9/11 and its necessarily terrifying, anti-democratic security philosophy of total surveillance, is not the issue here. What was done was done. Some of it delivered. Some of it didn’t. But I am certain it served to stop what was ready to destroy us all — all people of good faith, that is — within twelve months, if not less.

Where I now disagree firmly, fiercely, ferociously even, is that two decades after — hanging blindly onto this orthodoxy of machine-primacy total surveillance, even when these days it only appears to surveill ourselves in any way efficiently — we continue to allow our security #bigtech corporations to argue that all we need to fight creative criminality is even more machines and even fewer crimefighting humans capable of crimefighting such extreme criminality:

https://gb2earth.com/primacy

In these two decades, remember, Russia’s Putin has dislocated over and over each and every attempt of Western-style democracies to return to some semblance of the values and missions which other epochs allowed us to aspire to.

And last October 2023, machine-primacy total surveillance permitted Hamas to work for probably a year before launching their catatrosphic attacks, as they aimed — successfully in the event — to upturn the historical narrative all good people have had of the Jewish experience of life before and after World War II.

The wilful and deliberate blanking of nonconformist thinking — not just mine, either— has served to unnecessarily enable Hamas, Russia and Ukraine, Iran, China, North Korea et al. We have refused to learn from events: we have learnt only to use events to remain attached to our now unthinking orthodoxies.

That is, ideas which the brutally single-minded application of security orthodoxies of total surveillance & related — NOT their fact; their application … — have dismissed wholly from serious debate around how to learn from contrary events post-9/11: events which don’t fit the mould, don’t support the rationales behind current bottom lines, and don’t allow us to affirm with any degree of confidence that we respect the enemy at all.

To conclude, this has led us to believe and practise the philosophy that it is enough to pursue the goal of out-spying the enemy, and no longer necessary to invest half as much in out-thinking them.

We continue to rely almost entirely on machines with humans as extensions of the same, whilst our hyper-creative hyper-criminal enemies use machines to extend their terribly inhumanity

This is the second matter I’d like us to revisit. And why once revisited, an issue we have to do something ferociously about.

Original webpage from which this is taken can be found here: https://gb2earth.com/phd

And this is the real reason why I want to be part of a project to deliver two interconnected PhDs with another person who will be as engaged as I am in the fields of cognitive and hybrid warfare, as they deepen their stealthy impact on Western & related democratic ways of seeing.