Excerpt from the first iteration of my article on Bannon, Mercer, Facebook and Cambridge Analytica on Medium, 2016
The oligarchs, technocrats, kleptocrats, scions of kleptocrats, and illicit power brokers, who thought that the sophisticated and popularly unsuspected covert psyops and cyber-warfare waged in the criminal state of Putin’s Russia and the NSA of Snowdon’s day could be flown under the radar in the contemporary West with impunity, are due to find out otherwise. Blinded by power, the ready cash of money-laundering cash dumps by Eastern European oligarchs, the Saudis, Emirates and other dynastic oil states, and dazzled by the illusion of protection and insulation afforded by inordinate privilege, the scions of aspiring kleptocrats, the junior Trumps and increasingly solitary Kushner, will fare no better.
A motivated public, at least as motivated as Mr. Mercer, needs to push to get the corporate/technocratic ideologues’ methodologies and practices examined on social reform, the public welfare, and consumer/voter protection grounds. But first and foremost, we need to educate ourselves about the phenomenon and publicize the issue. Few know this is even happening, or that it’s changing, and has already changed, their world so as to cause it to become virtually unrecognizable over just a few months, and making the principles of democracy practicably moot.
Carole Cadwalladr at the London Guardian is an intrepid investigative journalist on this topic. Her three-part series on these companies’ roles in the Brexit win spurred several government investigations of these new technologies and campaign-funding money flows in Britain.
After having successfully socially-engineered Brexit and the Trump victories, as well as a roster of less well-known psyops coups worldwide, all masquerading as democratic process and coming under the radar of local campaigning laws, the activities of psi-corps operations like Cambridge Analytica, Alamo, and AggregateIQ are in desperate need of regulation and ethical oversight. It is to be hoped that these types of psychographic behavioral modification measures, mounted by corporate technocrats rooted in the time-worn values of the military-industrial complex, shall not prevail in the end. As Luciano Floridi said in a recent opinion piece for The Guardian (Floridi, November 29, 2016),[19] “[w]e need to shape and guide the future of the digital, and stop making it up as we go along. It is time to work on an innovative blueprint for a better kind of infosphere.”
~ Excerpt from the first iteration of my article on Bannon, Mercer, Facebook and Cambridge Analytica on Medium, 2016
