Revenge of the Luddites Part One: Can I Have Your Attention?
What do FEMA’s crisis in North Carolina, the plight of the Palestinians, and the Rohingya genocide all have in common?
“Today, the commodity that we're all after is people's attention.”
What do Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, the burning of the Amazon rainforest, FEMA’s crisis in North Carolina, the plight of the Palestinans, and the Rohingya genocide all have in common?
Mark Zuckerberg.
Of course it is unfair to place all the blame on poor Zuck. Still, he should at least shoulder some because he was practically the inventor of using social media to accrue personal wealth instead of bettering humanity or the planetary ecosystem upon which we all depend.
He could have as easily designed his Facebook and Instagram algorithms to optimize for planetary wellness. Instead, he chose to optimize for engagement, not fully appreciating (at least, we hope not) the implications of that choice. When you optimize for engagement you quickly discover that there is no comparison between engagement in heady discussions that activate the human cerebral cortex to cooperate and collaborate on wide boundary problem solving and the engagement response for cute kitten videos, frights and outrages that activate the limbic brain stem—our primitive reptilian brain. Those latter enticements drive engagement off the charts.
If you are marketing eyeball counts to advertisers, you want to go for outrage, not permaculture design charettes. Stoking outrage worked for Zuckerberg, and then SnapChat, TikTok, and Elon Musk. What drives engagement? Conspiracy theories, sex, the dark web, Satanist pedophile cults, alien abduction—pretty much anything that fired sales of the most sleazy tabloids and dime novels for the past two centuries. It was how The Hammer of the Witches brought witchburning frenzies to the Protestant Reformation—it weaponized the Gutenburg press. It was how The Protocols of the Elders of Zion drove Adolf Hitler to the Final Solution.
Recently Shankar Vedantum interviewed Dr. Dannagal Young for his Hidden Brain podcast.
Young: Conspiracy theories are really rooted in a very simple causal mechanism. They say that whatever the crisis is, or the horrible event is, it's not some complex systemic thing. It is something that has been caused by powerful people operating in the shadows to benefit themselves and harm others. And it provides a really quick closure to what could be a complex problem.
Vedantum: How is this connected to our capacity to deal with uncertainty or how does it influence it?
Young: If you're high in need for cognition it signals that you have the time. You feel that you have the time and security to be able to dedicate to thinking about something for a long period of time. I think a need for cognition is actually correlated with people who are less likely to be monitoring their environments for threat. If you're not monitoring for threat and you're not looking around the corner see who's lurking you can just, you know, I call it cud chewing—you can just chew your cud all day. You could write a cost benefit analysis of every possible decision you could make. You can write your profile list, and you can just sit there and think.
Most people do not take the time to think. This makes disinformation dangerous.
These days working class Americans are conditioned to respond not as individuals whose opinions may differ radically from the opinions of their neighbors, but as the property of the government. They are conditioned to be, as essayist Lewis Lapham wrote, "happy villagers glad to waive the flags and wage the wars, grateful for the good fortune that placed them in the care of a sublime leader.” They aren't unified by any particular text but are conditioned in a habit of mind and thinking. They subscribe to no political doctrine as such. Rather they are bathed hour after hour in the televised imagery of the new corporate state in which eagles screen gloriously above the wreckage of the World Trade Center, in which the enemies are smitten on foreign shores, in which thrilling cavalcades of motorcycle police and marching SWAT teams appear larger than life.
—Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting with Jesus
Joe Scarborough, Morning Joe October 7:
I saw part of Donald Trump's speech this weekend. It was remarkable, the lies. not just on these things, but on policy, he'd make up things and throw it out there. I was shocked that the audience was really that stupid, to believe the crazy lies that he was throwing out there. But he does it so much.
It is the falsehood, the firehose of falsehoods, but they continue to lie about 2020. Vance continues lying about 2020, Trump continues lying about 2020, Senators will not say on Sunday news shows that Donald Trump lost in 2020, despite the fact Republican officials in every one of those states that mattered said that, yes, in fact, Donald Trump lost. Brian Kemp said it in Georgia. Republican officials said it in Michigan. Republican officials said it in Pennsylvania. They said it in Arizona. They have said it repeatedly.
Trump and Vance lying about the people of Ohio eating dogs and cats. You have the Republican governor of Ohio, a lifelong Republican, telling them to stop, that it is a lie.
Now the people of the Carolinas are suffering in a way that only those who have gone through tragic hurricanes, like Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Camille, and now this hurricane, Helene, could imagine. Donald Trump, JD Vance, Eric Trump, everyone else in the Republican party, and entire news channels are out and out lying about what's going on on the ground there.
It should be little wonder that when Zuckerberg ignored the pleas of Brazilians to please tamp down the fact-free ravings of wealthy right-wing landowners, the result was that Jair Bolsonaro became president of Brazil. To please the wealthy landowners, Zuck threw fuel on the burning Amazon and drove a stake through one of the great lungs of the planet. We had already lost the Nile, Jordan, and Tigris/Euphates lungs and surgically shrunk the Mississippi lung. The Amazon watershed browning is on a vastly greater scale. And for the past year, Zuck has been censoring anything criticizing the genocide in Gaza.
In Nexus, Yuval Harari writes:
The early 2010s were a period of optimism in Myanmar. After decades of harsh military rule, strict censorship, and international sanctions, an era of liberalization began. Elections were held, sanctions were lifted and international aid and investments poured in.
Facebook was one of the most important players in the new Myanmar, providing millions of Burmese with free access to previously unimaginable troves of information. The relaxation of government control and censorship however also led to a rise in ethnic tensions, in particular between the majority Buddhist Burmese and the minority Muslim Rohingya.
The Rohingya are Muslim inhabitants of the Rakhine Region in the west of Myanmar. Since at least the 1970s, they have suffered severe discrimination and occasional outbursts of violence from the governing junta and the Buddhist majority. The process of democratization in the early 2010s raised hopes among the Rohingya that their situation would improve but things actually became worse, with waves of sectarian violence and anti-Rohingya pogroms, many inspired by fake news on Facebook.
In 2016 to 17 … the Myanmar Army and Buddhist extremists launched a full ethnic cleansing campaign aimed at the entire Rohingya community. They destroyed hundreds of Rohingya villages, killed between 7,000 and 25,000 unarmed civilians, raped or sexually abused between 18,000 and 60,000 women and men, and brutally expelled about 730,000 Rohingya from the country.
The violence was fueled by intense hatred towards all Rohingya. The hatred in turn was fermented by anti-Rohingya propaganda much of it spreading on Facebook which was by 2016 the main source of news for millions and the most important platform for political mobilization in Myanmar.
Forensic Psychiatrist Bandy Lee has worked in prisons and mental institutions and has been able to observe and explain how mental pathologies, when left untreated, become contagious, just like an airborne virus. What may start with patient zero soon infects hundreds, and then thousands. In the same way, a single posting to Facebook can become a mental health epidemic, unless there is an intervention. It may seriously harm people, as when social media ethnically cleansed the Rakhine Rohinga or brought about the election of Bolsinaro in Brazil.
Liberal or conservative the average American spends about 1/3 of his or her waking life watching television. The neurological effects are profound. For example, researcher Herbert Krugman famously demonstrated that television viewing makes the right brain hemisphere twice as active as the left, releasing a surge in the body's natural opiates and endorphins, including beta-endorphins which act on the same brain receptors as opiates.
Meanwhile, in truth, television drives the hologram that creates Americans' reality. It regulates our national perceptions and interior hallucinations of who we Americans are—the best and the bravest—the richest country. Television promotes the illusion du jour whether it be the environment-destroying automobile as a God-granted entitlement of all Americans, or the reason the United States was forced to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
—Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting with Jesus
Dr. Lee says you do not require physical exposure to catch the symptoms, you only need emotional bonds. She also says there are accelerants of the spread of the pathology, which she calls “facilitating environments” such as a prison, but also propaganda networks, religious cults, and isolation from diversity.
When Helene struck North Carolina, causing debris flows that wiped whole neighborhoods off the map, Elon Musk tweeted to his 201.4 million followers and anyone else on X that FEMA was "actively blocking citizens who try to help" by "blocking shipments and seizing goods" intended for hurricane relief; that authorities in North Carolina had "taken control to stop people helping;” accused FEMA of having "used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country," calling it “treason;” spread baseless claims that FEMA would limit disaster relief to $750 per person; said that FEMA was "seizing" donations and "claiming them as their own;” claimed that sheriffs in North Carolina were threatening to arrest FEMA employees who "hinder rescue and aid work;” and claimed the FAA was blocking rescue flights. Musk termed the rescue effort blamed "belligerent government incompetence,” which caused many in the region to avoid contacting relief agencies. Musk and his followers squelched donations, hampered recovery efforts and demoralized aid workers. Some FEMA personnel on the ground received physical threats.
Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022 and renamed the platform X. Since then its value has dropped 71%. X made only $114 million in revenue in the U.S. during the second quarter of 2024. Does that matter to Musk? Well, if you are the world’s first trillionaire and expect to take home $45 billion in 2024 alone, the cost of Twitter (NASA’s Apollo moon landing mission from 1960 to 1973, by comparison, cost $25.8 billion) represents to Musk about what middle class USAnians would spend for a gym membership or trips to the hair salon or barber. Do you care if it is losing money? Do most of the owners of professional sports teams or thoroughbred racehorses care if they lose more often than they win? A little. But these are hobbies, and the rewards are not all monetary. For Musk, control of minds is far more important than recovering his investment.
Next week: Part Two: Prying the Billionaires’ Hands off Democracy. How a new generation of Luddites are combatting the control freaks.
Meanwhile, let’s end these wars. We support peace in the West Bank and Gaza and the efforts to bring an immediate cessation to the war. Global Village Institute’s Peace Thru Permaculture initiative has sponsored the Green Kibbutz network in Israel and the Marda Permaculture Farm in the West Bank for over 30 years and will continue to do so, with your assistance. We aid Ukrainian families seeking refuge in ecovillages and permaculture farms along the Green Road and work to heal collective trauma everywhere through the Pocket Project. You can read all about it on the Global Village Institute website (GVIx.org). Thank you for your support.
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#RestorationGeneration.
當人類被關在籠内，地球持續美好，所以，給我們的教訓是:
人類毫不重要，空氣，土壤，天空和流水没有你們依然美好。
所以當你們走出籠子的時候，請記得你們是地球的客人，不是主人。
When humans are locked in a cage, the earth continues to be beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is: Human beings are not important. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.
We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the great old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. It is not too late. All of these great works are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize, not destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.
Daniel Sallberg, welcome to FB jail. I've been here for a couple years. They don't give you any appeal. And the food sucks. But you are in good company.
I've been reading your column since the Stephen Gaskin memorial in 2014. I got a little heavy handed with the Substack Posts and have now been in Facebook Jail for several weeks.