Their magick, and ours

For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it.

The sheer ease with which this machinery has been able to do its work reflects a creeping structural weakness which now afflicts the production of our news.

This extract from a new book on how the spooks took over the news explains in great detail about how al-Zarqawi had nothing to do with al-Qaeda... until the meme-machines of the Western media made him that way. (Hey, it's a good metaphor to think of a newswire service or a website as a prayer wheel of the modern era.)

And this is exactly why we need Chaos Marxism - or something like it. I think we have an aphorism which points out that the reason why there is a "concerted strategy" of brainwashing and black memetics right now for the first time in history is because the traditional forms of manufacturing consent, brute force and bribery, don't work in an advanced industrial democracy. Constant competition for the advertising dollar has had the same effect as constant competittion for market scare - the means of production of memes are becoming ever more efficient, and yet their equivalent of the "rate of profit" (the rate of effectiveness?)tends to ever diminish. And much like we need to learn from the industrial workers how best to make the revolution in the factories, we need to learn from the cyberworkers and the internet nerds how to build the revolution in the mediasphere.

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ON that subject, for those following Project Chanology at home: February 10 rocked, London and elsewhere. What has the "traditional protest movement" learned from this phenomenon?

1) Just because people follow some weird and offensive memes doesn't mean they're not potent allies.
2) A protest movement is NOT a community - when it becomes a "community", with its own "permanent" power structures and ethos, you're in the realms of small-group psychosis and you by Goddess should be looking to bust out.
3) We haven't yet begun to plumb the depths of what the self-organisation of internet nerds is capable of. There must be cross-fertilisation with the "Traditional" workers' movement, expecially for those of us seeking to organise the cybertariat of the 21st century.