Free as a bird in a cage

"Freedom" has become a dirty word in many circles. Even writing the term here is giving me the icks, so before I dip into discussing the algorithmic traps of our online social spaces, I want to inspect why the word "freedom" feels so gross.

My first memory of "freedom" being widely politicized was the 9/11 era of "freedom fries", a Republican reaction to France's opposition to the proposed invasion of Iraq; an absurd framing that even my young conservative-bred, Mormon-raised mind interpreted as ridiculous. Most people around me seemed to understand the narrative was cover for another imperial push to seize oil in the Middle East (which the US regime is currently repeating in beast-mode, with far less care for propagandic subtleties). No evidence of "weapons of mass destruction" ever surfaced, and the "Mission Accomplished" narrative has become a dark joke to many.

The word "freedom" has become especially muddled in the aftermath of Covid-19. I don't think I have to dissect how or why, we've all witnessed the protests, the "anti" movements and the convoys, all in the name of "freedom". And in progressive circles, "freedom" is a word so triggering, most of us bring the mental hammer down and think "NEXT" before making space for whatever follows. "FREEDOM" has become politicized to extremes, where the word ties so tightly to certain concepts, some of us would rather not consider it at all.

I'm here to talk about "freedom" in relation to our online social spaces. And I must be clear, I am not going to talk about "freedom of speech". I will request of you, dear reader, to erase from your mind the political paradigm of "left vs right" and instead consider "top vs bottom". This reframing is essential for what's ahead, where I will talk about "freedom" in relation to tech, social media, and algorithms.

So, top vs bottom. And let's also define what we mean by "top".

My personal shorthand for "top" is just "the ruling class", but what does "ruling class" even mean? To answer that, I'm going to ask that you trust my 20 years of monitoring and disseminating flows of information as a communications professional, and know that the sources I cite are approached with a level of media literacy I actually take a fair amount of pride in.

With that, I'm going to cite an article published on a site I came across called Monthly Review. It's a "socialist" publication, and we're all very scared of the word "socialism". I'm from Alberta, where "socialism" is essentially a swear word, so I get it can be a trigger point for some who might be reading this. But dear reader, you're smart, right? You can't be influenced by ideological hogwash right? And being smart includes staying informed, and staying informed includes being aware of different ideas, right? We can't resist what we can't see or understand.

Right?

(My personal honest position is I don't think any ideologies or political parties prior to 2025 answer the current political moment usefully. Many inform what's happening, but social entropy has nullified most ideological and political paradigms. I have ideas on how I think we could move forward, but those are for future posts.)

Anyway, the "ruling class". We're going to define what that means. Here's a historical catch-up I've pulled from Monthly Review's article The U.S. Ruling Class and The Trump Regime. Please don't skip it, it's quite fascinating regardless of which side of the political spectrum you identify with:

...in the early to mid-1970s, the U.S. economy entered into a deep stagnation from which it has been unable fully to recover in the half-century that has followed, with economic growth rates sliding decade after decade. This constituted a structural crisis of capital as a whole—a contradiction present in all of the core capitalist countries. This long-run crisis of capital accumulation resulted in the top-down neoliberal restructuring of the economy and state at every level, instituting regressive policies designed to stabilize capitalist rule, which eventually led to deindustrialization and deunionization in the capitalist core and the globalization and financialization of the world economy.

In August 1971, Lewis F. Powell, only months before accepting President Richard Nixon’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, wrote his notorious memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce aimed at organizing the United States in a neoliberal crusade against workers and the left, attributing to them the weakening of the U.S. “free enterprise” system. Hence, at the very same time as the left was dropping the notion of a class-conscious U.S. ruling class, the U.S. oligarchy was reasserting its power over the state, leading to a political-economic restructuring under neoliberalism that encompassed both the Republican and Democratic parties. This was marked in the 1980s by the institution of supply-side economics or Reaganomics, colloquially known as “Robin Hood in reverse.

The neoliberal era and the reemergence of economic stagnation, accompanied by the resurrection of such fears at the top, led to a stronger assertion of ruling-class power over the state at every level aimed at reversing working-class advances made during the New Deal and the Great Society, which were wrongly blamed for the structural crisis of capital.

The Great Financial Crisis [2007-2009] had lasting effects on the U.S. financial oligarchy and the entire body politic, leading to significant transformations in the matrices of power in the society. 

The weak prospects for the U.S. economy, pointing to continuing stagnation and financialization, were recognized by orthodox as well as radical economic analysts.

The 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission removed most restrictions on the funding of political candidates by the wealthy and corporations, allowing dark money to dominate U.S. politics as never before. 

Eighty-seven Republican Tea Party members were swept into the U.S. House of Representatives, mostly from gerrymandered districts where Democrats were virtually absent. Marco Rubio, a Tea Party favorite, was elected to the U.S. Senate from Florida. It soon became apparent that the role of the Tea Party was not to initiate new programs but to prevent the federal government from functioning at all.

Its biggest achievement was the Budget Control Act of 2011, which introduced caps and sequestrations designed to prevent increases in federal spending benefiting the population as a whole (as opposed to subsides to capital and military spending in support of empire), and which produced the largely symbolic government shutdown of 2013.

By 2013, the Tea Party was waning but continued to retain considerable power in Washington in the form of the House Freedom Caucus established in 2015. But by 2016, it was to metamorphose into Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement as a full-fledged neofascist political formation based on a close alliance between sections of the U.S. ruling class and a mobilized lower-middle class, resulting in Trump’s victories in the 2016 and 2024 elections. 

MAGA neofascism saw the reemergence of the leader principle in which the leader’s actions are considered inviolable. This was coupled with increased ruling-class control, via its most reactionary factions, of the government. In classical fascism in Italy and Germany, privatization of governmental institutions (a notion developed under the Nazis) was associated with an increase in the coercive functions of the state and an intensification of militarism and imperialism.

In line with this overall logic, neoliberalism formed the basis for the emergence of neofascism, and a kind of cooperation ensued, in the manner of “warring brothers,” leading in the end to an uneasy neofascist-neoliberal alliance dominating the state and the media, rooted in the highest echelons of the monopoly-capitalist class.

The reality today is less one of class struggle than class war. As billionaire Warren Buffett stated, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning."

The centralization of the global surplus in the U.S. monopoly-capitalist class has now created a financial oligarchy like no other, and the oligarchs need the state. This is above all true of the high-tech sector, which is deeply dependent on U.S. military spending and military-based technology both for its profits and for its own technological ascendance. 

The dominance of dark money, exceeding all previous elections, makes it impossible to trace the full list of billionaires supporting Trump. Nevertheless, it is clear that tech oligarchs were at the center of his support.

Here it is important to note that Trump’s backing in the capitalist class and among the tech-financial oligarchs was not principally from the original Big Six tech monopolies—Apple, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook), Microsoft, and (more recently) the AI technology leader Nvidia. Instead, he was mainly the beneficiary of Silicon Valley high tech, private equity, and big oil. Although a billionaire, Trump is a mere agent of the political-economic transformation in ruling-class rule taking place behind the veil of a national-populist grassroots movement. 

And in the summary:

Western Marxism and the Western left in general has long abandoned the notion of a ruling class, believing that it was too “dogmatic” sounding or constituted a “short-cut” to the analysis of the power elite. Such views, while conforming to the kinds of intellectual fine points and needle threading characteristic of the mainstream academic world, inculcated a lack of realism that was debilitating in terms of understanding the necessities of struggle in an age of the structural crisis of capital.

I have to say, as I read the entire article I gasped audibly multiple times. If you have the time, I highly recommend reading the whole thing. The clarity of the information is incredibly refreshing.

Which brings us back to "the ruling class". The "top". It exists as defined above, and everyone else is the "bottom". I'll get to algorithms and social media in a sec, but first let's go deeper into the current motives of the ruling class.

In order for the ruling class to sustain itself, exponential profits are required, and the human economy is tapped out, so the current American regime has placed all its bets on "silicon valley, big oil, and private equity". And where is private equity investing by the hundreds of billions? As reported by Crunchbase and every other market analysis website, "roughly 50% of all global venture funding in 2025 went to companies in AI-related fields".

Enter accelerationism and "the dark utopia of the new radical right", a movement embraced by the tech leaders within Trump's circles. Curtis Yarvin, one of the movement's most prominent influences, of whom JD Vance and Peter Theil are devout disciples, "concluded that the “best humane alternative to genocide is to “virtualize” these people: Imprison them in permanent solitary confinement where, to avoid making them insane, they would be connected to an immersive virtual-reality interface so they could experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world.”"*. What this looks like, for now, is Instagram, apps like it, and their algorithms. And Yarvin's terrible proposal provides a bit more context to Zuckerberg's obsession with establishing a Metaverse, not to mention the flood of AI companion and therapy apps. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg (Meta CEO) and Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) consider themselves saviours of sorts, building peaceful pastures for us common plebs to exist within, sedated, ignorant, and neutralized.

Let's take a deep breath here. In... and out... loosen shoulders, jaw, etc.

Tech regulations are dropping. Oil regulations are dropping. The ruling class is in hyperdrive to establish an AI economy (or at the very least, to hype the ideas around AI tech for bloated valuations). But replacing the human workforce with AI will take years, so in the meantime, all those "AI agents", bots and algorithms are harvesting our behavioural data, surveilling us, and subduing us with the aim of making us easier to control. That's the idea, anyway. Their success depends on all kinds of variables; public resistance, climate instability, the chaos of entropy... but in any case, for their plan to work they need data centres and lots of them. And to power those data centres they need fast, readily available energy – enter "big oil".

But in an AI economy, what about human labour and capitalism's fundamental need for it? Without us to exploit, where does all the wealth come from? Well, imagine a world where automated systems autonomously purchase energy, compute power, RAM upgrades, network access, all on their own using digital currencies. And what would all those automated systems be working on? War, acquiring resources, maintaining order, processing data... trillions of automations generating the need for endless energy, compute power, RAM upgrades, network access... a perfect, autonomous loop, a closed system between big tech and big oil, owned by the ruling class, generating capital in the trillions rather than the measly millions and billions of human-centred economies.

I'm not the first person to think about this, and if these ideas are sparking a lot of "WHAAAAAAT"s in your mind, you should read Douglas Rushkoff, starting with his article, The Joy of Becoming Worthless. It's a hopeful, refreshing take on what could come after capitalism's collapse. But if you don't end up exploring his work, just look around. It's happening. The ruling class is attempting to iterate capitalism into the Cloud.

It's important to note here that, for all their power, the ruling capitalist class is not immune to climate catastrophes. The great equalizer is humanity's delicate reliance on our environment. The wealthy are still only human, though that statement could be argued, given their cold disregard for humanity as a whole. It's also worth noting that when a wealthy class has lived its entire life in "cheat mode", barrier-free and with absolute impunity, real-world resilience is completely beyond them. Hence billionaire bunkers. They are more delicate, dependent, and vulnerable than 99% of the population, a fact well worth remembering.

Given all of this, let's now return back to social media algorithms. Rather than rewrite everything I wrote in my last post, which you should maybe read again, I will simply say: whatever their roles and functions were up until this point, the purpose of social media algorithms are now to contain you, surveil you, and regulate your behaviour, all in service of this new accelerationalist vision.

A year ago, before all these pieces had become clear to me, I wrote a post titled 10 reasons you should leave X and Meta as soon as possible. Those reasons, while still completely valid, dwarf in comparison to this. "Privacy" on social media platforms like Instagram, Threads, Facebook and X no longer exists, no matter what their terms of service might say. This Violation Tracker shows Meta's penalties from 2012 to present, revealing global violation penalties in the billions. If user privacy was being violated so egregiously before Trump's second term, think about how little they care about privacy law now that there is literally no one in power willing to stop them.

Now let's return to the concept of "freedom". If you decided to leave Instagram or Facebook today or tomorrow, could you? If your primary access to family, friends and community is through social spaces owned by powers explicitly interested in controlling your behaviour – who can ostracize you, sedate you, confuse you, and keep you hooked via dopamine cycles administered exactly as a drug to an addict through cycles of engagement...

And if AI tools, owned by those same interests, succeed in draining your cognitive functions, atrophying (literally shrinking) the regions of your brain most critical to intuition, decision-making and critical thought...

What then? What is left of your freedom? Your personal agency? Your ability to choose? To say "no"?

My previous posts all point back to this existential emergency. It's dark and it's scary, I know. But retreating from it is exactly what they want us to do. Their whole strategy depends on it.

If you care about "freedom" at all, please inform yourself and others about these threats. I know it sounds crazy, but unfortunately for all of us, it isn't a conspiracy. The evidence is blatant and once you see it, it's literally everywhere. Canada's Mark Carney is a neoliberal working for the capitalist class – think about how that fits into the above. Think about why he hasn't regulated our media to filter out populist propaganda, why he's pushing AI and data centres, why he's all-in for oil. Think about why Alberta's Danielle Smith and other provincial premiers align with MAGA so smoothly. "Populist" governments act in the interests of private powers, their flavour of ruling, whether blatantly authoritarian or not, whether neoliberal, neofascist, or a murky cocktail of both, will differ from government to government, but the populist aims remain. That's what we're dealing with here, friends. That and oceans of neoliberal and neofascist propaganda, all mobilizing for the benefit of the ruling class (and there are fissures within the ruling class too, but none of them give two shits about prioritizing the wellbeing of us plebs, I can promise you that).

We need to stop with the useless "right vs left" rhetoric and see the bloated vampiric behemoth in front of us, draining us of our freedoms – our societal freedoms, our cognitive freedoms, our economic freedoms... I can't stress enough how important it is that we see it.

This information is hard to ingest, and if you choose to share it with others, I recommend broaching the topic with care. Have patience and introduce these concepts slowly. It's too overwhelming all at once, but when you see an opportunity, take it with compassion. We are running out of time. We can't afford infighting over political disagreements. If you've fallen victim to propaganda, or if you know others who have, yeah no shit! That's why propaganda sucks, it's very sneaky! Set aside the temptation of smug I-told-you-so's, rebuild those bridges and swallow some pride. Shame is a demotivator, and we need motivation here. We need openness and humility. Everyone is allowed to change their mind. That's what free will is about. That's agency. You still have that freedom. We need to stand united against this malignant, psychotic, anti-human class of resource hoarders.

There is still so much hope, and so many modes of resistance. Please take care of yourself, grieve, but don't let despair consume you.

And if you have questions that you just don't have the time or wherewithal to explore, feel free to nudge me. I have more time to dig and make sense of things than most, a privilege I hope to leverage as best as I can.