joining a peace march to starting a union to leading an armed revolution. It can be used to closely monitor our individual path toward political radicalization, and it can be used to feed us information intended to steer that dissident energy toward political movements that don’t threaten the status quo.

Our rulers see AI as an opportunity to recapture the degree of social control that was shaken by the arrival of widespread internet access — a loss of information hegemony we’ve seen oligarchs and empire managers openly complaining about with regard to how social media has spread public dissent on issues like Israel and Palestine.

Journalist Whitney Webb has flagged the fact that Google plutocrat Eric Schmidt co-authored a book with war criminal Henry Kissinger which envisions a future where the public becomes increasingly dependent on artificial intelligence to do our thinking and creative expression for us, allowing our consciousness to become further and further intertwined with these oligarch-owned technologies.

“The Kissinger/Eric Schmidt book on AI basically states that the real promise of AI, from their perspective, is as a tool of perception manipulation — that eventually people will not be able to interpret or perceive reality without the help of an AI via cognitive diminishment and learned helplessness,” Webb warns.

Once we’ve outsourced our cognitive sovereignty to AI, our minds have been captured by the owners of the machines.

So it’s a dark and creepy trail we are traveling down. As a collective we’re going to have to find it within ourselves to start fighting back against this dystopia which is consuming more and more of what’s decent in our world, and as individuals we’re going to have to find ways to maintain our inner clarity despite the empire’s increasingly aggressive efforts to make us vapid, stupid and confused.

Luckily for us there are still large aspects of our humanity which they cannot infiltrate or control, and we would do well to familiarize ourselves with that terrain. Inspiration. Creativity. Consciousness. Spiritual awakening. These are realms wherein the tech plutocrats and imperial social engineers cannot tread.

Explore your own consciousness. Inquire deeply into the nature of self and the mind until clarity dawns on you. Heal your inner wounds. Remove from within yourself all the mental hooks of fear and hatred so that the propagandists can find no psychological purchase with which to manipulate you. Follow the faint whisperings of your muse, and learn to help your inspiration birth new creative expression into the world.

These are the kinds of things we’ll have to do to preserve ourselves as we move into this strange new world, on top of the usual business of staying informed and learning to see through the propaganda illusions. Luckily these things are all good for us anyway; the path toward protecting our humanity also just happens to be the path toward becoming a healthier human being and making the world a better place.

We are being called to awaken, and to transform. We are being beckoned not away from our humanity as the transhumanists imagine but deep into the heart of it, to a widespread blossoming of a bud that’s been waiting within us this entire time. This age invites us to evolve into a truly conscious species.

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Wayne Creed

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