TrueLife - Power, Politics & Poverty in the Digital Age: Inequality, Influence & Control

Episode Date: October 16, 2020

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/Based on a phenomenal book by Jakob Linaa Jenson: “ The medieval Internet”https://books.google.com/url?client=ca-google-gppd&format=googleprint&num=0&id=01xtzQEACAAJ&q=https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/_/_%3Fean%3D9781839094132&usg=AFQjCNFfVMUuvVasbzyny83HOe-woq9rGQTranscript:https://app.podscribe.ai/episode/54443874Speaker 0 (0s): Welcome back. My friend, I change by not changing history. Doesn't repeat, but it isn't it weird how the older you get, the more you become like your parents, even though when you were young, you swore to yourself that you would never become like your parents. It seems to me, you can run your whole life, but not go anywhere. There's nothing new under the sun. Do you guys see what's happening right now? If you want to know the future, you must look at the path he who controls the future controls the past. He controls the past control as the present did, get it. You understand, we have this weird feeling of deja VU right now, a feel, and I hope you feel this way. And if you don't feel this way, I am going to try to make you feel the way that I feel using the words I'm using. I'm going to paint you a picture. I'm hopeful. It will be a masterpiece. I'm hopeful that if you can get goosebumps by listening to the words, I'm about to talk to you about the words I'm about to give to you. If I can make you get goosebumps, if I can make your face flush, then I am communicating with you. So let me see if I can do that. This whole COVID the whole world of the internet. It seems eerily familiar. Doesn't it? You know, history is something that can be so amazing and so beautiful. And so poetic. If you want to know where your rat in your life, there's probably someone who wrote a book or a story or a fable. There's probably a story that explains your life. Your story is a beautiful story. If your willing to take control of it, if you're willing to take ownership of your life and your story, it will be a story that can be remembered. And if you've lost your way, they look back and you can find your way ahead. Let me explain what I mean or at least attempt to do so controlling information is controlling the world. Speaker 1 (3m 1s): Gonna say that again, controlling information is controlling the world. If you can control information, you can control the world. I'm going to make the argument that we in today's society in 2020 are beginning to look a lot more like a medieval system. Speaker 0 (3m 21s): The, the comments, the monarchy, the Catholic church, Speaker 1 (3m 29s): What worries about new technology they're as old as the discoveries of new technologies already, Plato was warning that writing would damage memory and recognize the double sided nature of new technology with on the one side, the vast advantages given by writing in the organization of his resources. And on the other side, have the ability of insurgence to use writing, to organize against the powers that be. We've touched upon this a little bit. There's a book Speaker 0 (4m 4s): That Speaker 1 (4m 6s): Goes in to some of this. It's called tech knobbly, and he also speaks about this exact same passage. However, he takes it back further. He takes it back to the times of Toth. Remember the Emerald tablets of talk. Do you remember that? And Toth goes up into his, his master, Speaker 0 (4m 25s): God damn. And I forgot that guys name Speaker 1 (4m 28s): Anyways, I'll come back to it. However, he goes and he speaks to them and he says, listen, to have created this new technology called writing, and it's going to help the people so much cause they didn't have to remember everything in the leader says on a top Toth, you are marvelous. You come up with all of these beautiful technologies and inventions, but think about it writing while it would make things easier for people in the long run, it's going to make them weaker. It's going to make them weaker due to the fact that they no longer need to understand why they need don't. They no longer needed to have to remember. They were just going to refer to this book and it's going to weaken the mentally. And isn't that the case with all our technologies, all our technologies make life a little bit easier, but they also take something away from us. Let me put it into a, into a term that the blue collar guy, guys like me can understand. I I can drive a 40,000 pound truck stick, shift up a Hill. I realize how to put one foot on the brake, one foot on the clutch and then gas. It slowly led off. Put that thing in first and then move up the Hill without rolling back too far in today's world. Most people Speaker 0 (5m 52s): Have a, Speaker 1 (5m 55s): The car. If you live in the first and an upper class neighborhood, you have a car. This not only has an automatic transmission, but it has a backup camera. You might even have a car that drives itself. So those who can drive a stick shift in today's world are there old, but there are also knowledgeable that's one example of how technology is making our life better, but also making us forget about how to really use the technologies that got us here. Does that kind of make sense, trying to paint a few examples of how all this marvelous technology is actually taken us backwards in the middle ages, the Catholic church exercise, it's a vast power to make itself the gatekeeper, not only of salvation, any eternal life, but also information. It was the church that preserved the culture of the past, including the Latin language, the ability to read and write and thereby the access to written information, not at least forbidden or censored texts, not at least forbidden or censored texts. Those were reserved for a relatively small sector of the population consisting of monks priests, sometimes nuns and others related to the church. This a symmetry between the keepers of written information for the most part in Latin, which existed as the code in which a serious information is represented this reproduced and reinforced existing power hierarchies and society, keeping the masses illiterate. Who does that sound like? Now? The modern day church are the tech companies. They are in fact a form of religion, right? OK. This is the social justice warriors can be like the new Catholics and The the right wingers, the Q and honors. And these people on the right. They could be like the Muslims. And there are, there's this new division. Hey, I hate this perfect cause of this. I hate this person cause of that. Right? It's like the Qur'an versus the Bible versus the new Testament, right? The religious books are like fingers pointing to the moon, but everyone gets caught up in the finger. It's the same thing with ...

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear, through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Kodex Seraphini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Welcome back, my friends. I change by not changing. History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. Isn't it weird how the older you get, the more you become like your parents? Even though when you were young, you swore to yourself that you would never become like your parents.

It seems to me you can run your whole life but not go anywhere. There's nothing new under the sun. Do you guys see what's happening right now? If you want to know the future, you must look at the past. He who controls the future controls the past. He who controls the past controls the present. Do you get it? You understand?

I have this weird feeling of deja vu right now. I feel, and I hope you feel this way. And if you don't feel this way, I am going to try to make you feel the way that I feel using the words I'm using. I'm going to paint you a picture. I'm hopeful it'll be a masterpiece. I'm hopeful that if you can get goosebumps by listening to the words I'm about to talk to you,

about the words I'm about to give to you, if I can make you get goosebumps, if I can make your face flush, then I am communicating with you. So let me see if I can do that. This whole COVID, the whole world of the internet, it seems eerily familiar, doesn't it? You know, history. is something that can be so amazing and so beautiful and so poetic. If you want to know where

you're at in your life, there's probably someone who wrote a book or a story or a fable. There's probably a story that explains your life. Your story is a beautiful story if you're willing to take control of it. If you're willing to take ownership of your life and your story, it will be a story that can be remembered. And if you've lost your way, then look back and you can find your way ahead. Let me explain what I mean, or at least attempt to do so. Controlling information is controlling the world. I'm going to say that again.

Controlling information is controlling the world. If you can control information, you can control the world. I'm going to make the argument that we in today's society in 2020 are beginning to look a lot more like a medieval system the commons the monarchy

the Catholic Church worries about new technology there is old as the discoveries of new technologies already Plato was warning that writing would damage memory and recognize the double-sided nature of new technology with on the one side the vast advantages given by writing in the organization of his resources and on the other side the ability of insurgents to use writing to organize against the powers

that be we've touched upon this a little bit there's a book that goes into some of this it's called technoply and he also speaks about this exact same passage however he takes it back further. He takes it back to the times of Toth. Remember the emerald tablets of Toth? Remember that? And Toth goes up into his master. I forgot. Damn it, I forgot that guy's name. Anyways, I'll come back to it. However, he goes and he speaks to him and he says, listen, I've created this new technology called writing. And it's going to help the people so much because they don't have to remember everything. and the leader says on to Toth Toth you are marvelous

you come up with all these beautiful technologies and inventions but think about it writing while it would make things easier for people in the long run it's going to make them weaker it's going to make them weaker due to the fact that they no longer need to understand why

they no longer need to have to remember they're just going to refer to this book and it's going to weaken them mentally. And isn't that the case with all our technologies? All our technologies make life a little bit easier, but they also take something away from us. Let me put it into a term that the blue collar guy, guys like me can understand.

I can drive a 40,000 pound truck stick shift up a hill. I realize how to put one foot on the bridge, break, one foot on the clutch, and then gas it slowly let off, put that thing in first, and then move up the hill without rolling back too far. In today's world, most people have a automatic car. If you live in the first world in an upper class neighborhood, you have a car that not only has an automatic transmission, but it has a backup camera. You might even have a car that drives itself. So those who can drive a stick shift in today's world are they're old, but they're also knowledgeable. That's one example of how technology is making our life better, but also making us

forget about how to really use the technologies that got us here. Does that kind of make sense? I'm trying to paint a few examples of how all this market. The marvelous technology is actually taken as backwards. In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church exercised its vast power to make itself the gatekeeper, not only of salvation and eternal life, but also of information. It was the church that preserved the culture of the past, including the Latin language, the ability to read and write and thereby the access to written information, not at least forbidden or censored texts,

not at least forbidden or censored texts. Those were reserved for a relatively small sector of the population consisting of monks, priests, sometimes nuns, and others related to the church. This asymmetry between the keepers of written information, for the most part in Latin, which existed as the code, in which serious information was represented, this reproduced and reinforced existing power hierarchies in society, keeping the masses illiterate.

Who does that sound like now? The modern day church are the tech companies. They are in fact a form of religion, right? Hey, the social justice warriors can be like the new Catholics and the right-wing. the Q&A honors and these people on the right, they could be like the Muslims. And there's this new division. Hey, I hate this person because of this.

I hate this person because of that. Right? It's like the Koran versus the Bible versus the New Testament. Right? The religious books are like fingers pointing to the moon, but everyone gets caught up in the finger. It's the same thing with these nude ideologies of these tech companies. And isn't it weird how they have been deemed, the arbiter of truth?

Does new tech companies believe that they are the ones that should be censoring stuff? That is too... Oh, no, it's too scary for you to read. Oh, man. Hey, no one look at Hunter Biden smoking a bunch of crack right now. Don't do that. We need Joe Biden in office. Otherwise, the whole world's going to...

If we don't have Joe Biden... Biden become president, we're all going to die. If Trump becomes president, we're all going to die. Are you fucking kidding me? Those two people are exactly the same, only different. The exploitation of the human mind right now is out of control. Families fighting one another over an 80-year-old man or a 75-year-old man? How about families fighting each other over this new disease that's going to take over the world?

Oh no, man. Watch out for COVID, man. You're all going to die. It's COVID-19, man. Hide in your house. Put on a mask. Don't let your kids watch this. Don't let them listen to that.

It's hysteria. It's a middle-age medieval disease. It's a disease of the mind. It's a virus. It's a computer virus and a man-made virus. It's like the Salem witch trials. COVID-19 is the Salem witch trials. The church restricted literacy because reading and writing

had the potential to challenge power hierarchies. Further, there was no society-wide incentive for the secular authorities to challenge the church. No society-wide incentive for the secular authorities to challenge the church. church. Is there no society-wide incentive for everyday people to challenge the tech companies? Literacy might challenge authority, but it also, as in modern society, makes authority easier to enforce with using direct force in violence. When you can sign your name to a contract,

you are less likely to straightforwardly violate that contract. How about a user agreement? You want to challenge authority? Hey, you sign the this user agreement, hey, you signed your name off on this checking account. And if you read the fine print, it says that we can take all your money. Oh, you didn't read the fine print? Sorry. When information is democratized, as began to happen after the invention of the printing press, structures and societies collapse or change.

The film, The Name of the Rose starring Sean Connery and based on the novel by Umberto Echo addressed the control of information. in the Middle Ages. Preserving the status quo is even worth to kill for. As the hero, Father Baskerville discovers, the story follows his investigation of a murder case in a monastery. It appears that the motive is to hide certain information that could be used to threaten the power of the church. Sounds like our modern day politicians, right? the lost second book of Aristotle's poetics devoted to laughter. The murderer seeks to obliterate the book because Aristotle, in his opinion, spreads an irreligious view of the world,

and the book holds that laughter is a serious object of philosophical investigation. This would blur the lines between the serious and the non-serious, the sacred and the profane. Echo's fiction is informed by his research, into medieval practices where such dispute actually happened. As pointed out above, it would be reductive to equate the appearance of the printing press with the end of the Middle Ages. But it certainly mechanized the production of text and incentivized the growth of vernacular literature, which in turn transform the education system.

In this chain of events, we can trace the historical. historical, thematic that led to new ways of legitimating power. A quantitative leap in literacy and the transformation of old power structures. Today, governments battle for the same kind of control of information through censorship, not only in China and Iran, but also in Western countries. Laws in the aftermath of September 11th are examples. Everybody knows that, right? Think about the Patriot Act.

Think about every time you go to the airport now, you got to go through a body scanner. Guess what? Congratulations. Now you get to go through that same scanner when you go to the ballpark. Hey, congratulations. You want to get on a bus because of the scanner. Congratulations. You get to go through the scanner when you go shopping.

Lucky for you, there's this new vaccine. And you don't even have to pluck your wallet anymore. You just wave your hand. Now you get access and. We can charge your chip. Meanwhile, multinational tech companies like Apple or Facebook strive for another kind of information control. Their aim is to establish information silos, keeping the users within their own information environment. Apple's use of tethered applications depend on Apple data.

That's one example. And Google's conquest of the browser market and expansion into all the information niches associated with the Internet is another. during the period of utopian enthusiasm for the internet in the late 1990s, the mantra that information needs to be free became popular among libertarians and anarchists who were heavily overrepresented at the time in tech culture. The meaning of this mantra was a little ambiguous. Did it mean that intellectual property rights should be destroyed? That everything should be public to everybody?

In fact, in fact, a freeware culture flourished organizations like WikiLeaks, which hacked into secret documents held by governments and corporations, and published them is the most extreme example. By the way, I hope everyone's paying attention to Julian Assange. If you get a chance to go to WikiLeaks and support that, you definitely should. That's an assault on all our liberties. The backlash to WikiLeaks was strong. However, the entailed successful new attempts to control the information flow, to hide information through censorship, and limits to freedom of speech, ever while giving the green light to more extensive government surveillance.

The reasons are the same as those in the Middle Ages. To preserve the power of the establishment. Of course, the arguments that are put forward to justify secrecy and surveillance are noble. the public needs to be protected against hate speech, national security is at stake, a war against terrorism, information of a certain type. For instance, instructions on how to build nuclear bombs that can kill people. Some of these claims might be true and some might be reasonable. But behind all of the claims for censorship and control is the fear that the powerful will lose control as knowledge is power. Thus, a static order like the Middle Ages is justified.

From the 90s, dream of one giant information network open and accessible to all to now when we have a strided, tethered world where information is commodified. It's quite a come down and a shock certain old internet enthusiasts. The way the system has evolved has implications that affect not only the free market, but also the exchange of ideas and opinions. The way the system has evolved has implications that affect not only the free market,

but also the exchange of ideas and opinions and ultimately democracy. He who controls the information rules the world. And again, I quote Orwell, he who controls the past controls the future. If you want to control the past, you must control the present. Love you guys. Aloha.