patrick.net

Narrative coordination’s impact is also enhanced by the fact that, a bit like the CCP, the managerial “party” has already achieved an extensive level of penetration throughout every corner of society. Any concentration of a sufficient number professional managerial class members – an HR department, DEI office, or communications staff, for example – can begin to function as a de facto “party cell,” serving as a ready-made surveillance and reporting mechanism, propaganda channel, and internal pressure group. This is the case no matter how deep into “hostile” geographic/class territory that they otherwise are. Since any sufficiently large organization ends up having to recruit these managerially educated people in order to operate, basically no institution, not even say a mostly working-class energy company in Texas, a Christian school in Alabama, or a military academy in Virginia, will be spared from steadily accumulating its own group of agitators dedicated to pushing it to adopt elite-favored managerial policies, practices, and values. (Thus it can be expected that any organization not explicitly anti-managerial will sooner or later become managerial.) ...

But, hold up… this doesn’t quite match the reality of what we’ve seen develop in the West in recent years, including most obviously in the hulking form of the Censorship-Industrial Complex. As revealed by the intrepid investigative reporting of journalists like Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger of Public, Lee Fang, and many others, the Complex is a network of managerial institutions that have directly coordinated with each other in order to censor political opposition and manipulate the public.

In their own words, technology platform companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google engaged in extensive “collaboration” with “partners” from across the federal government – including the Pentagon, State Department, intelligence agencies, and public health bureaucracies – as well as for-profit defense contractors, NGOs, universities, think tanks, media outlets, and the Democratic Party in order to erase or limit the reach of information detrimental to their interests. ...

Officials often used language directly leveraging their authority, such as claiming that “the highest (and I mean the highest) levels” of the administration demanded action, or – upon discovering the existence of parody accounts mocking Hunter Biden – that they could not “stress the degree to which this needs to be resolved immediately” (as with others like it, this request was “resolved” within 45 minutes). ...

“Only a whole-of-society approach – one that engages government, private companies and civil society alike – can effectively combat and build resilience to disinformation,” is how FBI Director Christopher Wray put it in 2020. ... Indeed the “whole of society” framing can now be found in use just about everywhere you look across the Western world, serving as an excuse for directly fusing state power with a single extensive and unified international network of managerial technocrats, effectively circumventing and shielding it from any democratic control whatsoever. ...

Even holding too zealously to yesterday’s sacred truth could be a disastrous mistake. But Berlin noted that while, “Inability to predict curious movements of the line is a crucial failure in a communist,” it always remained the case that “nobody can feel certain of the password from day to day.”

This is deliberate. In such a system keeping up with the party line – or maintaining what in Russia after the revolution of 1917 came to be known as “political correctness” – is itself the true test of an individual’s reliability and loyalty to the regime. ...

It is a closed, self-reinforcing feedback loop that rewards every new justification for growth in power and scope, no matter if that justification has any basis in truth, while punishing any threat of limitation. So in fact it has every incentive to eventually achieve takeoff velocity and leave all earthly reality behind. Those who insist on trying to reassert reality then become a threat to its growth. Protecting the narrative from reality becomes a core job of the narrative’s systems. ...

Simultaneously, a small core portion of those who have made it to the top are, unsurprisingly, psychopaths. For them the truth of the narrative was never important, only power, so they are happy to take more direct control of the narrative if they can. ...

Combine this with an extreme center rapidly growing more paranoid about threats to its legitimacy and control, and more determined to respond with a managerial united front, and we get a party line. Through it, the singular unreality of a one-party state is to be forced on everyone. While the success of this prospect may sound unrealistic, the party seems to be in luck: new technologies offer it tantalizing hope that the total administration of reality can indeed soon be achieved...

... all the assorted “experts” involved have, by “devising digital mechanisms by which they can turn down the volume on different ideas” on the internet – through tools like “deamplification” (shadow banning), search manipulation, and the selective addition of “friction” (such as spurious content warnings) – in effect appointed themselves as “unelected masters of the universe messing around with reality itself.

Kirn then followed up with an evocative metaphor:

"They’re mixing a record, Matt. They’re sitting there at a soundboard mixing a record. A little more cowbell. Let’s bring down the bass. Let’s bring up the treble, and they use words like friction and other mechanical metaphors for what they do to actual people. And we’re all just kind of bytes and digits in this musical production they call society. And it does sound crazy because it sounds so arrogant, so effortlessly arrogant as though social processes are computer processes and as though the thoughts, feelings, and opinions of a society are different instruments in a recording studio to be brought up in intensity or pushed out."

Artificial intelligence and other advances may allow for a far more precisely and comprehensively controlled information environment. The result could be a world in which automated censors are capable not only of instantaneously detecting and removing content disagreeable to the regime, but are able to completely filter and shape all of the information that reaches any person through the internet. Search results could be manipulated, inconvenient facts and data made simply undiscoverable. Definitions, official records, databases, and digital textbooks or even literature could be altered on the fly to match the party line. Disagreeable opinions and news could be algorithmically suppressed or made entirely unsharable, with seekers seamlessly rerouted to propaganda. Even large-scale real-world events, like a major pro-democracy protest, could be effectively disappeared, as if they had never happened, or immediately re-framed through selective editing to depict a chosen propaganda narrative. Personal digital IDs (whether officially mandated or simply informally assembled for each individual through big data collection) would allow consistently customized messaging and incentive “nudges” to be pushed to each person.

Of course, all of this is already happening. Social media companies already algorithmically filter information, secretly implement “search blacklists,” prevent certain topics from trending, and selectively disable links. These methods are already used for explicitly political purposes. Google has already been caught regularly manipulating search results (e.g. hiding search results for the lockdown-skeptical Great Barrington Declaration and only showing users results of opinions criticizing it, as verified by documents reviewed in the Missouri v. Biden case). ...

Google software already “assists” users by automatically prompting them to change politically incorrect words and phrases as they’re writing them.

But these may be just the first stumbling baby steps towards what with further developments in AI could become an all-encompassing regime of algorithmic gaslighting and fully-automated narrative management. ...

We already know that ChatGPT, for example, isn’t merely biased and ideological; rather, as the mathematician and writer Brian Chau has pointed out, explicit policies by its creator OpenAI mean that the structure of its code already goes “as far as prohibiting the chatbot from communicating politically inconvenient facts [at all], even ones agreed upon in the scientific community.” It is literally built to be incapable of accurately describing reality. ...

This would represent the greatest possible triumph for soft managerialism: a system in which all potential resistance from the masses is completely contained by pure narrative manipulation, with no need for coercion or the open use of force to ever be used at all. It’s no surprise then that developing this kind of innovative narrative control is one area where the West is in fact leading the way, while China, with its sweeping but relatively ham-fisted censorship and uninspired propaganda apparatus, is now scrambling to catch up and develop similarly sophisticated discourse power. ...

In June, the British bank Coutts closed the account of right-wing politician Nigel Farage without explanation. Farage was subsequently refused service by ten other banks. Internal “risk” documents produced by the bank and obtained by Farage soon showed Coutt’s reasoning for “exiting” him from his account: Farage had been found to no longer be “compatible with Coutts given his publicly-stated views that were at odds with our position as an inclusive organization.” The terrible sins listed on Farage’s rap sheet included: being friends with Donald Trump and unvaccinated tennis champion Novak Djokovic; campaigning for Brexit; using the word “globalist” with a negative connotation; being “climate denying/anti-net zero”; being “seen as xenophobic and racist”; and having been a “fascist” when he was a schoolboy, according to some rumors once heard by someone said to be in the know. Together this evidence proved Farage was “increasingly out of touch with wider society” (i.e. progress) and thus presented an “ongoing reputational risk to the bank.” So, especially “when considering our stance specifically on ESG/diversity,” he had to go. ...

Politically motivated debanking has in recent years become increasingly routine practice across the West.

Most memorably, Justin Trudeau’s Canadian government invoked emergency powers to freeze the bank accounts and seize the assets of the truckers protesting his destructive vaccine mandates and demagoguery. Canadians who had merely donated money to support the truckers also had their accounts frozen. This tactic of using financial levers to personally destroy political dissidents and shut down protests has since quickly spread around the world, also being used against protesting truckers in Brazil, for instance. ...

Debanking initiated by the banks themselves appears to have become even more common, however. In the same month as Farage, for example, the UK’s Rev. Richard Fothergill had his account closed on the spot after offering mild disagreement with his bank’s relentless promotion of transgender ideology on a customer feedback survey (the bank told him this view was “not tolerable”). Also in the same month, Scottish anti-Woke blogger Stuart Campbell had his account of 25 years closed by the bank First Direct without his even being notified. He only discovered the fact upon suddenly finding himself unable to use his card to buy groceries. In the US, mere days after the Farage scandal, JP Morgan Chase shuttered the bank accounts of anti-vaccine proponent Dr. Joseph Mercola, as well as his business’ CEO, CFO, their spouses, and all of their children. Again, these are all examples from within just a single month. And such cases that manage to draw public attention are doubtless only the tip of the iceberg. Farage says he has begun assembling a “very large database” of potentially thousands of similar cases from the UK alone.

Nor are banks the only ones involved. Online payment platforms have joined in too. GoFundMe seized money donated to the Canadian truckers through its platform on its own initiative. In May, Konstantin Kisin’s popular anti-Woke Triggernometry podcast was deplatformed by fintech company Tide. PayPal, in one of the more symbolic instances of its especially prolific debanking habit, cut off the Free Speech Union for promoting “intolerance.” PayPal also famously attempted to slip language into its user agreement allowing it to confiscate $2,500 from users each time they spread “misinformation” or said or did anything “harmful” or “objectionable” (all defined at PayPal’s “sole discretion”).

Why is this happening? Why would private banks and other businesses force out paying customers like this and risk courting public backlash? Because it is in their interest to do so if they want to survive and thrive, and indeed they have little choice. These banks are not really fully “private actors,” as they are part of the managerial economy in a budding managerial party-state. The business of a managerial business is not business; it’s managerialism. And once more: there can be no neutral institutions in a party-state. The party-state’s enemies are the institution’s enemies, or the institution is an enemy of the party-state (which is not a profitable position to be in). This is what “reputational risk” means: the risk of appearing to be on the wrong side of the party line. Hence why we find Coutts, a bank founded in 1692 and so quintessentially posh establishment that it banks the British Royal Family, decking out its entire headquarters in the rainbow regalia of loyalty and operating like it too is, like the AIIB, controlled by “an internal secret police.” ...

Most importantly, in a society as digitized as ours, control over digital transactions means surveillance and control over nearly everything. When someone is debanked – and then inevitably blacklisted from all other banks, because the banks are networked and share “risk” information – they are cut off from participation in nearly every aspect of modern life. They will have no easy way to receive pay from a job, as cashing checks without an account incurs exorbitant fees, and they may even simply be fired to avoid inconvenience (US federal law permits companies to make direct deposit mandatory). If they own a business, they will be left with no way to process the vast majority of payments, and won’t have any functional means to distribute payroll to employees. They will even be cut off from the primary medium for soliciting any donations beyond loose change. They cannot buy property and, in the case of many property management companies, may not even be able to rent. They will be unable to purchase almost any digital service and, increasingly, will be prevented from completing many everyday offline transactions as well. Once the ongoing war on cash is won, they will be well and truly screwed.

Having dipped a few of their mandibles in to test the waters with other lessons from China, the West’s managerial elite seem to have concluded that they now have the tools and latitude to begin implementing a similar system here. Although not yet anywhere near as comprehensive, this nascent system shares the same fundamental characteristics: using public-private coordination and “social governance” to collapse any distinction between public and private life, thereby greatly raising the risks for public non-conformity and dissent from the narrative. ...

How far might this all go? While the powerful realm of financial flows is today’s focus, there is no reason to think that, on the current trajectory, the same dynamics won’t be applied, in a united front, to every other sector of our economy and society. If someday soon people find themselves evicted from their insurance policies for speaking out of turn online (or associating with too many people who do), apartment leases come with ideological morality clauses, and airlines unite to ban customers with the wrong beliefs from traveling, we shouldn’t be surprised – this will simply be the behavior of a hardening managerialism seeking stability through mechanistic control over all the details of life. ...

New technologies, like AI and, especially, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) will only continue to make this kind of granular control more and more possible.[22] And all that which can possibly be used will be used. A few months ago, a man found himself completely shut out of his digitally controlled “smart home” by Amazon after a delivery driver accused his doorbell of saying something racist.[23] Why would Amazon bother to do this? Because they can do this; and so, in the end, under a managerial regime, they must do this. As our managers find that every day it feels easier and easier to “solve” problematic people with the click of a button, they will not be able to resist hitting that button, hard and often. ...

In the West, progressive managerialism softly strangled democracy to death over a century of manipulation, hollowed it out, and now wears its skin. In the East, the imported virus of communist managerialism wiped out a once-great civilization in a river of blood, then crystalized into the cold, hard machine that now rules the lands of China. ...

Managerialism has today conquered the world so thoroughly that to most of us it may seem like the only possible universe, the very water in which we swim. With our history rewritten and our minds conditioned, just as Orwell (and other prophets) predicted, we now struggle even to perceive its existence, yet alone to break through the iron paradigm of managerial thinking and recognize that, as both a form of government and a way of being, it is in the human experience something wholly new, abnormal, tyrannical, and absurd. ...

Sharing the same managerial hubris, tempted by the same growing technological powers and desire to engineer the mind and soul of Man, sheltering the same elite insecurities and delusions, and seeking to head off many of the same challenges, China and the West are today both leading the charge for that resurgence from different directions. Even as they roil and clash, each – hard and soft, modernist and post-modernist – is in its own way converging on the same destiny: the same socially engineered submission of everything human, real, and free to technocratic nihilism and the false reality of an all-encompassing machine-government – to a total techno-state.

It’s in my view now clear that humanity’s great task of the 21st century remains fundamentally the same as that left unfinished in the battles of the 20th: to reawaken and reassert the flame of the human spirt and reclaim its tradition of and natural right to self-governance. And then with that spirit, wielding the fire and sword of true human love and freedom, truth and right reason, to rise up in counter-revolution against the evil of its archenemy and tear the false order of managerialism and all its poisonous ideological spawn root and branch from the world forever.

One thing I've noticed is that the managerial classes WANT their kids to get pozzed with woke in Private Schools.

It's the engineers, chemists, etc. that are not in management that get upset over Whole Math and CRT and Queer Theory in those Private Schools. As non-managers, they don't see all the 'benefits' of signalling in memos from HR and DEI and everything else; they're working on actual projects.

“We think of this country as having a political divide, but we are actually not divided politically,” she told The Post. “The real divide in this country is along class lines — between an over-credentialed college elite and the working class.”

Though she has a PhD herself and admits to being “100% of the class I critique,” she’s motivated to give a voice to the working class who, she says, have been robbed of a platform by politicians and journalists from the elite echelons of society.

“I simply cannot stand to see the good-hearted working-class people of this country smeared by the left that sold them out,” she said. “We simply have evicted the working class from public view. We just don’t hear from them anymore, even though they represent most Americans.”

Ungar-Sargon’s extensive interviews for “Second Class” reveal a common thread: that working-class Americans, regardless of their personal characteristics or political affiliation, generally agree on which political reforms would improve their lives.

The author realized that working-class Americans largely share the same view on stricter border control and trade tariffs that favor domestic industry.

“The open border hurts them economically in a very real way by driving down their wages — and that’s obvious to people, whether they are Democrats or Republicans,” she explained.