Anonymous poster Consensus at Why We Protest has posted an insightful set of remarks on Anonymous and the internet from his interest in Cognitive Science that illuminate Project Chanology. I have reproduced his posts below these comments.
Consensus sees that "The internet has changed the game. Every game. In all ways" and that "the world hasn't yet realized the significance of the Anonymous protests."
He puts his finger on a key issue in Chanology's war with Scientology:
What the internet has done is vastly increased the number and strength of connections, of communications pathways, between independent brains. And just as there's no 'seat of consciousness' in a human brain, there's no 'leader' of an
organization designed around twitter, facebook, or a forum.
This is why Anonymous will ultimately win the war with Scientology. The classic "Cut off the enemy's head" tactics of the cult no longer work. As a totalitarian organization all power in Scientology is concentrated in one man, David Miscavige. Leaderless Anonymous will eventually lop off his head.
Consensus goes right to the heart of the matter in Chanology: freedom to discuss politics and religion in ways in which you are prevented from reprisals. The internet has given hundreds of thousands of people the ability to speak critically of Scientology and its clothing itself in religious respectability to hide inquiry into its business operations and human rights abuses.
Remarkable and society changing. It is The Anonymous Revolution using new media and the blogosphere to expose organized Scientology by discussing relevant issues that have been taboo or supressed by Scientology.Another thing worth addressing is 'freedom of speech.' Yeah, we've always* had it... but discussions of politics and religion have been kept carefully controlled. In the past, bars were the equivalent of what the internet is today.
Yeah, you can see the night-and-day comparison; it really is like the difference between trying to sound out the word 'pencil' without a corpus callosum, and doing it with. But we won't talk about politics or religion in bars. Mostly because people get butthurt - and in a bar, butthurt people put up fists. On the
internet, that doesn't happen - so nobody fears the butthurt, and, in fact, we mock the butthurt mercilessly. So now we can breach topics of religion, politics, economics, race, and so on without fear of violent reprisals.How many of you have parents that joined facebook in the last six months? How many have received messages from them condemning your use of profanity?
And how many have stood up to your parents and said 'its my fucking internet, tolerate it or get the fuck off. P.S. Love you <3.'?>
Remarkable. Society-changing. And few realize or appreciate it yet. All the sudden, we have a true memescape with a Darwinian system killing weak ideas and spreading good ideas. All the sudden, we have real dialog going using more than empty rhetoric (doing an end-run around cable news, which has completely failed us on that end).
These rhetorical questions are the best:
How many of you have parents that joined facebook in the last six months? How many have received messages from them condemning your use of profanity?
And how many have stood up to your parents and said 'its my fucking internet, tolerate it or get the fuck off. P.S. Love you <3.'?>
Here he totally counters the prudish PC/socially-Conservative accusations by critics and enemies of Anon which Scientology uses to defame Anon and Project Chanology. "I'm shocked, shocked that Anonymous is using profanity."
The Scientology executives at Gold Base international headquarters prepared a booklet of these smears and gave it to their ally Republican Supervisor Jeff Stone. He used it to convince his fellow Riverside County supervisors to pass a Scientology-inspired revised protest ordinance designed to eliminate Anon's free speech right to protest, among other things, Scientology's suppression of free speech.
By propagating truth across the Darwinian memescape of the internet Anonymous is threatening Scientology's survival:
We - Anonymous - have been thrown into this in the last year. Scientology is a system designed to use every cognitive bias and logical fallacy against its members. And we have learned to recognize and shine a light on those bad forms of persuasion. We work to innoculate scientologists against them, because
scientology cannot survive if its membership is aware of them.
Chanology is fundamentally about free speech . Scientology is fundamentally about the suppression of free speech for individuals and society. Anonymous runs this game. Scientology is losing and cannot win because a lot of kids are telling their parents," its my fucking internet, tolerate it or get the fuck off. P.S. Love you <3.'"
Chanology is also more fun than Scientology.
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Posts by Consensus on the Why We Protest thread :CNN.com - Protesters use technology to coordinate efforts...
First post:
Okay, my background is Cog Sci, so I'm a little nutty for this stuff... but I've been saying since the beginning that the world hasn't yet realized the significance of the Anonymous protests.
The internet has changed the game. Every game. In all ways.
The corpus callosum, in the brain, is the neural pathway between the left and right hemispheres. In severely epileptic persons, it's sometimes medically advisable to sever that connection. The result is two mostly-independently functioning brains in one body.
You get the 'alien hand' effect, where you might be making an omelet with one hand, and the other is throwing dish soap into your pan (or you might be buttoning up your shirt with one hand, and the other unbuttons it). You can show a person with the split brain a pencil in their left field of vision and ask what it is, and they'll be unable to name it. Nonetheless, they'll know what it is, and can describe it until the left hemisphere recognizes the discription (via the auditory cortex rather than corpus callosum), and produces the word 'pencil' (perhaps, even, with mistaken guesses like 'pen' first).
Human brains are like the independent hemispheres. We're our own being, with our own consciousness. And these brains communicate via language. What the internet has done is vastly increased the number and strength of connections, of communications pathways, between independent brains.
And just as there's no 'seat of consciousness' in a human brain, there's no 'leader' of an organization designed around twitter, facebook, or a forum.
Anyone with the time, read up on the bonus army protests. Imagine how it would have played out differently if today's internet existed then. Hell, imagine if the internet existed in the lead-up to the great depression.
And if everything was just going smoothly, these changes due to technology would go largely unnoticed. But now the shit is hitting the fan. The global economy is collapsing. We're going to see a revolution whereby the internet takes control of the world - well, we'll either see that or we'll see the internet shrink and nearly disappear as despair and poverty takes over - for decades.
In any case, Anonymous is the proof-of-concept.
Second post:
Another thing worth addressing is 'freedom of speech.' Yeah, we've always* had it... but discussions of politics and religion have been kept carefully controlled. In the past, bars were the equivalent of what the internet is today. Yeah, you can see the night-and-day comparison; it really is like the difference between trying to sound out the word 'pencil' without a corpus callosum, and doing it with.
But we won't talk about politics or religion in bars. Mostly because people get butthurt - and in a bar, butthurt people put up fists. On the internet, that doesn't happen - so nobody fears the butthurt, and, in fact, we mock the butthurt mercilessly.
So now we can breach topics of religion, politics, economics, race, and so on without fear of violent reprisals. How many of you have parents that joined facebook in the last six months? How many have recieved messages from them condemning your use of profanity?
And how many have stood up to your parents and said 'its my fucking internet, tolerate it or get the fuck off. P.S. Love you <3.'?
The ability to communicate has gone through an unprecedented revolution - and, not coincidentally, so has the concept of freedom of speech. We - not anonymous, but people who endorse the philosophy that is 'the internet' - need to keep pushing. We've hit a tipping point where everyone and their mother is now joining facebook, and facebook is being used to post digg links, which are voted up or down, and link to forums, news articles, youtube vids, and so on.
This structure is incredible. Remarkable. Society-changing. And few realize or appreciate it yet. All the sudden, we have a true memescape with a darwinian system killing weak ideas and spreading good ideas. All the sudden, we have real dialog going using more than empty rhetoric (doing an end-run around cable news, which has completely failed us on that end).
Be ready for BIG changes in the next decade. I'm betting my house on freedom of speech and increased communications technology, and regard anyone working to undermine the two as a mortal enemy.*all of our lives, anyway - but it's a relatively new concept in human history.
Third post :
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mutante -
I agree with much of what you say but you just defined your
mortal enemy as the industry of Western intelligence agencies. And good luck with that bit.
Western intelligence agencies were incredibly powerful in the old paradigm. In the new paradigm, they are almost worthless - as the new paradigm demands transparency. We're not yet to the point where they're worthless, but it's heading that way.And the ideas I'm expressing here aren't my own pet ideas; they're being popularized in ideas like the 'technological singularity', 'here comes everybody', 'the wisdom of crowds', 'the tipping point', 'blink', and so on.
The memescape is like a tidepool, and memes are like organisms. Survival of the fittest decides what dominates. Of course, our tidepool is actually divided in places; everywhere there's a language barrier (russian, english, french, spanish, etc) is a big wall. Everywhere there's a massive firewall (china) is a barrier. But the barriers are being breached for the first time in human history. They can't stop the memes from cross-pollinating. Prior to WWI, the tide pools were clearly deliniated. Then all the pools grew too large, and started pressing against eachother - that was the 'powder keg' that set off two world wars. The result was a much smaller world, with a lot of breaches between tide pools.
The internet is the second wave, it's the dams bursing completely. Notice that countries tended to line up along linguistic barriers in the world wars. Those barriers are still a threat, but they're breaking down. We won't see a war between the US, Canada, and/or the UK. We're slightly more likely - though still very unlikely - to see wars between english-speaking countries and germanic, french, or spanish speaking countries.
Part of this, I think, is that English is a hybrid of romance and germanic languages. Japan, thankfully, has embraced american culture to the point where they are unlikely to go to war with the romance/germanic tidepool. Russian and Chinese are the dangerous areas, but there's a lot more cross-polination there than there was in the lead-up to WWII or the cold war.*
And as far as the 'survival of the fittest', this occurs through persuasion. And there are a lot of 'tricks' to persuasion; cognitive biases, logical fallacies, and so on. It's important to innoculate yourself against them, to educate yourself on them, and to point them out where you see them. This will help ensure only the best ideas survive.
We - Anonymous - have been thrown into this in the last year. Scientology is a system designed to use every cognitive bias and logical fallacy against its members. And we have learned to recognize and shine a light on those bad forms of persuasion. We work to innoculate scientologists against them, because scientology cannot survive if its membership is aware of them.
Hell, Hubbard himself set up a seperate tidepool by giving scienotlogy its own language. And anonymous has it's own shibboleths too. And in the last year, these two tidepools have largely merged, as we learned sci-speak and they learned chan-speak. They still have a large population of members that they try to keep out of the tidepool, but every single one of them that falls into the tidepool switches sides eventually.
It all comes into play here. And it's going to shape our world going into the next century.*I don't mean to suggest that the romance/germanic language tidepools are 'right' or that the russian or chinese are 'wrong.' Rather, I mean to point out that the walls dividing these three pools are precisely where there's the greatest risk of violent conflict (as opposed to reasoned dialog).
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