Facebook and The Matrix Conspiracy
Credit: Tesfu Assefa
With my concept of The Matrix Conspiracy I put myself in the risk of being accused of being a paranoid conspiracy theorist (see my article The Matrix Conspiracy). This is not the case. My concept is a theory of conspiracy and not a conspiracy theory.
My main question is: What if it is the conspiracy theories (and their roots in the growing anti-intellectual movement) which are a conspiracy? – see my article Anti-intellectualism and Anti-science. The concept of the Matrix comes from mathematics, but is more popular known from the movie the Matrix, which asks the question whether we might live in a computer simulation. In The Matrix though, there is also an evil demon, or evil demons, namely the machines which keep the humans´ in tanks linked to black cable wires that stimulates the virtual reality of the Matrix. Doing this the machines can use the human bodies as batteries that supply the machines with energy. This leads of course to questions of evil scientists, Sophists, etc. It is the fascination of the virtual reality that deceives the humans. My main critique of the matrix conspiracy is that we in fact see powerful people who find it desirable to live in a computer simulation, a virtual reality game of some sort, and therefore paradoxically enough come to supports the machines in the movie, and put up philosophies like Agent Smith could have done. This weirdness origins in the so-called California Ideology, with a lot of computer worshippers called transhumanists and singularitarians. These people are quite open about that they would like us to melt together with machines and computers, and therewith solve all human problems. The path towards this are, for example, through techniques such as whole brain emulation and mind uploading (read a detailed analysis of this in my Ebook Evolutionism – The Red Thread in The Matrix Conspiracy. It is far-streched? You would never be in for this, would you? The consequence of evolutionism, and futurism, is that the line between fact and fiction is getting more and more blurred. A common trope in science fiction for decades is that the prospect of transcending the current form may be positive, as in Arthur C. Clarke's 1953 novel Childhood's End, or negative, as in the film The Matrix, with its barely disguised salvationist theme, or the Terminator series of films, where humanity has been essentially replaced by machine life. Change so radical elicits fear and thus it is unsurprising that many of the portrayals of transhumanism in popular culture are negative. The cyberpunk genre (foe example Blade Runner) deals extensively with the theme of a transhumanist society gone wrong. Most people would probably support that the prospect is negative. But this is not the view of The Californian Ideology (The Silicon Valley futurism). They are following Arthur C. Clarke. They are evolutionists and progressivists. Futurism as the ideology of Silicon Valley sees transhumanism as positive. On closer inspection, this should not be surprising. Since transhumanism is ambitious about conquering age-related illnesses (extropianism), death (immortalism), ecological damage (technogaianism), gender differences (postgenderism) and suffering (abolitionism), a fictional world where this has already been achieved leaves a story with few plot devices to exploit. Additionally, it could be hard for the public to identify with flawless, post-human characters. The fact is that Silicon Valley is in progress with indoctrinating people into their ideology. It happens for example by making people fascinated by virtual reality. And you are one of them, right? How much time do you for example spend on Facebook daily? (besides that you probably are aware that your children are spending too much time on computer games). You have probably watched and agreed with dystopian movies like Terminator and Blade Runner, but you probably haven´t realized, that Facebook is the closest we come to a real existing Matrix Machine. In the Popular Culture and Philosophy series on Facebook, Trebor Scholz has written an article called Facebook as Playground and Factory, where he gives an account of Facebook as a clever mix of playground and factory. He asks: “You can´t look at what we are doing on Facebook without noticing something, however. Do you see it? If you rent a room in an apartment then you first buy a bed, a chair, a few things for the kitchen. You pay what you owe to the landlady and then you cook, sleep, play, work, and invite others over to have a party. You´re allowed to do all these things because you paid your bill. On Facebook, the “free” services that we are consuming come at a price. All of our actions produce value for Facebook and other companies (“third parties”). Broadly speaking, labor markets have shifted to places where labor does not look like labor at all.” Our power of togetherness is facilitated in exchange for letting operators – in this case, Facebook – harness the “energy” from our casual interactions. In the midst of pleasure, excitement, and possibilities of our togetherness, you and me and our networked publics are being “worked.” We are becoming “social workers.” We are social and we are working in the sense that we are producing economical value: both speculative value (Scholz asks us to think: Tulip Mania of 1637, dot com crash, Lehman brothers) and tangible value in terms of dollars in the bank. As Tim O´Reilly says, “They are participating without thinking that they participate. That´s where the power comes.” Scholz claims that the “power” that O´Reilly refers to is “power” in the sense of a “power plant”: energy that can be stored and harnessed. Without much struggle, corporations turn a profit through activities that most of us would never think of as “labor” or even work. The invisible labor that follows our rituals of interactivity creates surplus value. Social participation is the oil of the digital economy. Scholz admits that it´s counterintuitive to think about time spend on social networking services as labor or wage theft. Sitting in front of our computers, staring at glowing screens, engaging our brain, moving our computer mouse around, clicking, and occasionally writing an update does not look or smell anything like the industrial labor environment. It´s hard to pin down. But when we do even the smallest of these things we are complicit in this “interactivity labor.” Our bodies are placed in the working position before even noticing it. It´s not a matter of opting in. Nor is it a matter of opting out. We all must admit that a big achievement of capitalism, really, is to make workers believe that digital labor does not exist. But even when we realize we are being “used,” that dawning awareness is often quickly superseded by the experience of pleasure in the activities themselves. And we may not mind it much. After all, being used is a lot different from being “duped,” right? It looks like a fair deal: on the other hand, we´re constantly reminded that the operator has tremendously operational costs – bandwidth is expensive, servers need to be run, and developers won´t work without pay. And then, some want us to believe that most mainstream operators don´t even make “real” money, which is not entirely accurate. Scholtz shows that we produce economic value for Facebook in numerous ways, but for the sake of simplicity we can break it down into a few basic categories: 1. Garnering attention for advertisers; 2. Donating unpaid services and volunteer work; and 3. Offering complexes of network data and digital traces to researchers and marketers. The first one – attention to advertisers – is the one we are most familiar with from TV, radio, and billboards. The second recalls good old-fashioned modes of exploitation and expropriation, and the third takes us into the murky terrain of total knowledge production. While far from unique to the commercial Social Web, each of these modes of creating value has implications that are made more acute and striking in this context. The Return of the Sophists The so-called ”Californian Ideology” have emerged promoting a form of techno-utopia as a reachable goal. "The Californian Ideology" is a 1995 essay by English media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron of the University of Westminster. Barbrook describes it as a "critique of dotcom neoliberalism". In the essay, Barbrook and Cameron argue that the rise of networking technologies in Silicon Valley in the 1990s was linked to American neoliberalism and a paradoxical hybridization of beliefs from the political left and right in the form of hopeful technological determinism. The Californian Ideology is based on evolutionism, which very shortly said is a linear view of history which are describing a forward movement of constantly progress and innovation. It is a worship of the up-cycles of life. The problem is that it ignores that life also consists of down-cycles. Evolutionism is based on optimism and positive thinking, and are avoiding to see the negative sides of life. It is avoiding seeing the human painbody, or the human shadow side (see my article The Emotional Painbody and Why Psychotherapy Can´t Heal It). In his book Antisocial Media – How Facebook disconnect Us and Undermines Democracy, Siva Vaidhyanathan explains what the consequences are when The Silicon Valley ideologists ignore this dark human trait. He claims that Facebook is a story of the hubris of good intentions, a missionary spirit, and an ideology that sees computer code as the universal solvent for all human problems. And it´s an indictment of how social media has fostered the deterioration of democratic and intellectual culture around the world. Silicon Valley grew out of a widespread cultural commitment to data-driven decision-making and logical thinking. Its culture is explicitly cosmopolitan and tolerant of difference and dissent (the postmodern relativism). Both its market orientation and its labor force (included the Facebook users) are global. Silicon Valley also indulges a strong missionary bent, one that preaches the power of connectivity and the spread of knowledge to empower people to change their lives for the better. But Vaidhyanathan asks: “So how did the greatest Silicon Valley success end up hosting radical, nationalist, anti-Enlightenment movements that revolt against civic institutions and cosmopolitans? How did such an enlightened firm become complicit in the rise of nationalists such as Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte, and ISIS? How did the mission go so wrong?” I say: because of the denial of the dark side of life. Facebook is the paradigmatic distillation of the Silicon Valley ideology. No company better represents the dream of a fully connected planet “sharing” words, ideas, images, and plans. No company has better leveraged those ideas into wealth and influence. No company has contributed more to the paradoxical collapse of basic tenets of deliberation and democracy. Evolutionism and The Californian Ideology have fertilized the ground for the return of the Sophists, and a global spreading anti-intellectual and anti-scientific movement (about the Sophists, see the last part of my article The Matrix Conspiracy). The problem is much more dangerous than Donald Trump, much larger than the United States. Vaidhyanathan claims that the autocrat, the de-territorialized terrorist organization, the insurgent group, the prankster, and the internet troll share a relationship to the truth: they see it as beside the point. If they can get the rest of us scrambling to find our balance, they have achieved their goals. Those who oppose or dismiss democracy and the deliberation and debate that make democracy possible do not care whether claims are true or false, or even how widely they are accepted as true. What matters is that a loud voice disrupts the flow of discourse, and that all further argument will be centered on the truth of the claim itself rather than on a substantive engagement with facts. Power is all that matters when trust and truth crumble. Much of the world is suddenly engaged in a reignited battle over truth and trust. “Credibility” and “authority” seem to be quaint, weak concepts. Experts are derided for their elitism, their choice to reside in comfortable social and intellectual bubbles. Scientific methods are dismissed for reflecting class interests of the scientists and institutions that produce and certify knowledge. Vast bodies of knowledge are doubted repeatedly by elected officials through powerful media outlets to the point where substantial portions of Americans have cease to believe basic facts about the oceans that are rising around them. Across the globe communities of doubters invite renewed outbreaks of deadly measles among children because publicity-seeking, soft-minded doubters have fooled just enough parents into believing that the risks of vaccines outweigh the benefits (Oprah Winfrey is considered a larger medical authority than the medical experts). Journalism has collapsed as both a practice and an industry as advertisement revenue fled to online platforms and a cacophony of new voices asserted their newfound potency, certified by high Google search ranks or millions of Twitter followers. Vaidhyanathan says that the erosion of truth and trust is more acute in the United States than it is in Canada, The United Kingdom, France, or Germany. But much of the rest of the world is shaking as well, since America is the leading storyteller. We see how authoritarian governments assumed control of Turkey, Hungary, and Poland and economic and political chaos has tested institutions in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece in recent years. Pluralistic, liberal democracy finds too little favor these days in Russia, India, the Philippines, or Venezuela. Democracy has seen better days in Brazil and Mexico, both of which danced for a while with competitive elections and peaceful transitions of power, only to see traditions of grift and graft creep back again. Egypt flashed an interest in democracy, then quickly reverted to brutal military rule. Tunisia and Myanmar offer some hope for the sort of transitions to democracy and the rule of law we so recently celebrated as the emerging norm, but ethic and sectarian strife threaten to bludgeon any hopes in both of those countries. I have warned against the return of the Sophists many times. The whole debate between the Sophists and philosophy (Socrates), which Plato´s work was all about, is back. Also Vaidhyanathan believes this. He says that sophistry is the dominant cultural practice of the moment. People can´t agree. We can´t agree on what distinguishes a coherent argument from a rhetorical stunt. But despite the erosion of trust in long-established institutions, there are, according to Vaidhyanathan, two sources of trust that are growing in their power to claim truth: Google and Facebook. Americans trust Google search results and links much more than they trust traditional news outlets. My own concern here is the original wisdom traditions. New Age, with its infringement of experience and tradition, have completely taken over the internet so that everytime you do a google search on spiritual topics, you will find links to New Age websites. With New Age we are in this way witnessing an exploitative form of colonialism and one step in the destruction of, first the indigenous cultures (see my article Plastic Shamanism), and eventually all the original wisdom traditions. The latter is happening through the mantra about that these traditions best can be understood through Western psychology and psychotherapy (= reduced to, and therefore reduced to subjectivism). I have mentioned this kind of “google spirituality” in my articles The Conspiracy of the Third Eye, and Why I Don´t Teach Tibetan Dream Yoga. Google is, with the words of Stewart Justman, a “Fool´s Paradise”. And Facebook users judge the trustworthiness of information that comes across their News Feed based on who posted it rather than the source of the original post itself. Many people judge whether a claim is true or false based on how much prominence Google gives it or which of their Facebook Friends choose to push it forward to others. Vaidhyanathan believes that we are collectively worse off because of Facebook. If you wanted to build a machine that would distribute propaganda to millions of people, distract them from important issues, energize hatred and bigotry, erode social trust, undermine journalism, foster doubts about science, and engage in massive surveillance all at once, you would make something a lot like Facebook. Vaidhyanathan asks you to step back from your experience for a moment. Would the world be better today if Facebook had never been invented? If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, as Twitter could at any time unless it figures out how to make money, would the world improve? Vaidhyanathan claims that there is a strong case for the affirmative. While the Guardian story you encountered yesterday might have led you to a new novel or an interesting thinker, millions of others came across a story from Breitbart.com that drove up the barometer of bigotry in our society. Someone else decided not to vaccinate a baby because of something she read on Facebook. Someone else now believes climate change is a conspiracy constructed by Big Science. So, what we are facing with The Californian Ideology, is the return of the Sophists, who come in the disguise of philosophers and scientists. Following the Californian Ideology and its technological utopianism, they are all in for scientism, the ideology of science: the believe that you can do philosophy instead of the philosophers, and then avoid the difficult task of philosophical argumentation, by claiming that what you do is science. It is people who are suffering from the thought distortion called The Illusion of Transferable Expertise. It is typical people who are educated in a single branch of science, and then want this single branch to be the answer to all philosophical questions (this trend are followed by hordes of amateurs, or people with credentials from diploma mills or private weekend-educations). But the people with actual educations are typical computer programmers, biologists, psychologists or physicists, who have a very limited understanding of philosophy, or rather: a lack of a basic understanding of that they are doing philosophy and not science. The result is the spread of junk philosophy, and the first step in the destruction of philosophy. You could term them Matrix Sophists. Below is a list of people whom I have examined in The Matrix Dictionary (the list will be updated in line with that new Matrix Sophists pops up on the internet): British Matrix Sophists: Stephen Hawking (in popular culture believed to be one of the greatest scientists ever, but in reality he has made very limited scientific innovation, before he became inflated by The Illusion of Transferable Expertise. Is known for leading Nietzsche´s claim that “God is Dead” a step further, and pronouncing that “Philosophy is Dead”, and that science from now on has taken over, where after he spends the rest of his life doing what he just had pronounced dead: philosophy, or rather: junk philosophy). Richard Dawkins (in popular culture believed to be "the greatest scientist since Darwin" but in reality he has made no scientific innovation at all. Most of his ideas are based on those of others. He has come up with an idea of the Meme, though. An idea which only can be described as a pseudoscientific fantasy). Rupert Sheldrake American Matrix Sophists: Ken Wilber (in popular culture believed to be the greatest philosopher in history. In reality his work is a plagiarism of different historicist thinkers, who, like himself, were fascinated by evolutionism. He has hereafter replaced their words with his own words. The same trick is seen in New Age systems such as The WingMakers Project and The Human Design System). Robert Lanza (in popular culture believed to have created a scientific paradigm shift with his concept of Biocentrism. But biocentrism is just a reworded version of something which has been known in philosophy for hundreds of years; philosophical idealism, a metaphysical theory, that ends in psychologism/solipsism. Lanza combines it with quantum mysticism and a scientific sounding language, and hopes that no one with knowledge in philosophy will discover his plagiarism). Bruce Lipton (doing the same as Lanza) Gregg Braden (doing the same as Lanza) Joe Dispenza (a chiropractor who likes to call himself a neuroscientist and brain expert, and title himself Dr. Joe. Dispenza is also all in for Lanza). David Jay Brown (doing the same as Lanza combined with psychedelics and plastic shamanism). Deepak Chopra (doing the same as Lanza) Nassim Haramein (an amateur physicist who in popular culture is known as a nobel prize candidate for having solved Einstein's Field Equations. We are still waiting for the prize. Haramein is doing the same as Lanza). Source book: Facebook and Philosophy - What´s on Your Mind? (edited by D.E. Wittkower), Open Court, Chicago. Related texts: The Californian Ideology, by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron Evolutionism – The Red Thread in The Matrix Conspiracy (Ebook) The Matrix Conspiracy Updates |
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