drstrangelove » Sat Jun 19, 2021 4:08 pm wrote:The Bernician » Sat Jun 19, 2021 7:49 am wrote:Among this all, I think I see one really important piece of evidence on motivation. It is here, in the Daily Mail: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/sportsnews/article-9685661/Wimbledon-finals-staged-capacity-crowd-despite-Freedom-Day-delayed.html. Superficially, it's just an extension of what I've previously mentioned: vax passport 'trials' - in this case adding Wimbledon for the upper middle classes to the Euros for the masses. But there's a fascinating detail: it appears you can, instead of being vaccinated, self-report home lateral-flow tests via the app (with 'spot checks' at the venues to see if anyone tests positive there and then). This seems very significant to me, because you don't need to be vaccinated (indeed, you don't really even need to test yourself given it's self-reported), but you do need to get the app. In the short-term, then, this serves as a data-harvesting measure, and not a vax enforcement measure. Does that suggest that it's the data that is more important to our government than the vaccination?
I actually have a theory on this. I'll just quote what I've written on it else where.
In a world driven by Deep-Learning algorithms data becomes its greatest resource. The quantity and quality of data fed into an algorithm determines the speed and accuracy at which it learns, determining the efficiencies derived from the use of AI technology. Data is the economic fuel of the modern era, not oil.
If Nations are in midst of an AI race, then what they are really in is a race to collect data. If you look at this race as beyond nations and between civilisations, it becomes clear to see that the West is at a severe disadvantage to the East. This is because the characteristics of Western Civilisation are at odds with the authoritarian nature of data collection.
The quantity and quality of data collected on people is determined by the quantity and quality of their surveillance. Societies acclimatised to being surveilled produce a higher quantity and quality of data than those concerned with privacy. This also impacts the adoption rate of new technology.
The West is well aware that if their societies do not catch up and keep up in data collection they will see their power wane out of balance to the East's. US report outlining this fear in depth as one of national security ---> https://epic.org/foia/epic-v-ai-commiss ... on-pt9.pdf
In the 1980s Western capital poured into China and developed an economic system referred to as ‘Capitalism with Chinese characteristics’. In the 1990s the West did exactly the same thing with Russia. This brought the East economically on par with the rest of the world and more into balance of power with the West. To achieve this Eastern societies were forced to drastically and rapidly reorganise their societies along Western economic lines.
Due to the surveillance state mandate of AI driven technology, it appears to be the Wests turn to rapidly and drastically reorganise their societies along more authoritative lines to bring them on par with the Easts.
Luckily for the West the pandemic has provided not only the perfect necessity, but a mandate backed by a fundamental tenet of Western ideology—scientific rationalism, to rapidly and drastically reorganise itself into what could be called—Authoritarianism with Western characteristics.
The measures used to fight against this pandemic all produce greater quantities of higher quality data from Western populations:
Covid Testing – Tests collect data which populate dna databases for genome sequencing.
Lockdowns – Restricting the freedom of movement reduces kinetic activity that cannot be monitored and increases digital activity which is monitored.
Contact Tracing – Normalises the collection of kinetic activity through digitally signing into the real world environment through QR codes and installing applications on phones for the express purpose of tracking movements.
Deterrent against Cash – Less cash means more digitally recorded transactions.
Vaccines – Vaccine passports, which are coming though how they will operate is speculative.
Masks – teaches facial recognition algorithms to identify faces with obfuscations.
The motivations behind the policies governing covid19 responses are driven by two things:
Minimising the spread of virus
Maximising the collection of data
Since the second cannot be openly acknowledged, a problem begins to arise when a policy measure is designed to maximise data more than minimise virus. Such policy eventually becomes exposed and health officials are forced to defend measures designed to collect data. These health officials lose credibility as the nature of their job becomes that of a politician. One forced to navigate untenable positions through distortions of reality.
Now think about this.
If maximising data collection has become an imperative of national security, and the policy for collecting this data is literally the same policy for minimising virus, then it becomes a national security imperative for there to be virus to minimise for the collection of data. . .
I can see this for sure. It paints a coherent picture, and to me at least has fewer moving parts than the idea of vaccines as some kind of depopulation agenda. I also think that most of these things serve to increase anxiety, but that could readily make sense as the instrument of control - in order to serve some other end. I also think that suppressing the spread of the virus, while not a primary goal, needs to be in there somewhere, as for every evil psychopath (for want of a better shorthand), you need thousands of useful idiots. And the thing about useful idiots is that they're often pretty advanced in many facets of intelligence, so you do need a veneer of plausibility.
(I still don't fully get the data-as-raw-material thing. It might make more sense as a new frontier - the equivalent of colonising the world to make new markets for capital, a process which has more or less run its course - rather than a new form per se. But I haven't really read into it that much.)
I have been wondering (and trying to write) about the way in which this is a liberal fascism that is coming (which I found out in the process of thinking these thoughts is something that Reagan predicted). And I wondered why, which left me with the thought: my understanding of 'classic' fascism is that it was sold to the disgruntled working class who had been let down by their political representatives. But the liberal left are generally drawn from the middle classes. So, perhaps the similarity with the past is that in each case the groups who are central cheerleaders for fascism are those who are cheerleading their own impoverishment. It was the working class jobs that were on their way out in the second half of the twentieth century (OK, so maybe this fits better with neoliberalism and working class Tories / Reagan Democrats), but it's apparently the middle class jobs that are going to be automated next. Which brings me to the thought that maybe it's not qualitatively different from the last forty years of neo-liberalism, but both an acceleration and an expansion up the income distribution. That's where anxiety and insecurity come in, as well as the private capture of government spending, upward redistribution of wealth, the enrichment of a handful of corporations, etc.
Or it's the above plus a way of managing the collapse of our current form of capitalism (which would indeed lend itself to the data explanation, as capitalism's next form). It's clear that there are multiple agendas at play - and maybe there isn't a primary one, but just things gaining their own momentum?
