The election day is here and as Greg Olear wrote in his last beautiful essay, "Small wonder we’re all nervous wrecks." I'm a guest on American soil, I can' t vote and if it were not for the safety of other countries and my own kids, I wouldn't dare to meddle by a single word.
In fact, the role of someone, who can only observe from a distance, has its cruel advantage: You can see the most important threats to American society and stay in oblivion to daily cultural details. So, I am challenging you to read this (maybe completely ignorant) situation report.
Observation one: During Covid, the information warfare (which most of the American society has no idea about it´s very existence) got a clear license to kill. Experts say it was a biological warfare led solely by information means. It killed more Americans than WW2.
Observation two: The leaders of America and its institutions are old people, including the attackers (billionaires in bed with RU organized crime, Kremlin, Saudis, and China). But the information warfare is young, and the soldiers are even younger and very creative.
I almost hate to say this, but the dirty trickster, who taught NATO how to fight meme warfare and who helped Trump, Jeff Giesea, is one more time right again. The problem is those genius guys are constantly playing the role of useful idiots. In fact, US greatest brains are either social morons or for sale. If there are great people with great talents, they have to share some basic values and virtues. Otherwise, the strength turns into a major weakness.
If you read Jeff Gisea´s last piece, you can come to the conclusion, the Republicans are hand in hand with foreign money coming to a re-grouping strategy. Which means, while Biden´s people are still trying to fight the battles of yesterday and fix the old mess, the attackers are up to the next level of warfare.
Observation three: We keep coming back to the crucial vulnerable point of our defense. The information warfare is just a part of a complex hybrid attack and could never be won on the information field. We tried it and we failed.
We failed for many reasons which can't be undone. Our defense was late, ineffective, and mostly dissociated in the form of a citizen guerilla, because the state has been taken. The inhibiting factors of our outdated defense are as follows:
1. The shape of the playground. Unlike the attacker, we think that our playground is lined by our constitutions. However, these documents are many hundred years old and never anticipated automatic weapons and automatic information distribution and AI. The key to the information distribution was never so crucial to our survival. There is no such thing in basic human rights, no Magna Charta, no constitution, no nothing. We need to adjust. There is one completely new human right coming out of fog right in front of us.
Right for undue influence free decision, right for sovereign decision about your Big Data. Right for equal and objective information space.
2. Second inhibiting factor is the age and information skills of our leaders. I just mentioned this. Giesea is right.
3. Third inhibiting factor is the eternal desire of Russia and China to conquer the world, no matter what. Their culture is different, so is their thinking. They are zero sum game players, completely unaware of common good (a Christian humanism term, encapsulated in our culture). Our adversaries will give birth to a lot of other leaders than XI and Putin, but all these leaders will probably respect the cultural desire to conquer, to dominate. It's their way to flatter voters in bad times and to cover domestic failures. They´re eager to prove democracy is weak, outdated concept and that history is siding with them. My experience with life in the totalitarian regime says that to reprogram people to another national narrative takes decades. So, no democracy in RU and CH in sight. Even their organized crime is indistinguishable from the ruling elites, they´re part of the same narrative, eager to conquer and proud to see us fall. They’re not businessmen, they´re soldiers of hybrid warfare. No matter how much they try to resemble western bourgeoisie.
4. Fourth inhibiting factor of our defense is the fact that the greatest invention of all times - the internet - was taken over by private capital. I know it sounds crazy leftist, but the consequences of privately owned unregulated information exchange are devastating.
The business model of the so-called Surveillance capitalism is our direct road to unfreedom. Private owners own your virtual bodies, our friendships, our knowledge, virtual health, our virtual sanity, virtual freedom of speech, and our virtual money.
5. And the fifth inhibiting factor of our defense is the AMOUNT of dirty money or better put adversary monies floating in the dark. It's way more than Jeff Bezos will ever possess in his entire life and this money is hungry to buy, own and rule.
Am I right, dear PayPal mafia?
While our lives moved to the internet during Covid, we diminished our existence in the REAL LIFE, where rights are guaranteed and guarded by constitutions. We moved to the lawless jungle of digital life. And the digital life is here to stay. We really must stop pretending nothing serious happened.
Every step forward of human society has been always done by codification of rules: regulation. A natural state of every underdeveloped society is anarchy and slavery. This is how we ended up with an unregulated digital life.
Libertarians are de facto telling us, the new digital slavery of the surveillance society, where all constituents are just some meats for marketing data sale, is morally OK. It's not OK, it represents a deep regressive fall of our high stage of development to the very basic one. The digital life is completely equal and sometimes even deeply interwoven with our physical condition and has a deep influence on our ability to live, work, connect and heal. It represents the next stage of McLuhanian extension of human body and skills.
America did not fight the physical slavery in a long battle only to immediately bow to another one. Digital life is a true next stage of life, and we can no longer tolerate private anarchy and the Darwinist rule in this domain.
Alex Alvarova is Czech-Canadian author, who lives in Boston, MA. A recognized authority in political marketing and public relations, a sought-after seminar leader, facilitator, podcaster and public speaker. In 2017 she wrote The Industry of Lies, a non-fiction work that introduces, outlines and fully supports a core concept: Russia used the 2013 presidential election in the Czech Republic as a trial run to perfect its hybrid-warfare aggression for altering the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential elections. In 2021, she published Feeding The Demons: The conquerors of America, a political thriller on bannonist behavioural BigTech propaganda. The story features the events of the American election 2016 and how the propaganda machine was established to destroy America. She wrote numerous expert articles on political marketing and algorithmic propaganda.
This is how we do it, Alex. At 73% of vote so far. We call call 211.
Arizona Proposition 211. Sets new limits on campaign finance.
Requires entities making independent campaign expenditures of at least $50,000 in statewide campaigns or $25,000 in other campaigns to disclose the original source of money for contributions over $5,000.