Totalitarian (Corporate) Surveillance
The inevitable signal of over-extension and collapse
So 2023 is here. Another year, another celebration of an essentially arbitrary date, particularly when seasons and natural cycles are considered.1 What is significant is that we are now only 7 short 365-day cycles away from 2030. That’s a total of 2555 days, which is a numerologically important sequence of numbers (although I don’t need to point that out to you).2
What’s significant about 2030?
Specifically, we are entering a 7-year period when the historically predictable attempt to increase control of humanity will ultimately cause the collapse of civilization as we know it. It’s going to be a rough ride. I could sugar-coat this with the ‘happy new year’ meme that has filled your consciousness over the past few days, but that’s not my calling, sorry 🙇♂️
What’s in this Post?
Year in Review: Personal Surveillance (links to +/- 45min reads)
ESG as Corporate Surveillance (2min read)
What I’ve Been Reading & Watching (links to +/- 30min videos)
Year in Review: Personal Surveillance
Robert Malone has an exceptional end-of-year review, specifically around the idea of surveillance. The more than 100 comments are worth reading too:
Cell phone tracking:
DNA tracking: Justice Scalia And The Genetic Panopticon (Forbes)
Biometrics tracking: New surveillance tech means you'll never be anonymous again (Wired)
Profiting from user behavior: 'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism (The Guardian)
Spend tracking: How Target Got Cozy With the Cops, Turning Black Neighbors Into Suspects (Bloomberg)
Behavior prediction: Raytheon RIOT software tracks people, predicts future behavior (Computerworld)
Vehicle tracking: Atlanta’s surveillance network keeps growing, and growing, and… (Atlanta Magazine)
You get the idea: tracking individuals is big business.
ESG as Corporate Surveillance
This is the piece that most business people I speak to are not aware of: the level of corporate surveillance now exceeds the level of individual surveillance. To be more specific, one individual on this planet knows more about what every single company is doing than anyone else: Larry Fink.3 He also happens to be the most vocal champion of ESG mandates, and it's certainly not because he is in any way concerned about the planet.4
Friedrich Hayek understood that this level of centralized surveillance and control of price and incentive signalling is a dangerous situation. In fact, he believed it could never be accomplished:5
“The knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.” - Friedrich Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society, 1945
Here are a few examples of how Fink’s software, Aladdin, tracks company behavior based on ESG reporting:6
BlackRock Boosts Aladdin’s Forward-Looking Sustainability Analytics and Reporting Capabilities Through Strategic Partnership with Clarity AI (Businesswire, 2021). In other words, data science and machine-learning help BlackRock develop insights into every company that submits an ESG report.
ESG Phenomenon: BlackRock, Aladdin Platform (Family Wealth Report, 2020). “ESG data is evolving fast, BlackRock said, noting that more than 85 per cent of S&P 500 companies disclose such information data, compared with 20 per cent who did so ten years ago. BlackRock said it has also expanded access to ESG data through new partnerships with data providers Sustainalytics and Refinitiv.”
ESG Integration Frameworks (ZMH Advisors, 2022) “By 2023, BlackRock wants at least 80% of its funds to be ESG-integrated and to either promote sustainable characteristics or have sustainable investment as their objective. In the spirit of partnership, BlackRock intends to work closely with Aladdin to co-create new sustainable investment platform functionalities that will help meet these goals.”
All I wanted to show for this week is that we are entering a period where surveillance of every activity in our daily lives will soon reach a point that results in a backlash. This outcome was predicted by authors like Orwell, Bradbury, Huxley, Saramago, Burgess and more. While it’s tempting to “wish you a blessed 2023,” I believe we’re in for a bumpy ride this year and the next few years. The discomfort is a necessary part of the emerging new which inevitably arises as the old crumbles.
That’s all for this week. There’s a link to a more upbeat interpretation of where we’re at as a species below.
All the best,
Michael
What I’ve Been Reading/Watching This Week
Charles Eisentein’s more upbeat view of the world can be found here. It’s definitely worth reading the comments too, particularly if you’ve found my post a little too depressing.
Excerpts:
“I feel that we have tipped past the point of no return on the macro level. The world—its defining myths, narratives, and structures—will fall apart without my help.”
“Creative powers, with love at their core, are becoming available to us that make many of the old conversations obsolete. How do we become host to such powers?”
“We have passed already through the darkest hour. The outward structures of misery yet remain, in society, in our selves, but a new self-world-story has formed within both. The shell of the old, though cracking, will probably stay intact for a few more years, but its demise is unstoppable now if only we stop holding it together.”
This video, from March 2022, is an alternative view of the reason for the Ukraine war. What makes this video interesting is the more than 2,000 comments from people who vehemently disagree with her analysis. The point of the video is that, for any major piece of news nowadays, there are extremely conflicting narratives and it’s almost impossible to know with certainty what is true or not.
A few excerpts:
“The West is so used to being so self-involved and self-centred that it's not willing to hear that the world is unfolding, not because of you but despite you.”
“This is not about NATO. This is a challenge to the west by the BRICS countries—primarily Russia—which is trying to show, successfully, that both NATO and the United States are impotent in the new world order.”
“Russia is basically redirecting its energy products away from the west and towards the east. [The war] is a remarkable way to distract from what is basically a realignment.”
This video, from a few days ago, shows a back-and-forth debate about the defence budget. There is one important comment at 08:50: “Everything you are seeing unfold before your eyes is a setup; it’s a complete setup.”
More excerpts:
“This is broken and the leadership here in the House and the Senate has done nothing to change this trajectory. It cannot continue.”
“Things are upside down and we're spending money we don't have causing inflation.”
“Our national debt in 2003 was about six trillion dollars. We’re now at 31.4 trillion and climbing.”
“It is time to end the status quo and it is time for a radical departure from the way we are doing things.”
“We must fundamentally change this institution from top to bottom; from the leadership down this place must change. We will not accept anything but change.”
The Babylonians invented one of the first calendars, which showed March 25 as the New Year. They quickly realized the complexity of using human measurements to track universe-al cycles. https://www.deseret.com/1997/12/31/19354416/new-year-s-is-an-arbitrary-starting-line
2555 reduces down to 8 (2+5+5+5=17;1+7=8), which refers to the purely material aspect of life, and excludes the important spiritual aspect of life. In the ESG space, materiality refers to the continued infatuation with metrics (whether single, double or triple). In other words, let’s ‘measure’ all this stuff, in the same way we’ve tried to impose an unworkable ‘calendar’ that requires regular adjustments (leap years) to fit in with natural cycles.
“Every company and every industry will be transformed by the transition to a net zero world. The question is, will you lead, or will you be led?” - Fink’s 2022 Annual Letter to CEOs: https://www.blackrock.com/aladdin/products/aladdin-sustainability
Aladdin is a technology platform that carries out 250,000 trades and billions of financial calculations every day. As of 2020, Aladdin managed $21.6 trillion in assets. https://bit.ly/BR-Aladdin