3

he Internet enables information collection as an electronic machine operating as a central core to which other electronic machines that produce information attach.

This collection of machines is then controlled by web browsers, which are themselves big electronic machines operating within the big machine of the Internet.

This world wide web of information is part of the electronic information highway that began with radio and television after people diverted their attention away from the much more cumbersome information gathering of static print sources to the more fluid medium given life by electricity.

If the medium is the message, then those electronic machines like Google and Safari, Yahoo and Bing, controlling the use of the Internet through stylized algorithms and search engine tools, have immeasurable power and influence.

The information machines have been growing exponentially in the digital age to such an extent that the information can only be organized usefully with Artificial Intelligence or algorithms.

The machines have been put in charge of the information flow because the sentimentality imbued in human involvement is considered an impediment to the growth of this process.

The expansion of the digital universe is experiencing such acceleration that these electronic machines operated by artificial intelligence may one day manipulate civilizations as much as the electrical current has lit cities up and kept people warm at night.

The Internet as an electronic library influencing human behaviour may not be truly democratic, though, even if the user knows what they are looking for, because the search machines are controlling the access to information for other reasons than as advertised.

Censorship is everywhere, beginning with the user’s limited choice of search terms when entering the interface between human sentimentality and the coldness of artificial intelligence. A poor choice of search terms may uncover more fake news than true facts, the further into the past the story meanders.

Fake news is a type of censorship erasing the truth and otherwise casting doubt on the true story built on real facts. E-censorship reinvents the present to manipulate the future without a second thought for the past.

Marshall McLuhan stated that the electronic machines become an extension of human consciousness which compels an entire generation forward into the future. Time and space are compressed for the traveler to move faster and further through the digital universe, often travelling so fast forward that there are only fleeting opportunities to glance into the past, through the “rearview mirror”.

When using electronic mediums, users unconsciously feel transported from the present into a future connected to other communities ad infinitum until a sense of belonging to a “global village” develops.

McLuhan predicted the future present of the Internet eGeneration three decades before the Internet was gradually brought together from a number of United States military intelligence applications.

Users, and in particular hackers, get this sense of infinity, leaping from one information machine to another, further and further into other parts of the world, becoming part of a world that is simultaneously virtual and real.

And if you become part of the machine, that machine better be something special, as a logical extension of users immersed in this ethereal experience.

Apple CEO Tim Cook

C

rose through the ranks of one of the most influential artificial intelligence companies on the planet by meshing the efficiency of the electricity running the machines and the efficiency of electronic information published on the machines into an efficient way of producing the machines for loyal consumers.

Cook moved up in the world from watching black and white patrons using separate drinking fountains at the Piggly Wiggly as a child in Mobile, Alabama to the leading star at the Apple Park Spaceship Campus in Cupertino, California.

Just in Time (JIT) manufacturing has origins in Henry Ford’s automobile assembly line. And Ford had taken some cues from the Chicago meat plants making cuts of beef on conveyer belts, but the efficiency of JIT was apropos electricity and electronic machines, and JIT’s use at Apple turned Apple around from a money loser, just one fiscal year from insolvency, to the first Trillion Dollar Market Capitalized company.

Essentially, implementing JIT requires manufacturers to order parts that arrive at the plant as the parts are needed on the assembly line. And the assembly line only produces machines as the machines are ordered by customers. This immediacy of production eliminates the need for inventory warehouses for the parts and inventory warehouses for the manufactured end product.

This customization of production might appear simple and straightforward, but an Apple iPhone has thousands of tiny parts that must be brought together on one assembly line at the exact moment of creation.

Cook learned how to build computers to order at IBM, which is what got him hired at Apple. Apple CEO Steve Jobs had great ideas and designs for Apple machines, but he struggled to improve the company’s profit margins, having $1 billion in unfilled orders in 1994, and then $400 million in unsold machines collecting dust in inventory in 1998, the year during which Cook jumped on board the Apple ship.

IBM had developed the personal computer for mass market sales. The IBM personal computer became known as the PC. And everyone copied the IBM design while the world adopted the term PC for their personal computer. Cook spent 12 years at IBM PC.

Cook also saw the evolution of operating systems when Apple and Microsoft were still going head to head for market domination of the PC market. Windows 95 was essentially Apple’s Macintosh operating system.

Similarly to Ford, who had created a vertical market for automotive assembly plants at Red River, Michigan, Jobs had control of production from ‘bolts to fenders’. But the liabilities that that level of control over production entailed proved too much for Apple, just like vertical control was too much for Ford at Red River.

To avert sluggish growth and the consequential financial collapse in an industry where growth and moving forward fast is essential to business survival, Cook entered into outsourcing agreements with parts manufacturers. Cook even persuaded suppliers to relocate their plants closer to the Apple assembly line, all the while reducing Apple warehousing costs.

Apple also shifted from manufacturing machines based on forecast sales to real time manufacturing in which a computer was manufactured made to order by a customer the day before.

This Just In Time manufacturing seems easy enough, but the electric car company, Tesla, still struggles to achieve Just In Time manufacturing, partly because the company had more orders than could be manufactured in the early years of production, and partly because they just cannot produce the machine efficiently enough.

Tesla’s Elon Musk can already pick you out a personalized serial number for your EV if you communicate with him nicely on social media before placing your order, it’s just that you have to wait up to three months for delivery.

Jobs had not quite figured out JIT until Cook was put in charge of manufacturing and distribution at Apple.

Apple’s early success was the design of machines so beautiful and unique that people unconsciously wanted to be extensions of them and share their part in the collective consciousness with other similarly designed users of the Internet.

Jobs designed beautifully appealing products such as LISA and, then, iPhones and MacBook Air, so beautiful that people became naturally compelled to connect with them. This connection between the manufacturer and the machine and the user with other users created a lot of brand loyalty that rather quickly grew around the world in a parallel course with the growth of the Internet.

If you want to travel the cyberworld, you may as well be proud owners and be comfortable with the machine with which you are trusting your thoughts and dreams.

Apple went one step further, demanding consumer loyalty. Once you buy an Apple machine, you buy membership in a club that exclusively shares digital media and only syncs personal information with other Apple machines.

The Air Drop app, for example, only searches for other Apple machines in your immediate vicinity, like picking and choosing friendly faces in an unfamiliar cloud with whom to share your deepest thoughts. But the unfamiliar crowd got smaller and smaller as the Apple community grew and grew across the digital universe.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

A

used electric machines to project his thoughts with stylized computer code, reaching further and further from his hometown in Australia to other parts of the world until he experienced travelling toward infinity.

But Assange is an efficiency expert of a different sort. Assange is on the virtual e-world oversight committee which describes search engines, such as Google, as ‘undetectable mass social influencers powered by artificial intelligence.’

Assange too has the electric bug, referring to himself as a scientific journalist, who precisely reports the facts with attributed sources while simultaneously providing as much of the information as possible. Just as Cook gets a kick out of the efficiency electricity musters by taking all the slack out of the Apple assembly line, Assange thought of presenting information in a way that produces independent thoughts the most efficient way possible.

Journalists traditionally filter the facts of life in the creation of news. The public might only see a smidgen of the total information behind a story because the news process filters out the background noise.

Assange believes that the public should be given as much opportunity to decide for themselves, with the most complete information readily on hand. For Assange, inefficient storytelling and censorship are the real villains.

Assange developed WikiLeaks therefore to publish original documents with as little censorship as possible, and then to just let that information wander down the information highway until the facts become embedded into the distilled, mainstream media news. In a way, Assange created a JIT news cycle, within a horizontal market in which the manufacturers of the news receive identical parts from WikiLeaks, and then make unique stories for immediate publication.

United States President Joe Biden, when Vice President to US President Barack Obama, had a decidedly different view of Assange, calling Assange a cyber-terrorist because he had created a public profile for himself by publishing secret government information.

One of the first scoops for WikiLeaks was the leak of ‘Task Force 373.’ Task Force 373 was a list of 2000 Afghans scheduled for assassination on a kill or capture order that quite often favored the former over the latter. The list underscored United States President Barack Obama’s exclusivity in keeping America safe at home.

Obama had adopted the strategy of reducing the need for American boots on the ground in the 9/11 Middle East Wars by using lethal precision to eliminate leadership candidates for terrorist cells. The messy carpet bombing of Vietnam had no place in Obama’s legacy, especially with access to the electrifying precision of drone strikes.

WikiLeaks also claims as scoops the 10 million documents Chelsea Manning released, the Collateral Murder Video, the Afghan War Diary, the Iraq War Logs, the Guantanamo Files, the Spy files, the Hillary Clinton Emails, the CIA Files – Vault 7 and more than enough diplomatic cables to make Assange one of the most wanted anti-heroes of the eGeneration.

One diplomatic cable revealed that the Yemen President Ali Abdullah Saleh had persuaded the United States Airforce to bomb Yemen in a way that would place blame on the Yemen Air Force. (Assange, p. 35) The more Assange discovered the more Assange became morally outraged, and the more determined he became to root out injustice.

Google creators once interviewed Assange for a book they were publishing. Assange turned the book around to highlight the close Washington DC connections between Google and the Obama Administration.

Assange seems overwrought with this existence of invisible electric political power projected into civilization by governments and corporations for the purpose of controlling and manipulating the populations under their authority. Censorship is a big topic for Assange. And in the cause of justice, Assange “began to look at information as matter and how it flowed through people and though society.” (Assange, p. 113).

Assange portrays himself, not as a villain hanging from thin shoelaces in Belmarsh High Security Prison while waiting extradition to the United States for violating the 1917 Espionage Act, but as an omniscient anti-hero of the cyberverse.

The unfairness of the world can only be remedied by breaking the existing invisible patterns of government and corporate power. (Assange, p. 57) People are unconscious of the extent that government controls outcomes because the rules forced upon them are invisible.

McLuhan had described the friction that occurs when two worlds running parallel with each other collide. This friction creates uncertainty, but also a sort of reinvigorated dialectic discourse into which Assange has plunged himself, between the technically minded generation seeking out injustice with their electronic machines and the keepers of secret information and government lies.

Journalists are essentially conversationalists, and the more secret the facts uncovered the more interesting and the more invigorating the conversation.

This dialectic also compels social media. The emotion of sharing deeply personal views of the community, with people within the infinite space of a machine, triggers a lot of sensory perception. This discourse becomes all the more electrifying with the possibility of confronting just the opposite viewpoint held by a secret agent with a unique handle, who may or may not exist in an exotic location somewhere around the global village.

People are watching. And Mendax

M

likes a thorough discussion of the pressing issues of our time.

Cook is well aware of the presence of a global audience. Apple’s loyal customers are compelled forward ad infinitum when Cook directs Apple to take on green initiatives and to clean up workplace scandals so as to minimize the ‘rear view mirror’ effect.

Customers are given a splendid looking machine with futuristic capabilities to explore the cyberverse in intimate enough bites that make Apple machines welcome in the kitchen, the study and the bedroom.

The iPhone is the perfect companion for citizens of the Global Village, essentially a portable ability to remain connected throughout the day to an infinite community emboldened by ever expansive notions of time and space.

PEOPLE ARE ABLE TO GO ANYWHERE AT ANYTIME WITH THE iPHONE AS AN EXTENSION OF THEIR CONSCIOUSNESS.

Life is no longer confined to the time and space of the daily commute, and the conversations are no longer slowed by time zones. People are able to go anywhere at anytime with the iPhone as an extension of their consciousness.

The cyberverse has been divided between users of uniquely stylized machine extensions produced by Apple, and everyone else.

For Facebook, the process of providing organized information is the message. Belonging to Facebook creates the social interaction, not the truth of the content. In a sense, the bigger the lie the better, because the lie creates tension with the truth, and the tension creates further dialogue and thereby attracts more users.

Facebook CEO Mark Zukerberg likes experimenting with virtual communities, while Cook took Apple away from developing social media platforms, and recently provided Apple owners with a failsafe device for their apps, requiring the user to first consent each time an app wants to share personal information with other artificial intelligence driven machines.

Nobody cares about the level of truth within the conversation on social media, because the storytellers are the conversation. Red lights, green lights, no matter what the Internet traffic looks like today, the information must get through to publish the message: “I belong to Facebook’.

But when a red light and a green light appear together, that clash of opinion can create hate, revolution and perhaps even civil war.

Global Village, by Marshal McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers, New York, Oxford University Press, 1989.

Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography, by Julian Assange, Edinburgh, Canongate, 2011.

Julian Assange in His Own Words, Compiled by Karen Sharpe, New York O/R Books, 2012.

Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Massage; An Inventory of Effects, by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, produced by Jerome Agel, Corte Madera, Gingko Press, 2001.

Tim Cook, The Genius Who Took Apple to the Next level, by Leander Kahney, Portfolio/Penguin, 2019.

When Google Met WikLeaks, by Julian Assange, New York, O/R Books, 2014.