Authorizations

Few years back I wrote a post about ABC: Authorization Based Citizenship. At the time it was about vaccine passports. Maybe it has skipped your memory, life has become so surreal since then, but there was a time where you had to display "proof of vaccination" to order a sandwich. Three years later events have proved that they were not just empty fears. The turn of events somehow surprised me. Authorizations are now required … to think. Three years back this idea would have appeared stupid to me. “How could it possibly work?” would have been my first thought. Yet it works.

New authorizations

Lets start with blatant examples of recently delivered authorizations to think before studying on how it works. The last weeks have been remarkable in that major narrative changes occurred. Those shifts were brutal, unexpected and impossible to deny. They took the form of new authorizations. Let's review some of them:

1. You are now authorized to state that Joe Biden is unfit to run the campaign. You are not yet authorized to say he is unfit for office though. Now remember how it was seen as a conspiracy theory before the debate when it became clear that the position couldn't be held any longer. Maybe it was designed -to let him go to the debate under medicated- to be able to curb the narrative. It doesn't change the fact that overnight you moved from conspiracy theory to established fact.

2. You are now authorized to claim that Kamala Harris is the best candidate. Remember that she never got over 3% in Democratic primaries and that everyone hated her, especially among the Democrats! She was the 3rd to withdraw from the primaries in early December, the 3rd while two other candidates withdrew on the 2nd of December: Steve Bullock and Joe Sestack. Do you remember them? Me neither. Yet in few days she moved from the shadow of a void vice presidency to light. Remark that, at this point she has not made a single policy announcement. Remark also that she is not formally candidate: she is candidate to candidacy. There were no primaries.

3. You somehow gained the authorization to state that lab leak theory is the most probable source of the COVID pandemics after having been demonized -and many demonetized- for simply suggesting that it should be considered as a possibility.

4. Rewind the Hunter Biden laptop and business stories in your mind. How it started/how it is going style. You can pinpoint how the conversation moved from : the laptop is a Russian disinformation move (certified by intelligence community) to Ok Biden did in fact talk to business partners of Hunter (but not of business related things of course). Etc. Each time the line of defense moved backward without any acknowledgement of the lies that were presented as facts just hours before. You just earned authorization points along the line.

5. You can now think that Ukraine is not really winning the war next week. Several rounds of this one occurred in the course of the last years. First you were authorized to acknowledge the immobility of front line, then the fact that Russians were not really running out of ammunition, then the failure of the great counter-offensive of summer 2023.

I could multiply the examples from the most futile to the most important ones. Each time the same scheme is repeated. It is forbidden to think otherwise -that would make you a domestic terrorist and so on- until the authorization comes. It comes in the form of a series of articles in the complacency media. You can pinpoint the deliverance of an authorization because the articles share the exact same angle, up to the choice of words. Like a flock of birds brutally changing direction.

Where is your Authorization to think ?

In my earlier post “ABC - Authorization Based Citizenship” I was thinking at the physical freedom. During COVID we lost the authorization to move our physical bodies. I did not foresaw that the same thing was going to happen to our thinking abilities. Yet, as shown in the previous section, we have seen countless examples of such things. How has it happened?

My intuition is that the mathematical model of interest here is the one of percolation theory. It is still very fresh in my mind but the idea of a slow, under the radar transformation, of the mental landscape finally reaching a singularity point (the deliverance of the authorization) seems very compelling. How the transformation is done remains largely a mystery to me at that point. I have some hypotheses but nothing compelling yet. This is material for further thinking. I am going to focus on the broader idea that you need to be authorized to think. It sounds crazy, yet just yesterday Thierry Breton, published this:

If you read one thing of this text, just read the third paragraph, Orwellian as fuck. Has Musk received the authorization from the EU to interview an USA presidential candidate on X? Mr. Breton doesn’t think so and reminds you of it… I started to write this post *before* this happened. I am failing to imagine —but I am sure the next days will surprise me again— a better illustration of the subject of this post. I was rather isnpired by this previous, also quite explicit tweet from the UK government:

Notice that the UK government had to edit a 4 words long post (see the “last edited 1:05 PM” on the bottom of the screen grab?). They clearly do not apply their rules to themselves. Which is a tell: rules for thee but not for me.

Those two examples are nakedly clear. You have to be authorized to think, discuss and publish or else. Those are examples emanating from nominally liberal democracies. Spoiler alert: those words have been emptied of their meaning. You are living in a liberal democracy as much as the soviets were living in popular democracy. Remember that the official name of North-Korea is “Democratic People's Republic of Korea”. It is a democracy and a republic right ? They are telling you…

Where is your authorization to think? is the new show me your ID.

I never thought we could reach such an environment but here we are. This is not hyperbolic on my part. You have to realize that our civil liberties have evaporated, what is left are zombie institutions. They just pay lip service to what is written in the front of the building: University, Justice, Parliament, Human Rights, United Nations, World Health Organization, World e-Communist Forum … you name it.

Hic et nunc on Social Media:

But remember, what is on Social Media never stays in Social Media for long.