John Asimakopoulos begins by telling us we are all slaves. Hey, thanks for that! Now, a guy with a sensitive ego like me says, “But I’m not a slave.” Forget it. Asimakopoulos says all us slaves are brainwashed into believing we are free so we don’t rebel. And it’s true, I haven’t rebelled. Who are “They” who enslave us? You know, “Them.” They are the rulers, the landlords of the planet. They own it; They suck out our resources and They suck out our soul. The soul part is what sets Asimakopoulos apart from Karl Marx.
Marx gave us “class” – stratification of We the People into economic groups: capitalists, bourgeois functionaries, proles (most of us) and lumpens (the under- or often-unemployed). Asimakopoulos says Marx deceived himself, ignoring the social and psychological castes we are locked into. And castes have been around a very long time, well before the Industrial Revolution and the Bolshevik revolution, neither of which were revolutions at all, says Asimakopoulos. Because after all the production of cars built and blood spilt, we are still divided into slave and master.
There is nothing new under the sun, Asimakopoulos says, except the “spectacle” – the social tools and images that are imposed (or dangled as temptation) for us slaves. Old slaves had Heaven and Hell to keep their noses to the rulers’ grindstones. The new slaves have Facebook pages. And since we can’t get no satisfaction, we grope for status. It’s only after reading Asimakopoulos that I understood why several of my readers were absolutely indignant that I would not let them join my Facebook “friends” page (which had reached the allowed limit of 5,000 “friends.”) Instead, they had to address me through my “fan” page. They didn’t like the demotion: a “fan” is, after all, a subordinate, a supplicant. A “friend” is at eye level. But I really don’t have 5,000 “friends.” None were at my wedding – nor my divorce. It’s just spectacle, a con, a show, my “friend.”
And I am damn pleased that I have “friends” and “fans.” Hundreds of thousands of them. And I have fans and friends because I follow the Algorithm. If I don’t follow the Algorithm (or, more correctly, pay experts to pretend to be Me in the Algorithm), I will lose friends and fans. I am a slave to the Algorithm. I am a good cyber-slave on the Facebook Plantation. And like the slaves in Gone with the Wind, I love my master, The Algorithm. Though the status high it delivers is ridiculously short-lived. I need another fix, and another and another. Last month, my social net guru told me, I had a “reach” on Facebook and Twitter exceeding 10 million. And I want more! – Although I have no idea what “reach” means. And to Asimakopoulos, this is the key to Their Control: Addiction.
I’m an investigative reporter. (Asimakopoulos is likely amused by the claim. He’d say I play an investigative reporter on television and in newspapers. Anyway….) I had discovered that in the American state of Georgia, the election for Governor was rigged by the rulers of the state who removed 340,134 citizens from the voter rolls. So these voters could not cast ballots. They had been erased, disappeared. Vanished. And therefore, while the winner was chosen well before Election Day, the spectacle of an election marched on, with televised debates, pundits predicting a “close race,” and over two million lined up to cast ballots in this mockery of democracy. The voters who were disappeared were removed from the rolls because supposedly, they’d left the state. But they hadn’t. They were right there. I know. I hired experts in “address list hygiene” (the folks who know where every American was last Tuesday) to state, categorically, these voters had not moved, not disappeared, but lived in the exact addresses in Georgia where they’d always lived. But the pundits said on television: These are the rules. They may not be fair, but this is a Democracy, so you can always vote to change the rules. If you can vote. So we are enthralled in what Asimakopoulos calls “simulated democracy.” But to expose our democracy as a spectacle, merely a shadow on the wall, is to let the hoi polloi in on the secret that they do not choose their leaders. And if you’re led by those you don’t choose, well, you’re a slave. So the rulers must maintain what Asimakopoulos labels, “the Illusion of choices.”
In such a system, I had no reason to believe I could get my revelations, my sad little rags of fact, onto the big TV shows. But my video director told me, “Don’t worry, you were at the top of ‘Reddit’ three times!” I didn’t know about this Reddit thing, but I was assured that appearing on Reddit made me temporary King of the Internet—for minutes, maybe several minutes. So I asked if there were a way we could get our next story on Reddit again. One day I had no idea what Reddit was, the next I would do nearly anything to get into the center ring of the Reddit Circus. Because I had found a corner of spectacle screen that surrounds us that will justify my fact-mining toils. I now need my Reddit fix. I am addicted to my new role in the Spectacle.
There are two things we do as modern slaves: we obey and we pretend. Indeed, we would not obey unless we pretended that one day, we or our children will become one of the rulers, one of Them. Because class mobility is difficult but not inconceivable (via luck, education, assassination leading to change of leadership, and so on), the rulers have hardened the borders of caste, making entry into their circle that much harder. That is, says Asimakopoulos, “The rich are endogamous.” The ruling rich have intercourse with the ruling rich. “Intercourse” as in meeting, conversing, exchanging ideas and children—all in a tight iron-enclosed corral exemplified by The Jockey Club, Skull and Bones, New Orleans Mardi Gras crewes, the Republican National Committee, the Clinton Foundation, the Comintern, the front table at Cipriani in the basement of the New York Stock Exchange, the Federal Reserve Board, the red carpet at the seasonal opening of the Met, the poker table at the Petroleum Club, the Vatican, Bohemian Grove, the annual dinner party in the Hamptons honoring Michael Milken’s prostate (there is such a thing. I know, because, undercover, I worked my way in among a bevy of nine dining billionaires).
It’s a mating ritual too. Their daughters fuck their sons while their fathers fuck the rest of us. The mothers look gorgeously sculpted, take yoga and downers. (They are chemical concubine slaves, but we cry not for those warming in the master’s house.) In other words, They are real good at remaining Them. Notes Asimakopoulos:
Pierre-Louis La Rochefoucauld, duc d’Estissac, a well-known postmodern [French] noble, is the ninth generation grandson of François Alexandre Frédéric de La Rochefoucauld,
And, as his forebears, he remains richer than God. And, in the USA, the measure of inequality,
the income Gini in postmodern 2016 was 0.481—higher than the feudal thirteen colonies at 0.437 in 1774.
Revolutionary change? Feh! China’s inequity Gini matches the US almost exactly.
It seems there has been no real change since that pre-historic time, described by Rousseau, when Thug said to Ugh, “Here is a line I’ve drawn around the best dirt and if you step over the line, I’ll hit you on the head with this big rock.” And so Ugh accepted the legitimacy of private property and Thug’s authority. Same as it ever was. But now, it’s more entertaining, more enchanting. “Enchanting” as in “under a spell.” (I’m proud that I get more mentions in this book than Rousseau—There’s that false status thing again.) In The Wizard of Oz, Toto, that little rascal of a dog, chases the Wizard out from behind a curtain and the man behind the spectacle was exposed. Exposure eliminated his power which was all based on the imagery of power, fear and legitimate authority. The curtain was pulled back. Simple. But how do you pull back the curtain when it surrounds you? Asimakopoulos quotes Baudrillard:
Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real.
Writing from LA, I feel it directly. It’s kind of scary. I go on television here in Los Angeles—and think I’m leaving reality to perform. But in fact, I may be just switching screens. I was allowed one fleeting moment on the MSNBC screen. This was my chance to shout, “The emperor has no clothes! – America has no elections! It’s all fixed.” But my message comes out: “Obey your television! It will tell you the newest truth!” Because a bit of dissent simply legitimizes the spectacle, very much like the shitting monk in the corner of a crèche legitimizes the fantasy that the baby boy in the straw was born of a virgin. If you pretend, you will obey. We are like that guy at the end of the film 2001 in a museum created by extraterrestrials. We can do what we want—as long as we don’t leave the museum. We are the spectacle.
So, are we screwed? Well, yes, says Asimakopoulos. And so, he concludes, we are justified in picking up the gun against the 3,000-year-old aristocracy and their Slaves-R-Us system:
“[R]esistance by the oppressed in a caste-war, declared by elites, is not terrorism but self- defense through guerrilla warfare”
…even though he has already told us there have been no successful revolutions, because the guys with the guns simply want to join the circle of self-reproducing monsters. Ah, well, happy endings are for chumps. For slaves.
Journalist Greg Palast is the author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and co-director of the film of the same name.