Biden left office warning that a small number of super-wealthy individuals have taken control of the country. Echoing Eisenhower’s warning of the Military Industrial Complex, Biden described how these oligarchs used the Tech Industrial Complex (they own) to manipulate the opinions, beliefs, and behaviors of enough of the American population to elect their proxy. Brexit, Trump 1.0, and now Trump 2.0, are proof of the power of their “Weapons of Mass Manipulation“. Weapons still in their infancy.
Long before the weapons of mass manipulation achieved unprecedented political power they achieved unprecedented economic power.
“In sector after sector – health care, agriculture, financial services, energy, transportation – a handful of giant corporations control what is produced and how much we, as consumers, pay for their products. Unbelievably, just three Wall Street firms (BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street) control assets of more than $22 trillion. These three Wall Street firms are the major shareholders in about 95% of S&P 500 companies, exerting enormous control over the largest corporations in the world.” – Senator Bernie Sanders
“The combined net worth of America’s twelve wealthiest people passed $2 trillion last year. Meanwhile, U.S. homelessness increased 18% in 2024. Our problem isn’t an issue of resources. Our problem is ever-expanding wealth inequality.” – Robert Reich, Former Secretary of Labor
Eisenhower’s Military Industrial Complex. The Money Machines of Wall Street. The Weapons of Mass Manipulation. The Oligarchs. The Titans of Tech. Trump. Like the heads of hydra, they are all expressions of the same creature – all winners of the same evolutionary competition. They are the Apex competitors, the best adapted, mass scale predators and parasites in the world.
With respect and appreciation for Biden, Sanders, Reich, and many other crusaders for justice, provoking our anger at the abuses of the Apex competitors is exactly the wrong thing to do. By focusing our attention on abuse after abuse in the never ending story of abuses we are distracted from realizing how all the abuses stem from our consent to the license that perpetuates them.
We don’t blame lions for killing gazelles or mosquitos for sucking blood – they are doing what they evolved to do. Blaming Apex competitors for their predatory targeting or parasitic vitality sucking is like blaming chess champions for out strategizing their opponents, blaming a boxer for punching too hard, or blaming a magician for misdirecting our attention.
It’s not their fault for being winners and it’s not the tech’s fault either (blaming the tech is like blaming the printer for the food not tasting like the menu described). The fault is in our collective consent to the rules of the competition.
We have all been complicit in consenting to a world in which predation and parasitism are considered normal ethical modalities of economic and political competition. Nothing personal. Just business. Caveat emptor. We all daily consent to being free-to-use public assets. We all daily reaffirm that it’s perfectly legal and ethical to manipulate our thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and passions in order to induce profitable economic and political behaviors.
| pred-a-tory (stalking /acquiring) | (herding /consuming) par-a-sit-ism |
| 1 – a: of, relating to, or practicing plunder, pillage, or rapine b: inclined or intended to injure or exploit others for personal gain or profit 2: living by predation : predaceous also : adapted to predation |
1: the behavior of a parasite (abusively uses the resources of others) 2: a relationship where one benefits at the expense of the other (slavery, servitudes, addictions) |
We shouldn’t be surprised that in the era of ever more powerful social-info-tech we have a less intelligent, more manipulable, sicker population while at the same time an ever smaller percentage of the population gets ever more wealthy. It’s not the technology. The technology could make the world such a better place. It’s not human nature. It’s our general acceptance of human predation and parasitism, that by competitive extension, has led to the weapons of mass manipulation. The stock market, social media, malware. personalized ad targeting, ads in general, ad designs, news silos, politics, entertainment, health, food, drink, goods, services – every dimension of modern life is being predatorily and parasitically manipulated.
What scares me most is how well the magician-like misdirection skills of the predator-parasites work. Trump is a poster-boy proxy for (and the puppet) of predatory-parasitic wealth. Just like we were with Trump during his campaigns, we are always distracted, by their particular over-the-top abuses, at the expense of realizing how they have, like great magicians, misdirected our attention from realizing their deception. Again, they are not the bad guys. They are just the winners the competition we have all agreed to. The more we blame them, rather than the implicit consensus that licenses and incents them, the more powerful they become.
We will never stop them from winning by playing whack-a-mole with their specific abuses anymore than we could have ended slavery by prohibiting particular kinds of chains. So long as the predatory manipulation of human behavior is legally, ethically, and commonly accepted, like slavery once was, the most powerful forces in our economy and politics will continue to suck the health, intelligence, and economic vitality out of our population.
We have to revoke the implicit license to predatorily and/or parasitically use people. If we can’t do that the tech serving the money will continue to prevail and become ever harder to stop.
Our capitalism and politics are based on and depend upon using misinformation, predatorily and parasitically, to manipulate people’s behaviors. Many thousands of times every day the average American is hit with info-machine-gun fire. Info-ammo carefully created and fired to manipulate people’s mental, emotional and/or worldly behaviors. As if the “sponsors” have every right to intentionally, tactically, intelligently, and mostly covertly, enslave the behaviors of others to serve their purposes:
What happens when the most powerful technology ever developed by humans is used to super weaponize the manipulation of humans to the benefit of its owners? Where will that lead us?
According to all three of the major AIs today, the number one threat to humankind’s future is not climate change, global war, pandemics or any of the previous list toppers. Human Predation amplified by AI is now the greatest threat because AI as a super-weapon for predation and parasitism already elected Trump twice and he, on behalf of the powers that put him in office, can now decide the character of the most important phase of AIs coming dominance.
We have to stop venting our anger and outrage at the heads of the hydra and focus on killing its root: the license we have given it to prey upon and use us as if we were but its assets. The tech will make them even more powerful. We just elected exactly the wrong people to protect us from the abuses the tech will make possible.
WAKE UP
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