just one remark: that's why wike-leaks and the resulting treatment of JA...
ANd it gets equally scary, when you try to browse these days through academic thesis works.. The new trend: wiki citations, all over. WIthout even going though all of them, can say for sure, no PhD thesis will have wiki-leaks citation these days! If you work for the gov you will loose your job when you try to browse wiki-leaks on an official computer systems watched by..., IBF. The last word read backwards.
In 2013 I finally took being online seriously and opened a Facebook account. That same year I first attended an Anti-Fracking Camp in Balcombe, Sussex, UK. We had a meeting and decided that we did not want to be known as protestors and we chose, democratically, to use the name Protectors. I was Camp Treasurer and minute-taking of meetings. It was suggested that we should attempt an entry in Wikipedia. I duly wrote about us, when that camp closed and we were about to move to another in Salford, near Manchester. Wikipedia took my entry down immediately. I tried again. Same result.
I immediately realised that Wikipedia was an establishment operation and ceased using it as far as possible. If I could find an alternative source of information I would always prefer to use that, even if the content was identical.
Facebook, Twitter, Discord and even blockchain sites like Steemit and Hive.blog were becoming increasingly hostile to the work that the Protectors were doing. Over time, I was shadow banned, temporarily 'jailed' and finally permanently banned from Facebook, Twitter and Discord. I was hounded by trolls on Steemit and Hive.blog. 77th Brigade, working for the British Military, hounded me and were bold enough to inform me that they were removing me from all social media. I screenshot the threat.
On New Years Eve just past, I found my accounts simultaneously and permanently thrown off Discord and Facebook. I considered my options carefully. I could fold and let them win or I could find alternative social media and start rebuilding my 12,000+ following. Thankfully I had copies of all my most important research articles.
I opened a Substack account and immediately appreciated the impressive statistical analysis even though I noted the generally establishment nature of the most famous accounts.
Undeterred I have re-written, edited and improved my previous work on other sites and added them here. It took a whole year to reach only 2,000 subscribers.
It now occurs to me that we were being corralled into corners in which we would become 'harmless' because we would only be visible to 'the choir'.
I wrote about the general impact of 77th Brigade and its U.S. counterpart during the 2020 Covid lockdowns here:
It should be immediately obvious that the logos are very similar for both the U.K. and the U.S military online. They don't mind if we know about them..... They WANT us to know, so that we become intimidated from defying our governments.
Nowadays, when I check old posts of mine I find a large number of YouTube videos are no longer available. The same can be said for articles and studies.
At one time, I found myself reluctant to share ANY links to research because I felt that I was acting like a beacon for the censors to follow. One article I wrote about the humble dandelion was taken down from all sites IMMEDIATELY. Now I realise that dandelion is one of the crucial remedies for poisoning.
What a shame that we have no herbal remedies for spitefulness. If we did, I could think of a few thousand candidates for the cure!
My only suggestion to combat this cancel culture and erosion of our freedom of speech is for us to return to the old ways of combat, i.e., word of mouth, hand flyers and phone trees. Each activist is tasked with informing at least 10 people of events or actions. In this way Greenham Common women kept up the pressure against nuclear weapons on British soil for many years, finally succeeding in shaming the U.S. military and the compliant U.K. government into disposing of the offensive weapons from their British military bases.
I fully expect to lose the internet completely because it has become offensive in its persecution of those of us who want to live in a moral society. It is an evil, mind-warping, fat controller and it is like candy for babies, while the Predator class enjoys an entirely separate system, run by exorbitantly expensive private satellite companies such as Starlink, OneWeb, Inmarsat and undoubtedly there are others by now.
We are treated like criminals for wanting truth, fairness and liberty. That tells me that we live in a criminally insane world which would not think twice about murdering us all.
Marketing certainly plays a big part and I think you are right about data being 'the new oil' as far as commodities go, though I think there are non-monetary motivations worth considering as well.
If data is the new oil than that makes people like Elon Musk the new Rockefellers. Musk and other big tech barons vacuum up data at an alarming rate (especially through things like self driving cars and 'smart' devices in people's homes). They in turn feed that data to their AI development platforms which create ever more sophisticated learning machines (which in turn, that use that data to the to become more effective at getting even more data from people).
Social media like twitter, facebook etc and Programs like the spell correct software / platform called Grammarly run on rudimentary AI programs that scoop up millions of ideas, thoughts and technical descriptions every second. These programs use that data to get smarter and more effective at manipulating humans. We are reaching a point where a sort of exponentially accelerating feed back loop could take place and these human created synthetic intelligences could begin outsmarting their creators (for better or for worse).
Since the proliferation of ‘smart devices’ and satellite surveillance platforms I have let go of the illusion of privacy. While theoretically, I like the idea of a world where humans respected each other’s privacy (if one desires that). We do not live in that world, and so my strategy is not so much to minimize their ability to spy on me or collect my data (since data collection and spying is inevitable to some degree in any case given the tech they have now) but rather I choose to see the fact that my data and communications are being collected, collated and spied upon as an opportunity.
Permaculture design invites one to see problems as solutions. Thus, in the spirit of this, I chose to see my inevitable exposure to data collection and spying operatives as an opportunity to potentially plant the seeds for informing, emancipating and/or healing/turning those who are doing the surveilling.
If one embraces a path where one lives by example, embodying the truth, sharing the truth (truths that empower, emancipate minds, heal and illuminate shadows to make them flee) than when other humans spy on them or collect their data they are only serving to help our efforts to disseminate that information more widely. Thus, while I see the advantages of avoiding using certain online services (because they are detrimental to humans and the Earth in other ways than data collection/spying as well) I do not fret about their surveillance and data collection mechanisms as a whole, for in the end, if I am living in a way that is being true to myself (I am always working on improving that), walking a path of truth and integrity (also a perpetual work in progress for me), their spying can only serve to offer the potential for the agents of the surveillance state (and even perhaps nascent synthetic intelligences as well) to have an opportunity to choose a better path.
I mostly agree, but I try to limit my credit card usage, using cash as often as feasible. I also don't do banking on my phone. I'm not doing anything illegal, but see no reason to aid them. Interesting enough, I used Grammerly for a short time, but found it intrusive. I understand why FB and other social media sites are helpful for some things, especially business, but I choose not to participate. I do occasionally look at Twitter.
It's a dichotomy, that's for sure. I think we all (or at least many of us) realize just how unhealthy all of this time-sucking-Internet-information-gathering is. And, yet, here we both are, on Substack, sharing information. I have really honed my intuition over the past few years as it has become increasingly more difficult to discern what's true and what's not. What I love to do most, is close my laptop, turn off my phone, and go walk in the woods. When/if it all crashes, I will be just fine. That being said, thanks for your well-researched share, Gavin. :)
You raise some great points. I suppose I should have made it more clear in my article above that I am not trying to demonize the internet as a whole, but rather to point out that without exercising discernment when using that tool, it can become a double-edged sword.
In order to illustrate how tools like the internet can both serve to empower, uplift, unify, inform as well as to brainwash, disempower, obfuscate and stunt the mental growth of individuals I feel like there are some worth while analogies and parallels worth exploring that are related to the invention of the first printing presses.
When the Gutenberg movable type printing presses (https://www.howitworksdaily.com/see-inside-the-gutenberg-printing-press/ ) became reproducible they were revolutionary in educating, informing and empowering everyday people to be capable of sharing their ideas far and wide. The movable type printing press didn't just change the way people communicated; it changed what they communicated about.
"Before Gutenberg, "the news" was whatever you managed to gather from your neighbors, what you learned from travelers passing through your village, what you heard the town crier yelling through the streets or, at best, what you yourself read in the occasional proclamation or edict from the authorities.
But after the printing press, the news was for the first time collected, organized, printed on a regular basis and distributed far and wide.
In 1605, the world's first newspaper was published in Strasbourg. Soon many everyday people were printing a newsletter or a pamphlet or a newspaper or a tract. And these ideas were spreading around the world like they never had before. For the first time, someone could be reading the exact same news as someone in the next town over.
The printing press united people like never before and the result was an explosion in the spread of ideas, the likes of which would not be experienced again for centuries.
But not everyone was excited about this free flow of information. Entrenched power structures of medieval society—the crown, the church, the feudal lords—had persisted for centuries by controlling information and suppressing dissent. But as the barriers to new ideas collapsed, so did the old feudal order.
It's no surprise, then, that wherever the printing press traveled, wherever the new cadre of printers and booksellers set up shop, the censors were not far behind. When Lutheran books began appearing in England in 1520, Cardinal Wolsey was quick to declare that anyone caught with the texts would be subject to heresy laws. Not to be outdone, King Henry VIII's proclamation "Prohibiting Erroneous Books and Bible Translations" of 1530 afforded him the power to try readers of these "blasphemous and pestiferous" books in his own dreaded Star Chamber.
Parliament dissolved the Star Chamber in 1641, but they weren't about to give up censorship of the press. They just wanted to take the power for themselves, and that's exactly what they did. The Licensing Order of 1643 outlawed the printing, binding, or sale of books, except by persons licensed under authority of Parliament.
The Licensing Order was not overturned for half-a-century, when the Parliament chose not to renew the act. Those in positions of power had good reason to fear the printing press. Gutenberg's invention turned their world on its head. Suddenly, people who had been kept apart and largely in ignorance of the world around them had been brought into a community of readers; a gigantic societal conversation began, empowering radicals who sought to overturn the order that had existed for centuries and helping them to spread their dangerous new ideas faster and farther than they ever could have with pen and paper.
Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that these new ideas would come to their dramatic fruition in one of the most literate places on the planet: colonial America. By the end of the 18th century, literacy rates in the colonies were upwards of ninety percent, and there were 180 newspapers being published on the Eastern Seaboard, twice as many as in England, a country with twice the population. The colonists' appetite for books and learning was celebrated far and wide. In 1772, the Reverend Jacob Duché wrote of the colonies: "Almost every man is a reader. [. . .] The poorest laborer upon the shores of the Delaware thinks himself entitled to deliver his sentiment in matters of religion or politics with as much freedom as the gentlemen or scholar [. . .] such is the prevailing taste for books of every kind."
Just four years later, in 1776, Thomas Paine would publish Common Sense, a 47-page pamphlet that was to take those colonies by storm. In the first three months of its publication, a staggering 120,000 copies of the book had been sold; by the end of the year, it had sold 500,000 copies, or one pamphlet for every five men, women and children in the colonies.
At the beginning of 1776, before Common Sense, the average colonists believed themselves to be Englishmen engaged in a civil war; after Common Sense, they were revolutionaries engaged in a War for Independence. And that war was waged on the power of the printed word. That is the power of print.
The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the printing press is mightier than entire armies. By the end of the nineteenth century, a new creature had emerged to capitalize on this new instrument of power: the press baron." - James Corbett (from https://www.corbettreport.com/media/ )
From that point onward, hyper-consolidation accelerated and the tool that was so instrumental in educating, empowering and uniting people far and wide would be weaponized by the oligarchy in ever more effective ways to push propaganda onto the population and engage in social engineering.
Well the internet is basically Gutenberg 2.0 , in its nascent form, it served to empower, connect, uplift and facilitate unprecedented collaboration, serving as a tool that could inform and offer practical information to those that needed it desperately. For many years this was the case. However, just like with the printing press, the established oligarchy saw how this invention was empowering the general population and thus began to hyper-consolidate and hyper-centralize their control of the free flow of information online (while also engaging in advanced propaganda and psychological warfare operations via the internet to carry out their social engineering goals).
Thus, while I acknowledge that the internet can serve all the amazing functions that the first printing presses did (and more) I also see how it can be (and has been) weaponized by the existing plutocratic order (which exerts more influence than the leaders of nation-states). That is why I wrote this article, to try and offer people some sign posts to be able to navigate what has now become what outwardly appears to be a vast open expanse filled with helpful information, but is in fact a mine field (with addictive, emotionally manipulative, and mentally damaging incendiary weapons of psychological warfare hidden under the surface).
I do not have any illusions that where we are here on substack (or anywhere else) is immune to that. For now, there does not appear to be censorship on this platform, but how many individual humans being threatened, bought out or blackmailed would it take for that to change very quickly? Likely not that many.
Therefore I advocate for people to take your approach, to see the internet as a useful tool to connect and engage in autodidactism, but to also even spend more time learning from the real world, from nature, from books and introspection, rather than looking to have someone on the internet tell them what is true and what is not. In doing so, we can all become of greater service to our local communities and to gather valuable knowledge and experiences we can pass onto future generations.
Thanks for reading my article and for the comment.
Wow, so much information. I particularly liked the Wikipedia reveal. I knew it had gone corrupt (I even used to donate to them) and that Jimmy Wales was WEF but the details were new and shocking to me--if that's even possible anymore. And I like the permaculture comparison at the end.
Speaking of which, I'm honored by your invitation to pre-read Recipes and write a blurb, but I think I'll need to wait for the hard copy. If there's anything you can use in my post on it, though, feel free!
Thanks for reading what I put together I am glad you appreciated the part about wikipedia. I used to rely on it for research quite a bit but then noticed suspicious edits of past articles cropping up when the mainstream narrative changed and so began asking some hard questions and investigating further.
I am really glad you liked the part of the article that invites the reader to look through the permaculture lens at this situation at the end.
Seeing problems as the pathway to formulate a solution has been very helpful in my life in recent years.
In fact, I was just writing about the weaponization of food and found my self seeing a very empowering potential solution to the degradation of soil in the prairies and midwest of the US through that same process. I was examining the brutal history of how the US military and railroad barons ordered the almost complete extermination of the great Buffalo herds during the latter part of the 1800s. I found the potential for finding viable solutions through analyzing why they had gone about reducing a population of 30-60 million bison to only about 400 in less than a decade. The methodical genocide of the great Buffalo herds was initiated because the army generals (Generals Sherman and Sheridan) and the railroad oligarchs (from the Union Pacific Railroad and Canadian Pacific Railway) wanted the land the indigenous people were on, they wanted them dead and/or culturally destroyed and dependent on their centralized systems, so when they saw how the indigenous peoples of what is now called the US and Canada had a symbiotic relationship with the buffalo they knew they could cripple them if they shot all the buffalo. (If you are interested in learning more I provided some in depth historical accounts in the comments which you can find here: https://www.corbettreport.com/what-is-the-future-of-food/#comment-145620 )
While this piece of history illuminates the depravity, arrogance and malice (which all humans are capable of if they allow themselves to be guided by greed, hubris, fear and ego) it can also offer us some wisdom for solutions and hope for reversing the damage if we learn from our elder species and choose to work along side of them.
Buffalo are natural land restoration machines – when allowed to move freely, they instinctively don’t overgraze, they move through areas tilling the soil with their cleft hooves (providing aeration and opportunities for plants to grow without destroying the networks of beneficial insects and fungi in the soil as mechanized tilling does), distributing grass and other native seeds, and fertilizing (building soil) everywhere they go.
Species like Buffalo can serve as agents of Trophic Cascade and send out ripple effects that regenerate soils and entire ecosystems if we allow them to roam freely. Wild Buffalo can play a key role in restoring the tall grass prairie, restoring the watersheds, restoring the birds, insects and soil.
Perhaps to those that seek to create a future worth living in (and giving to future generations) we should strive to be working alongside beings like the Buffalo to encourage regenerative grazing practices can serve as a key to not only ensuring food security for humans, but ecological regeneration for countless other beings and good living soil for future generations to cultivate an abundance of diverse crops in.
Well that was quite a tangent about buffalo but my point is that perhaps we can also find solutions through analyzing the reasons why everything that I describe in my article above is happening, so that we can find resilience and sturdy footing on the path ahead.
Thanks for letting me know about the book. No worries, quite a few other people have shown an interest in reviewing it, so while I am grateful you considered being one of them, it looks like the page on my hard copy that is devoted to reviews that may be full already. I appreciate you giving me permission to extract your words from your kind and generous substack article (where you mentioned my work) and I will likely take you up on that offer in some format in the future.
Thank you for believing in the spirit and message of my book, I look forward to getting a copy to you.
Thank you for that extensive and thoughtful comment, Gavin! I had also heard that about the buffalo. It's also true for the Haiti native pig. Destruction of indigenous food sources has been a tactic of war for millennia. And I'm sure the propaganda about bird flu is part of it, and the shutting down of ranches and dairies in the Netherlands.
The principles of regenerative ag, as I've known them, are frequently moving domesticated ranch animals in particular rotations so they graze everything in a contained space, and then aren't on the same space for another six months. It mimics the way that herds moved, tightly packed against predators, rather than being spread out on open pasture.
My friend, a mom and regenerative rancher, compares it to giving a kid a handful of trail mix with choc chips or handing them the bag. When animals can graze anywhere, they eat their favorite things and leave the rest, so the wrong things grow untamed. If they're contained, they eat everything, along with all the other good side-effects of divots and dung you mention.
Why would you not want to feed people at the same time as restoring the land, which would make it financially self-sustaining rather than a gov't project? I'm very distrustful, as I know you are, of those land and wilderness climate change projects that have led to the current WEF depopulation solution to 'save the earth.'
Lot of extremely disturbing facts, Thank You!
just one remark: that's why wike-leaks and the resulting treatment of JA...
ANd it gets equally scary, when you try to browse these days through academic thesis works.. The new trend: wiki citations, all over. WIthout even going though all of them, can say for sure, no PhD thesis will have wiki-leaks citation these days! If you work for the gov you will loose your job when you try to browse wiki-leaks on an official computer systems watched by..., IBF. The last word read backwards.
In 2013 I finally took being online seriously and opened a Facebook account. That same year I first attended an Anti-Fracking Camp in Balcombe, Sussex, UK. We had a meeting and decided that we did not want to be known as protestors and we chose, democratically, to use the name Protectors. I was Camp Treasurer and minute-taking of meetings. It was suggested that we should attempt an entry in Wikipedia. I duly wrote about us, when that camp closed and we were about to move to another in Salford, near Manchester. Wikipedia took my entry down immediately. I tried again. Same result.
I immediately realised that Wikipedia was an establishment operation and ceased using it as far as possible. If I could find an alternative source of information I would always prefer to use that, even if the content was identical.
Facebook, Twitter, Discord and even blockchain sites like Steemit and Hive.blog were becoming increasingly hostile to the work that the Protectors were doing. Over time, I was shadow banned, temporarily 'jailed' and finally permanently banned from Facebook, Twitter and Discord. I was hounded by trolls on Steemit and Hive.blog. 77th Brigade, working for the British Military, hounded me and were bold enough to inform me that they were removing me from all social media. I screenshot the threat.
On New Years Eve just past, I found my accounts simultaneously and permanently thrown off Discord and Facebook. I considered my options carefully. I could fold and let them win or I could find alternative social media and start rebuilding my 12,000+ following. Thankfully I had copies of all my most important research articles.
I opened a Substack account and immediately appreciated the impressive statistical analysis even though I noted the generally establishment nature of the most famous accounts.
Undeterred I have re-written, edited and improved my previous work on other sites and added them here. It took a whole year to reach only 2,000 subscribers.
It now occurs to me that we were being corralled into corners in which we would become 'harmless' because we would only be visible to 'the choir'.
I wrote about the general impact of 77th Brigade and its U.S. counterpart during the 2020 Covid lockdowns here:
https://steemit.com/news/@francesleader/the-plague-of-fear-2020-part-4
It should be immediately obvious that the logos are very similar for both the U.K. and the U.S military online. They don't mind if we know about them..... They WANT us to know, so that we become intimidated from defying our governments.
Nowadays, when I check old posts of mine I find a large number of YouTube videos are no longer available. The same can be said for articles and studies.
At one time, I found myself reluctant to share ANY links to research because I felt that I was acting like a beacon for the censors to follow. One article I wrote about the humble dandelion was taken down from all sites IMMEDIATELY. Now I realise that dandelion is one of the crucial remedies for poisoning.
What a shame that we have no herbal remedies for spitefulness. If we did, I could think of a few thousand candidates for the cure!
My only suggestion to combat this cancel culture and erosion of our freedom of speech is for us to return to the old ways of combat, i.e., word of mouth, hand flyers and phone trees. Each activist is tasked with informing at least 10 people of events or actions. In this way Greenham Common women kept up the pressure against nuclear weapons on British soil for many years, finally succeeding in shaming the U.S. military and the compliant U.K. government into disposing of the offensive weapons from their British military bases.
I fully expect to lose the internet completely because it has become offensive in its persecution of those of us who want to live in a moral society. It is an evil, mind-warping, fat controller and it is like candy for babies, while the Predator class enjoys an entirely separate system, run by exorbitantly expensive private satellite companies such as Starlink, OneWeb, Inmarsat and undoubtedly there are others by now.
We are treated like criminals for wanting truth, fairness and liberty. That tells me that we live in a criminally insane world which would not think twice about murdering us all.
One word describes it all: marketing. And data is the most precious commodity in the internet age.
Hey Nancy,
Marketing certainly plays a big part and I think you are right about data being 'the new oil' as far as commodities go, though I think there are non-monetary motivations worth considering as well.
If data is the new oil than that makes people like Elon Musk the new Rockefellers. Musk and other big tech barons vacuum up data at an alarming rate (especially through things like self driving cars and 'smart' devices in people's homes). They in turn feed that data to their AI development platforms which create ever more sophisticated learning machines (which in turn, that use that data to the to become more effective at getting even more data from people).
Social media like twitter, facebook etc and Programs like the spell correct software / platform called Grammarly run on rudimentary AI programs that scoop up millions of ideas, thoughts and technical descriptions every second. These programs use that data to get smarter and more effective at manipulating humans. We are reaching a point where a sort of exponentially accelerating feed back loop could take place and these human created synthetic intelligences could begin outsmarting their creators (for better or for worse).
Since the proliferation of ‘smart devices’ and satellite surveillance platforms I have let go of the illusion of privacy. While theoretically, I like the idea of a world where humans respected each other’s privacy (if one desires that). We do not live in that world, and so my strategy is not so much to minimize their ability to spy on me or collect my data (since data collection and spying is inevitable to some degree in any case given the tech they have now) but rather I choose to see the fact that my data and communications are being collected, collated and spied upon as an opportunity.
Permaculture design invites one to see problems as solutions. Thus, in the spirit of this, I chose to see my inevitable exposure to data collection and spying operatives as an opportunity to potentially plant the seeds for informing, emancipating and/or healing/turning those who are doing the surveilling.
If one embraces a path where one lives by example, embodying the truth, sharing the truth (truths that empower, emancipate minds, heal and illuminate shadows to make them flee) than when other humans spy on them or collect their data they are only serving to help our efforts to disseminate that information more widely. Thus, while I see the advantages of avoiding using certain online services (because they are detrimental to humans and the Earth in other ways than data collection/spying as well) I do not fret about their surveillance and data collection mechanisms as a whole, for in the end, if I am living in a way that is being true to myself (I am always working on improving that), walking a path of truth and integrity (also a perpetual work in progress for me), their spying can only serve to offer the potential for the agents of the surveillance state (and even perhaps nascent synthetic intelligences as well) to have an opportunity to choose a better path.
I mostly agree, but I try to limit my credit card usage, using cash as often as feasible. I also don't do banking on my phone. I'm not doing anything illegal, but see no reason to aid them. Interesting enough, I used Grammerly for a short time, but found it intrusive. I understand why FB and other social media sites are helpful for some things, especially business, but I choose not to participate. I do occasionally look at Twitter.
I also strive to refrain from using the same 'services' that you mentioned, though at this point, it is a work in progress.
Thanks for the comment
It's a dichotomy, that's for sure. I think we all (or at least many of us) realize just how unhealthy all of this time-sucking-Internet-information-gathering is. And, yet, here we both are, on Substack, sharing information. I have really honed my intuition over the past few years as it has become increasingly more difficult to discern what's true and what's not. What I love to do most, is close my laptop, turn off my phone, and go walk in the woods. When/if it all crashes, I will be just fine. That being said, thanks for your well-researched share, Gavin. :)
Hi Barbara :)
You raise some great points. I suppose I should have made it more clear in my article above that I am not trying to demonize the internet as a whole, but rather to point out that without exercising discernment when using that tool, it can become a double-edged sword.
In order to illustrate how tools like the internet can both serve to empower, uplift, unify, inform as well as to brainwash, disempower, obfuscate and stunt the mental growth of individuals I feel like there are some worth while analogies and parallels worth exploring that are related to the invention of the first printing presses.
When the Gutenberg movable type printing presses (https://www.howitworksdaily.com/see-inside-the-gutenberg-printing-press/ ) became reproducible they were revolutionary in educating, informing and empowering everyday people to be capable of sharing their ideas far and wide. The movable type printing press didn't just change the way people communicated; it changed what they communicated about.
"Before Gutenberg, "the news" was whatever you managed to gather from your neighbors, what you learned from travelers passing through your village, what you heard the town crier yelling through the streets or, at best, what you yourself read in the occasional proclamation or edict from the authorities.
But after the printing press, the news was for the first time collected, organized, printed on a regular basis and distributed far and wide.
In 1605, the world's first newspaper was published in Strasbourg. Soon many everyday people were printing a newsletter or a pamphlet or a newspaper or a tract. And these ideas were spreading around the world like they never had before. For the first time, someone could be reading the exact same news as someone in the next town over.
The printing press united people like never before and the result was an explosion in the spread of ideas, the likes of which would not be experienced again for centuries.
But not everyone was excited about this free flow of information. Entrenched power structures of medieval society—the crown, the church, the feudal lords—had persisted for centuries by controlling information and suppressing dissent. But as the barriers to new ideas collapsed, so did the old feudal order.
It's no surprise, then, that wherever the printing press traveled, wherever the new cadre of printers and booksellers set up shop, the censors were not far behind. When Lutheran books began appearing in England in 1520, Cardinal Wolsey was quick to declare that anyone caught with the texts would be subject to heresy laws. Not to be outdone, King Henry VIII's proclamation "Prohibiting Erroneous Books and Bible Translations" of 1530 afforded him the power to try readers of these "blasphemous and pestiferous" books in his own dreaded Star Chamber.
Parliament dissolved the Star Chamber in 1641, but they weren't about to give up censorship of the press. They just wanted to take the power for themselves, and that's exactly what they did. The Licensing Order of 1643 outlawed the printing, binding, or sale of books, except by persons licensed under authority of Parliament.
The Licensing Order was not overturned for half-a-century, when the Parliament chose not to renew the act. Those in positions of power had good reason to fear the printing press. Gutenberg's invention turned their world on its head. Suddenly, people who had been kept apart and largely in ignorance of the world around them had been brought into a community of readers; a gigantic societal conversation began, empowering radicals who sought to overturn the order that had existed for centuries and helping them to spread their dangerous new ideas faster and farther than they ever could have with pen and paper.
Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that these new ideas would come to their dramatic fruition in one of the most literate places on the planet: colonial America. By the end of the 18th century, literacy rates in the colonies were upwards of ninety percent, and there were 180 newspapers being published on the Eastern Seaboard, twice as many as in England, a country with twice the population. The colonists' appetite for books and learning was celebrated far and wide. In 1772, the Reverend Jacob Duché wrote of the colonies: "Almost every man is a reader. [. . .] The poorest laborer upon the shores of the Delaware thinks himself entitled to deliver his sentiment in matters of religion or politics with as much freedom as the gentlemen or scholar [. . .] such is the prevailing taste for books of every kind."
Just four years later, in 1776, Thomas Paine would publish Common Sense, a 47-page pamphlet that was to take those colonies by storm. In the first three months of its publication, a staggering 120,000 copies of the book had been sold; by the end of the year, it had sold 500,000 copies, or one pamphlet for every five men, women and children in the colonies.
At the beginning of 1776, before Common Sense, the average colonists believed themselves to be Englishmen engaged in a civil war; after Common Sense, they were revolutionaries engaged in a War for Independence. And that war was waged on the power of the printed word. That is the power of print.
The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the printing press is mightier than entire armies. By the end of the nineteenth century, a new creature had emerged to capitalize on this new instrument of power: the press baron." - James Corbett (from https://www.corbettreport.com/media/ )
From that point onward, hyper-consolidation accelerated and the tool that was so instrumental in educating, empowering and uniting people far and wide would be weaponized by the oligarchy in ever more effective ways to push propaganda onto the population and engage in social engineering.
Well the internet is basically Gutenberg 2.0 , in its nascent form, it served to empower, connect, uplift and facilitate unprecedented collaboration, serving as a tool that could inform and offer practical information to those that needed it desperately. For many years this was the case. However, just like with the printing press, the established oligarchy saw how this invention was empowering the general population and thus began to hyper-consolidate and hyper-centralize their control of the free flow of information online (while also engaging in advanced propaganda and psychological warfare operations via the internet to carry out their social engineering goals).
Thus, while I acknowledge that the internet can serve all the amazing functions that the first printing presses did (and more) I also see how it can be (and has been) weaponized by the existing plutocratic order (which exerts more influence than the leaders of nation-states). That is why I wrote this article, to try and offer people some sign posts to be able to navigate what has now become what outwardly appears to be a vast open expanse filled with helpful information, but is in fact a mine field (with addictive, emotionally manipulative, and mentally damaging incendiary weapons of psychological warfare hidden under the surface).
I do not have any illusions that where we are here on substack (or anywhere else) is immune to that. For now, there does not appear to be censorship on this platform, but how many individual humans being threatened, bought out or blackmailed would it take for that to change very quickly? Likely not that many.
Therefore I advocate for people to take your approach, to see the internet as a useful tool to connect and engage in autodidactism, but to also even spend more time learning from the real world, from nature, from books and introspection, rather than looking to have someone on the internet tell them what is true and what is not. In doing so, we can all become of greater service to our local communities and to gather valuable knowledge and experiences we can pass onto future generations.
Thanks for reading my article and for the comment.
Hi Gavin, I didn't think you were demonizing it in its entirety - I think we're on the same page! :)
Wow, so much information. I particularly liked the Wikipedia reveal. I knew it had gone corrupt (I even used to donate to them) and that Jimmy Wales was WEF but the details were new and shocking to me--if that's even possible anymore. And I like the permaculture comparison at the end.
Speaking of which, I'm honored by your invitation to pre-read Recipes and write a blurb, but I think I'll need to wait for the hard copy. If there's anything you can use in my post on it, though, feel free!
Looking forward to it.
Hey Tereza!
Thanks for reading what I put together I am glad you appreciated the part about wikipedia. I used to rely on it for research quite a bit but then noticed suspicious edits of past articles cropping up when the mainstream narrative changed and so began asking some hard questions and investigating further.
I am really glad you liked the part of the article that invites the reader to look through the permaculture lens at this situation at the end.
Seeing problems as the pathway to formulate a solution has been very helpful in my life in recent years.
In fact, I was just writing about the weaponization of food and found my self seeing a very empowering potential solution to the degradation of soil in the prairies and midwest of the US through that same process. I was examining the brutal history of how the US military and railroad barons ordered the almost complete extermination of the great Buffalo herds during the latter part of the 1800s. I found the potential for finding viable solutions through analyzing why they had gone about reducing a population of 30-60 million bison to only about 400 in less than a decade. The methodical genocide of the great Buffalo herds was initiated because the army generals (Generals Sherman and Sheridan) and the railroad oligarchs (from the Union Pacific Railroad and Canadian Pacific Railway) wanted the land the indigenous people were on, they wanted them dead and/or culturally destroyed and dependent on their centralized systems, so when they saw how the indigenous peoples of what is now called the US and Canada had a symbiotic relationship with the buffalo they knew they could cripple them if they shot all the buffalo. (If you are interested in learning more I provided some in depth historical accounts in the comments which you can find here: https://www.corbettreport.com/what-is-the-future-of-food/#comment-145620 )
While this piece of history illuminates the depravity, arrogance and malice (which all humans are capable of if they allow themselves to be guided by greed, hubris, fear and ego) it can also offer us some wisdom for solutions and hope for reversing the damage if we learn from our elder species and choose to work along side of them.
Buffalo are natural land restoration machines – when allowed to move freely, they instinctively don’t overgraze, they move through areas tilling the soil with their cleft hooves (providing aeration and opportunities for plants to grow without destroying the networks of beneficial insects and fungi in the soil as mechanized tilling does), distributing grass and other native seeds, and fertilizing (building soil) everywhere they go.
Species like Buffalo can serve as agents of Trophic Cascade and send out ripple effects that regenerate soils and entire ecosystems if we allow them to roam freely. Wild Buffalo can play a key role in restoring the tall grass prairie, restoring the watersheds, restoring the birds, insects and soil.
Perhaps to those that seek to create a future worth living in (and giving to future generations) we should strive to be working alongside beings like the Buffalo to encourage regenerative grazing practices can serve as a key to not only ensuring food security for humans, but ecological regeneration for countless other beings and good living soil for future generations to cultivate an abundance of diverse crops in.
Well that was quite a tangent about buffalo but my point is that perhaps we can also find solutions through analyzing the reasons why everything that I describe in my article above is happening, so that we can find resilience and sturdy footing on the path ahead.
Thanks for letting me know about the book. No worries, quite a few other people have shown an interest in reviewing it, so while I am grateful you considered being one of them, it looks like the page on my hard copy that is devoted to reviews that may be full already. I appreciate you giving me permission to extract your words from your kind and generous substack article (where you mentioned my work) and I will likely take you up on that offer in some format in the future.
Thank you for believing in the spirit and message of my book, I look forward to getting a copy to you.
Thank you for that extensive and thoughtful comment, Gavin! I had also heard that about the buffalo. It's also true for the Haiti native pig. Destruction of indigenous food sources has been a tactic of war for millennia. And I'm sure the propaganda about bird flu is part of it, and the shutting down of ranches and dairies in the Netherlands.
The principles of regenerative ag, as I've known them, are frequently moving domesticated ranch animals in particular rotations so they graze everything in a contained space, and then aren't on the same space for another six months. It mimics the way that herds moved, tightly packed against predators, rather than being spread out on open pasture.
My friend, a mom and regenerative rancher, compares it to giving a kid a handful of trail mix with choc chips or handing them the bag. When animals can graze anywhere, they eat their favorite things and leave the rest, so the wrong things grow untamed. If they're contained, they eat everything, along with all the other good side-effects of divots and dung you mention.
Why would you not want to feed people at the same time as restoring the land, which would make it financially self-sustaining rather than a gov't project? I'm very distrustful, as I know you are, of those land and wilderness climate change projects that have led to the current WEF depopulation solution to 'save the earth.'