Tag Archives: Big Data

The Rise of Tech Totalitarianism, by James Kirkpatrick

Big Tech has become just as big an enemy as Big Government, and the two are closely allied. From James Kirkpatrick at unz.com:

Michael Rectenwald’s GOOGLE ARCHIPELAGO

The Wall Street Journal just published a shocking expose, How Google Interferes With Its Search Algorithms and Changes Your Results, [by Kirsten Grind, Sam Schechner, Robert McMillan and John West , November 15, 2019], revealing not only that Google is exploiting its market power in ways the clearly raise anti-trust questions, but also that it shadow-bans sites that promote “hate or violence” even if “expressed in polite or even academic-sounding language”—i.e. VDARE.com and all immigration patriots. This confirms the terrifying message of Michael Rectenwald’s new book Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom: the combination of Woke Capital and monopoly power is turning America into an open-air prison.

Rectenwald is a liberal academic who was chased out of New York University for dissenting mildly from the “pronoun wars” and the Leftist demand for blanket approval of transgenderism [I was a liberal NY prof, but when I said the left was going too far, colleagues called be a NAZI & treated me like a RUSSIAN SPY, RT, November 12, 2019]. In his book, he shows the Left is consumed by collective hysteria, a theme with which VDARE.com readers are familiar, and also that the ideology of “Corporate Socialism” and the emerging “Internet of Things” is making it impossible to escape from a repressive system.

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The New Military-Industrial Complex of Big Data Psy-Ops, by Tamsin Shaw

There’s all sorts of obscure companies out there gathering, analyzing, massaging,  and manipulating data…and manipulating people. From Tamshin Shaw at nybooks.com:

Bryan Bedder/Getty Images

Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica, addressing the Concordia Summit in New York, September 19, 2016

Apparently, the age of the old-fashioned spook is in decline. What is emerging instead is an obscure world of mysterious boutique companies specializing in data analysis and online influence that contract with government agencies. As they say about hedge funds, if the general public has heard their names that’s probably not a good sign. But there is now one data analysis company that anyone who pays attention to the US and UK press has heard of: Cambridge Analytica. Representatives have boasted that their list of past and current clients includes the British Ministry of Defense, the US Department of Defense, the US Department of State, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and NATO. Nevertheless, they became recognized for just one influence campaign: the one that helped Donald Trump get elected president of the United States. The kind of help the company offered has since been the subject of much unwelcome legal and journalistic scrutiny.

Carole Cadwalladr’s recent exposé of the inner workings of Cambridge Analytica shows that the company, along with its partner, SCL Group, should rightly be as a cautionary tale about the part private companies play in developing and deploying government-funded behavioral technologies. Her source, former employee Christopher Wylie, has described the development of influence techniques for psychological warfare by SCL Defense, the refinement of similar techniques by SCL Elections through its use across the developing world (for example, a “rumor campaign” deployed to spread fear during the 2007 election in Nigeria), and the purchase of this cyber-arsenal by Robert Mercer, the American billionaire who funded Cambridge Analytica, and who, with the help of Wylie, Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon, and the company’s chief executive Alexander Nix, deployed it on the American electorate in 2016.

But the revelations should also prompt us to ask deeper questions about the kind of behavioral science research that enables both governments and private companies to assume these powers. Two young psychologists are central to the Cambridge Analytica story. One is Michal Kosinski, who devised an app with a Cambridge University colleague, David Stillwell, that measures personality traits by analyzing Facebook “likes.” It was then used in collaboration with the World Well-Being Project, a group at the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center that specializes in the use of big data to measure health and happiness in order to improve well-being. The other is Aleksandr Kogan, who also works in the field of positive psychology and has written papers on happiness, kindness, and love (according to his résumé, an early paper was called “Down the Rabbit Hole: A Unified Theory of Love”). He ran the Prosociality and Well-being Laboratory, under the auspices of Cambridge University’s Well-Being Institute.

To continue reading: The New Military-Industrial Complex of Big Data Psy-Ops

The Hidden Payoff in the Brussels and Paris Attacks, by Paul Rosenberg

From Paul Rosenberg at freemansperspective.com:

I don’t have any more secret information than you do. I don’t have access to any of the backrooms that matter, and I don’t get leaks from “informed sources.” I do, however, have experience with protecting data and with a variety of things “crypto.”

So, what I’m telling you now isn’t verifiable… but it’s very close to accurate.

The Missing Piece

When looking at the recent attacks in Paris and Brussels, we are impelled to look for explanations. And to do this, we generally rely on stories we get from mass-media corporations. We all know the news is worked over before it reaches us, but it’s really almost all we have, and the live video they show is probably actual live video. From these minimal facts, we fill in the gaps as best we can.

Some of us are quick to attribute these evils to our favorite secret cabal. Others blame government policies, clashes of cultures, and so on. None of these are necessarily wrong, but neither are they automatically right. To be believed, a theory needs evidence.

And in this particular puzzle, there is a missing piece. It doesn’t explain why the attacks happened (Muslim crazies, false flags, two more intel failures, whatever), but it explains a good deal of what’s happened from the moment of the attacks onward.

This missing piece happens to be something that Jonathan Logan, my associate at Cryptohippie, dubbed “Descartes’s Demon,” an automated manipulation system based on the combination of universal surveillance and big data. I explained the current state of this technology in issue #59 of my subscription newsletter and examined its implications in The Breaking Dawn. But I don’t have space to recap all of that here. So, at the risk of self-promotion, I really do suggest you read those publications.

As I’ve been warning for almost a decade now, this system is taking shape and will have massive effects. But more than that, Descartes’s Demon – this surveillance-and-big data-empowered manipulation system – is an intelligence agency’s grandest dream. With it, they can not only find their adversaries’ secrets, but they can misguide their opponents.

These systems of automated manipulation are true power in an intelligence environment. Therefore, we can be certain that all the big intel agencies want them and will use all their tricks to get them.

Furthermore, the difference between winning and losing in a competition between such systems is probably in the range of a few percent. And that injects a serious level of desperation into these agencies.

Put together, these facts lead to just one place: an arms race. And yes, by that I mean intel agencies scrambling to get the best system and the best data.

That’s why, in the aftermath of the recent attacks, we find the friends of intel agencies pushing for the things that support these systems. In France, we saw instant martial law, which involves a remarshaling of government assets. Again, I don’t have any backroom info, but I’d bet that a whole lot of French assets are moving toward mass surveillance and big data just now.

To continue reading: The Hidden Payoff in the Brussels and Paris Attacks