Big Tech and the political class are addicted to permawar
Big Tech uses bipartisan senior intelligence and national security state officials with heavy offense connections as lobbyists
(My 9,000 word May 6, 2022 article “I want you to wake up and wake others up” was TLDR. I reworked it significantly and will be chopping it up into shorter chunks centered around more specific themes over the next week or so.)
Big Tech uses bipartisan national security heavyweights as a key feature of its lobbying efforts against the dissolution of their monopoly status. Four days after Musk started playing footsie with Twitter sending Blue MAGA legacy media apoplectic, an April 18, 2022 open letter signed by senior intelligence officials was sent out to the Beltway Bubble at large. All of the signatories held positions at public relations firms, lobbying groups, and think tanks funded by Big Tech. The letter urged Congress to not to pass Big Tech antitrust bills because it would hurt American’s efforts in support of Ukraine in their war against Russia. The wholesale and unconstitutional surveillance of erstwhile citizens at home and conducting permanent war abroad is a completely bipartisan affair.
Through interlocking directorates, ad revenue sources, being owned by the same hedge funds that own offense contractors, and a variety of cozy and mutually beneficial funding arrangements, Big Media and Big Tech are completely committed to war. The signatories urged that the trust-busting measure be sent before the military, intelligence, and homeland security committees in both chambers of Congress. The letter focused almost entirely on Russia. It mentioned Ukrainian false flags at Bucha (twice) and Mariupol. In spite of that emphasis, it closed by calling on Congress to join Big Tech “in the fight against cyber and national security risks emanating from Russia’s and China’s growing digital authoritarianism,” giving the issue a familiar “democracy” vs. authoritarianism framing.
I have to presume that all of the signatories had access to independent sources of intelligence telling them exactly what was going on in Ukraine and knew that this letter was factually inaccurate, a lie being told to a DC insider audience for specific political and economic objectives. To wit, these were that: 1) the real objective of the letter is to preserve Big Tech’s monopoly status, 2) more competition in the technology sector might end Big Tech’s monopoly but would not dramatically lower their immense profitability, and 3) an end to Big Tech’s monopoly status would probably not have as deleterious national security repercussions as they assert, even if the single Approved Narrative did become harder to promulgate. Nevertheless, they were able to sign off on this tripe, which is worth quoting at length.
“This is a pivotal moment in modern history. There is a battle brewing between authoritarianism and democracy, and the former is using all the tools at its disposal, including a broad disinformation campaign and the threat of cyber-attacks, to bring about a change in the global order. We must confront these global challenges.”
“U.S. technology platforms have given the world the chance to see the real story of the Russian military’s horrific human rights abuses in Ukraine, including the atrocities committed in Bucha, and the incredible bravery of the Ukrainian people who continue to stand their ground. Social media platforms are filled with messages of support for Ukraine and fundraising campaigns to help Ukrainian refugees.”
“At the same time, President Putin and his regime have sought to twist facts in order to show Russia as a liberator instead of an aggressor. When reporting and images of the atrocities in Bucha began to circulate, along with evidence and testimony pointing to Russian forces as the perpetrators, the Kremlin was quick to label the claims as ‘fake news.’ The Russian government is seeking to alter the information landscape by blocking Russian citizens from receiving content that would show the true facts on the ground – and it has already received buy-in from other like-minded states, such as China, whose social media platform TikTok continues to abide by Moscow’s rules of “digital authoritarianism.” Indeed, it is telling that among the Kremlin’s first actions of the war was blocking U.S. platforms in Russia. Putin knows that U.S. digital platforms can provide Russian citizens valuable views and facts about the war that he tries to distort through lies and disinformation.”
“U.S. technology platforms have already taken concrete steps to shine a light on Russia’s actions to brutalize Ukraine. Through their efforts, the world knows what is truly happening in cities from Mariupol to Kiev, undistorted by manipulation from Moscow. Providing timely and accurate on-the-ground information – and disrupting the scourge of disinformation from Russian state media – is essential for allowing the world (including the Russian people) to see the human toll of Russia’s aggression and is increasingly integral to U.S. diplomatic and national security efforts. It is our belief that these efforts will play a part in helping to end this war.”
“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marks the start of a new chapter in global history, one in which the ideals of democracy will be put to the test. The United States will need to rely on the power of its technology sector to ensure that the safety of its citizens and the narrative of events continues to be shaped by facts, not by foreign adversaries.”
The April 18, 2022 letter hearkens back to an earlier one dated September 21, 2021 signed by a similar (and overlapping) slate of senior intelligence luminaries, this one addressed specifically to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. It differed from the previously discussed letter by urging antitrust measures under consideration by Congress be quashed because they would hurt Big Tech’s strategic competition with China for global technology supremacy. Again, all of the signatories held positions at military contractors, public relations firms, lobbying groups, and think tanks funded by Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft.
Among the 12 signatories to the September 21, 2021 letter were several who also signed the now notorious October 19, 2020 letter declaring that “more than 50 former senior intelligence officials” felt the Hunter Biden lap top story on the eve of the 2020 presidential election had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” With apologies to sex workers, who provide an ancient and valued service, this partisan whoring hall of fame signature list includes former CIA director and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and former acting CIA Director Michael Morell, who signed all three letters.
In unguarded moments, signatories to the partisan whoring hall of fame letter and the two bipartisan military-industrial complex, national security state, and foreign policy blob letters might be willing to admit that ending Big Tech’s monopoly would probably be better for consumers and society as a whole. They might even be able to admit that ending Big Tech’s monopoly in the service of a disinformation governance regime coordinated with economic sanctions and a proxy war bonanza for the military-industrial complex is not the only way for America to maintain its global supremacy. What they might not be able to admit, however, is that it is no secure path to an accommodation with the inevitable reality of a multipolar world - because they would probably not accept a multipolar world as inevitable.
They would likely have a very hard time seeing past American hard power as a central feature of its global dominance. America’s key military planning documents from before, during, and after the Clinton administration are remarkably similar and completely bipartisan. Wolfowitz’ Defense Planning Guidance of 1992, the Quadrennial Defense Review of 1997 drafted by Secretary of State Blinken’s lobbying partner Michèle Flournoy, and the Project for a New American Century’s iconic Rebuilding America’s Defenses in 2000 all have a number of features in common. They are to 1) take America’s unrivaled military dominance as a given, 2) demand that no “regional great power or global peer competitor” emerge, 3) reserve the right for unilateral, preemptive action in violation of international law, 4) require America to be able to fight and win two major wars simultaneously, and 5) have as a key national interest “uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources.”
One of the many difficulties facing America today is that we are well past the event horizons imagined by any of those documents. Since no one on Team Blue took up Zbigniew Brzezinski’s suggestion that a rapprochement with China and Russia might be advisable and since neoconservatives have commandeered Democratic foreign and military policy through the Lincoln Project, Trump Resistance, and other means, the approach of America under the dominance of Big Media, Big Tech, intelligence (sic), academia, and the military-industrial complex towards the world remains mired in an obsolete militarism singularly unable to recognize the emergence of a multipolar world, let alone even begin to adapt to it. The financial warfare component is not new either. America has been doing that since the Bretton Woods monetary conference of 1948 set the stage for the dollar’s dominance in the post WW II era.
John Perkins’ 2004 classic Confessions of an Economic Hitman laid out the phases America presented to client and dependent states during that time. Accept the IMF, World Bank, and Wall Street loans that remove a country’s wealth from the neocolonial periphery to the metropolis. If not “the jackals” move in to stage assassinations, coups, and covert operations. Failing that, outright invasion can always be considered. The information war is not a new component either. Lies and propaganda have been a central part of war for millennia. It has certainly been no different in modern American war.
What has been different, however, has been the evolution of the technology of mass communications as the empire rose to prominence, dominated the world, and then began declining, and the application of new and sophisticated psychological insights developed over that period since the innovations of Freud. Radio, film, television, and lately the internet and social media have all played their roles, especially in the coordination between the government, media, and now Big Tech in creating, controlling, and sustaining dominant narratives in order to drum up domestic support for mass murder.
The “don’t break up Big Tech monopolies based on national security because Russia bad” letter signed by Panetta, Morell, and company shows that, with the support of Big Media, Big Tech, intelligence (sic), and academia, it is still quite possible to create, control, and sustain predominant narratives. The ubiquity of smartphones, high speed internet, and social media, however, has made it more difficult. Facebook’s IPO of 2012 adequately marks when this proliferation occurred in earnest.
The fervor with which the government is creating what Alan Macleod called “an intellectual no-fly zone” in Mint News Press, an author and publisher who just recently had their money fucked with by PayPal along with a number of other anti-war, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist platforms and writers, including the legendary Consortium News. By using Big Tech and fintech to clamp down on any dissent indicates to me that TPTB know that the omnipresence of information makes the edifice of lies undergirding any Approved Narrative extremely precarious. Any Approved Narrative. Glenn Greenwald put it succinctly: “Big Tech censorship of political speech is…virtually always devoted to silencing any meaningful dissent from liberal orthodoxy or official pieties on key political controversies.”
The model was initiated during the pandemic. It is being perfected now with the proxy war in Ukraine. In the future it will be over something else. The pandemic served the sickness maintenance industry, Big Pharma, and the state’s aspirations to create a bio-surveillance regime. The war in Ukraine is serving the military-industrial complex and helping the state perfect its disinformation governance regime. The next iteration will likely be enacted to support one of the other few remaining large sectors of the American economy and improve some other sector of the government’s war against its people.