IMO, this is a must read. Difficult to give a synopsis and some of it has been discussed on this board, however in addition to the ruling class and AI, it covers the following:
I. Russophobia Returns, Unexpectedly: The Origins of Contemporary "Disinformation"
II. Trump's Election: "It's Facebook's Fault"
III. Why Do We Need All This Data About People?
IV. The Internet: From Darling to Demon
V. Russiagate! Russiagate! Russiagate!
VI. Why the Post-9/11 "War on Terror" Never Ended
VII. The Rise of "Domestic Extremists"
VIII. The NGO Borg
IX. COVID-19
X. Hunter's Laptops: The Exception to the Rule
XI. The New One-Party State
XII. The End of Censorship
XIII. After Democracy
Appendix: The Disinfo Dictionary

A couple snippets. Regarding Sam Harris' analogy of a Trump reelection to "an asteroid hurtling toward Earth."...

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With an asteroid hurtling toward Earth, even the most principled rationalists might end up asking for safety over truth. But an asteroid has been falling toward Earth every week for years now. The pattern in these cases is that the ruling class justifies taking liberties with the law to save the planet but ends up violating the Constitution to hide the truth and protect itself.

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After Democracy...

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So the problem of disinformation is also a problem of democracy itself - specifically, that there's too much of it. To save liberal democracy, the experts prescribed two critical steps: America must become less free and less democratic. This necessary evolution will mean shutting out the voices of certain rabble-rousers in the online crowd who have forfeited the privilege of speaking freely. It will require following the wisdom of disinformation experts and outgrowing our parochial attachment to the Bill of Rights. This view may be jarring to people who are still attached to the American heritage of liberty and self-government, but it has become the official policy of the country's ruling party and much of the American intelligentsia.

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To a ruling class that had already grown tired of democracy's demand that freedom be granted to its subjects, disinformation provided a regulatory framework to replace the U.S. Constitution. By aiming at the impossible, the elimination of all error and deviation from party orthodoxy, the ruling class ensures that it will always be able to point to a looming threat from extremists - a threat that justifies its own iron grip on power.

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Regarding the use of Artificial Intelligence...

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A siren song calls on those of us alive at the dawn of the digital age to submit to the authority of machines that promise to optimize our lives and make us safer. Faced with the apocalyptic threat of the "infodemic," we are led to believe that only superintelligent algorithms can protect us from the crushingly inhuman scale of the digital information assault. The old human arts of conversation, disagreement, and irony, on which democracy and much else depend, are subjected to a withering machinery of military-grade surveillancesurveillance that nothing can withstand and that aims to make us fearful of our capacity for reason.

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If you can carve out some time in your evening, it is worth the read...

Link

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A couple snippets. Regarding Sam Harris' analogy of a Trump reelection to "an asteroid hurtling toward Earth."...

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The global economy was destroyed and millions were killed 'with' covid or by the secondary effects of covid to get Trump out of office.

We'll have a global apocalypse before Trump sniffs being sworn in again.

Harris is right. People are terrified about the prospect of Trump getting reelected. I've never seen the establishment so terrified of one man.

Trump people got to come to Jesus on this. So mark me down as Trump getting reelected and taking office as very low probability.

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We'll have a global apocalypse before Trump sniffs being sworn in again.

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Frankly, at this point, I think I'd welcome The Apocalypse just to get it over with.

We need the right person to be president to stop the nonsense

AggieVictor10 said:

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We need the right person to be president to stop the nonsense

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Or dictator?

A TLDR thread I know. There is a lot to unpack here, however the following excerpt is probably a fairly good synopsis...

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Even trenchant critics of the phenomenonincluding Taibbi and the Columbia Journalism Review's Jeff Gerth, who recently published a dissection of the press's role in promoting false Trump-Russia collusion claimshave focused on the media's failures, a framing largely shared by conservative publications, which treat disinformation as an issue of partisan censorship bias. But while there's no question that the media has utterly disgraced itself, it's also a convenient fall guyby far the weakest player in the counter-disinformation complex. The American press, once the guardian of democracy, was hollowed out to the point that it could be worn like a hand puppet by the U.S. security agencies and party operatives.

It would be nice to call what has taken place a tragedy, but an audience is meant to learn something from a tragedy. As a nation, America not only has learned nothing, it has been deliberately prevented from learning anything while being made to chase after shadows. This is not because Americans are stupid; it's because what has taken place is not a tragedy but something closer to a crime. Disinformation is both the name of the crime and the means of covering it up; a weapon that doubles as a disguise.

The crime is the information war itself, which was launched under false pretenses and by its nature destroys the essential boundaries between the public and private and between the foreign and domestic, on which peace and democracy depend. By conflating the anti-establishment politics of domestic populists with acts of war by foreign enemies, it justified turning weapons of war against Americans citizens. It turned the public arenas where social and political life take place into surveillance traps and targets for mass psychological operations. The crime is the routine violation of Americans' rights by unelected officials who secretly control what individuals can think and say.

What we are seeing now, in the revelations exposing the inner workings of the state-corporate censorship regime, is only the end of the beginning. The United States is still in the earliest stages of a mass mobilization that aims to harness every sector of society under a singular technocratic rule. The mobilization, which began as a response to the supposedly urgent menace of Russian interference, now evolves into a regime of total information control that has arrogated to itself the mission of eradicating abstract dangers such as error, injustice, and harma goal worthy only of leaders who believe themselves to be infallible, or comic-book supervillains.

The first phase of the information war was marked by distinctively human displays of incompetence and brute-force intimidation. But the next stage, already underway, is being carried out through both scalable processes of artificial intelligence and algorithmic pre-censorship that are invisibly encoded into the infrastructure of the internet, where they can alter the perceptions of billions of people.

Something monstrous is taking shape in America. Formally, it exhibits the synergy of state and corporate power in service of a tribal zeal that is the hallmark of fascism. Yet anyone who spends time in America and is not a brainwashed zealot can tell that it is not a fascist country. What is coming into being is a new form of government and social organization that is as different from mid-twentieth century liberal democracy as the early American republic was from the British monarchism that it grew out of and eventually supplanted. A state organized on the principle that it exists to protect the sovereign rights of individuals, is being replaced by a digital leviathan that wields power through opaque algorithms and the manipulation of digital swarms. It resembles the Chinese system of social credit and one-party state control, and yet that, too, misses the distinctively American and providential character of the control system. In the time we lose trying to name it, the thing itself may disappear back into the bureaucratic shadows, covering up any trace of it with automated deletions from the top-secret data centers of Amazon Web Services, "the trusted cloud for government."

In a technical or structural sense, the censorship regime's aim is not to censor or to oppress, but to rule. That's why the authorities can never be labeled as guilty of disinformation. Not when they lied about Hunter Biden's laptops, not when they claimed that the lab leak was a racist conspiracy, not when they said that vaccines stopped transmission of the novel coronavirus. Disinformation, now and for all time, is whatever they say it is. That is not a sign that the concept is being misused or corrupted; it is the precise functioning of a totalitarian system.

If the underlying philosophy of the war against disinformation can be expressed in a single claim, it is this: You cannot be trusted with your own mind. What follows is an attempt to see how this philosophy has manifested in reality.

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I had never heard or seen the term "prebunking" and found this interesting...

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But the system reflected in those disclosures may well be on its way out. It is already possible to see how the kind of mass censorship practiced by the EIP, which requires considerable human labor and leaves behind plenty of evidence, could be replaced by artificial intelligence programs that use the information about targets accumulated in behavioral surveillance dossiers to manage their perceptions. The ultimate goal would be to recalibrate people's experiences online through subtle manipulations of what they see in their search results and on their feed. The aim of such a scenario might be to prevent censor-worthy material from being produced in the first place.

In fact, that sounds rather similar to what Google is already doing in Germany, where the company recently unveiled a new campaign to expand its "prebunking" initiative "that aims to make people more resilient to the corrosive effects of online misinformation," according to the Associated Press. The announcement closely followed Microsoft founder Bill Gates' appearance on a German podcast, during which he called for using artificial intelligence to combat "conspiracy theories" and "political polarization." Meta has its own prebunking program. In a statement to the website Just The News, Mike Benz called prebunking "a form of narrative censorship integrated into social media algorithms to stop citizens from forming specific social and political belief systems" and compared it to the "pre-crime" featured in dystopian science-fiction movie Minority Report.

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Make 1984 fiction again.

I thought this was going to be about the Global Warming (aka climate change) grift.

I can't say what I think should happen here without getting banned.

Just read the entire article. Would recommend taking the time to do so. Many here have been aware that all of this is taking place, but the piece does a very good job of putting it all together and articulating the why's and how's. It's about so much more than political parties....it's about consolidating control within the ruling class and seizing from the governed any avenue of possible dissent or vocal power. Perhaps if citizens from all sides of the political spectrum would wake up we might have a chance....but sadly, they have succeeded in getting everyone focused on fighting each other rather than realizing who the real oppressors are.