Publisher’s Note: This new Scout investigation has been keeping us up at night here in the Green Mountains of Vermont’s once and future Republic. To wit – what do you get when you marry 1) “social” media platforms, 2) Big Data (the aggregated digital info of hundreds of millions of SM users), 3) the surveillance state,  and 4) amoral Deep State actors (Steve Bannon, John Podesta and their ilk) with clearly articulated political agendas who will spare no expense to influence election and policy outcomes – secretly, and behind the scenes? Read on.

The only solution? Face-to-face decision making in small communities, paper ballots hand counted in full public view, and all other forms of analog collective deliberation. Sound quaint? Maybe, but in an emerging world of the digital Panopticon (see above image), it may be our best hope.

INSURGE INTELLIGENCE indy journalist Nafeez Ahmed imagines it this way:

“Imagine every city, every community, every rural center, every town hall replete with its own customized version of a civic engagement model, based on ecological variants, predominant socioeconomic needs, deeply embedded journalistic practices, and policies that actually create opportunity for anyone who chooses to participate.”

More from Ahmed on “behavioral micreotargeting” here – chilling, but we know what we need to do–>

As an investigation by Scout has shown, the ‘alt right’ has made major strides in ‘weaponizing’ artificial intelligence (AI) to harness Big Data: developing personality profiles of members of entire populations, by which to manipulate their psychologies.

Trump’s chief strategy advisor, Steve Bannon, sits on the board of one key organization, Cambridge Analytica, which — supposedly — boasts the ability to predict a subject’s behavior even better than themselves based on analyzing just 300 Facebook likes. The firm now maintains a database of fully 200 million Americans — based on data derived from extensive social media surveillance, as well as the purchasing of other personal and consumer data from private sources.

Cambridge Analytica used “behavioral micro-targeting” during the US elections by planting Facebook ‘dark posts’ — targeted ads that are only visible to the target — in swing states. By monitoring the way people reacted to these ads, they were able to assess and fine-tune their messaging. These methods are combined with the creation of extensive ‘fake news’ media websites and networks, which over many years have honed the techniques of search engine optimization to position themselves at the top of relevant Google searches; as well as the systematic use of social media ‘bots’ to advance partisan narratives and silence opposing views.

The extent to which these methods actually influenced the US elections is unknown — and potentially unknowable, precisely because all the relevant data to determine their effectiveness is held by private firms like Cambridge Analytica. But as Scout reports, these methods are not just being used by the ‘alt right’ and conservatives — they’re also being used by liberals.

Similar methods were used by the Clinton campaign, in some ways with far deeper sophistication. And as INSURGE intelligence has previously reported, government security agencies took the lead in developing these technologies to influence the beliefs of civilian populations as an integral part of military and intelligence operations, at home and abroad.

What does this mean? It means, to quote Flobots, there’s a war going on for your mind.

The point of this is that the war within the Deep State, along with the war between conservative, liberal and ‘alt right’ political polarities, is increasingly being fought to influence your beliefs, emotions and behaviors in a way that is toxic, polarizing, invisible and unaccountable.

This is how the public sphere is being slaughtered, again and again and again. And this is how the war on all life and the Earth itself is able to accelerate and intensify, while we watch, eat, buy, swipe our smart-screens, and endure restless sleep.

Axiom 8: While the information sensors of human civilization are already in disarray, this information war fought from multiple fronts — by the liberal, conservative, government and corporate establishments — seeks, fundamentally, to manipulate your beliefs and behaviors.

No wonder, then, that this political atmosphere produces a sense of apathy and resignation — a sense of atomization and, ultimately, powerlessness.

We are made to feel that our individual roles are merely to choose where we sit passively within a spectrum of banal political polarities that benefit powerful interests, competing with each other for influence over our minds, our feelings and our behaviors.

We are simply cogs in a machine of endless production and consumption whose final logic is to concentrate wealth in the hands of a powerful minority at the expense of people and planet.

Therefore, this sense of powerlessness and despondency that we feel in the face of the overwhelming nature of the crises before us, does not necessarily reflect the reality of what is possible at all. In fact, it doesn’t — it reflects our mode of being within the system as it stands, today.

The sense of powerlessness reflects how the conventional institutions of liberal democracy have led to the erosion of the public sphere as a space of meaningful democratic empowerment.