Showing posts with label Guardian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Guardian. Show all posts

The Great Hack - a review.

The Great Hack.

How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political power to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the twentieth century.” ~ Aneurin Bevan 


I just watched 'The Great Hack' on Netflix.

I watched it twice, just to make sure I was clear on what I thought it was, and editing this months later, I have to adjust my position, I have more information.

Now on 24th June 2020, having read 'Zucked',  I am about to start on Christopher Wylie's 'Mindf*ck'.

I will be reappraising my stance as a result and will edit this piece, or write a part two, as a follow up, to show what I am learning as I travel.

The online user-content-creator social media in general is an advertisers landscape : We create content on our timelines, that content tells facebook a lot about our psychologies.

Google+, Youtube, Amazon and Facebook's management and business model, the techniques they use to expand their business, and their willingness to make advertising revenue by selling access to their users psychologies, with intimate specificity through micro-targeting.

The lure to advertisers is founded on intimate psychological data gathering of the users likes, dislikes, key strokes, reactions, engagements, fears, rages etc, which users agree to, even if we do not fully understand what that means.  As Bill Hick put it  they are working ' the outrage dollar' or the 'fear dollar' ...

It is true Facebook does not sell your data - it is too valuable a resource for them. They hold that data and it is their feedstock for advertisers seeking to reach precise target groups. Facebook also allows the advertisers to work on any targeted group, to observe how effective their adverts are, what ways targets are responding to various versions of the content, and it enables them to use that information in real time to refine the content and enhance the effectiveness of the advertisments. 

This is relatively innocent, until a bad actor pays to target deliberately manipulative content at specific groups of vulnerable people, and enhance that for political, ideological or economic gain. And when the bad actor is spending millions of dollars a week, or billions in an election, all classed as 'advertising' then the platform becomes a vector of abuse. The platform does not create the abuse, it allows the abuse to occur.

These Companies have no functional ethical or moral code. They permit all the tactics of narcissistic bullying across their platforms, knowing it causes real harm, under the fig leaf of 'freedom of speech'. That is the problem. A bit like The Vatican.

Bill Hicks was on point in this beautiful routine.



They - the social media giants - are not the origin of such behaviours.

Most official News and Press media and all entertainment and all marketing revel in such tactics to increase sales and profitability. The Bible is as fine an example of this as any document I know of. 

Telling people what to think.

I have written much about that subject on this blog over the past decade. What they appear to be doing is knowingly, if not intentionally, enabling and profiteering from these behaviours across their services because a lot of people are vulnerable to manipulation, and there is a dysfuctional vulnerablity dollar out there, for marketers to exploit.

My apologies to Carol Cadwalladr for misunderstanding her perspective. Her work and that of other journalists and, importantly, the whistle blowers like Mr. Wylie and Ms. Kaiser is really critically important work.


-----.What follows is the original piece.

It was not about a hack at all.

Hacking is gaining unauthorised access to a prohibited computer system and injecting novel code into it to play with it, extract information, undermine it etc...

Cambridge Analytica is not a hacking operation.

Though it has been associated with hacking in the Nigerian Elections in 2015, with Cambridge analytica staff organising the hacking the emails of the Nigerian President to bring him down during an election Not that that was mentioned in this 'documentary'.

Not enough time, really. There is a lot in this documentary.

The narrative presented in 'The Great Hack' was carefully designed to avoid the simple truth that all mainstream news that carries advertising, are also being utilised as political grooming devices and that many are actively aware of that and unwilling to do anything reasonable about it.

The Sun, Telegraph and the Daily Mail, the Guardian, the Independent and the Mirror, they all carry propaganda posing as news.

The narrative in The Hack was also to seek to blame Facebook, and the Tech companies, rather than talk about political grooming, seriously.

In essence a deflection
 

Another way to say it this : no one talked intelligently about political grooming.
 

As a cultural and politically institutionalised dynamic of abuse carried out in the public domain, a form of bullying, that is the mainstay of advertising, marketing, religious indoctrination and propaganda.

Jeremy Corbyn is not an anti-semite, racist, terrorist supporting politician; he is exactly the opposite.
 

The press bullying of him, and his strength of character, are an object lesson in how to deal with public bullies.

Here's my take on the 'documentary'...

 
Ms. Kaiser is no ordinary whistle blower...

 
Ms Kaiser worked for the Obama Election campaign, a proven grooming operation - I said so at the time, even without understanding the way online micro targeting was being weaponised by groups such as Cambridge Analytica, because I was paying attention to the funding drives on facebook, and to the mainstream print and broadcast campaigns. And because it's been the basic dynamic of neoliberal 'democracy' for a long time and I understood that no rational citizen would ever vote for policies that cause harm to his or her own community, voters are not that irrational.


Ms. Kaiser was involved in  the 2015 Nigerian Election campaign, where she introduced a team of Israeli specialists to the Cambridge Analytica team,  who had hacked the incumbent Nigerian President's emails...

Cambridge Analytica ran campaigns for right wing candidates in a number of third world countries, to earn a few bob and to prove the efficacy of the model, before going on to the really big bucks. 68 countiries, and probably more. Hundreds of elections.

Trumps Election 2016 campaign spent just under one hundred million US dollars on their facebook messaging.

 

Ms. Kaiser worked on Trump's campaign at the very core of it's Facebook operations, fully aware of what she was doing. She was at the very center of this. She knew they were targeting peoples biases, fears, insecurities and prejudice in order to exploit those for political gain.

The term for this activity is grooming.

It is taboo to say this out loud. "shhhhhhhshshs!"

Ms. Kaiser mentioned the use of weaponised communications tactics, which are apparently 'restricted' by the Department of Defence. I would say that  every Instiotutional Religion deploys the exact same behaviour. Indoctrination of the faithful. Such practice is normative in violent hierarchies. Spreading stories, maintaining a narrative, optics, favours and punishment.
 
I would take issue with Carole Cadwalladr's effort to load all the blame to Facebook and the Tech companies. They are liable and culpable, I agree, yet not singularly so. That has to be called out - the general practice of targeting known cognitive biases (vulnerability) ought itself be declared a criminal offence, as it is an abusive thing to do to another person.

Alexander Nix 

Included in the 'documentary' was two brief sections covering Alexander Nix, the CEO of CA.

His boasting at a dinner meeting about CA's abilities, and his recalcitrant appearance before the House of Commons Committee Hearings on Fake News, where he got off very lightly.

Cambridge Analytica was shut down due to bankruptcy, - such a difficult decision to make (not), and so much money already banked, lives ruined and it is likely that the bulk of their files are now missing, destroyed or lost, etc  -  there's a hole in the evidence set.

Well, well, well.

If you wish to check the nature of the Observer and The Guardian take a peek at Medialens a UK based news media analysis website which has, since 2001, confronted the propaganda that gets passed off as 'news reporting' - in effect misleading readerships in line with existing established political hegemony via the readerships triggering their cognitive biases, or as I would call it, the grooming of ordinary folk via opinion posing as evidence (WMD) in the UK media.

Chomksy called that process of propaganda the manufacturing of consent.

www.medialens.org is well worth a look.

The Great Hack

I found The Great Hack riveting - and yet I felt it was somehow dishonest. That said, everyone might want to to watch it, and note how we, in our own unique case, are being mislead - turn the exercise into a learning by experience.

It also tried to pass off Russian influence on UK voting as a major influential factor, which is inaccurate -  all competing powers brief against their perceived opponents, through various media outlets. That is standard practice, and no great secret or conspiracy. It rarely has any meaningful effect upon the target populations elections.

The major effective malign influences are always homegrown. The home government has more to fear from a people who realise they are being bullied than any other external state or agency.

In this previous posting, I outlined in the most precise and concise terms, the true nature of political grooming gangs.

Let's have a laugh!

Boris Johnson's £10 million grooming operation will go nowhere near his hair or his crumpled suits...

and


"You've been Groomed!"

New Reality Show Pitch.

'Enjoy the thrills and spills of indoctrinators, indoctrination and the indoctrinated as our intrepid reporter takes you on a journey of discovery, breakdown and release."

pitched to ITV, BBC, CNN etc...

all rejected it as 'improbable'.

subtext - are you trying to kill us off.

( yes, of course, you are grooming gangsters!)

No, i did not pitch this, this is all make believe fake news...

--
Here's a track I created to articulate the realities of political and ideological grooming.

https://soundcloud.com/coreluminous/we-know-how-to-groom-you



Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."

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Question Time : the BBC, the media and the past, present and future, with regard to all our children.


Seriously, it's time The Guardian and The BBC reported on WHAT IS KNOWN about child development, intergenerational and historical trauma, PROPER child protection at the very roots of Society in terms of full support for families (be they in poverty, dual working parents/childcare, in 'stress' or suffering themselves from intergenerational trauma or dealing with psychological distress of any kind).

IT'S 100% CLEAR THAT INSTITUTIONS CANNOT DO WHAT CAN BE DONE AT THE FAMILY LEVEL. THEY HAVE FAILED TIME AND TIME AGAIN IN THIS REGARD. CHURCH AND STATE.

BBC : SHOW THE DOCUMENTARY "WHAT BABIES WANT" AS A STARTING POINT.

GUARDIAN : PLEASE GIVE SPACE TO OLIVER JAMES, SUE GERHARDT, JAMES PRESCOTT, SUE PALMER AND OTHERS SUCH AS THE FOUNDERS OF THE NATIONAL COALITION FOR CHILD PROTECTION REFORM

Last night on the BBC's "Question Time" Thursday 15th November 2012 (Corby) the Politicians were questioned on whether or not the story of the abuse of children was eclipsed by the story about the BBC. IT was surreal to see them do exactly what the questioner was pointing out - they spoke about the BBC, about false allegations and said nothing meaningful or nothing that showed they had ANY scientific or common sense understanding of the issue.

Two comments were revealing - Chris Grayling's Freudian slip about "a clip around the ear!" when defending SECRECY concerning allegations made against a teacher.... and Tessa Munt's comments that she taught her children that 'respect must be earned' which sounded like respect for children must be earned by children, which is part of the old-school Empire traditionalist approach.

Respect from children is dependent on the children themselves being treated with respect AT ALL TIMES, at home and elsewhere. This they learn by example, as they do empathy, honesty, courage and so forth.

The fact that Tessa Munt did not clarify what she meant, given the seriousness subject matter, is typical of un-thought, sound-bite, politics.
... and when a Paediatrician spoke out, briefly, on Question Time, one could see the pain, the sheer frustration in that man's face in regards to what I wrote above.... he is not alone in this.. and he was more or less passed over - Dimbleby as chairman of the panel, could have asked him to expand a little, as he was the only one who spoke who seemed to have a grasp on the realities.... this omission is revealing.
Even the 'liberal' political mindset is trapped in the past and refusing to address the present and all the more likely to undermine the future. 




Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe



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Dianne Abbots Tweet..... reveals more than one realises!

Had Diane Abbot tweeted "Power loves to divide and rule" she would have siad something that is truthful. Power is the issue, not race.... she might even have stimulated a decent discourse....

Race has always been utilised by Power to divide people..... 

But, being part of the Power Structure, Abbot is either incapable of , or unwilling to engage in profound critical analysis.

That's not to say that there aren't people who hold deluded views on race, (currrent Iran phobia?) and on difference, (Native Americans are 'savages', San Bushmen are 'primitives) and that there aren't those who hold such views are prone to violence. 

Such people exist - yet they were not born with those attitudes, they learned them... how did they learn them, and who benefits from such learning?

They are merely the product of a dishonest Institutionalsied Society, one which launches mass war against innocent people with what are KNOWN to be falsehoods and urges the people to carry on shopping, and so many of we, the people, do....
So, cui Bono? Eh?

Who benefits if we demonise the 'racists' whilst power tramples over EVERYONE?

Diane Abbot, and the Editors of The Guardiuan and other Newspapers, (and their readerships) would do well to read Paolo Friere's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed' and actually take some of it in. Though they'd very quickly find themselves unemployed if they did so and acted on what Friere wrote, which is truth and beauty, REAL power.... the power to become fully human.

I am appalled at the craven nature of this discourse.


Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe





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London Metropolitan Police Force Coercive Threat to Guradian to reveal 'Sources' ....

Letter to UK media....

To the Editor,

Regarding the recent move by the Metropolitan Police Force to coerce the Guardian to reveal it's sources' in the NOTW hacking story, may I suggest a solution:

ALL Whistle Blowers need to be protected by Law, and by Society, that is to say, by the people and by the Institutions that purport to serve the people. With the severest of sanctions imposed on those who threaten whistle blowers in ANY manner..... and for those that blow the whistle falsely.

This meets the requirements of Justice, Public Interest, transparency, honesty and integrity, and cannot impede anyone's human rights.

yours truly

Corneilius Crowley

etc, etc....

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe




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