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xtruss · 3 years

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Are You Ready and Willing to Be Free Again?

“Care what other people think of you and you will always be their prisoner.” — Lao Tzu

— By Stacey Rudin | September 16, 2021

The modern West’s sudden and near universal acceptance of “lockdowns” — a novel concept of government-enforced house arrest — signifies a far-reaching and sinister shift away from bedrock democratic values. When fear was injected into the atmosphere by the media, the West was a sitting duck, ready to accept any lifeline offered by any politician — even the communist dictator — in a stunning reversal of our nation’s founding principles.

“Give me liberty or give me death” was our original rallying cry. Oppressed by British rule, Americans rebelled. They fought for independence, for the right to live their own lives in their own way. This passion for liberty created the most successful republic in history, a nation to be proud of — a beacon of hope and prosperity for people of all nations.

Today’s Americans behave in a diametrically opposed manner, trusting the government with blind allegiance and giving it full and total control over their wellbeing. Even personal health decisions like whether or not to receive a quickly-developed vaccination are entrusted to politicians to mandate. Any neighbor who disagrees is marginalized and rejected: “She’s an antivaxxer; she must be an ignorant Trump supporter.”

You cannot betray the concept of “give me liberty or give me death” any further than by adopting the premise that no one can disagree with you and still be a reasonable person. When you are on board with a plan that includes subverting your neighbors’ autonomy and violating their bodies as you deem necessary to satisfy the people on TV, you’ve rejected the American experiment. You’re a collectivist, and I wonder: have you looked into how well collectivist systems have worked out for regular people lately?

It is shocking how many people appear to want to live in a world where everyone thinks just like they do. The average person quickly distances himself even from political opponents, as if it would be desirable to have just one political party that everyone votes for. Yet in 2021, in affluent coastal communities, republicans have to pretend to be democrats, and they actually do it. When even this commonplace difference of opinion cannot be accepted and dealt with, it’s clear we’ve moved far away from prizing eccentricity as John Stuart Mill did in 1859, back when Liberty was cool:

“[T]he mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.”

“The mind-bending part of conformist behavior is this: we all know the truth. We know. We just aren’t saying or doing it”

This fear of eccentricity — which I’d argue is tantamount to freedom — was laid bare in March 2020. Even when the “deadly disease” propaganda out of China was thickest, the average person really did not want to lock herself at home and pull her children out of school, let alone force people out of work. Yet it was only the very rare person who made this desire public. Everyone else pretended to agree — they decided to “go along to get along.” They put the “stay home, save lives” sticker on their Facebook profiles. They did drive-by birthday parades (my God.) And now that the failure of lockdowns is irrefutable, they refuse to admit they were wrong, afraid to face the damage they helped to cause.

To summarize, the appearance of universal agreement with lockdown was just that: an appearance. Agreement was depicted because most people do “what’s cool,” and because mass media is everywhere, and because social media astroturf propaganda efforts are very effective. A society that wants to “be cool” is very easy to manipulate. The dissenters will betray themselves to stay cool, so just make something appear cool, and the conformists will jump on board.

To today’s Americans, appearances are everything — we are afraid to be different, lest it make our friends uncomfortable (maybe we will lose one, whatever will we do?!) We have ceased caring about truth and authenticity entirely. We have tacitly agreed as a society that true things should be hidden whenever they conflict with what is “popular”; with what everyone “smart” and “cool” is doing. Anyone acting outside of these boundaries — the “eccentrics” of centuries past, considered by Mill to be geniuses — are today’s untouchables.

In a nation founded by rebels, somehow it has become cool to be a conformist.

Thanks to lockdowns, we know that people want to “stay cool” more than they want they want their kids educated, more than they want to open their businesses, and more than they want to breathe freely. They will even accept open-ended vaccine dosages for an illness that poses less risk to them than driving a car — anything to “stay cool.” Disagreeing with someone is too much for Americans today. Confrontation is so scary that we’d rather let society dictate who we are; that way, everyone else will feel comfortable.

“Care what other people think of you and you will always be their prisoner.” — Lao Tzu

This is how the West sacrificed freedom before lockdowns were ever imposed. We care far too much what other people think of us. We fear freedom. Freedom is truth and authenticity and acting in your own interest, as your own person, even when — especially when — it makes other people uncomfortable. Why would you want a bunch of fake “friends” who only like the image you’re projecting? They will leave you the second your social power is tarnished. If you’ve never burned a bridge in your life, these are the people you’re surrounded by, guaranteed.

Speaking the truth, even when it burns bridges, will dissatisfy just the people you want to be rid of: the people who want you in a box, who resent having to follow onerous rules themselves, and mean to force you to do the same. The only power they have is the power to reject you, and once you don’t care about that, you’re free. You say the truth, accept the results, walk away from the wrong people and end up with the right ones.

Trade truth for popularity, by contrast, and you kill yourself in a sense. All that’s left of “you” is what society finds acceptable, which isn’t “you” at all. It’s completely external to you and has nothing to do with you. By conforming, you betray yourself by accepting the premise that there is something wrong with the real you. Maybe you’re so bent on being perfect (as defined by others) that you don’t even know what “you” is. That would make you the perfect cog in a machine, but as for your personal well-being, there is nothing worse. You will suffer.

“We defraud ourselves out of what is actually useful to us in order to make appearances conform to common opinion. We care less about the real truth of our inner selves than about how we are known to the public.” — Montaigne

The mind-bending part of conformist behavior is this: we all know the truth. We know. We just aren’t saying or doing it. There are dozens, hundreds of people who email me thanking me for opposing lockdowns and for standing up for medical choice and privacy. So why aren’t they doing this themselves, if they admire it so much, and know it needs to be done? If everyone did it, there could be no repercussions for any of us. Yet it isn’t happening because we are scared of telling the truth, which means we fear freedom. Far too many of us fear freedom.

We fear freedom and authentic humanity so much that we pretend people are robots. One glimpse of human frailty and a person can be blacklisted without a trial. Humanity is barbaric at present, demanding a certain perfect image and absolute cooperation with majority rule or social death. It isn’t hard to understand why people eventually crack in such a system, or develop severe anxiety disorders. Consider one of my favorite passages of literature from modern philosopher Karl Ove Knausgaard, discussing how he was banished by his family for simply telling the truth in his epic autobiographical novel:

“The social dimension is what keeps us in our places, which makes it possible for us to live together; the individual dimension is what ensures that we don’t merge into each other. The social dimension is based on taking one another into consideration. We also do this by hiding our feelings, not saying what we think, if what we feel or think affects others. The social dimension is also based on showing some things and hiding others. What should be shown and what should be hidden are not subject to disagreement . . . the regulatory mechanism is shame. One of the questions this book raised for me when I was writing it was what was there to gain by contravening social norms, by describing what no one wants to be described, in other words, the secret and the hidden. Let me put it another way: what value is there in not taking others into account? The social dimension is the world as it should be. Everything that is not as it should be is hidden. My father drank himself to death, that is not how it should be, that has to be hidden. My heart yearned for another woman, that is not how it should be, it must be hidden. But he was my father and it was my heart.”

“He was my father and it was my heart.” What is there to gain by calling Knausgaard a freak and rejecting him, when we know these things happen all the time — alcoholism and infidelity? Shouldn’t we revere him for his brave example, for his confidence? I find his display of human vulnerability incredibly attractive, perhaps because I see so little of it in my daily life. I’m tired of the display of perfect people with perfect lives and perfectly-scheduled, perfect kids on the path to Harvard. I want the mess, and I want to show my mess and still be accepted and loved.

Knausgaard, I guess, is the rare modern eccentric. He puts it all out there. Here he is again, discussing the purpose of publishing a novel so true that he lost family members over it:

“I was there, turning 40. I had a beautiful wife, three beautiful kids, I loved them all. But still I wasn’t truly happy. It’s not necessarily the curse of the writer, this. But maybe it’s the curse of the writer to be aware of it, to ask: why is all this, all I’ve got, not enough? That’s really what I’m searching for, in this whole thing, an answer to that question.”

Maybe that’s the heart of it all — even the heart of the current crisis. We are all so empty despite “having it all,” because “it all” has been defined by something other than us. Hollywood, the media, popular politicians — they are telling us what to be, and we have listened, and we are miserable. We are lying, pretending, putting on a show; hiding our pain with drugs, drink, porn, overspending. Things that they sell us.

The end result of this entire exercise in anti-self-development is lockdowns and forced perpetual vaccinations, a segregated society with everyone suspicious of everyone else, and technological apartheid on the horizon. Slavery. If we had all defined ourselves, instead of turning into a mass with one hive mind, afraid of any differences — of freedom — would we be here? I don’t think so. We’d be happy, healthy, and free.

“To be satiated with the ‘necessities’ of external success is no doubt an inestimable source of happiness, yet the inner man continues to raise his claim, and this can be satisfied by no outward possessions. And the less this voice is heard in the chase after the brilliant things of this world, the more the inner man becomes a source of inexplicable misfortune and uncomprehended unhappiness.” — Carl Jung

We’ve neglected individuality in pursuit of perfect conformity, and as a result we’ve become a miserable society filled with miserable people who will never feel safe enough. There is no boundary they will not cross in pursuit of perfect compliance with the rules, doing anything and everything that’s needed to “be cool” today, as defined by The Today Show. “Come to our all-vaccinated wedding!” “I won’t play tennis with ‘the unvaccinated,’ regardless of the fact that I took my own vaccine and stand 40 feet away.”

This is what we’ve become.

We simply must revisit truth and authenticity sometime very soon. We urgently need to find what’s real in all of this fake, and that can’t be done without individual human voices. If you care about liberty, you must do this one scary thing: embrace it. Be free. “But to be free, you have to be inconsiderate.” Yes. Inconsiderate to others, but considerate to yourself. Speak now or forever hold your peace.

— Stacey Rudin is an attorney and writer in New Jersey, USA

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poop4u · 5 years

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How To Prevent Dog Bites

#Poop4U

The post How To Prevent Dog Bites by Victoria Stilwell appeared first on Dogster. Copying over entire articles infringes on copyright laws. You may not be aware of it, but all of these articles were assigned, contracted and paid for, so they aren't considered public domain. However, we appreciate that you like the article and would love it if you continued sharing just the first paragraph of an article, then linking out to the rest of the piece on Dogster.com.

The act of aggressing is often reinforced by positive consequences for the aggressor because the threat frequently moves away and leaves the aggressor alone. Threat displays range from a subtle lip lift to a full bite, and while aggressive behavior is important for survival, it is an extremely worrying behavior for dog lovers to live with.

If your dog has bitten a person or another dog, it is vital that you find what caused the bite and control future situations so your dog is never in a position where he can bite again. Whether your dog has bitten once or has a multiple bite history, your No. 1 priority is to keep your dog comfortable, and other people and animals safe by managing your dog’s environment at all times.

Management means that your dog is safely contained behind a door, baby gate or crate when visitors come over or that he is never let off the leash when walking outside. These simple safety steps will help until you find a certified positive trainer to work with you and your dog to minimize the chance of a bite happening again. Some of the best positive trainers can be found at positively.com/trainers, or you can take your dog to a board- certified veterinary behaviorist.

Stress leads to biting

Stress has a profound influence on aggressive behavior and a significant impact on even the calmest of dogs. While some dogs might shut down when they feel threatened, others will express their discomfort by showing fear-based aggression, which is why many bites happen. Dogs might look like they’re being “nasty” when they aggress, but a bite always serves some kind of important function for the dog at that time. Physically punishing a biting dog or using old school confrontational methods or equipment to “fix” aggressive behavior rarely leads to positive results, and in many cases increases the dog’s stress levels and insecurity, which leads to more bites in the future.

Stopping the bite

So how can you stop aggressive behavior? Positive training techniques and methods are very effective in helping dogs cope with domestic life. Once you understand why the behavior is happening, your trainer will create a management plan for safety and a behavior modification plan designed to increase your dog’s confidence and guide him into making better choices. These protocols are much more effective than punishment-based training, both for short- and long-term success, because they give dogs coping skills in different situations and environments, promoting emotional stability.

Preventing bites in the first place

One of the most important ways to prevent your dog from biting is to ensure he has a good canine education as well as a positive social foundation. I teach all my puppy clients to accept “rude” human greeting behavior, because it is virtually impossible to prevent people from invading their personal space to say hello. We are a dog-loving nation and are naturally drawn to touch these incredible animals even when we know we shouldn’t. Children are particularly vulnerable to being bitten and often imitate the behavior of their parents, caregivers and guardians.

Dog bite prevention therefore puts the focus on human education. Every child and adult needs to know what body language to look for, how to greet a new dog appropriately and some important points to remember:

Avoid kissing a dog on the nose

Watch out for signals that a dog is uncomfortable such as avoidance, lip licking and yawning

Do not hug a strange dog or a dog that you do not know very well

Do not reach out to touch a dog uninvited

And, if you are told it is OK to pet a dog, allow him to come into your personal space rather than invading his. Building a general awareness helps keep everyone safe and comfortable.

High or low threshold

Most dogs can be helped with a behavior modification plan, but if your dog has a long bite history and a very low threshold for aggressive response, or if bite incidents have become more severe and frequent, a positive outcome might be harder to achieve. If the aggressive behavior cannot be successfully redirected or has become more unpredictable and is occurring in many different environments or situations, there is less likelihood of success.

If bite injuries have caused slight bruising or minimal wounds, the behavior has only recently begun and your dog has a higher stress threshold, which makes an aggressive response more predictable, manageable and avoidable, the prognosis is much better.

Make sure that your dog has a full medical checkup to ensure that aggressive behavior is not linked to pain or some other medical problem. Teaching your dog appropriate life skills and allowing your dog positive social experiences will help build his confidence and emotional stability.

Every dog’s well-being should be taken into account, especially when out in public. Every handler needs to be aware of and advocate for their dog’s unique needs. This will not only help prevent dog bites but will also help guardians successfully manage their dog’s future if a bite has already occurred.

Using a muzzle

Muzzles are vital safety tools. However, they can also cause untold amounts of stress for dogs that are not used to wearing them. The sudden restriction of facial movement and confinement of the mouth can cause panic in the calmest of dogs, as their primary method of defense is taken away. Not only that, certain muzzles can restrict breathing, making it hard for dogs to breathe normally and to cool themselves down.

Teaching any dog to wear a muzzle should be a slow, careful process, as it is especially important to do things right, particularly with dogs who are nervous or do not like being handled around the mouth or face. Don’t make the common mistake of only putting the muzzle on when your dog is in a situation or environment that makes him uncomfortable — in the presence of strangers or when there are loud noises, for example. The key to successful acclimation is to pair the muzzle with good things and fun experiences, rather than the muzzle becoming a predictor of “bad” or “scary” experiences. Once that is done, the muzzle can be worn when needed.

Thumbnail: ©alexei_tm | Getty Images

About the author:

Victoria Stilwell, dog trainer, TV personality, author and public speaker, is best known as the star of the TV series It’s Me or the Dog, through which she reaches audiences in more than 100 countries. Appearing frequently in the media, she’s widely recognized as a leader in the field of animal behavior, is editor-in-chief of positively.com, CEO of the VSPDT network of licensed trainers and the founder of the Victoria Stilwell Academy for Dog Training & Behavior — the leader in dog trainer education. Connect with her on Facebook or Twitter at @victorias.

Learn more about dog behavior and training at dogster.com:

Simple Tips for Crate Training a Dog

7 Bad and Rude Behaviors — From Dog Parents

The Latest in Dog Training

Poop4U Blog via www.Poop4U.com Victoria Stilwell, Khareem Sudlow

#poop4u #cute dog #dogs of tumblr #puppy doggo #doglover #doggrooming #my doggo #dogmeme

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lisarprahl · 6 years

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Changing the Big Audit Model: Where Might the Regulators Go?

In the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s litigation against PwC over its audits of the failed Colonial Bank in Alabama, Judge Barbara Rothstein has loosed a second blast—her decision of July 2 fixed damages at $625 million for the liability spelled out at length in her decision last December.

Appeals will come, making premature any crystal ball gazing on the final result. That did not stop a media snowstorm—a partial sampling included the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the Times of London, Reuters and Bloomberg, Accountancy Age, and Compliance Week.

On July 3, Francine McKenna at MarketWatch reckoned this the largest judgment in the U.S. against an auditor—rare as those are, and assuming its ultimate finality. McKenna then shifted her focus from judicial outcomes to negotiated settlements, to round on the practice of protecting settlement figures in private auditor litigation by confidentiality agreements.

She cited as an argument of the firms that settlements should be kept confidential, out of “fear that public awareness of potentially large settlement amounts might undermine confidence in an audit firm’s continued viability and/or prompt clients to abandon it.”

On the basic but seldom discussed financial fragility of the Big 4 networks, her proposition picked up reinforcement from the Times of London on July 9, under the sub-head, “Litigation over a flawed audit could quickly lead to an Arthur Andersen-style collapse.”

This issue should not be new. Starting in 2006 in my “Balance Sheet” column in the late and lamented International Herald Tribune, I have been calculating the litigation “tipping point” that would disintegrate a Big 4 firm. Updating, the 2017 edition of my book, Count Down: The Past, Present and Uncertain Future of the Big Four Accounting Firms, estimates those figures today at between $4 billion and $6 billion at the global level and between $1 billion and $3 billion for one of its U.S. firms standing alone—amounts falling somewhere between “modest” and “scary” considering the level of their exposures.

Is McKenna’s supposition of anxiety on the part of the profession that settlement disclosure might undercut public confidence a straw man? Equally arguable would be the benefit of public recognition that the business models of the Big 4—running on their client receivables and paper-thin capital—are simply not robust to withstand the shock of a truly “bad case” litigation or penalty.

If transparency of the large auditors’ financial information does have the virtue for which McKenna argues, an approach perhaps deserving a refreshed airing would be that the large firms publish their own global financial statements.

It’s been done. In the U.K., the Financial Reporting Council’s Audit Firm Governance Code (section E.5, 2016) requires such statements, although on a county-level basis only. And going back to the 1970s, Arthur Andersen made public its global financial statements.

The FRC or the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board in the U.S. could readily craft requirements that would compel such broad disclosure. Audits could even be required, drawing on the Andersen practice that its statements were audited and opined on by Haskins & Sells, as the Deloitte firm in the U.S. was then branded. Such a step would, however, involve a twist—both ironic and politically charged—that the only auditors with the scope and scale to report on a Big 4 network would be other members of that quartet.

In the pros and cons of that debate, in other words, the critics of the profession who are inclined to see malign cartel behavior under every rock would do well to consider what to wish for.

As for any utility attributable to broad release of settlement information, “public awareness”—like movie temptress Mae West’s dismissive attitude toward “goodness”—has nothing to do with it. Competent management and audit committees, as well as any trial counsel with the skills and experience to litigate a 10-figure claim of audit failure, have the information needed to evaluate the soundness of a firm—both absolutely and relative to its peers.

In that calculus, the firms’ litigation exposures and the stability of their finances are further ingredients in an information mix that also includes the virtual lack of auditor replacement choice at the large-company level—a subject front and center in the public debate, as witness the three separate inquiries now ongoing in London, under remits undertaken by the FRC, the Competition and Markets Authority, and the committee instigated by the British parliament.

The range of possible changes to the Big Audit model being tabled runs from the anodyne to the harmful to the laughably impractical—“open source” audit software, break up or spin off the Big 4 audit practices, or even fixed quotas on a Big 4 firm’s book of large clients (see the Times for July 9).

Because the city of London boffins charged to tinker with the U.K.’s regulatory machinery would think it unseemly to concede the intractability of the issues, Messrs. Stephen Haddrill (FRC), Andrew Tyrie (CMA), and Sir John Kingman may be expected to deliver something. But caution is called for; as the sub-head of the Economist’s May 26 editorial put it, “The audit industry needs fixing. But dismantling the Big Four is not the way to do it.”

As the recent experience with the unintended anti-competitive consequence of the FRC’s requirement for re-tender has shown—namely the withdrawal of Grant Thornton from tendering for FTSE 350 audits—attention by the inquiry trio would be well-focused on proposals having both practicality and achievability.

If in the end they manage to do no actual harm, that would deserve to be called success.

Jim Peterson was a senior in-house lawyer with Arthur Andersen for 19 years, leaving in 2001 to pursue his own practice and to write about the accounting profession—in the International Herald Tribune and now on his blog, Re:Balance. His book, “Count Down: The Past, Present and Uncertain Future of the Big Four Accounting Firms,” was published in July 2017 by Emerald Books.

Image: iStock/alphaspirit

The post Changing the Big Audit Model: Where Might the Regulators Go? appeared first on Going Concern.

from Accounting News https://goingconcern.com/changing-big-audit-model-where-might-regulators-go/

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ashleydpalmerusa · 6 years

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Changing the Big Audit Model: Where Might the Regulators Go?

In the pros and cons of that debate, in other words, the critics of the profession who are inclined to see malign cartel behavior under every rock would do well to consider what to wish for.

If in the end they manage to do no actual harm, that would deserve to be called success.

Image: iStock/alphaspirit

The post Changing the Big Audit Model: Where Might the Regulators Go? appeared first on Going Concern.

from Accounting News https://goingconcern.com/changing-big-audit-model-where-might-regulators-go/

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loriglessner · 7 years

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Happy first day of Spring, my Art Bite Blog friends!!

Continuing from my last post on the topic of marks, as I sit down to write this post about the process of my recent acrylic and gouache paintings, (and pictured above) I realize I can’t write about them without first thinking about where and how the marks in these paintings originated. I also took into consideration the many conversations I’ve had with students and workshop participants regarding approaching galleries with a consistent ‘style’ or ‘voice’ and how an artist acquires such things. I look at my work from five years ago and it’s so drastically different from what I do today, yet when I look at the total evolution across the span of twenty years, I can see why the total body is related and it’s an interesting path. Giving lectures about my work has enabled me to chronologically trace back to where I am today, but I only go as far back as grad school and rarely go back that far anymore. I’ve recently started a huge studio clean-out and as a result I’ve come across work that I’ve long forgotten about. Seeing this work again is what prompted me to go back even further, to delve into some of the reasons why I do what I do today. I would like to explore that path a bit in this post and in a few future posts. Perhaps reading about my journey will help you to develop and/or trace your own.

I first considered art as a career in high school with the discovery of Hieronymus Bosch, Georgia O’Keefe and Wassily Kandinsky, not necessarily at the same time or in that order. My high school boyfriend’s father had a huge book of Bosch’s paintings and we would stare at it for hours. I loved the tremendous detail, the chaotic imagination and narrative. These paintings taught me to spend time, look further, to notice the small things not overtly apparent at first glance. I hope to encourage the viewer to do the same with my work by my adding camouflaged details one has to look to find. I was intrigued by O’Keefe’s voluptuous, sensual and simplified forms, use of color, subtle shading, smooth brushstroke and feminine subject matter. At that time, I had never seen any work similar to hers-mine was a more traditional exposure to art with pastoral landscape, tight still life and other popular art/craft of the 70’s, like scary clowns, bull riders and macrame owls…but I digress. I read everything I could about O’Keefe, poured over her work and even taught myself to successfully draw value, light and shadow by copying her drawings. I discovered Kandinsky around the beginning of undergrad and was literally blown away by the abstract expressionist ideas of communicating emotions through marks, patterns, gesture and color and that one could make a whole painting by simply being inspired by the emotions and melodies evoked by music. This approach to art making was totally foreign, yet it resonated with me almost immediately and I saw in my mind the art I wanted to make. Even though it isn’t obvious, I see the influence of O’Keefe’s wonderful forms and Kandinsky’s rhythmic marks in almost all of my work of the past 30 years. See the images below for some of my favorite paintings by these artists.

Although it was not my choice, I went to design school instead of art school…Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science, now Philadelphia University and my major was textile design. Throughout my schooling and subsequent ten year career as a textile designer, I learned the fundamentals of design..composition, color, scale, repetition, etc. and acquired a detailed painting hand by countless hours of DOING. My first job out of school was as a jacquard designer for home furnishings. The company was unique in that I could take on a line of fabrics and design everything from start to finish-from the painted designs, to choosing the weaves and colors, to correcting errors in the weaving mill and on the computer. I learned an exponential amount about all aspects of design and because I had to spend hours correcting the shape of a flower on the computer if I painted outside the lines, I developed a very tight painting hand and eye for detail. The mill had been a former tie manufacturer and my bosses, the new owners, had kept within the traditional style of florals, damasks and allover patterns, small to large scale. Designing fabrics for a large scale area like a wall or sofa presents certain problems in that the design must ‘flow’ evenly without certain elements creating a distracting line. Looking out for these kinds of design no-no’s helped me develop an excellent eye for balance and placement as well as that continuous flowing line still so prevalent in my work today.

After nostalgically writing that last paragraph, I must confess that I hated that textile designer job, I found so much of it creatively stifling and perfection seeking. Thirty years later, I am grateful for certain aspects of working as a designer and I’m certain I wouldn’t be the artist I am today without that early training. See the second group of images below where I have included some of my hand painted designs from that job. Keep in mind that the colors in the paintings only represent different weaves and not necessarily the colors used in the final fabric. It’s fun to look at these designs and see how my textile design background influenced my early encaustic paintings (and pictured below) as well as a tiny flicker of my recent acrylic and gouache series. If you don’t yet notice that tiny flicker, I will fill in the blanks as to where the marks in that series come from in a near future post.

Please don’t be discouraged if you don’t have thirty years to devote to developing your voice, or if your first career choice wasn’t a creative endeavor as mine was, a lot can be achieved with determination, maturity and persistence. As I have mentioned in many previous posts, drawing a little bit everyday is the road to developing your own mark. One of my favorite quotes from my favorite book, Art & Fear tells it like it is…What you need to know about the next piece is contained in the last piece. The place to learn about your materials is the last use of your materials. The place to learn about your execution is in your execution. The best information about what you love is in your last contact with what you love. Put simply, your work is your guide. In time, as an artists gestures become more assured, the chosen tools become almost an extension of the artists own spirit. In time, exploration gives way to expression. If you’re determined and persisting in working everyday, even if it’s a 15 minute drawing, you will achieve your artistic goals…guaranteed!

I hope you have enjoyed this post and it helps you in some way. As always, I look forward to your comments, questions and suggestions-the comments section is located at the upper left sidebar of this post. Stay tuned for an exciting April-a two part series focusing on inspiring hikes for artists with contributions from some of my artist friends. Covering hikes from all over the world, remote and urban, these hikes range from other-worldly to tranquil to transcendental.

Enjoy the first day of spring, see you soon.

Working Title/Artist: Black Iris Department: Modern Art Culture/Period/Location: HB/TOA Date Code: Working Date: 1926 photographed by mma in 1983, transparency 2a scanned by film & media 6/8/04 (phc)

Working Title/Artist: Drawing XIII Department: Modern Art Culture/Period/Location: HB/TOA Date Code: Working Date: 1915 photography by mma 1997, transparency #3A scanned and retouched by film and media (jn) 12_15_04

Image Descriptions (From left to right, top to bottom)

Georgia O’Keefe, Black Iris, 1926

Georgia O’Keefe, Drawing XIII-I copied this drawing over and over, obsessed with learning to draw this way.

Georgia O’Keefe, Drawing X, charcoal on paper

Georgia O’Keefe, Blue and Green Music, 1919

Georgia O’Keefe, Music, Pink and Blue, 1918-I had a framed poster of this painting in my room through high school, college and my first apartment.

Georgia O’Keefe, Special Drawing No 9, charcoal on paper, 1915 -I remember reading in her biography that this drawing was done while she had a headache, I found it fascinating that she was able to capture such a thing.

Wassily Kandinsky, Yellow Red Blue, 1925

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VII, 1913, one of my all time favorite paintings.

Wassily Kandinsky, Blue Circle, 1922

Hieronymus Bosch, Concert in the Egg

Hieronymus Bosch, detail, Garden of Earthly Delights

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition IX, 1936

Hieronymus Bosch, detail, Garden of Earthly Delights

Hieronymus Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights

Wassily Kandinsky, A Center, 1924

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1-7. Lorraine Glessner, home furnishing textile designs for Jacquard Fabrics, Inc., gouache on Bristol board, circa 1991-94. 8. Lorraine Glessner, Sprawl, encaustic, mixed media on rust printed silk on wood, 12x12x1, 2006 9. Lorraine Glessner, Seed, encaustic, mixed media on rust printed silk on wood, 12x12x1, 2006 10. Lorraine Glessner, Misguided Angel Redux, encaustic, mixed media on rust printed silk on wood, 36x36x1.5, 2010 11. Lorraine Glessner, Flaupher, encaustic, mixed media on rust printed silk on wood, 12x12x1, 2006 12. Lorraine Glessner, Aggregate, encaustic, mixed media on rust printed silk on wood, 24x42x1, 2006 13. Lorraine Glessner, Crush, encaustic, mixed media on rust printed silk on wood, 24x2x1.5, 2010 14. Lorraine Glessner, Perfect Timing, encaustic, mixed media on rust printed silk on wood, 12x12x1, 2006

How does an artist acquire a consistent style or voice? In this post, I trace how and where from my personal mark evolved. Happy first day of Spring, my Art Bite Blog friends!! Continuing from my last post on the topic of marks, as I sit down to write this post about the process of…

#acrylic painting #approaching galleries #art and fear #artist process #artist statement #artist styles #damask patterns #design #design concepts #drawing #fabric pattern #floral patterns #home furnishing fabrics #jacquard #jacquard design #jacquard weaving #mark making #textile design

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viralhottopics · 8 years

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Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media

With links to Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage, the rightwing American computer scientist is at the heart of a multimillion-dollar propaganda network

Just over a week ago, Donald Trump gathered members of the worlds press before him and told them they were liars. The press, honestly, is out of control, he said. The public doesnt believe you any more. CNN was described as very fake news story after story is bad. The BBC was another beauty.

That night I did two things. First, I typed Trump in the search box of Twitter. My feed was reporting that he was crazy, a lunatic, a raving madman. But that wasnt how it was playing out elsewhere. The results produced a stream of Go Donald!!!!, and You show em!!! There were star-spangled banner emojis and thumbs-up emojis and clips of Trump laying into the FAKE news MSM liars!

Trump had spoken, and his audience had heard him. Then I did what Ive been doing for two and a half months now. I Googled mainstream media is And there it was. Googles autocomplete suggestions: mainstream media is dead, dying, fake news, fake, finished. Is it dead, I wonder? Has FAKE news won? Are we now the FAKE news? Is the mainstream media we, us, I dying?

I click Googles first suggested link. It leads to a website called CNSnews.com and an article: The Mainstream media are dead. Theyre dead, I learn, because they we, I cannot be trusted. How had it, an obscure site Id never heard of, dominated Googles search algorithm on the topic? In the About us tab, I learn CNSnews is owned by the Media Research Center, which a click later I learn is Americas media watchdog, an organisation that claims an unwavering commitment to neutralising leftwing bias in the news, media and popular culture.

Another couple of clicks and I discover that it receives a large bulk of its funding more than $10m in the past decade from a single source, the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer. If you follow US politics you may recognise the name. Robert Mercer is the money behind Donald Trump. But then, I will come to learn, Robert Mercer is the money behind an awful lot of things. He was Trumps single biggest donor. Mercer started backing Ted Cruz, but when he fell out of the presidential race he threw his money $13.5m of it behind the Trump campaign.

Its money hes made as a result of his career as a brilliant but reclusive computer scientist. He started his career at IBM, where he made what the Association for Computational Linguistics called revolutionary breakthroughs in language processing a science that went on to be key in developing todays AI and later became joint CEO of Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund that makes its money by using algorithms to model and trade on the financial markets.

One of its funds, Medallion, which manages only its employees money, is the most successful in the world generating $55bn so far. And since 2010, Mercer has donated $45m to different political campaigns all Republican and another $50m to non-profits all rightwing, ultra-conservative. This is a billionaire who is, as billionaires are wont, trying to reshape the world according to his personal beliefs.

Donald Trumps presidential campaigned received $13.5m from Robert Mercer. Photograph: Timothy A Clary/AFP/Getty Images

Robert Mercer very rarely speaks in public and never to journalists, so to gauge his beliefs you have to look at where he channels his money: a series of yachts, all called Sea Owl; a $2.9m model train set; climate change denial (he funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland Institute); and what is maybe the ultimate rich mans plaything the disruption of the mainstream media. In this he is helped by his close associate Steve Bannon, Trumps campaign manager and now chief strategist. The money he gives to the Media Research Center, with its mission of correcting liberal bias is just one of his media plays. There are other bigger, and even more deliberate strategies, and shining brightly, the star at the centre of the Mercer media galaxy, is Breitbart.

It was $10m of Mercers money that enabled Bannon to fund Breitbart a rightwing news site, set up with the express intention of being a Huffington Post for the right. It has launched the careers of Milo Yiannopoulos and his like, regularly hosts antisemitic and Islamophobic views, and is currently being boycotted by more than 1,000 brands after an activist campaign. It has been phenomenally successful: the 29th most popular site in America with 2bn page views a year. Its bigger than its inspiration, the Huffington Post, bigger, even, than PornHub. Its the biggest political site on Facebook. The biggest on Twitter.

Prominent rightwing journalist Andrew Breitbart, who founded the site but died in 2012, told Bannon that they had to take back the culture. And, arguably, they have, though American culture is only the start of it. In 2014, Bannon launched Breitbart London, telling the New York Times it was specifically timed ahead of the UKs forthcoming election. It was, he said, the latest front in our current cultural and political war. France and Germany are next.

But there was another reason why I recognised Robert Mercers name: because of his connection to Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics company. He is reported to have a $10m stake in the company, which was spun out of a bigger British company called SCL Group. It specialises in election management strategies and messaging and information operations, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. In military circles this is known as psyops psychological operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on peoples emotions.)

Cambridge Analytica worked for the Trump campaign and, so Id read, the Leave campaign. When Mercer supported Cruz, Cambridge Analytica worked with Cruz. When Robert Mercer started supporting Trump, Cambridge Analytica came too. And where Mercers money is, Steve Bannon is usually close by: it was reported that until recently he had a seat on the board.

Last December, I wrote about Cambridge Analytica in a piece about how Googles search results on certain subjects were being dominated by rightwing and extremist sites. Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who had mapped the news ecosystem and found millions of links between rightwing sites strangling the mainstream media, told me that trackers from sites like Breitbart could also be used by companies like Cambridge Analytica to follow people around the web and then, via Facebook, target them with ads.

On its website, Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters its USP is to use this data to understand peoples deepest emotions and then target them accordingly. The system, according to Albright, amounted to a propaganda machine.

A few weeks later, the Observer received a letter. Cambridge Analytica was not employed by the Leave campaign, it said. Cambridge Analytica is a US company based in the US. It hasnt worked in British politics.

Which is how, earlier this week, I ended up in a Pret a Manger near Westminster with Andy Wigmore, Leave.EUs affable communications director, looking at snapshots of Donald Trump on his phone. It was Wigmore who orchestrated Nigel Farages trip to Trump Tower the PR coup that saw him become the first foreign politician to meet the president elect.

Wigmore scrolls through the snaps on his phone. Thats the one I took, he says pointing at the now globally famous photo of Farage and Trump in front of his golden elevator door giving the thumbs-up sign. Wigmore was one of the bad boys of Brexit a term coined by Arron Banks, the Bristol-based businessman who was Leave.EUs co-founder.

Cambridge Analytica had worked for them, he said. It had taught them how to build profiles, how to target people and how to scoop up masses of data from peoples Facebook profiles. A video on YouTube shows one of Cambridge Analyticas and SCLs employees, Brittany Kaiser, sitting on the panel at Leave.EUs launch event.

Facebook was the key to the entire campaign, Wigmore explained. A Facebook like, he said, was their most potent weapon. Because using artificial intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts of things about that individual and how to convince them with what sort of advert. And you knew there would also be other people in their network who liked what they liked, so you could spread. And then you follow them. The computer never stops learning and it never stops monitoring.

Steve Bannon, Donald Trumps chief strategist, is an associate of Robert Mercer. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

It sounds creepy, I say.

It is creepy! Its really creepy! Its why Im not on Facebook! I tried it on myself to see what information it had on me and I was like, Oh my God! Whats scary is that my kids had put things on Instagram and it picked that up. It knew where my kids went to school.

They hadnt employed Cambridge Analytica, he said. No money changed hands. They were happy to help.

Why?

Because Nigel is a good friend of the Mercers. And Robert Mercer introduced them to us. He said, Heres this company we think may be useful to you. What they were trying to do in the US and what we were trying to do had massive parallels. We shared a lot of information. Why wouldnt you? Behind Trumps campaign and Cambridge Analytica, he said, were the same people. Its the same family.

There were already a lot of questions swirling around Cambridge Analytica, and Andy Wigmore has opened up a whole lot more. Such as: are you supposed to declare services-in-kind as some sort of donation? The Electoral Commission says yes, if it was more than 7,500. And was it declared? The Electoral Commission says no. Does that mean a foreign billionaire had possibly influenced the referendum without that influence being apparent? Its certainly a question worth asking.

In the last month or so, articles in first the Swiss and the US press have asked exactly what Cambridge Analytica is doing with US voters data. In a statement to the Observer, the Information Commissioners Office said: Any business collecting and using personal data in the UK must do so fairly and lawfully. We will be contacting Cambridge Analytica and asking questions to find out how the company is operating in the UK and whether the law is being followed.

Cambridge Analytica said last Friday they are in touch with the ICO and are completely compliant with UK and EU data laws. It did not answer other questions the Observer put to it this week about how it built its psychometric model, which owes its origins to original research carried out by scientists at Cambridge Universitys Psychometric Centre, research based on a personality quiz on Facebook that went viral. More than 6 million people ended up doing it, producing an astonishing treasure trove of data.

These Facebook profiles especially peoples likes could be correlated across millions of others to produce uncannily accurate results. Michal Kosinski, the centres lead scientist, found that with knowledge of 150 likes, their model could predict someones personality better than their spouse. With 300, it understood you better than yourself. Computers see us in a more robust way than we see ourselves, says Kosinski.

But there are strict ethical regulations regarding what you can do with this data. Did SCL Group have access to the universitys model or data, I ask Professor Jonathan Rust, the centres director? Certainly not from us, he says. We have very strict rules around this.

A scientist, Aleksandr Kogan, from the centre was contracted to build a model for SCL, and says he collected his own data. Professor Rust says he doesnt know where Kogans data came from. The evidence was contrary. I reported it. An independent adjudicator was appointed by the university. But then Kogan said hed signed a non-disclosure agreement with SCL and he couldnt continue [answering questions].

Kogan disputes this and says SCL satisfied the universitys inquiries. But perhaps more than anyone, Professor Rust understands how the kind of information people freely give up to social media sites could be used.

Former Ukip leader Nigel Farage is a friend of the Mercers. Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images

The danger of not having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook and elsewhere is clear. With this, a computer can actually do psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour. Its what the scientologists try to do but much more powerful. Its how you brainwash someone. Its incredibly dangerous.

Its no exaggeration to say that minds can be changed. Behaviour can be predicted and controlled. I find it incredibly scary. I really do. Because nobody has really followed through on the possible consequences of all this. People dont know its happening to them. Their attitudes are being changed behind their backs.

Mercer invested in Cambridge Analytica, the Washington Post reported, driven in part by an assessment that the right was lacking sophisticated technology capabilities. But in many ways, its what Cambridge Analyticas parent company does that raises even more questions.

Emma Briant, a propaganda specialist at the University of Sheffield, wrote about SCL Group in her 2015 book, Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism: Strategies for Global Change. Cambridge Analytica has the technological tools to effect behavioural and psychological change, she said, but its SCL that strategises it. It has specialised, at the highest level for Nato, the MoD, the US state department and others in changing the behaviour of large groups. It models mass populations and then it changes their beliefs.

SCL was founded by someone called Nigel Oakes, who worked for Saatchi & Saatchi on Margaret Thatchers image, says Briant, and the company had been making money out of the propaganda side of the war on terrorism over a long period of time. There are different arms of SCL but its all about reach and the ability to shape the discourse. They are trying to amplify particular political narratives. And they are selective in who they go for: they are not doing this for the left.

In the course of the US election, Cambridge Analytica amassed a database, as it claims on its website, of almost the entire US voting population 220 million people and the Washington Post reported last week that SCL was increasing staffing at its Washington office and competing for lucrative new contracts with Trumps administration. It seems significant that a company involved in engineering a political outcome profits from what follows. Particularly if its the manipulation, and then resolution, of fear, says Briant.

Its the database, and what may happen to it, that particularly exercises Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a Swiss mathematician and data activist who has been investigating Cambridge Analytica and SCL for more than a year. How is it going to be used? he says. Is it going to be used to try and manipulate people around domestic policies? Or to ferment conflict between different communities? It is potentially very scary. People just dont understand the power of this data and how it can be used against them.

There are two things, potentially, going on simultaneously: the manipulation of information on a mass level, and the manipulation of information at a very individual level. Both based on the latest understandings in science about how people work, and enabled by technological platforms built to bring us together.

Are we living in a new era of propaganda, I ask Emma Briant? One we cant see, and that is working on us in ways we cant understand? Where we can only react, emotionally, to its messages? Definitely. The way that surveillance through technology is so pervasive, the collection and use of our data is so much more sophisticated. Its totally covert. And people dont realise what is going on.

Public mood and politics goes through cycles. You dont have to subscribe to any conspiracy theory, Briant says, to see that a mass change in public sentiment is happening. Or that some of the tools in action are straight out of the militarys or SCLs playbook.

But then theres increasing evidence that our public arenas the social media sites where we post our holiday snaps or make comments about the news are a new battlefield where international geopolitics is playing out in real time. Its a new age of propaganda. But whose? This week, Russia announced the formation of a new branch of the military: information warfare troops.

Sam Woolley of the Oxford Internet Institutes computational propaganda institute tells me that one third of all traffic on Twitter before the EU referendum was automated bots accounts that are programmed to look like people, to act like people, and to change the conversation, to make topics trend. And they were all for Leave. Before the US election, they were five-to-one in favour of Trump many of them Russian. Last week they have been in action in the Stoke byelection Russian bots, organised by who? attacking Paul Nuttall.

Politics is war, said Steve Bannon last year in the Wall Street Journal. And increasingly this looks to be true.

Theres nothing accidental about Trumps behaviour, Andy Wigmore tells me. That press conference. It was absolutely brilliant. I could see exactly what he was doing. Theres feedback going on constantly. Thats what you can do with artificial intelligence. You can measure ever reaction to every word. He has a word room, where you fix key words. We did it. So with immigration, there are actually key words within that subject matter which people are concerned about. So when you are going to make a speech, its all about how can you use these trending words.

Wigmore met with Trumps team right at the start of the Leave campaign. And they said the holy grail was artificial intelligence.

Who did?

Jared Kushner and Jason Miller.

Later, when Trump picked up Mercer and Cambridge Analytica, the game changed again. Its all about the emotions. This is the big difference with what we did. They call it bio-psycho-social profiling. It takes your physical, mental and lifestyle attributes and works out how people work, how they react emotionally.

Bio-psycho-social profiling, I read later, is one offensive in what is called cognitive warfare. Though there are many others: recoding the mass consciousness to turn patriotism into collaborationism, explains a Nato briefing document on countering Russian disinformation written by an SCL employee. Time-sensitive professional use of media to propagate narratives, says one US state department white paper. Of particular importance to psyop personnel may be publicly and commercially available data from social media platforms.

Yet another details the power of a cognitive casualty a moral shock that has a disabling effect on empathy and higher processes such as moral reasoning and critical thinking. Something like immigration, perhaps. Or fake news. Or as it has now become: FAKE news!!!!

How do you change the way a nation thinks? You could start by creating a mainstream media to replace the existing one with a site such as Breitbart. You could set up other websites that displace mainstream sources of news and information with your own definitions of concepts like liberal media bias, like CNSnews.com. And you could give the rump mainstream media, papers like the failing New York Times! what it wants: stories. Because the third prong of Mercer and Bannons media empire is the Government Accountability Institute.

Bannon co-founded it with $2m of Mercers money. Mercers daughter, Rebekah, was appointed to the board. Then they invested in expensive, long-term investigative journalism. The modern economics of the newsroom dont support big investigative reporting staffs, Bannon told Forbes magazine. You wouldnt get a Watergate, a Pentagon Papers today, because nobody can afford to let a reporter spend seven months on a story. We can. Were working as a support function.

Welcome to the future of journalism in the age of platform capitalism. News organisations have to do a better job of creating new financial models. But in the gaps in between, a determined plutocrat and a brilliant media strategist can, and have, found a way to mould journalism to their own ends.

In 2015, Steve Bannon described to Forbes how the GAI operated, employing a data scientist to trawl the dark web (in the article he boasts of having access to $1.3bn worth of supercomputers) to dig up the kind of source material Google cant find. One result has been a New York Times bestseller, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, written by GAIs president, Peter Schweizer and later turned into a film produced by Rebekah Mercer and Steve Bannon.

This, Bannon explained, is how you weaponise the narrative you want. With hard researched facts. With those, you can launch it straight on to the front page of the New York Times, as the story of Hillary Clintons cash did. Like Hillarys emails it turned the news agenda, and, most crucially, it diverted the attention of the news cycle. Another classic psyops approach. Strategic drowning of other messages.

This is a strategic, long-term and really quite brilliant play. In the 1990s, Bannon explained, conservative media couldnt take Bill Clinton down becausethey wound up talking to themselves in an echo chamber.

As, it turns out, the liberal media is now. We are scattered, separate, squabbling among ourselves and being picked off like targets in a shooting gallery. Increasingly, theres a sense that we are talking to ourselves. And whether its Mercers millions or other factors, Jonathan Albrights map of the news and information ecosystem shows how rightwing sites are dominating sites like YouTube and Google, bound tightly together by millions of links.

Is there a central intelligence to that, I ask Albright? There has to be. There has to be some type of coordination. You can see from looking at the map, from the architecture of the system, that this is not accidental. Its clearly being led by money and politics.

Theres been a lot of talk in the echo chamber about Bannon in the last few months, but its Mercer who provided the money to remake parts of the media landscape. And while Bannon understands the media, Mercer understands big data. He understands the structure of the internet. He knows how algorithms work.

Robert Mercer did not respond to a request for comment for this piece. NickPatterson, a British cryptographer, who worked at Renaissance Technologies in the 80s and is now a computational geneticist at MIT, described to me how he was the one who talent-spotted Mercer. There was an elite group working at IBM in the 1980s doing speech research, speech recognition, and when I joined Renaissance I judged that the mathematics we were trying to apply to financial markets were very similar.

Bannon scorns media in rare public appearance at CPAC

He describes Mercer as very, very conservative. He truly did not like the Clintons. He thought Bill Clinton was a criminal. And his basic politics, I think, was that hes a rightwing libertarian, he wants the government out of things.

He suspects that Mercer is bringing the brilliant computational skills he brought to finance to bear on another very different sphere. We make mathematical models of the financial markets which are probability models, and from those we try and make predictions. What I suspect Cambridge Analytica do is that they build probability models of how people vote. And then they look at what they can do to influence that.

Finding the edge is what quants do. They build quantitative models that automate the process of buying and selling shares and then they chase tiny gaps in knowledge to create huge wins. Renaissance Technologies was one of the first hedge funds to invest in AI. But what it does with it, how its been programmed to do it, is completely unknown. It is, Bloomberg reports, the blackest box in finance.

Johan Bollen, associate professor at Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing, tells me how he discovered one possible edge: hes done research that shows you can predict stock market moves from Twitter. You can measure public sentiment and then model it. Society is driven by emotions, which its always been difficult to measure, collectively. But there are now programmes that can read text and measure it and give us a window into those collective emotions.

The research caused a huge ripple among two different constituencies. We had a lot attention from hedge funds. They are looking for signals everywhere and this is a hugely interesting signal. My impression is hedge funds do have these algorithms that are scanning social feeds. The flash crashes weve had sudden huge drops in stock prices indicates these algorithms are being used at large scale. And they are engaged in something of an arms race.

The other people interested in Bollens work are those who want not only to measure public sentiment, but to change it. Bollens research shows how its possible. Could you reverse engineer the national, or even the global, mood? Model it, and then change it?

It does seem possible. And it does worry me. There are quite a few pieces of research that show if you repeat something often enough, people start involuntarily to believe it. And that could be leveraged, or weaponised for propaganda. We know there are thousands of automated bots out there that are trying to do just that.

THE war of the bots is one of the wilder and weirder aspects of the elections of 2016. At the Oxford Internet Institutes Unit for Computational Propaganda, its director, Phil Howard, and director of research, Sam Woolley, show me all the ways public opinion can be massaged and manipulated. But is there a smoking gun, I ask them, evidence of who is doing this? Theres not a smoking gun, says Howard. There are smoking machine guns. There are multiple pieces of evidence.

Look at this, he says and shows me how, before the US election, hundreds upon hundreds of websites were set up to blast out just a few links, articles that were all pro-Trump. This is being done by people who understand information structure, who are bulk buying domain names and then using automation to blast out a certain message. To make Trump look like hes a consensus.

And that requires money?

That requires organisation and money. And if you use enough of them, of bots and people, and cleverly link them together, you are whats legitimate. You are creating truth.

You can take an existing trending topic, such as fake news, and then weaponise it. You can turn it against the very media that uncovered it. Viewed in a certain light, fake news is a suicide bomb at the heart of our information system. Strapped to the live body of us the mainstream media.

One of the things that concerns Howard most is the hundreds of thousands of sleeper bots theyve found. Twitter accounts that have tweeted only once or twice and are now sitting quietly waiting for a trigger: some sort of crisis where they will rise up and come together to drown out all other sources of information.

Like zombies?

Like zombies.

Many of the techniques were refined in Russia, he says, and then exported everywhere else. You have these incredible propaganda tools developed in an authoritarian regime moving into a free market economy with a complete regulatory vacuum. What you get is a firestorm.

This is the world we enter every day, on our laptops and our smartphones. It has become a battleground where the ambitions of nation states and ideologues are being fought using us. We are the bounty: our social media feeds; our conversations; our hearts and minds. Our votes. Bots influence trending topics and trending topics have a powerful effect on algorithms, Woolley, explains, on Twitter, on Google, on Facebook. Know how to manipulate information structure and you can manipulate reality.

Were not quite in the alternative reality where the actual news has become FAKE news!!! But were almost there. Out on Twitter, the new transnational battleground for the future, someone I follow tweets a quote by Marshall McLuhan, the great information theorist of the 60s. World War III will be a guerrilla information war, it says. With no divisions between military and civilian participation.

By that definition were already there.

Additional reporting by Paul-Olivier Dehaye

Carole Cadwalladr will be hosting a discussion on technologys disruption of democracy at the bluedot festival, Jodrell Bank, Cheshire, 7-9 July