The ghost of Edward Bernays walks the streets of the ancient capitals of Europe. As the man who wrote the book on propaganda (literally) Bernays made a chilling observation:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.
In a post-Cambridge Analytica world, the battle for humanity will be fought over the equivocation of “freedom”—the basic human freedom of expression will be coopted by the corporate freedom from regulation to profit from surveillance by machines. It is the ad-man’s old challenge–make you think something that will kill you is actually good for you.
Descendant of Bernays’ “Torches of Freedom” Campaign
In turning the machines loose on the humans who are their product, corporations will use tools that Bernays foreshadowed–but these “men we have never heard of”. Who wins this battle is up for grabs right now and nowhere are we seeing this struggle for humanity more clearly rendered than in Europe in the battle over Article 13.
In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.
Bernays described Google some 70 years before its time.
The offspring of Joe Camel proudly displayed at the Googleplex
We should understand that the “value gap” that sparked this extraordinary lobbying effort by American multinational corporations to bring Europe to heel was symptomatic of a more fundamental sickness. That commercial symptom could, and perhaps should, be more readily understood as a “values gap”–the perverse voyeurism of the surveillance capitalists to commoditize all that touched their networks and use artists to lure the humans whose data could be scraped, whose behavior could be monitored and eventually manipulated for even greater profit.
I’d suggest that is why this struggle in Europe resonates so deeply with artists around the world. It’s not just the commercial insult. It’s not the metaphorical Room 101 app where the winning answer is 2+2=5.
It is an insult to humanity. It is an insult to the heart.
[from https://ift.tt/2llz3cO]
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