The Power Elite Series

The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills, 1956, Excerpts

In American society, major national power now resides in the economic, the political, and the military domains. Other institutions are duly subordinated to these. Within each of the big three, the typical institutional unit has become enlarged, has become administrative, and, in the power of its decisions, has become centralized. The power elite is not an aristocracy, which is to say that it is not a political ruling group based upon a nobility of hereditary origin.

The power elite is composed of men whose positions enable them to transcend the ordinary environments of ordinary men and women; they are in positions to make decisions having major consequences. Whether they do or do not make such decisions is less important than the fact they do occupy such pivotal positions: their failure to act, their failure to make decisions, is itself an act that is often of greater consequences than the decisions they do make. For they are in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society. They rule the big corporations. They run the machinery of the state and claim its prerogatives. They direct the military establishment. They occupy the strategic command posts of the social structure, in which are now centered the effective means of the power and the wealth and the celebrity which they enjoy.

The life-fate of the modern individual depends not only upon the family into which he was born or which he enters by marriage, but increasingly upon the corporation in which he spends the most alert hours of his best years; not only upon the school where he is educated as a child and adolescent, but also upon the state which touches him throughout his life; not only upon the church in which on occasion he hears the word of God, but also upon the army in which he is disciplined.

Elite Institutions

Elite Centralization - Political, Economic, and Military

Elite War Economy

Elite Clique

Elite Social Class

Elite Prestige

Elite Corporate Wealth

Elite Law and Finance

Elite Schooling

Elite Educational Path

Elite Propaganda
Elite Military Policy
Elite Moneyed Life

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Elite Concentrated Authority

Chatty Kathy

I was talking to a younger co-worker and mentioned that a friend of mine who when had a couple beers became a Chatty Kathy. Though he laughed, in retrospect, I wondered if he actually knew what I meant by ‘Chatty Kathy’ considering that it’s a dated phrase.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatty_Cathy

Chatty Cathy was a pull string "talking" doll manufactured by the Mattel toy company from 1959 to 1965. Chatty Cathy was on the market for six years and was the second most popular doll of the 1960s after Barbie. The doll had eleven phrases when it came on the market in 1960 such as "I love you", "I hurt myself!" or "Please take me with you." Seven more phrases such as, "Let's play school" or "May I have a cookie?" were added to the doll's repertoire in 1963 for a total of 18 phrases. The term "Chatty Cathy" can be used to refer to a particularly talkative person.

I had two older sisters while growing up in the sixties, and our household had a Chatty Kathy doll. A child will share their most intimate thoughts and emotions with a doll. A doll that could say phrases appealing to a child became immortalized in the culture as a saying ‘Chatty Kathy’.

Which made me wonder, what are today’s techno dolls like where a child shares their most intimate thoughts and emotions? I suspect they would be interactive dolls where every interaction is uploaded into big data, processed, evaluated, compared, trended, and forecasted to the point where AI could know the sexual orientation of the child before the child or parents knew, building a complete psychological profile of the child to be sold and capitalized upon.

Is there such a doll? If not, there will be.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts

Propaganda and advertising have always been designed to appeal to unacknowledged fears and yearnings. This is not the first time that the unconscious mind has been targeted as an instrument of others’ aims. These have relied more on art than science, using gross data or professional intuition for the purpose of mass communication. Those operations cannot be compared to the scientific application of today’s historic computational power to the micro-measured, continuous rendition of your more-or-less actual feelings.

Surveillance capitalists declare their right to modify others’ behavior for profit according to methods that bypass human awareness, individual decision rights, and the entire complex of self-regulatory processes that we summarize with terms such as autonomy and self-determination. The new toolmakers do not intend to rob you of your inner life, only to surveil and exploit it. All they ask is to know more about you than you know about yourself.

At no other time in history have private corporations of unprecedented wealth and power enjoyed the free exercise of economies of action supported by a pervasive global architecture of ubiquitous computational knowledge and control constructed and maintained by all the advanced scientific know-how that money can buy.

Under surveillance capitalism, the means of production serves the means of behavioral modification. Machine processes replace human relationships so that certainty can replace trust.