The Deep Politics of Jared Leto’s Cult | Popaganda

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The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20191115230624/https://lorenzoae.wordpress.com/2019/09/15/the-deep-politics-of-jared-letos-cult/

…Pop singer—he’s not so much a person as a puppet, whose strings are pulled for a scheme of total nightmare!

…A terrifying and withering exposé of the misuse of power in an age of illusion!

—Privilege theatrical trailer, 1967

For the past year, I’ve been working hard on a book project, which is going to offer insight into a lot of the bigger contemporary political trends. One of the main threads is this: many of the political conflicts we see are the result of internecine struggles between ruling class-power blocs, and many of these are the result of Silicon Valley taking its place among the monopoly industries. In order to illustrate the concept of deep politics, one chapter discusses conclusions we can draw from two of the best on the subject: Crypto Cuttlefish and Dave McGowan.

One of the first things to say about the value of their respective research is that they illustrate how to identify a network. Unless you’re studying counterinsurgency or something, you probably won’t have an opportunity to learn this academically. So the best way to grasp this is by seeing patterns identified, so you can recognize the signs yourself. The world’s richest people constitute a class, but the composition of this class isn’t laid out formally, the way a corporation has a neat-and-clean org chart. Fortunately, the world’s richest people have patterns that are quite predictable—like having the same jobs, attending the same institutions, and marrying one another. Some of the best resources for figuring these things out are obituaries and marriage announcements in major newspapers like the New York Times. Since these patterns are easy to recognize once you know what they are, people with a stake in confusing us dismiss these things as either conspiracy theories or coincidences. They do so because things like family and intelligence connections are not insignificant data points, they’re actually a really big deal.

Cuttlefish’s work on Silicon Valley, in particular, is invaluable for grasping the nature of the newest monopoly industry. Cuttlefish first introduced me to the fact that the Internet was actually not started by a bunch of idealistic nerds who wanted to share college papers—it was a decentralized communications network developed by the RAND Corporation in order to help wage nuclear war. Professor C. turns the tech industry’s utopian mythology rightside-up, showing that the Internet is a tool for social control because that’s exactly what it was built to be all those years ago.

Cuttlefish also illuminates how the ruling class’ human terrain maps onto the physical geography of the military/intelligence-industry. The sergeants and lieutenants of the world’s richest people go to Washington, DC, they graduate from spy-heavy universities, they staff think tanks specializing in social engineering like RAND, they work at military bases and for intelligence fronts, etc. Particularly as it relates to Silicon Valley, they often ended up next to US Air Force installations, working at computers powering missile bases, signals intelligence facilities, and targeting stations. The Air Force was born in 1947, at the advent of the digital age, and its development was rooted in the high-tech industry. That’s why the USAF is overwhelmingly the military branch of the Silicon Valley clique.

This is where the work of Dave McGowan comes in, specifically his fascinating and though-provoking book Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops, and the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream. McGowan starts from one essential premise: when something “comes out of nowhere” to great acclaim and “suddenly” dominates the public eye, this must be cause for great skepticism. Unfortunately, this sort of fundamental insight—which separates the actual radical thinkers from the fakes—seems to be in short supply these days. I blame Noam Chomsky for teaching so many people...