The Sorcerer's Apprentice

We live in an age when corporations, even more than governments, can literally "flip a switch" and create information, or make it disappear.

Organizations like Google, Farcebook and all their related and equivalent beasts - including all of China's homegrown copies - are the embodiment of fascist architecture.  No need to burn books when hitting the delete button neatly vanishes the past, and data entry clerks create the future, like hives of Winston Smiths.

There is really only one way to combat this creeping threat.  Buy all the hard-copy books you can find, especially those printed before the 1940s, and especially things like dictionaries, atlases, encyclopaedias, and similar reference books.  The day will certainly come when owning real, printed books will be illegal, a la Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, but until then, the only way to preserve unedited, unmolested knowledge is in a form that cannot be manipulated by the gargantuan media monsters.

An individual is only as powerful as the information he has.  This is why governments spent inordinate amounts of time and money on "intelligence."  Seeking the truth, while denying it to one's enemies is the oldest form of warfare Humankind has known.

When people lie to us, they are in fact committing a form of violence, because when we act on false information, the outcome is likely to be far less than what we were hoping to get.  When Google, Farcebook and others purposely deny us information, they are in fact committing violent acts on us for the express purpose of causing us pain.  Whether they alter the information or block it altogether makes no difference.  It is the denial of true and correct information that constitutes the act of violence.

For centuries, governments has done this.  We variously call it propaganda or false flag attacks, but over the centuries, we have come to expect it from such institutions.  For millennia, religions have done the same.  Governments only usurped and secularized the technique, but the results have been the same.

Now there are corporations who have the power to deceive both governments and religions.  In the digital age, it is not who controls the libraries, it is who controls the transmission.  After all, having powerful information is useless without the ability to transmit it to someone else.  As a corollary to Marshall McLuan's postulate that the "medium is the message," we can now add that the "medium controls the message," and "whoever controls the medium controls the world."

If I have the power to alter, block or manipulate any message sent to anyone on the planet, or worse, to generate messages based on your habits on- and off-line, then I have to the power to deprive you of necessary information, or to change the content of the message. or even worse, to change the information to cause you to act wrongly.

The most devious part of this kind of warfare is that it is now possible to manipulate the messages, disguise the manipulation, and to do it so fast as to make the manipulation seem almost impossible, even if it is suspected.

A couple of decades ago, the US broke up the Bell System, because a single company had full control of all telephonic communications.  Most of the worry then was simply non-competitive control of pricing for access, but I can imagine that if Bell could have manipulated real-time conversations at will and without detection, then the outcry would have been far more urgent.

Before that, the US broke up the Standard Oil Company (Rockefeller's monopoly) because it had complete control of petroleum from the wellhead to the fuel tank.  One entity having this amount of control over something as important as energy rang alarm bells in the minds of millions of people.  Rockefeller not only had the power to set prices, but to control quantity, quality and delivery.  He could force producers to sell lower and force consumers to buy higher, and there was nothing anyone could do.

That those former monopolies acquired so much power as to alarm most rational people and cause a wave of cabal-busting, it is even more alarming that no one seems to have the temerity to take the Googles and Farcebooks apart.  This is because, unlike Standard and Bell, the new monopolies own the government.  They can cut off government just as effectively as any individual.  And those the leviathans can't control with fear, they can simply buy with bottomless cash supplies.

This degree of fascism has never existed before in human history.  We have seen extreme cases on numerous occasions, including the current American and Chinese empires, but never have we seen such power coagulated in so few hands with so little opportunity to control it.  These corporations have endless power to advertise themselves, insert themselves into so many aspects of daily life, and absolute authority to boost or destroy whomever they please, and with the twitch of a finger, they can make any of us vanish - if not physically, then in any other way that matters.  They can control our ideas, thoughts and actions in ways we are hardly even aware of.

Imagine if/when these behemoths launch algorithms that can digest vast amounts of data almost instantly, then act and react faster than most of us can even glance at our watches.  A more serious question arises, though.

If we mere humans are able to break up these digital monopolies, would we find ourselves becoming the Sorcerer's Apprentice?  Would we hack the magic broom into a thousand pieces, only to see each piece become a new attack on our humanity?

These are serious problems and they raise even more serious questions.  We are blithely dancing into our own demise without question who or what we are following.  It is well past time to migrate away from Google and Farcebook and their ilk.  Choke them with the power of the purse.  They thrive on our eyeballs, so we must deprive them of their food.

In the meantime, start building private libraries of books - real, printed books with print dates long before the digital age.  Collect reference books - medical, electrical, engineering, and general knowledge.  They are powerless to block or modify that information, but we should be ready for full on physical attacks on books if they get desperate enough.  Threatened beasts are unpredictable.

Like master pickpockets, they dangle shiny baubles in front of our eyes while sliding their fingers into our minds to steal our humanity and reality.

When things seem too wonderful to be true, they often are.

Removing The Blinders

To start off today's rant, let us first define "government."  Government is a human institution designed to erect barriers to creativity that protect favored entities (regulation), be a parasite that leeches off of the productive parts of society (taxation) and provide life-long employment for those members of society who are unwilling or incapable of being creative or productive (bureaucrats).  Like bacteria, government will grow until it consumes all of the resources available within its jurisdiction.  In other words, there is no such thing as a "good" or "benign" government, and this is true in every form, in all places and at all times throughout history.

What prompts today's tirade is the annual repeating of the Indonesian government mantra, "We are incapable of managing within our limits."  Last year, it was this whining article, this year it's (naturally) even more dire.  In keeping with the character of all governments everywhere at all times, there is no discussion of laying off apparatchiks or scaling back government programs, there is only talk of how to steal more money from the productive parts of society to feed the parasite.

Let's begin with the vaunted government "tax amnesty" program.  This was conceived as a way to get people to fess up and pay in all those taxes they hadn't reported in the past, with the carrot being a 'promise' not to cause grievous bodily harm to those who 'voluntarily' threw themselves on their swords.  Everything was all optonistic at first, as the government crowed that folks would happily deal the government in on their personal wealth if they just weren't afraid of retribution.  In the old days, this was called a "protection scheme" used by mafia and gangs to extract money from local shop owners.

Turns out people really are as broke as they kept telling the apparatchiks.  The program has so far brought in less than 25% of the expected windfall the government originally represented to investors and bankers.  Stocks and foreign investment have duly registered their disappointment with this situation, as the market deflates like a farting balloon.

All of that would be bad enough, but wait!  There's more!

The next example of government beneficence recently in the news is the Natuna Gas Project.  Here we have a case of one of the largest estimated gas reserves in the world sitting under the Natuna Sea, and the Natuna island chain.  Let's forget just for a moment that this rich gas field is sitting right next to the South China Sea, and is surrounded by Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and Brunei, in addition to Indonesia.  If this sounds like a recipe for disaster, it gets better.

The Natuna people have lived in these islands since before records were kept, and certainly longer than the 70-year history of Indonesian independence.  They dwell in relative obscurity, being at the very frontier of national boundaries and receiving attention only because they sit on top of a veritable gold mine.  Can we have a show of hands, how many folks think these people will directly benefit from the wealth under their feet for the past millennium or two?

Let's begin with government regulations, shall we?

Under current Indonesian resource laws (updated during the 2009 coal boom), the government wants to "partner" with a producer to drill and extract the gas.  The government wants the producer to take all the risk and expense, bringing all the necessary equipment to do the job.  The result is that the government will then own all the production and take ownership of all the machinery and infrastructure that was imported to produce the field.  Furthermore, under Indonesian cabotage law, all vessels used to import the equipment and cart off the gas much be Indonesian flagged in national waters.

In other words, you do all the work, cover all the costs, and we get all the benefits.  Such a deal!  Anyone who finds this a fair and equitable arrangement please contact me right away so I can manage your investment for you.

Naturally, the locals will be promised the sun, moon and stars in exchange for their cooperation.  They will be offered government indoctrination centers (schools) and government resource management centers (hospitals) that, if they are worth a damn in the first place, will soon devolved into deteriorating skeletons of empty promises.

Finally, once (if) the money starts rolling in, there will suddenly be layers upon layers of government apparatchiks, brokers and corruptors of all stripes with ladles in hand, ready to siphon off as much of the wealth as possible.  The locals will be forced to join in the festival of slime, or find themselves completely out of the loop, watching as tar balls and trash wash up on their once-pristine beaches.  And all this assumes the government can find a competent sucker to come in under its terms in the first place.

Meanwhile, those companies who were stupid enough to hang a shingle under the government's oh-so-equitable rules are finding themselves under attack with few options for relief or response.  GOOGLE has been hit with a US$400 million tax bill for 2015 alone, with the past five years under the microscope, and its only options for appeal are the Indonesian tax office (good luck) and/or the Indonesian courts (hahaha!).  In other words, their only option is to ask the very leeches who live off GOOGLE blood to stem the flow just a bit.

Don't get me wrong.  I really don't like or trust GOOGLE, but this makes for a great case study of government greed and desperation.  After years of corruption, bloated hierarchy, mismanagement, convoluted and overlapping ministries, waste, sleaze and slime, the government finds itself running out of options to perpetuated itself, with the one obvious option of cleaning up its act being quite far off the table.

Under Indonesian tax laws, GOOGLE has two options: pay the government's tax claim, or face years of audits and court hearings to determine if this money is actually owed.  Given the government's track record, GOOGLE will end up being liable for the money AND being out all the lawyer and court fees, as well as penalties and interest.  Great options, ne l'est pas?

Notice that the article mentions the one tool to which all governments always resort - force (read guns property confiscation and grievous bodily harm).

What all this boils down to, and Indonesia is by far not the only or best example, is that governments are destructive.  They stand in the way of real people making real profits and creating real things.  They are protection rackets that take money for the promise of protection from phantoms, while failing to protect people from the real threat - government itself.  The reason that governments appear to dance so well is their habit of constantly shooting themselves in the foot.

The reason that all governments are corrupt in all places and at all times is that they are collections of people who have been granted exclusive use of force to collect money that pays themselves.  If this is not a classic recipe for disaster, then nothing is.  Corruption and waste are natural by-products of organizations that produce nothing and get paid for it at the point of a gun.

Humans have yet to devise a system of governance on a large scale that does not eventually become its own worst enemy.  It is a parasitic institution that is utterly dependent on its ability to suck the life out of everyone who submits to it.

The only viable option is to have the smallest possible scale so that the 'leaders' are as close to the people being governed as possible.  In this way, 'leaders' can only be as corrupt as the communities they 'serve,' and the ability to escape corruption is as easy as a short move away to a neighboring community.

What we, the real people, must disabuse ourselves of is the notion that there is any such thing as benign government.  It does not, nor cannot exist.  At some point, the parasite always turns on the host in order to promote its interests over all others.  It is always a negative force that produces nothing and offers no rewards.  It simply takes, and when threatened, it takes more, until the host expires and rids itself of the infestation.

It is thus that we part with our new mantra, "All governments are always destructive at all times and in all places."