With the internet, every ordinary social interaction is now subject to counterinsurgency tactics like COINTELPRO and GLADIO. In places like Vietnam, Kenya, and Ireland, counterinsurgency strategists have allowed the working class to organize while embedding agents within their orgs and also encapsulating these orgs within controlled structures, so that they may be manipulated, frustrated, and even misdirected to cause general chaos and drive society as a whole further toward authoritarianism. Today with Signature Reduction, Integrity Initiative, and similar programs in Japan and across the world, we know (and they want us to know) that similar forces are being brought to bear directly on every human mind. On the other hand, this is nothing new: ancient Egyptian scribes’ guilds celebrated initiation rites glorifying their craft of writing itself as being able to grab like a claw, catch like a net, or embalm like salt, any element of reality in the interest of ruling class control (and this general idea became the loose basis for hellenistic Hermeticism, or logos mysticism like that found in the Gospel of John). So what the fuck am I doing recording a podcast? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.