technology

Social Media Destroyed the World. Let’s Be Real. It ruined so much by Quinton Mitchell

Referencing the film Fight Club is quasi-cringey because it represents every angry, in your twenties, posters on the wall without a frame, cliff-note Bukowski, jaded, wannabe Nietzschean “edge lord” that most of us, especially men, have dealt with.

But almost in my forties, over most things, and arguably…content mostly, etc., I do admit I daydream about how Edward Norton saw the banking buildings at the end of the film go down in rubble, but instead of banks, I envision social media companies. Seeing all the symbols come crashing down to Earth. The blue bird of Twitter, well – now the way too bright X shinning down in San Franscisco as drug addicts hiss in piss filled streets being bought up by hedge funds like BlackRock or Vanguard. The F of Facebook. The almost Hello Kitty looking camera symbol of Instagram. This, that, whatever. Yet, before I get flagged, I just want to say I’m not really serious – at least about any violence or destruction, though a world without social media, at least as it is now, would be much better, healthier, etc.

But I don’t hate Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, etc., though, yes, Elon is lame, but when I think of a person like Mark or Jack, I see optimists who had a dream they couldn’t’ control and still can’t control but can’t admit they don’t have control because they’re in charge of capitalist enterprises bent on profits. In other words, Mark, etc., signed out and could care less if the world burns. This adds on more to the irony. Analogous to demi-gods they created a universe but are letting it crumble because they didn’t comprehend the sheer power.

Books aren’t dead but they very well may be dead. To read means to sign out, and to feel catharsis must now be shared instead of silently appreciated by oneself. Basic cable, though organized and safe, doesn’t stimulate us as much as streaming where we can customize our experiences. Social media reigns supreme but still it’s…inhuman. Maybe it’s too convenient? With such an easy way of getting information, maybe it’s making us dumber, yet living in a world that requires us to keep track of the ever-growing interconnectivity of things, that is why people are…depressed? Stupidity mixed with complexity creates a dialectical tension that leads to hopelessness as one realizes they become masters-of-none, just repositories of trivial information.

Twitter stands to make up to $19m a year from ads on just ten toxic reinstated accounts

At least, you get off with porn, though sure, many will say that too is bad, yet at least you get a spike of some naturally occurring chemicals in your body.

With basic social media…what is it even really for? To feel bad? To flex wealth? To juxtapose our romantic relationships against that of others to remind us that we should be happy where we are rather than being “single” or with someone else? To pretend to be a wise sage even though deep down instead you’re just speaking to yourself but through others without the fear of having to actually deal with…people? Are we just projecting our fears out onto the electric ether just like how a child who sees a scary movie will tell his or her friends about it, so they too are afraid but in that collective fear comes comfort, solace?

I think a healthy New Years resolution would be to spend less time on social media. And I get that is hard because in many ways we have “social media friends”, i.e., people we’ve met online who we’ve vetted who are people we consider to be on friendly terms with though you may not have ever physically have met the person. People who know you exist and are a person with a life in a world that may not see that. There are also legitimate close ties with people in your actual personal lives (friends, family, co-workers, business connections, etc.). Yet, the good parts aside, the truth is social media has destroyed the planet.

As with most tools, humans get utility out of it, but most tools become corrupted because of our innate nature as self-serving, self-preserving, aggressive yet passive-aggressive creatures. Instead of saying hello, we spy and snoop. Instead of trying to find common ground, we instead agitate an already agitated public. Instead of pursing our dreams in the real world, we scroll.

We don’t even need to fear Artificial Intelligence because we as humans have a good enough job at driving ourselves crazy, making alternative universes, pushing a culture of solipsistic post-truths, etc.

It will take us as a society to teach the social media companies a lesson by not spending so much on time so they can’t mine our data, etc.

Social media is a postmodern cesspool of racial tension against all groups, conspiracy theories (spanning the Great Replacement Theory, the New World Order, Blood Libel by Jews, a belief we are being turned gay, etc.), racial conspiracy theories, antisemitism, misogyny, sovereign citizens, Qanon, Manosphere & Men’s Rights shaming videos that feed the insatiable appetites of Incels across the blob of angry men who LARP (live action role play) in video games about killing people or dying honorably in battle. Men who struggle with women and publicly commit to “no fapping” (masturbating) as a means of tapping into their inner Marcus Aurelius but taking out their sexual repression on women by providing “fatherly words of wisdom” to women who they think have no minds of their own. How many Pakistanis, Saudis, or other horny Middle Eastern men using VPNs to access Western porn/women are the ones actually crying about their alleged addictions?

Let’s not forget the Instagram “thirst trap” models of large squat sculpted buttocks, sultry MILFs, what have you, but also…bot accounts, covert government operations both foreign and domestic, etc. Or wait, the annoying street interviewers attempting to make people seem stupid or lost for whatever agenda they are really about, such as “drinking liberal snowflake tears.” 

You never know if its Iranian intelligence firms with bot armies infiltrating black “woke” Marxist liberation sites to stoke anti-whitey sentiments because Iran knows they have a backdoor plug into the Black American community via Muslim adjacent hate groups such as the Nation of Islam with figures such as Rizza Islam.

You never know if Israel Unit 8200 bot accounts ran by drafted Israeli teens are stoking racial division to keep the eyes away from Israel and that it’s not Jews behind the scenes but rather hordes of Muslim refugees flooding Europe who will topple the West.

You never know if Russian bot accounts are stoking unrest by infiltrating American Conservative politics as a means of depicting the West as a “corrupt, amoral, Sodom and Gomorrah” so more and more paranoid white Americans and Europeans see Putin as “big daddy savior” of Christendom.

You never know if what you’re seeing is being ran by a legitimate cult who are pushing every New Age conspiracy theory that intends to unravel our linear view of history apart. You never know if hate groups like the Aryan Brotherhood, or any other aspiring group are behind many accounts. You never know if it’s the CIA, FBI, DEA, ATF, local police, MI5/6, Mossad, etc.

We are literally living in a William Gibson Neuromancer nightmare, and we all know it, but we don’t know how to express it because outside of social media, in perfect American fashion for example, we’ve all been trained to be self-serving individuals. Despite out own quiet desperations and ennui, if we see such melancholy elsewhere, we are now trained to simple walk over the dying bodies of others, because we are too busy “manifesting” our own happy little worlds. Any whiff of negativity could lead to the dreaded…unfollow.

It is everything that Philip K Dick lost his mind over.

Social Media is arguably MK Ultra 2.0. A brainwashing tool for various parties, some in unison, and some in opposition, who fart out toxicity to scramble the general public’s brain.

I’ve literally been seeing people get murdered on social media. Seeing the N word is just commonplace now and even if reported, sites like Instagram do nothing. Nudity is even acceptable.

The thing is…it’s all insanity. It’s to the point where I make it a hobby to block accounts. I’ll literally try to block 50 a day because many are just replica accounts, often pushing Right Wing social conditioning that mixes a denunciation of progressive politics with a worship of capitalist greed, misogyny, Abrahamic religion, doomsday Revelation fears, etc. It’s as if the Koch Brother Foundation along with the John Birch Society wrote a blank check and gave it to a bunch of Young Republican college kids and shills like Charley Kirk to fart out as many bot accounts as they can as a means of pulling the youth to the far right, just because rich people or aspiring rich people want a tax break.

Social media is a joke

Deconstructed to an animal impulse the only thing on social media that makes me somewhat happy is a combination of food porn, glamour shots of retro porn actresses from the 90s to 80s, history stuff, and models in yoga pants.

Sex, food, daydreams

The only way to really fix social media is to (1) Dox everyone, i.e., make it some everyone’s real first name, age, and country of origin is on their profile because this will expose the armies of chaos agents stoking tension. Imagine if that Right Wing Anti-SJW account is owned by Boris in some oblast in Russia or Ahmed as the IT guy working with the Iranian Revolutionary guard or a Jewish kid with braces doing a high school project funded by the IDF. (2) Limit the number of accounts a person can have/hunt down replica accounts and limiting how many times a specific video can be uploaded or using digital forensics of some sort to post the date that photos or videos were taken in order to add context to conversations. For example, a racist account intent of shaming black people will upload frequent videos of black crime or racial tension when certain videos may be very old, but pretending they are new helps to feed the current narrative that black people are these “ungrateful criminals” intent on “killing the white man”. (3) More culturally sensitive content moderators because an Indian person in a cubical may not get certain American nuances or vice versa. (4) An active campaign to fight conspiracy theories by having users list sources. (5) Partnerships with sites such as Ground News to help show the political biases of articles (6) continued parental controls

Social media is too cerebral.

It reveals everything ugly about us without any way of making us better. Even most self-help just serve to reduce one into a consumerist bot.

But I saw some good food and yes, some great feminine, squat-sculpted powerful buttocks in an array of multi-colored synthetic material leggings. At least I am honest.

Am I Jack Gladney from White Noise? Are we all?

#philosophy #relationships #socialmedia #technology #books

William S. Burroughs could’ve been a Steve Jobs. Chaos Magick, Internet, and Other Far Out Things by MRG Staff

William S. Burroughs, the Occult practicing, heroin-addict scion of the early Counterculture movement within the circles of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, could’ve been Steve Jobs in an alternate reality or if he played his cards differently. Unisys (NYSE: UIS) is the successor of Burroughs Corporation, an early computer firm. If things had gone differently for William and his family didn’t sell off their remaining shares of the company, William could’ve positioned himself in early Silicon Valley-type circles due to his powerful Harvard connections after WW2.

After WW2 there was a Cold War rat-race emergence of the RAND Corporation from the US Air Force; intensive computer science and collective behavior studies at MIT, Stanford, UCLA, University of Chicago, and the New School of Social Research (Transhumanism of MS-2030 and the sociology research of the University in Exile); the growth of joint-ventures between private industry and Defense, and the MK-Ultra sociological programs under the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence and US Army’s Biological Warfare Laboratories (drug studies, crowd-control agents, etc.).

Burroughs Corporation today exists as UNISYS, a global IT firm, that was created by a merger of Burroughs with Sperry Corporation in 1986 whom specialized in UNIVAC computers as well as Artificial-Horizon imagery, trigonometry based ballistic calculation solutions for missiles, etc. Sperry earlier on had acquired the typewriter division of gun-maker Remington. Unisys is now a subsidiary of DXC Technology in Tysons, Virginia, that specializes in Business-to-Business IT solutions, with Unisys itself being a subsidiary sister company to companies such as Molina Healthcare. The remnants of what remains of Sperry that wasn’t absorbed in the Burroughs (Unisys) merger, became part of Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, United Technologies, and Northrop Grumman

Further, System Development Corporation (SDC), which was spun off from the RAND Corporation, in which the SDC helped develop SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Equipment) software for NORAD. SDC was sold to Burroughs Corporation. Burroughs merged with Sperry Corporation in 1986 to make Uniysys. Unisys sold its defense division called Paramax to Loral Corporation in 1996, which was later sold to Lockheed Martin but then later to L3 Harris.

The brand-name of Burroughs was spun off separately by Unisys when the company spun-off its payment division. In 2010, Unisys sold off its Payment Systems Division to Marlin Equity Partners, a California-based private investment firm, which incorporated it as Burroughs Payment Systems based in Plymouth, Michigan

Yet, this is just a loose theory, that despite William not being active in the company’s operations, in effect Burroughs played the role of culture-agent to prep the masses for what would become the “postmodern” “erratic” “jittery” “sensory overload” “man merged with machine” ideas of the Global Internet Age, i.e., now.

I’m not making a direct link between Burroughs and all the zany things that went on during the Cold War but by proxy, due to his status and the possibilities available to him from that status, he was on the periphery of Intelligence, Drugs, and Technology.

His maternal uncle, Ivy Lee, was an advertising pioneer later employed as a publicist for the Rockefellers. Ivy Lee is known as the founder of modern public relations. William thus came from Blue Blood Anglo-Saxon stock with ancestry traced back to the Civil War and England with familial Ivy League ties. Ivy Lee did the Public Relations for John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil during the days of the Ludlow Massacre which was a coal-mining strike but remained a close “media fixer” for the family. Ivy Lee was also a founding member of the Council of Foreign Relations, which is the premier think-tank and global policy center for the elite within the United States where corporate American, defense, etc. merge for long-term planning with periphery organizations such as the Trilateral Commission. Both the CFR and Trilateral Commission are linked to the Central Intelligence Agency. Through these Rockefeller connections, if William S. Burroughs and his direct family retained control or board-membership in Burroughs Company, they could’ve used Ivy Lee’s Rockefeller connections to obtain venture capital from people such as Laurence Rockefeller, whom through his own Venrock Associates, in real life gave the seed money to both Apple and Intel. https://www.venrock.com/ https://burroughs.com/ https://www.unisys.com/

Seriously, if the William’s parents had retained some level of participation within Burroughs Corporation, despite making a smart move of divesting before the Great Depression, this could’ve set up William with an active inherited role within the company. They could’ve done clever moves of their stock such as switching common stock to preferred stock or selling those shares for more lucrative stocks in the defense industry and then re-buying a large stake in Burroughs at a post-war bargain. With vision and foresight which William put into writing instead of business, that foresight could’ve been a powerful tool in business even if from a consulting standpoint. By tapping into family ties and Rockefeller capital, William could’ve established himself as a preeminent member of the early Silicon Valley crowds either directly in business, consultation, or lobbying. With Silicon Valley being close to San Francisco which has a large LGBTQ community, William S. Burroughs may have found himself right at home.

However, him choosing the less profitable literary field could have meant that he was on to what future was coming and he instead rejected wealth for a Bohemian life. A rich kid with a hyper-aware depression prone to ennui and self-destructive behavior, as a closeted gay man, suppressing his desires, yet, he had a strong pulse on the absurdity that existed within the world and within the elite class. Burroughs was an artist against conformity who took it to surrealist extremes to push boundaries. Even if a person is a “junkie” or a part of a community such as the LGBTQIA community, they are still human with insights into things the standard culture overlooks, ignores, or persecutes.

Regarding intelligence links, Attanasio (1980) stated he applied to the OSS (Officer’s Strategic Services) but was rejected because he had deliberately cut off a piece of his finger (“I’d once got on a Van Gogh kick”); the Army declared him a paranoid schizophrenic and thus 4-F. By 1944, with nothing else to do, Burroughs became a junkie. Regarding the OSS link and claim, Marzoni (2019) states, “Burroughs tells Brookner that before he became a writer he wanted to be a doctor (he briefly attended medical school in prewar Vienna) and then a spy (he blames an old Harvard rival for curtailing his career with the CIA), but more than anything Brookner’s film showcases Burroughs’s talents as an actor.”

Back to technology, Steve Jobs for example, like many in the San Francisco area during the sixties and seventies engaged in heavy drug use, particularly LSD. We all know that GPS, the internet, etc., comes from these private-public partnerships, with NASA serving as the monopoly freight-carrier of Satellites into orbit, though this monopoly has been competed with companies such as SpaceX by Elon Musk, and the US Air Force Space Command serves as a type of Federal Aviation Administration for oversight and monitoring.

How does the Occult and technology align? Burroughs was into magic, the Occult, Chaos Magick, sprying (sight-seeing), etc. This was an interest he gained at Harvard. Magic or magic in a Satanic view is Luciferian, which thus equates to the “Light Giver” or “Light Bearer”, i.e., reason and Darwinism over Divinity. It seems strange to talk about concepts such as computer science, Automated Intelligence, and cloud computing with concepts such as magic, Darwinism, Chaos Magick, Luciferian, etc., but we need only to look to real-life example Jack Parsons associated with the Jet Propulsion Labs and he practiced the Dark Arts. Essentially, you have some very smart technocratic minded people who also engage in things which are Occultic in nature since Luciferian ideals are basically evolutionary in nature, i.e., scientific progress indifferent to weakness.

However, some magicians or Chaos Magick advocates see limitations to the empiricism of the Scientific Method, yet, the Luciferian idea still is essential in performing a type of evolutionary, Darwinian, strongest survives process upon material to thus morph that material into something new. Willing things into existence which are impossible based on the rules of linear reality is an aspect of where Darwinism, Nietzsche, and Lucifer align.

Burrough’s heroin usage, which is highly toxic to the body, debases the body in a type of “magical” process, posited on achieving a type of Illumination, and by killing the body a person into certain types of magic believes the body can be resurrected into something new. One must effectively die to be reborn and living a life of excess and amoral behaviors is simply the individual pushing their limitations for enlightenment (choosing to be a Goat that is free over a “Sheep” that is a slave). Heroin thus serves as a type of mystical Illumination agent needed for the Alchemical process of evolution to kill the weak body and maintain the strong bodies who will be reborn into a new postmodern, digital, hyper-real landscape. So, even though Burroughs wasn’t at board meetings in Silicon Valley or DC, rubbing elbows with military Generals, Madison Avenue ad men, and venture capitalists, he was instead on the streets writing fiction that foresaw the upcoming digital age. Employing surrealist elements into his works is a type of “alchemical debasement of body and mind”, by destabilizing and mutating them, to signify what technology would do to the human physiology.

I’m sure many people have written about Burroughs within conspiracy circles, considering he was almost a member of the early Office of Strategic Services, i.e., the CIA in the days of people like Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, Kermit Roosevelt, David Rockefeller, Edward Lansdale, etc. The biggest revelation I personally pull from Burrough’s CIA connections, though unproven, is that William himself was type of pusher of drugs essential for the MKUltra experiments to take hold. Like Crowley who advocated for drugs and had a popularity within celebrity and counterculture circles, William served a similar role (theoretically). It is known that the CIA and the American elite have long ties to the heroin industry. Going back as far as the early American merchant dynasties of Massachusetts via the Port of Salem regarding Old China Trade, i.e., the legal heroin trade at that time. Families such as the Forbes and Russell families of the Boston Brahmin circles were involved, and it is public knowledge that Skull and Bones was founded by William Huntingdon Russell. Further, heroin goes back to the British Empire during its time in Hong Kong but also British India, where the heroin growing region of Nuristan in present day Afghanistan, translates to “Land of Illumination”.

References

Attanasio, P. A. (1980, February 1). William Burroughs: News: The Harvard Crimson. Retrieved November 23, 2019, from https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1980/2/1/william-burroughs-pbwbilliam-burroughs-came-to/.

Marzoni, A. (2019, November 18). Precarious Immortality: William S. Burroughs on Film. Retrieved November 23, 2019, from https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/precarious-immortality-william-s-burroughs-on-film-5473/.