Contemporary politics and the ensuing organization of consensus currently employ techniques and methods never used before.
We are
going through an era in which completely new mechanisms operate within the
traditional Parliamentary political representation, inherited from the liberal
and democratic thought of the eighteenth century and of the following century.
These mechanisms are much more powerful than those that – in the modern
imitation of the Athenian agora -formed the will of the people and the
guidelines and directions of the government.
Democracy
of Ancients and Democracy of Moderns – just to use the simile of Benjamin
Constant – were basically similar, but different in their functioning.
The
number of citizens did not constitute a substantial difference, except that,
according to Constant, modern democratic citizens delegated to the ruling class
what did not fall within their being “private individuals, with private
interests”.
Again
according to Constant, the reason lay precisely in the new category of “private
individuals” who, with a view to maintaining their wealth or work, deemed it
right to delegate to someone else their power to make and break laws. Nowadays
the private sphere does no longer exist. But not in the sense of the society of
“one thousand eyes” and of continuous supervision and surveillance, but because
the very category of “private” is over even in the political discourse.
Hence a
mass totalitarian society, with a repressive apparatus that applies to
everything would previously have been the subject of the strictly personal
sphere of life.
Everything
has currently changed, but everything still appears to be similar to the
criteria and principles we have studied in the manuals of history of political
doctrines. This is not the case.
Meanwhile,
since the beginning of the 20th century, Eduard Bernays, Freud’s nephew and the
father and pioneer of public relations, had established some connections
between Sigmund Freud’s psychology (and with Gustave Le Bon’s Psychology of the
Crowds, Mussolini’s favourite book) and political practice.
That was
the beginning of what we now call “corporate communication”.
The
suffragettes smoked and that was an operation funded by Bernays through the US
tobacco producers.
The
exaltation of sex – following the publication of the Kinsey Report and the mass
spread of the contraceptive pill-changed and upset the consumption styles and
habits of vast masses of young people who, in the 1960s, were to shape the
consumption habits of what Galbraith called the “affluent society”.
That was
the objective, not sex.
Hence,
based on what discovered by Sigmund Freud, with a view to selling or prompting
and inducing political behaviours, there was the need to “work” above all on
the unconscious.
Currently,
whatever is implanted from outside into the unconscious – if repeated
constantly – always becomes real in the future.
The real
for itself always becomes in itself, because what individuals think -in crowds,
but solitarily (Riesman’s “lonely crowd”) -becomes either consumption or
political behaviour, which is basically the same.
The
subconscious has a huge power, i.e. controlling all subjective experiences. It
is the autopilot of life, also from a practical viewpoint.
Nowadays
no one speaks to the “reason”, the myth of the eighteenth century, but to
instincts, to the subconscious, even to the unconscious.
The
whole mechanism of the subconscious is already well in place and ready at 7-8
years of age and continues all lifelong.
With a
view to reprogramming it, we need at first to limit the external and
environmental negativities.
Indeed,
we need to look for fully “positive” people, things and environments, as well
as information.
Needless
to say, this rule is carefully followed by all political propagandists and,
above all, by advertisers.
Currently
politics always follows the rules of consumer goods advertising. The leader is
a testimonial. The script is the program and the government an oligopoly.
With a view to de-programming the “negative”
mind, we need instead to visualize – as in a daydream – positive situations
which we have already experienced.
We also
need to reprocess the feelings of joy, which reach the subconscious
immediately, well before the other ones.
The
subconscious mind always and only knows the present.
Past and
future are conceptual notions and processing – hence they are conscious. The
subconscious interprets the negative of a negative proposition only as
negative.
Creating
positive propositions that counteract the negative ones processed and produced
by the subconscious and then continuously repeat these actions. This is the
basic technique.
This is,
in short, the subjective mechanism that is currently used in political and
commercial communication.
What
are, however, the current technologies used to program and reprogram people’s
minds?
We can mention
the theory of social warfare, the virtual but all-out clashtaking place in the
minds of citizens of a target country, using current technologies.
The aim
of any reprogramming campaign is, in fact, to make the enemy (the enemy people,
indeed) think like us.
It is a
new kind of manipulation, much wider than the one carried out with the old
disinformation or with the intelligence intoxication that was the non-violent
part of the Cold War.
The most
used information technologies are now Precision Targeting – which sends
messages and behavioural inductions to a specific group – as well as the wide
range of Artificial Intelligence mechanisms that are used to simulate online
the behaviour and thought in relation to the primary information we wants to
convey. There is also the algorithmic decision-making, which processes
information through specific algorithms in view of formulating recommendations
or taking fully automated decisions.
This
holds true both for decision-makers and for the vast mass of users, citizens
and voters of the aforementioned decision-makers.
We can
also mention the Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) technologies,
which create partially or completely artificial environments for both the
programmers of the public opinion and the public itself.
But also
the Internet of Things (IoT) is used in this field, by correlating machines and
sensors for the construction of a Complete Reality, which becomes facts and
data to be spread as such.
In this
context of complete manipulation of information, which becomes the Complete
Reality, also voice interfaces are useful. They allow to exchange information
between the Source and the User or between Users, thus allowing the
psychological reinforcement of news.
Again in
the field of information manipulation, blockchains are also important. They
allow to control and process information only through the users enabled to use
the “chain”.
We
should also recall the computerized programs that generate completely false
videos and images – fakes which, however, are absolutely plausible.
Precision
Targeting is used above all to reprogram groups of pre-selected individuals,
who provide the Web with a continuous flow of information, from mobile phones,
from the Web and from the other channels, to those who can selectively access
the Web. All this is currently used, above all, through social media.
In this
case, we have already reached the phase of neuromarketing, which changes the
desires and habits of specific population groups, by combining the mental
effects with the emotional ones.
As if it
were a sign which, according to De Saussure, is the indestructible connection
between signified and signifier. But the product of neuromarketing is not at
all a language sign.
In this
case, the above mentioned technology could be used for indirect facial
recognition, manoeuvred by Artificial Intelligence systems.
Facial
recognition will enable those who manoeuvre -also temporarily – the Web to
quickly check the emotions of millions of people, and we all know how important
emotions are now to tamper with the psyche and communicate concepts that often
have very little relevance at conceptual and even at emotional or mental
levels.
By 2035
these technologies are expected to be spreading like wildfire, since they are
very important both for commercial operations and for political marketing.
Artificial
Intelligence is the primary axis of development of all the other technologies
we are talking about. AI will be used
above all in verbal and textual recognition, as well as in the collection and
analysis of very broad spectrum data, and for the processing of raw initial
data, again in a very large population.
AI,
however, will above all be used for defining an automated decision-making that
can support the human decision-makers when they do not know, remember or
understand all facts and, above all, the underlying determinants of facts.
We will
get to imitate, without realizing it, Elsa Morante’s book “The World Saved by
Kids” and certainly what is happening in global communication already
guarantees this future to us. They are more manipulable. They have no memory
and they are perfect for the Brave New World that stands before us.
We can
easily imagine what all this means for advertising, for the selection of
markets, for business decisions but, above all, for the development of
political platforms, both in terms of the electoral process and for the more
specific decision-making process.
The next
level will be content, which will often be produced directly by AI systems.
But let
us better analyse what algorithmic decision-making is.
It is
often currently applied in medicine.
Disease
analysis, therapy forecasting, statistical analysis of diseases and their
effects, both at subjective and population levels. In the near future, however,
other sectors will be ever more like the banking system. Human Resources, even
political decision itself, will be the subject of these applications, which
will often become so complex as not to be understood – in the future – by the
computers using them.
If you
collect a lot of data, it is increasingly likely that a sequence of decisions
or simple new data is not recognized by the program operating in the computer.
Also for
AI networks we will have a process of learning by doing.
There
are two dangers. Firstly, that the private ownership of the most important
databases makes competition between systems impossible; secondly that the
algorithms are hackable or manipulable by third parties unknown to the system.
There
are also Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality.
If we
proceed with the increasingly analytical and obsessive adaptation of the
devices to the Ego of the User, or to his/her tastes- considered, for some
reason, immutable – we risk an
ideological drift of new technologies, i.e. that of hyper-subjectivism and, as
happens in current educational practice, that of the permanence of the mass Ego
in an eternal childhood.
The
“Minor Ego” advocated by some people is a very real risk and it is not even
clear how a super-massified production can be adapted to the increasingly
self-referential psychologies of the Consumer Ego.
Not to
mention the natural limit – currently often evanescent – that the Augmented
Reality keeps between the imaginary and reality – a limit that, in the
propaganda and political implementation of the Virtual Reality, could become
very dangerous to cross.
Immanuel
Kant spoke of the 100 gold Thalers that can be in your pocket or just in your
imagination, but that cannot certainly be mistaken one for the other.
Hence
beyond any technological processing, Reality is never the Imaginary.
Although
the imaginary can induce behaviours very similar to those that the subject
would have if subjected to reality, the one that – as Voltaire said – has “hard
head”.
By
Internet of Things (IoT) we generally mean an environment full of machines that
interact with one another through the Web.
As can
be easily guessed, the IoT information potential is huge.
Human
consumption habits, but also communication, ways of life, lifestyles, exchanges
between subjects, positions and information exchanged between individuals will
be part of huge databases.
Probably,
in the future, it will be difficult to find exactly what is needed in those
databases, considering that the bias of the IT and data storage systems tends
to increase with the quantity and complexity of data.
It is estimated
that, by 2030, there will be over one and a half trillion sensors connected to
IoT networks, which will be worth half of the entire Internet traffic of
“simple” users.
According
to Deloitte, the entire IoT market is expected to be worth a trillion, in
addition to further 750 billion for IoT network connection modules.
It can
be easily imagined to what extent this makes it possible to hack data not only
from IoT networks, but also from all other networks connected to the Internet
and ending up in an IoT structure.
By 2030
blockchains will be the basis of financial, control, check and analysis
networks.
It will
be the beginning of virtual monetization, which is, in itself, the opening of
the financial gates of Hell.
The
miserable level of the current economic thinking allows it.
Nevertheless,
all this technological development – between imagination and reality – will
lead us towards a society of the unverifiable and probable, with no possibility
of responding to a government financial
or information fake and with an increasing penetrability of information
networks, to which the whole social fabric and not only its control will be
delegated.
However,
the society of the imaginary 100 Thalers – believing that the imagined ones are
already in the pocket – will not be able to pay anything.
****Giancarlo
Elia Valori: Advisory Board Co-chair Honoris Causa Professor Giancarlo Elia
Valori is an eminent Italian economist and businessman. He holds prestigious
academic distinctions and national orders. Mr. Valori has lectured on
international affairs and economics at the world’s leading universities such as
Peking University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Yeshiva
University in New York. He currently chairs “International World Group”, he is
also the honorary president of Huawei Italy, economic adviser to the Chinese
giant HNA Group. In 1992 he was appointed Officier de la Légion d’Honneur de la
République Francaise, with this motivation: “A man who can see across borders
to understand the world” and in 2002 he received the title “Honorable” of the
Académie des Sciences de l’Institut de France. “