We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Tuesday, March 7, 2017

Facebook Zero and the “People’s Receiver”

Click here to access article by Tony Cartalucci from New Eastern Outlook.

Cartalucci examines whether Facebook Zero could be the current version of the Nazi's "People’s Receiver" which gave the capitalist sponsored Nazi party control over the minds of the German people.

In this era of fake everything made possible by a very sophisticated technology that is controlled by a transnational class of capitalists ensconced in the US-led Empire, it is more imperative than ever before for citizens to create their own organization for delivering news. Not only is a major citizens activated alternative news organization a must to end this era of fake everything, but it could very well serve as a catalyst for a revolutionary organization. Such a revolutionary movement is absolutely necessary to prevent the end of humans due to capitalists' obsession with profits and power that is destroying our planet's biosphere and threatening almost daily a nuclear holocaust.

I have argued this previously in this post, and I shall reproduce the relevant paragraphs (with some editing) here:
The only activity that I can see would generate a collective revolutionary movement would be focused on organizing alternative news, information, and opinion sources that are strictly funded by non-ruling class sources. I see signs such as more and more websites that are devoted to presenting such content and are funded by ordinary people. But many need to rid themselves of advertising because their sponsors inevitably end up influencing content. They also need to combine resources such as journalists, administrators, and funding in ever large media collectives to effectively counter the influence of corporate media.

To attract the right kind of activists they
[media revolutionaries] need to build in new alternative organizational structures, and not simply borrow hierarchical structures typical of class-structured organizations and societies. Thus some kind of bottom-up control structures are necessary to assure authentic democratic control which serves the people. Thus much experimentation must be done to produce a workable, practical model that can be adopted by other organizations in a growing revolutionary [activist] movement.

Once such alternative collective media organizations become a significant influence, we can expect attacks from the ruling class in the forms of infiltrators who would try to create dissension in these organizations, attempts to bribe people to serve the ruling class, smears in corporate media in an attempt to discredit the alternative media, and even threats to people engaged in work for the new media. All such attacks could escalate as the new media became more effective, but this would only serve to attract more attention and people to the new media organizations. The new media could serve as a revolutionary catalyst that could grow a viable movement to overthrow the reign of capitalists and their entire support system, and then to replace it with a genuine democratic system that affirms life and harmony with nature.