ACMA and the Ministry of Truth
From one nation of sheep to another, across the waters Australia also has its ministry of truth
In the wake of an ever expanding online media phenomena overtaking the mainstream, the ministry of truth is finally playing catch up by building another wing.
This ought to be of interest to non Australians. Similar moves are afoot everywhere in a more or less co-ordinated manner and information in an economy of public private partnerships is already globalised.
The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. – George Orwell
“We will continue to be your single source of truth…….so I can tell you this message. New Zealanders must prepare, but do not panic. Prepare. And when you see these messages, remember that unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth” – Jacinta Adern: Former NZ PM. Former policy advisor to the Blair regime. WEF young global leader graduate. Former president of the International Union of Socialist Youth. And for her services to the party, comrade Adern was made a dame by a monarchy.
ACMA, the Australian Communications and Media Authority has recently expressed that it wants more power over controlling the trade in online information. It says so itself as expressed in the Australian government factsheet.
“However, the ACMA recommended the government provide it with a graduated set of new powers to combat misinformation and disinformation across the sector”
Just how can the state resist such a request from a supposedly independent body. Naturally the request was granted in spades, finding its form in the current draft Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023.
I link to both resources here.
While the lawyers are parsing through the legalese of a 60-page bill looking for those positivist traps and routes of escape, allow me, a non lex amicus curiae, present a lay interpretation of the bill and what really is at stake.
To begin with, you needn’t subject yourself to the torture of reading through the whole 60 pages. I did that for you. But even this was unnecessary. Power declared itself in the final paragraph of the simplified outline in the introduction.
“Where there is no registered misinformation code, a registered misinformation code is deficient or there are exceptional and urgent circumstances, the ACMA may determine a standard to provide adequate protection for the community from misinformation or disinformation on digital platform services.
Digital platform providers are required to comply with misinformation standards that apply to them.”
That is to say, in states of emergency — or not even emergency but rather states of urgency — or not even urgency but rather the declaration of exceptional circumstances — or any time the powers that be can say “yes but this time is different” – those are the times when new standard can be conjured up and new censorships come into being.
This is the danger of the state of emergency I have written on previously.
https://rmachine.substack.com/p/the-once-and-forever-state-of-emergency
The plain fact of the matter, the covid era bearing this out, is that there is no law. Sure, there is that tissue of custom and habit borne out of doing today what we did yesterday. Granted the operations of custom will appeal to cases of the past and the power of words on a page.
But the past, like a song once sung, has no power in the present save for those who would sing it still. And words on a page have no greater power than the echoes of a past song, for ink too is dried and dead.
Only humans with power willing to exercise it (or not) have power, this measured against the power of human action to defy them.
I learned this as a junior doctor in another time. In the state jurisdiction of my practice there was a blanket prohibition against abortion. The words on the page of the criminal code combined the text of the law with three little numbers, 224,225 and 226.
One cannot have, perform, or assist in the termination of the life of the unborn. There was a little get out of jail clause later in the criminal code, the spirit and wording of which appealed to those extremely rare, vexed cases where the life and limb of the woman was in jeopardy and circumstances forced the hand to do what it must.
It was, so to speak, a little microcosm of the state of emergency. So why was it that countless thousands of elective abortions were conducted every year in almost factory procession, for reasons of objective convenience and not peril?
The answer is simple. There was the existence of that escape clause and infinite plasticity in its interpretation as to what constituted necessity. Moreover, and more importantly, there wasn’t the will to prosecute or punish the case.
The matter at hand isn’t the rightness or wrongness of abortion but rather the rightness or wrongness of our legal metaphysics. Without will and human action, there is no law. And in its impotence there never has been law, only the dreams of lawyers.
These dreams, essentially an inductive fallacy, are spun from what they can do when they can do it. Give the system a little regularity and predictability and these dreams invest law with the magic of being.
Probably it’s another case of crypto Luciferian hubris. Somewhere in eternity there is the perfect union between law and power. For the time being we all live in the real world where law is a tool of power.
Same with what constitutes the exception in restrictions of the movement of persons as embodied genomes in a “pandemic”. This virus is exceptionally different, or so they said in the last 3 years.
Or has trauma repressed from front of mind that we battled the pandemic of a century…..or so they said. In any case this was war, and corners were cut to win it, including the first casualty of war…truth.
Genome meets genome and antigen meets an immune system. Genes are often described as packets of information. Likewise, there is that packet of conventional information in future years that you may wish to deliver to another.
It too will be also different and especially harmful. That is what they will say if they wish to say it, all for reasons of the common good against common harms. It might be a comment relating to the racial element in mass riots, even quoting the very words and intent of the protagonists who might want the dignity to be properly quoted.
It might involve comment on the religious element in instances of child exploitation. It might involve certain lay interpretations of the mental health or clash between reality and ideology of sex and sexuality.
It might involve interpretations of geopolitical affairs that are spun as threatening confidence in our country and its alliances with architects of foreign wars, with further inference that any fair-minded favourable comment about the enemy makes one an agent of the enemy.
What of ‘climate change’, those who would deny it or deny the point of certain actions made to combat it?
The burger eaten today furthers the industry that advertises it tomorrow and the cow who farts out ‘climate change’ the next. All is connected in the biosphere don’t you know. It’s basic eco-theology.
Is it harmful to suggest an election is rigged? The government thinks so.
My own take is that culture wars are a distraction from the development of a totalitarian technocracy. Speaking of, what of surveillance apparatus and big tech. Is critique of rampant digitalization as an existential threat to privacy an oblique call to arms as saboteurs against the cameras popping up like mushrooms in the rain?
The factsheet provides some examples orbiting around all these themes, including this final one
“Misinformation that encouraged or caused people to vandalise critical communications infrastructure”
How does such “causation” work? Have I invented mind control to cause behaviour in another? Perhaps the deep state has such tech whereas I don’t. Can I fling an adult body, qua object of material causation, at a camera?
If only I were that strong. Once upon a time inciting action involved a direct call to action. Now information as such can be thought to cause action. You see, in the world of biopolitics you already are a mechanism.
More disturbing for the conspiracy theorist is the state’s motivation to use this example. What is communicated in the age of the internet of bodies, that they are worried we will damage the infrastructure of big data?
And the bill states
“harm means any of the following: (a) hatred against a group in Australian society on the basis of ethnicity, nationality, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion or physical or mental disability; (b) disruption of public order or society in Australia; 12 (c) harm to the integrity of Australian democratic processes or of Commonwealth, State, Territory or local government institutions; (d) harm to the health of Australians; (e) harm to the Australian environment; (f) economic or financial harm to Australians, the Australian economy or a sector of the Australian economy.”
These are the harms ripe for infinitely plastic interpretation. We are all part of the ecosphere and the econosphere, of the ideo-sphere and biosphere. All boundaries are blurred. The wave function places most of me here and a little part of me there, most of you there but a small amount here.
Even this article is harmful, or at least I hope so in my own intended way. Perhaps even to think it constitutes a risk before writing it?
Think I’m talking nonsense? The lockdowns were to create a sense of gravitas and fear driving us towards the mask wearing in turn driving us towards mass jab compliance. Dissidents such as I saw the spider spin its psy op web in real time with its telos spread across all nodes of operation.
The powers that be sold a narrative of mission to preserve the public good and minimise harm by delivering us from the cocoon of lockdown all the way to the coerced jab. The novel virus will kill us and the novel jab would save us they said.
Consequently, to speak of Swedish epidemiology was as harmful to public health and the vaccine rollout as a virus. To speak of differential risks in young vs old was also harmful to the vaccine rollout.
To suggest mask wearing carried no biological utility was harmful, for maskless faces risked pausing covid consciousness and displacing the mind from its propagandised place on the web. You did not need to be talking about the vaccine to be threatening the vaccine.
This is one of the essences of totalitarianism.
The bill defines misinformation as
“For the purposes of this Schedule, dissemination of content using a digital service is disinformation on the digital service if:
(a) the content contains information that is false, misleading or deceptive; and
(b) the content is not excluded content for misinformation purposes; and
(c) the content is provided on the digital service to one or more end-users in Australia; and
(d) the provision of the content on the digital service is reasonably likely to cause or contribute to serious harm”
To which if to become disinformation another criteria is added
(e) the person disseminating, or causing the dissemination of, the content intends that the content deceive another person.
Note: Disinformation includes disinformation by or on behalf of a foreign power. Are we gearing up for an information cold war, if not a hot one?
Note that ACMA want to shut down even one ear hearing what it wants to hear and what that individual wants to decide is true. This is important as free speech is dyadic within a relationship of information exchange towards the end of interpersonal growth and connection.
In order to truly have the freedom to say what you have to say, I have to also have the freedom to hear what I want to hear. To silence your voice or the voice of an alt media network is to render me deaf.
What follows is a constraint to my thinking to which I am deaf. Even the speech I might want to make even alone in a forest loses its range and perhaps its objective truth value. In a sense then, individual free speech is deeply wounded here by ACMA. Every individual everywhere is wounded.
ACMA themselves are explicit they will not determine what is true or false except via advice by establishment academy, government and think tank players (and trusted foreign establishment partners).
The spirit of Adern floats over Australia now. False is what they say is false.
This is taken from a long document. Read the rest here substack.com
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