It’s October 7th. Year two. I felt like I should write something but to be honest not much is coming out. What else is there to say? Too many words have been written and too many murders have been witnessed online with little impact. I wrote on October 9th two years ago that Israel and its supporters would very likely take the path of genocide…and indeed they took it.
From the vantage point of being here in America, the slaughter in Gaza is just a particularly grisly example of the many demons that plague this empire/managed industrial democracy — demons that not only drive the genocide but touch almost every part of life…ecological, financial… We are all too far removed from issues that matter most to us and have no power over the forces that govern our lives. And so everyone’s political energies are directed into the Spectacle — to bear witness, to rage, to comment, to learn, to obsessively read, to mock, to argue with people on line. In fact you could say the lack of political power is inversely proportional to the amount of time we spend in the Spectacle. The Spectacle gives us the illusion of power…of doing something…of projecting our will and being into the world. I’m not on social media as much as I used to be but its interesting to watch as more and more people turning to AI not to have their questions answered but to mediate their interactions with other people online — they can’t do it themselves anymore…they need the computer to interpret the social world now, too. The Spectacle is folding in on itself, requiring more and more mediation from the Spectacle.
With Gaza, I can’t help but think about the internet. The internet was sold to us as a technology of personal empowerment. And yet in Gaza we are seeing the first live-streamed genocide with the most grizzly murders brought to us in HD video. Billions of people know what’s happening there. It has turned many against zionism and Israel and America. And yet the slaughter and the starvation continues. Gaza has confirmed what has long been obvious to me: information is not power. Organization is power. And the internet, as far as we its users are concerned, is anti-organization. The internet is an atomizing technology. It’s not a surprise. It was, after all, developed by the Pentagon for pacification — a tool to centralize power in the hands of America’s military technocracy.
I believe that internet is a vampiric force — even the good things it gives us come with a hidden cost. It’s a poison chalice, no matter what you pour into it. I also believe people will need to radically minimize their contact with the internet — to figure some balance between the virtual and the real…a balance that tips way more towards the real. The internet is designed to funnel vast amounts of information into our minds to the point that information has become necrotic. Peeling ourselves away from this technology is not going to be easy. This tech was created to be addictive — it was created to replace real social interactions…to make the virtual seem more real. And so we won’t be able to dump this parasite individually. It’s a social parasite so we’ll need other people. But it will have to start at an individual level. The realization and the desire and the initiative will have to start with you and me. We’ll need to want to leave. Wanting to leave is the first step.
Anyway…Stop the genocide, free Gaza, and free the Palestinian people. I write these words as they go out in the Spectacle, convincing no one that doesn’t already agree.
—Yasha
INFORMATION IS NOT POWER. INFORMATION IS PACIFICATION.
Procrastinating while I’m supposed to be working on Episode Zero of Vampire Valley…so I wrote this to add to the general theme. Gather around everyone because I’m going to talk about something that’s taboo among the political influencer class. I see myself as a whistleblower…a traitor to my own class. Who knows…
Information without power is impotent. Power without information is erratic. We need both to be effective. Yes, information alone cannot shut down the Gaza genocide. But information has changed the landscape of power. Witness the huge demos in Europe. Witness the new laws restricting speech and assembly in the UK (which, btw, are also tanking the legitimacy of the mainstream parties and media). Witness too the rush to control all sources of information (tik tok, the “anti-semitic (sarc) CBS news). Why try to control it if it has no bearing on power? Why spend billions to manage the news if the news/info makes no difference? It doesnt, and I bet you know this too.
Where you are absolutely right is that we need more than info. We need power and given the lay of the neo-liberal land for the vast majority this can only come via organizing structures of resistance. This project also requires information, but also much much more. So, your take on the Spectacle is cute, but I doubt that you really believe it as stated.
I think AI is unintentionally doing the job for us: once all digital content are easily falsifiable and most is no longer generated by humans, the only purpose for the internet is fantasy. It becomes unusable or valueless since the information quality itself drops to zero. I think this will be accompanied by censorship as well, because why not?
And once governments further weaken protections on financial data and identity, it no longer is a safe place to do business.
Likewise human created things, even what was thought of as ridiculous crap become valuable niche commodities by virtue of being made by real people, the same way organic food became marketable with the emergence of factory farming.