Disrupt Everything

The neoliberal b*stards even steal the meaning of that word

Libertarianism is a misnomer as pervasive as those given to the IDF as the most ‘moral’ army in the world and Israel as the only ‘democratic’ state in the Middle East. Israel is as democratic as the sovereign individual. Only I decide what to eat for breakfast, no- one else has a say: but I did weigh up three options and chose one from the three, ergo ‘democracy.’

Israel is actually very moral in terms of Western imperialism. It genocides and maims; tortures and rapes at a completely unprecedented rate. As the Western world relies on fiction and gaslighting - and changing the definition of noble words to mean their polar opposites - Israel indeed is the most ‘moral’ place on earth. Even ‘Earth’ is a Western imperialistic word trick - Palestine is pure Hell.

Libertarianism implies an ideology of freedom. That one can live on earth as a free individual with minimal interference from the state. It means leaders keep the objective ‘peace’ by keeping an overall eye on things, preventing invasion from foreign powers and all that jazz while taking a total backseat in the daily business of its citizens. They do not interfere at all.

As such, what libertarianism really means, is the right of the capitalist to exploit people and resources at whim and without limit: no state health and safety legislation, no emissions regulations, no minimum wage. It allows these individuals to buy anything and everything without restriction: no green belt land, no public parks: everything privately held for the few and rented out to the rest. Libertarianism, in short, is the freedom to exploit the earth and fellow human beings without any mechanism to control these excesses. In other words, it is no liberty at all, but active serfdom of the masses. One need only to turn their eyes to the US to see the serfs in masses of debt, on hamster wheels churning out their energies on paying their masters back - the very same masters they work for, rent from, pay through the nose for basic healthcare from, repay interest to - while their rail, national healthcare, roads, social security, criminal systems, are all a crumbling, barely functioning mess. The ‘land of freedom’ aka libertarianism is in overdrive - the masses in forever debt to their lords.

No wonder Boris Johnson is always described as a libertarian; a man who breaks the law, does not want the state mechanism of law and order and police bothering him: it is his God-given right to do as he pleases! He is a free man and champions freedom to harm others! Of course, libertarianism is an utter myth and Western journalists never question how a devout libertarian - who doggedly believes in non-state interference - decided to become the Prime Minister and leader of an actual State. Don’t be too shocked at the hypocrisy guys: 20% of the West Bank colonial land-stealers aka ‘settlers’ don’t believe in God but do believe God gave them the land. I have long ago given up on the battle against a cognitive dissonance so severe that it should be acknowledged in the DSM.

‘Disruption’ is another word the libertarians and neoliberals have stolen. They claim disruption is 'to 'disrupt’ the fictional ‘market'. The pseudoscience of economics, which is based only on theory and no hard knowledge - built upon the abstract, mystical, fabricated ‘market’ - claims that disruption is when some product enters this ‘market’ and changes it so fundamentally that it creates a ‘new market’ which overtakes and eventually displaces the old.

We are taught that disruption is a good thing. Innovative and smart; creating efficiencies where they did not exist before and creating unimaginable (and unusable) wealth for those who ‘disrupt’.

What disruption really means is the exponential rise in neoliberal and libertarian dogma, turned into reality. It means a ‘disruptor’ has - through new ‘technology’ - found a way where he is able to exploit resources further for personal wealth for himself. In neoliberal and libertarian lexicology - (the two only differentiated by the slight difference in how much they would ‘allow’ the government to interfere in their actions) - resource means anything on earth, living or dead. A human being is merely a ‘resource’.

And so, through an explosion of big tech; data harvesting algorithms, coding - stuff that can be done whilst sitting on your a**e all day - ‘disruptors’ have created entire business models which exploit humans to death whilst they sit on billions of dollars - mountains of cash they will never, ever, ever, ever use.

Air BnB? The biggest hotel company in the world which does not own a single hotel; its owners fiddling on computer screens and making billions. “SO SMART! INNOVATIVE! GENIUS!” the Western world coos. What is so smart, innovative and genius about destroying societies through individualistic greed, demolishing affordable housing stock and destroying entire communities for the enrichment of a handful of people who CAN NEVER spend that amount of money in several lifetimes?

Uber? The biggest Taxi company on the planet which does not own a single taxi; its owners fiddling on computer screens and making billions. “SO SMART! INNOVATIVE! GENIUS!” the Western world coos. What is so smart, innovative and genius about exploiting drivers and taking a cut out of their pay for doing nothing, meaning they have to work longer for a decent income? What is so genius about enticing the poorest in society to take out loans on cars they cannot afford with cloud dreams of untrue riches, for the greed of a few men sitting in offices thousands of miles away? What is so genius about driving them to suicide by these exploitative payment structures?

The “genius” of these innovators is actually their malevolence. They create online platforms which become so dominant in society that they become almost impossible not to use. From the data of those platforms, they then mould our preferences.

It works like this. You supply data to these apps for free, simply by using them. This data is then used to create ‘content’, especially for you. In its most insidious form, this takes the form of introducing a tiny ‘seed’ of something into your media feeds; something which you had not been searching for or looking at and have never been interested in. Over time, this seed will eventually grow bigger, and you will be bombarded with more and more of it. This increased exposure manipulates your opinions and desires. For instance, it can entice you into entirely new spending habits to profit from you further.

There is a name for this phenomenon. It is called technofeudalism - and we are in the age of technofeudalism.

Technofeudalism is the notion that we serve our big tech overlords (Amazon, Google, Apple and Meta) by handing over data to access their cloud space. Technofeudalism suggests our preferences are no longer our own, they're manufactured by machine networks -AI- also commonly known as the cloud.

In the technofeudal era, we are not only the consumers. We are THE commodity.

It really is like a cyclical mind prison and the apex of human evolution to this point is that we have gone from hunter-gatherers to ar*e-sitters giving AI data to manipulate what we do and what we think, as we sit. The only people profiting from our evolutionary ‘progress’ being a tiny handful of people at the top skimming off all the rewards - our technofeudal overlords.

The nature of the technofeudal grip upon our minds to mould our very own desires - which in turn, directly influences the natures of our very own personalities - cannot be understated. Of course, much of it has to do with consumer preferences. But, it also allows technofeudal overlords to tell us what to think; and to accept their narrative unquestioningly in order to legitimise their plans and actions. Brexit was a boon for technofeudal overlords - it brought with it the promise of 'libertarianism’ in Britain and the possibility of less tax (aka more profit) for them and more influence over politicians, both in their aiding of the pro-Brexit government for mutual reward, but also in the success of Brexit and its consequent libertarian ideology which, post-Brexit, would be enacted. The Cambridge Analytica scandal of the profound manipulation of British voters was not so much a scandal in its aiding of pro-Brexit parties, but due to the very fact it wielded such enormous and seemingly unlimited powers over hearts and minds - not through traditional, reasoned argument, but through algorithmic bombardment and manipulation.

Big tech and their AI know you intimately. They learn about you quickly. Then they work on you relentlessly. By analysing everything you have ‘liked’ alone on their platform, Facebook knows you better than your spouse. The research actually shows:

“Given enough Likes, the computers came closer to a person’s self-reported personality than their brothers, mothers, or partners,” researchers said. “In the study, a computer could more accurately predict the subject’s personality than a work colleague by analyzing just 10 Likes; more than a friend or a cohabitant (roommate) with 70, a family member (parent, sibling) with 150, and a spouse with 300 Likes.”

Imagine how easily your loved ones can make you do something for them. It takes them years to build a bond of trust with you, to know you inside and out; and as such, when asked, you will do their bidding voluntarily. Big tech takes much less time to gather that information from you. It takes them far less time to make you do their bidding; involuntarily and unwittingly. It takes no time at all for them to make you vote for an intolerant and self-destructive Brexit, even while you own a house in Benidorm and always loved Europeans. Governments and leaders know this very well. Dominic Cummings, chief advisor to PM Boris Johnson credited big tech AI companies for the Brexit referendum win:

“Without a doubt, the Vote Leave campaign owes a great deal of its success to the work of AggregateIQ. We couldn’t have done it without them.”

Big tech companies are now furiously working on creating anti-Palestinian support and gaining sympathy for the genocidal state of Israel in a myriad of ways. True, many people have woken up to the horrors of what is happening, but the numbers still on the fence are still depressingly low. That the numbers in the US are still only around the 60% percentile in advocating for a ceasefire after 7 months of pure genocide, is testament to the difficulty of trying to turn away from the grip of these AI monoliths. Should the US population be entirely tech-dependent, with no real and solid social relationships such as friends and family - a situation which is fast approaching - then I guarantee the above percentage would be much lower. The fact that we do have lives outside of tech - however increasingly eroded they are becoming - means we do have other inputs which have prevented the complete cognitive takeover by technofeudal overlords. For now.

But it gets worse.

The biggest folly of man is to believe ‘efficiency’ and ‘ease’ translates into quality of life and comfort. It does neither. It translates into a life of inactivity and purposelessness. Make no mistake, we are in the Matrix. The algorithms literally feed off us in order to perpetuate our need for them. Our attention, our time, and our brain juice are taken in totality by the tech that controls us. It’s objectively insane - AI takes precedence over human beings.

Take a look at cryptocurrency for instance. Cryptocurrency is not even fiat currency and has no solid reserve - it works entirely on ‘vibes’. A’vibe’ simply refers to the collective sentiment or perception surrounding something which influences its perceived value, and consequently its market behaviour. The ‘vibes’ around the new Taylor Swift song maybe strong this week, but non-existent next month. ‘Vibes’ by their nature, are influenced entirely by subjective perceptions and trends, making them intangible and highly unstable.

What is the ‘vibe’ of Bitcoin today? How much do we think it’ll be worth? This ‘vibeage’ is even more shocking when you realise that Bitcoin is limited. This means on any day, people just decide what it’s worth, and the next day it can be worth much less or much more. Despite the PR, cryptocurrency is entirely unstable and in one fell swoop one’s whole crypto savings can be reduced to nothing simply because the crypto peeps weren’t feeling the ‘vibe’.

The insane thing about cryptocurrency is that ‘mining’ it takes a huge amount of energy. ‘Mining’ is a misnomer used to give the faux impression that cryptocurrency is like a reserve commodity such as gold. What crypto mining really is, is using computers to make small data packages which form the currency. This takes up a huge amount of energy and impacts the environment significantly.

To summarise, this faux currency, based on no solid asset, limited in number, whose value is based on ‘vibes’ - i.e. subjective perceptions and trends on any one day - is causing huge amounts of climate damage, rendering the earth less hospitable to humans and beast. This is the insanity of such tech; in pursuing it blindly for faux virtual riches, we destroy the very earth we need to survive. What is the point of all this crypto when it kills the actual earth?!

Another example is stock market trading. Stock market players have a significant impact on financial markets and national economies. But these days, humans do not even do the deals. It’s AI! One prominent example of a company that utilises AI entirely for stock trading without human intervention is Two Sigma. Two Sigma is a hedge fund that heavily relies on quantitative analysis and machine learning algorithms to make trading decisions. Their trading strategies are predominantly driven by AI systems that analyse vast amounts of data to identify patterns and opportunities in the market. The actual trading decisions are executed autonomously by the computer systems.

In other words, AI can autonomously destroy economies. By itself. A computer can decide whether to crash a currency on the Forex or make grain too expensive to import. A computer, not a human. A piece of metal.

This is what the neoliberal world calls ‘disruption’. It is not ‘disruption’ - it is an acceleration of the status quo and what has gone before; the enriching of the few by the labour of the many. It is the continuation of exploitative practices. It does this by tech - the programming of computers to exponentially increase the speed and capacity for exploitation. The only difference now is twofold:

1. The fruit - i.e. the profit - of the labour of the masses is now trickling up at warp speed, at a rate never before envisaged in the history of man.

2. It is now not just the profits of labour that are trickling up. Human beings are squeezed even further - their data; preferences, opinions, ‘likes’ - all are transferable into cold, hard cash. It is human exploitation on steroids.

The grip of technofeudal overlords on all of us is one thing, but their grip on states is another. These overlords are not subject to the laws of states: they will not come and give evidence when called. Instead, they power governments and control their militaries; giving them data and assistance in their most tyrannical and authoritarian decisions. These technofeudal overlords have powered the genocide in Gaza on behalf of Western states. For this, they are rewarded with complete immunity from any law; able to do what they want, when they want, untouchable and spoilt like Greek gods.

States know the power of tech very well; it is why there is a revolving door between big tech and the UK government: the former deputy PM Nick Clegg now head of Global Affairs at Facebook and in charge of silencing pro-Palestine voices.

Technofeudalism has made both the states we live in - and all of us within them - complete serfs to our global tech overloads. It is the most pernicious form of exploitation for profit the world has ever seen.

The only way out of the technofeudal system is to abandon it entirely.

To truly disrupt, we need to end this status quo once and for all. This means we must free ourselves from the machinations of our own exploitation.

True disruption is disrupting the status quo. It is forcing a reality of greater equality: where the very few cannot take hold of the majority of the earth while the rest of us get close to nothing.

It means forcing a reality of equality, justice and equity. These things can only be gained by dismantling the status quo which rabidly objects to these principles. The only way to demolish it - is to disrupt it.

We MUST divest from big tech.

It is only by throwing a spanner in the works of this mass surveillance and data harvesting exploitation racket that we can cause any real disruption. If we do not enter the Matrix, how can the Matrix take from us? If we do not buy from Amazon, how will Amazon tell us what to buy?

The cumulative effect of everyone leaving the Matrix will wreak absolute havoc on the globe. It will disrupt everything. From global economies and crypto values, to the ‘market’ and the environment, the knock-on effect will be enormous.

The greatest flaw in the technofeudal system is that it requires human input. Technofeudalism can only operate - and thus control us - if we engage in it. If we do not enter into its realm, it has nothing from which to harvest from us, nothing with which to control and manipulate us.

However difficult it may be, we do not need to enter their ‘cloud’. We do not need to engage.

It can be done. It takes discipline and focus. But above all, it needs us all to commit to it. We must all of us, commit to disrupting the status quo by quite simply refusing to engage in it any longer.

We must all - collectively and together - leave the Matrix.

We must disrupt everything.