Crisis Update - Words Fly Like Whizbangs Over Twitter Trenches.

Social media battle is about much more than chit chat; time to take your stand

Elon Musk and Twitter under siege as mainstream media doubles down.
Combined forces reveal state-corporate collusion in control of narrative.
Alt media is not immune from $billions deployed in pursuit of orthodoxy.

Purpose and objective remain in question; the public is trained to query not.
History fills the gap: the Enclosure of the Commons put the people in play.
Sociologic dilemma is to run from historical trajectory — or to confront it.

(2,300 words or 11 minutes of your time.)

Dec 5, 2022

The balance of force hardly seems fair. The Twitter HQ has been seized by a brigade nicknamed the Musketeers. They hunker down, having expelled collaborators by means of an admittedly crude and ad hoc loyalty test and have sand-bagged the doorways.

In the streets outside, former Twitter staff lay siege, joined by their sympathisers in the establishment media. The government and military provides covert support and munitions.

Despite initial claims in the state corporate media, the Musketeers have managed to keep the electrics on, as well as two-way transmission. As in all rebellions the ability to keep broadcasting is crucial to success.

Radio Elon, to its followers, is a beacon and its signal is strong — for now. Its rivals, however, are more numerous and even more powerful. The outcome cannot yet be called.

Popular sentiment is hard to measure. The rebel commander’s image, with his trademark spliff, earned him a certain raffish notoriety. As with the image of an earlier well-heeled rebel, just because the youth wear his visage on a T-shirt does not mean they commit to his cause or share it to any depth — nor, for his part, does it indicate a coherent message.

On the face of it, Musk appeals to a more carefree age, warning people to acknowledge the value of personal autonomy, and against the dangers of offloading the guidance of humanity to Artificial Intelligence.

His opponents claim already to have led their people to the land of New Normal, from which there need be no return, and can be no escape. The people shall discover soon that they have nothing except that which they can build back better.

The reader will notice that this Overton Window does not reflect the breadth of options available to humanity nor the multifarious arrangements for living, such as less government, decentralised monetary systems or economic, educational and political decision-making at the local level. Rather, it takes for granted big government and the concentration of the political in the hands of trillionaire corporations and their controllers.

History is my guide

The population thus finds itself in the middle: most of the citizenry — Musk as a South African above all — can still recall “Cry Freedom,” yet they witness the relentless shove by a patrician bully in the direction of the workhouse.

The workhouse is a fair analogy. With the destruction of the monasteries in Britain the barons increasingly enclosed land for their own profit, leading to the enclosure riots of 1530s to 1640s. The dilemma of what to do with people forced off the land led to the Poor Law of 1601 which put the duty of their care at the local level. Parishes built workhouses to mop up individuals and put them to profitable work.

Three years after the Poor Law the English parliament passed the first Enclosure Act in 1604. The two events, reflecting what to do with the poor and how to justify enclosure, proceeded in parallel.

In 1833 the English economist William Lloyd published a pamphlet that seeded the argument that would become The Tragedy Of The Commons. This argued that without ownership the transient population would simply have despoiled the land: thus justifying the enclosure of common spaces.

As the workhouses became prisons, the debate arose in utilitarian circles: to what extent should the poor be punished for their poverty, or how ethical is it to profit from their labour. As a side note, The New York Times attributes the surge in slavery to 1619; the timing coinciding with the workhouse debate. A major portion of slaves exported to the “new world” were poor English and Irish.

At the same time a vicar, and the pioneer of politics, philosophy and economics (PPE) at the College of the East India Company, Robert Malthus, provided a further argument that would serve as a justification for framing the poor as authors of their own destruction: his 1798 Principle of Population argued that an increase in a nation's food output improved general well-being but it was only temporary because it caused the population to expand.

The utilitarians of the 18th century were the ancestors of the technocrats of this past century. Both are a form of ethical philosophy concerned with maximising what Jeremy Bentham called “the benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness ... [or] to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered.”

A “party whose interest is considered” seems to be a definition of a stakeholder. The Overton Window remains, as I hope the reader suspects with me, fixed in the 18th century.

This is why the present economic debate, however one calls it — The Great Reset, the New Normal, Build Back Better, or a systemic and structural revolution — looks so keenly over its shoulder to what preceded the Poor Law and the Enclosure Act: namely feudalism.

Unmentionables

The professor of political sociology, Peter Phillips of Sonoma State University revealed that 17 conglomerates control the bulk of global economic activity and through groups like the Trilateral Commission the making of economic and social policy. We’ve written before about the asset managers — shorthand: the owner investors who account for 60 per cent of world trade.

The bulk of these conglomerates are headquartered in the U.S., the rest in the UK and France. Few other countries register at all. This is why the historian Carroll Quigley called his posthumous account of the power nexus, The Anglo-American Establishment (1981).

In the 21st century can we not match demand and supply without economic disruption that simultaneously brings us to this monetary and social crisis — which the arbiters of said monetary system decided to blanket with Covid: a pretext for a readjustment that would dispossess the bulk of the world’s population?

The Overton Window does not allow the people to interrogate this self-selected few. It is a “baseless conspiracy theory” to suggest that money and control of resources are the defining power in politics; that politicians are fig leafs and puppets since they clearly are not the owners and have neither authority nor power to dictate such a change.

Say it ain’t so

This technique of argument contends that the owners would never limit innovation and repress the population. First, the monetary system which the owners control has been brought, through successive pump and dump crises, to the point of collapse. The result is the economic system must be reset, taken over, in what is effectively a coup.