1984: Thread

[grarpamp]

Our Two Deep States: One Public, One Private

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2023/05/our-two-deep-states-one-public-one.html

One Deep State is bad enough, but a renegade, predatory private-sector
Deep State is intolerable.

In 2007, well before the term Deep State entered the common lexicon, I
sketched the interconnected public-private pieces of the Deep State,
which I termed the elite maintaining and extending global dominance.
This diagram doesn't make all the connections or list all the
consequential nodes of influence of course, but you get the idea:
elected officials, i.e. "democracy," play a modest role in the entire
structure, which displays remarkable continuity regardless of which
politicians and parties are currently in power.

That's the whole idea, of course: continuity that can't be disrupted
by an election.

What's changed is the emergence of a private-sector Deep State--a.k.a.
Big Tech--that has established unprecedented power outside the control
of elected officials even as it continues to play ball with the
traditional public-sector dominated Deep State of the alphabet federal
agencies and informal public-private sector ties.

This private-sector Deep State is free to pursue its own agenda of
information-gathering and selling, surveillance, influence and
profit-maximizing monopolies while seeming to serve the traditional
Deep State as information-collecting and censorship services.

What makes Big Tech a private-sector Deep State is that nobody outside
the corporations knows precisely what's in their databases and
algorithms or the extent of their capabilities. Sure, they share
information with the traditional Deep State players, and censor
whomever it's "suggested" they censor / shadow-ban, but that transfer
isn't 100% of what Big Tech has in hand. All that transfer is just
enough to appear to be playing ball so Big Tech can "suggest" OK,
we've done our part, now leave us alone.

The problem with both Deep States is there is no recourse within the
system for those censored / shadow-banned, those being tracked, those
whose data is being siphoned off and sold to whomever offers a hefty
sum of cash, and so on. The basic idea of the US Constitution is that
every citizen has some recourse via the judicial or political systems
should the state (government) or private entities overstep the
boundaries established by the Constitution.

Citizens have no recourse against the predations of Big Tech or the
traditional Deep State. Um, hello there, Big Tech, could you please
share precisely how and when I've been shadow-banned, who else has
copies of the data you've collected about me and how much you "earned"
selling my data to third parties? What's actually in your AI tools?
Does any public agency have any real oversight power over all the
looting, pillaging and predation you're pursuing?

So sorry (heh), you agreed to our terms of service which grant us all
the rights and our algorithms and databases are protected proprietary
corporate property. So blow chow, pal, you have no recourse. We're a
corporation, we have rights; you're only a citizen, you have none. You
currently have permission to post photos of puppies and kittens, so
just enjoy the photos of puppies and kittens and be happy you haven't
yet been digitally erased entirely.

Um, hello there, Alphabet-Soup Agency, could I please have all the
files you've assembled on me? Yes, there is a protocol for requesting
information (the Freedom of Information Act FOIA), but there are
exemptions and delays, so don't hold your breath.

Meanwhile, the nation careens into an era of Polycrisis, defined as a
cluster of related global risks with compounding effects, such that
the overall impact exceeds the sum of each part. This is of course a
classic description of emergent systems, which display characteristics
that differ from those generated by each individual component.

I've sketched out a few of these dynamics in the chart below of
overlapping crises.

At the same time, the global status quo, regardless of political
flavor, is sliding down the backside of the S-Curve (see graph below).
Everything that was considered a dependable solution is now the
problem. There are no solutions within the existing status quo, and so
everyone has no choice but to do more of what's failed spectacularly.

There are no perfect, sacrifice-free fixes to the demise of the
debt-funded, waste is growth / Landfill Global Economy, but a good
start would be bringing the private-sector Deep State of Big Tech to
heel, stripping it of its opacity and powers, relegating everything
Big Tech does or attempts to a tightly regulated utility with
transparent public oversight.

One Deep State is bad enough, but a renegade, predatory private-sector
Deep State is intolerable. It goes almost without saying that I've
been shadow-banned for the past 7 years (revealed by the bogus
PropOrNot hit list), if not longer, but the mechanisms of this
censorship are opaque, not just to me but to the elected branches of
government and the shadow-realm of the traditional Deep State.

*  *  *

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