Lord of the Trolls — How Silicon Valley Enabled Putin’s Genocidal Regime
Lord of the Trolls — How Silicon Valley Enabled Putin’s Genocidal Regime
Putin wouldn’t exist in his current form without technology
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Lord of the Trolls
As I return to the early days of the Great Information War, one thing stands out — Putin would not exist in his current form if not for technology.
While the West was lulled to sleep with the promise of a connected world, a KGB spy and his cronies went to work online installing fake realities and forcing people to live in them — hacking the minds first of the people in his own country, and then taking the act on the internet highway. Ads were taken out seeking criminals with tech experience — a certain psychopathy valued in the work of poisoning reality. Politicians, reporters, and dissidents who were on to his con were assassinated.
Putin’s act continues today, and the world is in grave danger of losing its grip on reality.
Propaganda isn’t new, it’s a core tool in the fascist playbook, but the technology is.
“Hitler took the radios and the newspapers, because he had to fasten reality into his image,” Silicon Valley technologist and my podcast partner, High Fidelity, told Bette Dangerous. “Putin has done the same thing — not only has he taken the newspapers and the radio and television, but he’s taken the internet, a far more powerful platform in that it’s interactive and provides feedback to those who would weaponize technology to destroy people’s souls.”
As Kyiv-based reporter Paul Niland told RadPod:
“As a result of propaganda, Russia has become a death cult.”—Paul Niland, Ep96 RadPod
Our data, our privacy, our minds, all co-opted by a sneaky spy, who made David Pepper’s heart sink when he found out Putin would be leading Russia. Pepper knew him from St. Petersburg and knew his ascension would be bad for the Russian people. And now we know, it’s been damaging the world.
But he has lots of help.
“The billionaire oligarchs from Moscow to Silicon Valley have lined up and are goosestepping right behind him,” said High Fidelity. “They’ve turned over our data. We’ve been sold out. Putin and authoritarian regimes throughout the world are enabled by the Silicon Valley shysters.”
As I wrote in The Cult of the Genius Tech Bro:
They were treated as special — tech wunderkinds who possessed magical powers.
Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel etc…
Awe-inducing cover stories in polished tech periodicals, which existed to exalt them on high. The faces of these special boys appearing in chiaroscuro to ensure their canonisation.
But what was Mark Zuckerberg, really? A troll who created a website twenty years ago that judged if someone was hot or not. FaceMash, as it was known, evolved into Facebook, and its ‘move fast and break things’ ethos nearly broke democracy when the social media platform allowed Cambridge Analytica to hoover up all our data and target minds.
“It started with the dream of a connected world,” said digital rights activist Professor David Carroll in the film The Great Hack. “These digital traces of ourselves are being mined into a trillion dollar a year industry… we are now the commodity.”
No one read the terms and conditions, or checked the box for the part where the world becomes a deeply divided wreckage site, he said.
And it wasn’t that long ago when Elon Musk was a deified ‘star man’.
The world thought he was really special.
Then he bought Twitter and starting posting Hitler memes and neo-Nazi references.
Many were shocked. Those who knew him from Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal, and the plethora of dewy deifying tech cover stories couldn’t believe it was the same guy.
But those who’d been paying closer attention saw it coming, as we did here in our report Unmusked: How Elon Musk is Using Twitter to Destroy the Concept of Truth.
The Bag Men
The origin stories of Twitter and Facebook always seem to leave out the initial funding. As the Guardian reported in 2017:
“Two Russian state institutions with close ties to Vladimir Putin funded substantial stakes in Twitter and Facebook through an investor who later acquired an interest in a Jared Kushner venture, leaked documents reveal.
If money is coming from a mafia state — one that is consistently and relentlessly targeting the West with information warfare, that should be well-publicized in the terms and conditions that no one reads…
“They’re shady lying con artists,” said High Fidelity, who grew up on the chans, desensitizing himself and preparing for a war he saw coming. He became a wartime troll, going after the worst offenders, bullies, and liars online, and exposing vast networks of cons. He now tells people to get off social media.
“They promised us utopia, and they delivered us dystopia,” he cautioned. “They’ve delivered radicalized mass shooters and organized militias. We were lulled into a sense of complacency by a complicit press that fed us bullshit myths about the California technology wonder boys. The press will never admit to their complicity — that they were had.”
It’s why I wrote my American Monster series and my 2016 Election Attack series — to make sure the evidence is well documented.
And as always, I seek solutions.
I don’t do dystopia, I do solutions — anything can be solved with the will to do so.
“We need to take everything they have,” said High Fidelity. “Where are the investigations into money laundering? With Tesla catching on fire and Facebook users twisted into an unreality, while Palantir continues to gather data on the entire maelstrom of broken humanity, we need truth and reconciliation and international tech treaties.”
As disinformation researcher and author Alex Alvarova said:
“The conscription of today is information literacy. The information space is toxic, and we should behave the same way as if the water we drink and the air we breathe would be poisoned too. We, as a human hive, need a quality information mix in order to survive on this planet, in this life, in this present. Imagine what happens to bees when their information exchange gets broken. They lose their orientation, the ability to warn each other, the skill to react accordingly, to heal or find food. The same is happening to us. Without a healthy natural information exchange algorithm, we are doomed.”
—Alexandra Alvarova
As I wrote in my conclusion to The Cult of the Genius Tech Bro, citing Dr. Michael MacKay:
The internet “has the promise of being an online, global community in which all people participate freely, openly and without barriers like wealth. It should be like being able to speak a language and talk to other people – as simple as that.”
“The way we get to a better place with our technology,” Dr MacKay believes, “is to recognize how we got here. Let's celebrate the real geniuses who freely gave us the enormous benefit of their talents. Let's put the tech bros in their proper place and recognize they are merely commodities brokers who package and sell other people's ideas."
I agree. Let’s combat this hateful darkness in a sweeping new deal that ensures the cult of the tech bro genius no longer has the power to sabotage our world — it’s well past time for a tech troll reckoning.
That reckoning begins when we start shunning the liars, the fakers, the criminals, the shady businessmen laundering Russian money to destroy the beauty of the real world and drag us into the darkness of fascism.
That reckoning should start today.
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