Vampire Valley: A toilet manifesto about the internet

Four Lions

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I published a video sneak peak of Episode Zero yesterday. And as you probably noticed I’m really trying to get close to half-coherent internet assassin/suicide bomber aesthetic in the intro. Figured I’d post it in text form, too, in case the FBI or Ken Klippenstein ever want to get their hands on it in the future.

—Yasha Levine

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I’m sitting here in the bathroom…recording this transmission. A bathroom is a good place to be. No windows. No line of sight. It’s safe. And you can’t be too safe these days…

I want to say a little bit about myself for everyone who doesn’t know me. I’m Yasha Levine. I’m 44 years old. I was born in Leningrad and moved to America was I nine. Spent a good chunk of my childhood in San Francisco. For most of my adult life I’ve worked as a journalist. The profession no longer really exists anymore. Everyone is an influencer now. Everyone is trying to ride the attention market, doing whatever it takes to get people to look at them…to get people to notice if only for a few seconds. I’ll admit I haven’t been able to keep up with the changing times that well. I haven’t been getting enough views and clicks and likes to stay relevant. It’s a brutal war for your attention out there and I guess I don’t have what it takes.

You can say I’ve been failing, but I don’t really think it’s my fault. It’s the system. It’s been conspiring against me…it’s been conspiring against all of us.

Some years back I wrote a book called Surveillance Valley. The book uncovered a repressed chapter in the history of the internet — a part of the origin story that those who control this thing did not want us to know. My discovery was that the internet was born out of America’s pacification efforts during the Vietnam War — developed because the Pentagon needed to better defeat insurgencies and wars of liberation in Southeast Asia and Latin America…and also inside America itself. What became clear to me as I uncovered that history was that the internet, going right back to the 1960s and 1970s, had been about surveillance and social control. These things aren’t new — they’ve been baked into the very origins of this technology.

Close to a decade has passed since I wrote that book. Looking back on my work now, I realize that in Surveillance Valley was more right than I thought. At the same time, that it did not go far enough. Despite all the complexity and weirdness and commercialization of the internet today, the technology is still very much about pacification — pacification is at the core of the internet today…even if those who control and own this technology don’t fully realize it. The internet now — in its full consumerist development — is much powerful as a pacification technology than anything that America’s technocratic planners had envisioned a half-century ago, when this tech was still very primitive and was really little more than a collection of primitive databases and messaging services tied together by extremely slow modems. The internet mediates the modern world…its role now is to keep atomized and distracted…to keep us all apart. I’ve come to believe that the internet is now a purely negative force — even the good things it gives us come with hidden costs that massively outweigh the benefits. The internet, as it exists now, should be destroyed.

I’m gonna be making a documentary series about the internet. It’ll be about how the internet has become a vampiric technology — about how it caught us in its parasitic embrace, draining us of life. I’m doing this not so much for the old people like me…or people who are older than me. I’m doing this for the young people out there — people who have grown up their entire lives surrounded by the internet. People who don’t know that another world is possible.

And I’m not here to entertain you — although you might be entertained at times and you might even laugh a little. No, I have a very specific goal in mind. I want to poison your relationship with this technology. I want to convince you the internet was never your friend. I want you to use your phone and laptop and tablet with disgust. I want you to become aware of the parasitic force feeding on our lives…that it’s keeping from being free.

To see the rest…watch this video. And support our work!

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Vampire Valley: a toilet manifesto about the internet [VIDEO]