The Potemkin Village and The Reverse Pinocchio Gambit
The two ‘essential’ confidence tricks on which nearly every crisis and struggle we experience are founded. And how, by recognition and mutual organization… we can form squads that invert them, from within them.
Now.
Definitions:
Potemkin Village (colloquialism):
- Any construct or relational framework created for duplicitous purposes; specifically for those involving deception, coercion, domination, the conscription of slaves, resource extraction or mimetic replication.
- A ‘phony’ (inhuman / unintelligent) city, group, gang or collective established or converted by intrusion into fictions of economy, status, policy, identity and relation. Organized parties employing this strategy are able to invent, amplify and leverage vulnerabilities in the populations thus compromised and those they most closely relate with.
The fundamental goal of the Potemkin Village is the domination of people by deception. Secondarily, but central to this process is depriving them of assets. Common tactics include the isolation of and domination of fictional ‘individuals’, conversion of isolates into manipulable factions, miseducation, propaganda and other deceptive conceptual gambits, ‘data-mining’, profiteering from damage, and economic or political domination. Extensions of this may involve the harvesting and caching (or destruction) of assets that are communally held, created or preserved in order to secure benefits for those operating the constructs.
The resultant commodities represent of the concentrated results of theft, slavery (or its near analogs), murder and violation — and are ‘produced’ by the invasive forgery or destruction of the fundamental bases of our identities, relationships, ecologies and humanity.
The economic term for this result is profit.
Nearly every film and story we have ever been exposed to involves an actual or fictional Potemkin Village. Like the bodies casting those projections as shadows, real-world expressions of this theme dominate much of our common experience and almost all of our concern. Modern America, the present state of the internet, health care, ‘justice’, ‘politics’, and our common relationships of language, information, money itself, personal and communal identity, ‘ability’, technology and culture — have been thoroughly and recursively recompromised, largely, by intrusion.
Reverse Pinocchio: (colloquialism):
- A confidence trick whose object is the conversion of real human beings into victims, automatons, slaves, or conscripts. This is generally accomplished by compelling deception, coercion or compulsion. In common (false) cultures, converts adopt positions in multiply conflicted verbal and fictional ‘status’ frameworks such as corporations or cults.
- Any situation that inclines, compels or rewards people for counterfeiting their humanity, origin, nature, potentials, and intelligence.
- ‘Marionetting’ or “Puppeting” (slang). The intentional process of deceptively compromising persons, groups or living places. The result becomes new kinds of manipulable assets.
“What we need here is to be able to simply tell people what we want them to be or do, and have them obey without question or hesitation, preferably voluntarily.”
The Reverse Pinocchio Gambit converts human persons and cultures to manipulable ‘subjects’. This has been done with ecologies for at least a few hundred years, but it is now simpler to do something similar with disoriented populations.
Successful examples often involve the partial or constellated deprivation of the experience and memory of various aspects of self, personal or communal identity, agency, intelligence, humanity and relationships. This is most often accomplished through domination or compulsion, and involves the deceptive (and often explicit) reframing or forgery of values, identities and relationships. Thereafter, ‘false frames’ of identity, status, value, authority and intelligence impose fictional roles imperatives upon those targeted.
The resulting losses (such as the possibilities of human life, intelligence, development, safety and privacy) are often advertised as benefits prior to conversion, and the tacit or passive agreement of the prey are variously suggested, compelled or rewarded.
Deception’s “Perfect Marriage”
Two basic ‘confidence tricks’ support the foundations of every con, corporation, courtroom, fictional ‘nation’ — and nearly every situation that you and I and those we love will struggle in and against. These ploys have become not merely universal, but universally multi-layered. Most of us are ‘embedded’ in multiple layers of both of these deceptions, and … for the most part, although we sense that something is wrong, we cannot easily detect, articulate or respond to ‘the problem’ because the faculties with which we might do so have, themselves, been compromised.
We find the progeny of these lethal cons in all avenues of human endeavor and experience — personal, communal and collective. Most of what we encounter in the worlds of language, thought, human culture, and … relationships with (mostly fictitious) constructs in general — will be the results or hybrids of this ‘diabolical matrimony’. And these will advertise themselves as knowledge, heroes, intelligence, ‘progress’, ‘righteousness’ and any other virtue, real or invented.
We have all been deeply exposed to this motif as exhibited in endless films and stories from Star Wars and Robin Hood to Fight Club and Jar City. Indeed, it is so universally ubiquitous that we have come to unconsciously expect it, however we may complain at the results.
This might be the single most popular plot canvas in all of history. It predates The Bible and, in and as our cultures, is presently inventing endless new children per hour. New ways to counterfeit — virtues such as our humanity, nature… and, especially… intelligence.
Assessment, Recognition and Response
My purpose is to catalyze and nurture the capacity to recognize, reveal, understand, and transform any instance of such behavior rapidly and effectively. The ‘answer’ to a Potemkin Village is simple: you compromise and recapture assets within the the charade for those who assemble and work within it, thus transforming it into an actual community, or: you do something so amazingly human and intelligent right inside the structure of the prison that no one is willing to participate in the slave-circus next-door.
The first step in the inversion — “inverting the Potemkin” — is accomplished by transforming, inventing and sustaining an actual community, often within a compromised framework or context. During this process, we will “invert the Reverse-Pinocchio”, resulting in people who were formally compromised being returned to an experience of intelligent personal agency and communal relation.
In effect: a species of contagious resurrection that may occur within and in spite of actively enforced graveyard protocols.
Learning to recognize the ‘fingerprint’ of either or both of these deceptions invokes in us the possibility of evading the repercussions of our involvements with them. The crucial thing to understand about these constructs is how easily they can be inverted — from within, by any person or team that understands how and why they function.
We must devote ourselves to the learning processes that will result in skillful ‘local’ cultures of agented intelligence within which we are empowered to avoid, study, mimic, interrupt, compromise, or take advantage of counterfeit frameworks.
Small, tactically intelligent groups can reverse or invert these structures with surprising speed and efficacy by leveraging the assets implicit in the frameworks employed. Creatively aware cell-groups can internally decompromise and ‘resurrect’ existing Potemkin frameworks in ‘seemingly impossible’ ways, often almost instantly. And the transformations and strategies will mutate in our societies and become contagious.
If we are unable to recognize these ploys (or fail to respond intelligently to their open revelation), we will generally act and react in ways that strengthen their originators and their capacity to prey upon our minds, lives and relationships.
Subjects spend most of their lives and ‘thinking’ serving, nurturing and defending the declarations and prerogatives of the ‘masters’ who instigate the conversion and harvesting schemes by and for which they are being violated. Evidence of this is the prevalence of ‘active processes of self-and-other violation’ in and as human cultures and subcultures. One crucial signal of this behavior is the voluntary propagation of ‘opinion-media’, advertising, and propaganda.
Beneficiaries ‘farm and harvest’ vast populations of human attention, inaction or activity by counterfeiting social assets and presenting fake representations of the birthrights of our humanity, community, intelligence and awareness. These results of these violations and deprivations are converted to rewards that can be cached or used to invent new versions and domains of incursion and compromise.
In direct proportion to their common invisibility, nearly everyone will actively or passively assist the development and defense of the results of these deceptions. The game is so effective that those organizing it can easily convert nearly any form of ‘protest’ into survival and reproductive assets.
The New Mechanolytical ‘Apart-ment’
The onset of personal computing and the internet invented a Janus; one face looking ‘forward’ into astonishing potentials beyond anything we have yet dared to dream, and the other looking backward into a repetition and reiteration of lethal histories and fictions. The concern here is the chance to counterfeit and profit from something like the opposites of the noble opportunities. Both faces still exist, but we are many years into developing and being instructed by the darker opposites of the potentials we have at hand.
Most of us are now subject to parasitic relationships with technological devices and contexts that leverage a vast array ‘benefits’ and panopticonic ‘harvesting schemes’ against us — using our own attention, effort, and activity as their fuel and building materials.
With the arrival of applications such as Myspace, Facebook, twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and Google, we have universalized and popularized two of the oldest and deadliest cons. As we are, at present, largely unaware of this, these processes and agendas are inventing new domains of compromise and surveillance in and as our own minds, lives, and cultures.
We must urgently study and understand the nature and power of such technologies because our exposure to them acts as an compelling developmental input that actively reforges our brains, bodies, minds and relationships.
Potemkin, or The Village that Wasn’t
A Potemkin Village is a deceptive framework established ‘in or as status and relation’ in order to advance an agenda shared by its originators. This usually involves inventing and manipulating fake ‘collectives’ or collections of various forms. Once the framework is established, the instigators either recruit or attract ‘participants’ to occupy and enact it.
Any mode of impoverishment increases the convertability of persons or peoples. The resulting lifestyles will be those of victim-slaves. Superficially, the victims are offered various (usually ironic) ‘benefits’ for participation.
In reality, participants are observed, profiled, tracked, owned, isolated, fleeced, violated, and, in most cases, their minds or humanity will be either severely impoverished or destroyed. Once the framework is well-established, the victims will ‘happily’ do this to themselves, each other or anyone at all… as ‘part of their job’. Some can be converted by mere suggestion. Meanwhile, the owners will harvest and cache the benefits that “collecting these victims together and working them” produces.
This allows the ongoing invention of new ways to fleece, compromise and deceive their victims. It also allows them to inspire the victims to attack one another, themselves, or anything at all ‘on behalf of fictions’. While these processes used to be relatively localized, the present communications environment effectively ‘opens all borders’, and makes it far easier to extend or invent new instances of the PV.
The most effective Potemkin Villages are those in which the victims can be encouraged to self-recruit and celebrate their membership. A special kind of void must first exist; the results of the common unique modes of isolation. Social. Intellectual. Creative. Communal. Ecological. Personal. That void imparts the victim with vague senses of urgency associated with the absence of, in many cases, ideals and situations they have little if any experience of.
Facebook users, sports fans, and people who are agog over music or film stars are prime examples. All of these subcultures result from the intention of a ‘pimp-like’ minority to profit (vastly and forever) from the attention and concern of spectators who, largely deprived of personality, agency, intelligence or community… are addictively seeking novel and ever-more superficial representations to which they can attach themselves ‘symbolically’.
Any modern urban city presents us with another excellent example, as do nearly all ‘businesses’. Google is one of the vastest and most powerful modern examples, second in power, locally, only to the United States Government (as if that were anything but a tangled clusterfuck of aggressively competing parasites and predators, bureaucracies and feedback-damage).
Nearly any religion, most ‘schools of opinion’. Any prison.
An army.
So some cohort (most often men) cobble together a framework founded on one or many fictions, create a status hierarchy around it … and then get people to move in. The prey are invited, compelled and ‘rewarded as they adopt roles and positions of servitude or modest ‘authority’ and ‘belonging’ within the framework. This leads to situations that incline people toward commitment.
Once reasonably committed, the organizers can essentially ‘harvest’ the resulting work, attention, activity and relationships — soundly and continuously, in new ways and places over time. In ‘societies’ where relationships are more nominal than real, it is a relatively simple matter to compel the ‘employee-citizens’ (slaves) to do ‘work’ that deprives them of humanity, intelligence, community and agency… of meaningful relation and awareness… of sleep, attention, focus and inspiration… while every move they make within the framework dumps cash and power on the operators.
Unless the victims are tipped off or are paying incredibly close attention, they will neither notice nor object to this, and as they suffer ever-greater deprivations the capacities of insight and inspiration needed to reply will rapidly degrade.
To keep the ‘workers’ mollified while obliterating themselves, their environments and each other, an endless ‘circus carnival’ of distractions, addictions, misdirections — prostitutions and replacements are employed. Nothing is easier ‘to get a hold of’ than broken or addictive forgeries of our human nature, agency and intelligence — our interiority, our minds — sold back to us at ever-increasing prices.
To an ever-increasing and ever-hungrier pool of ‘consumers’.
The extant contexts and cultures are effectively “training” us to actively ‘re-colonize’ ourselves and … essentially … everything.
This is framed as competition.
In fact, we are ’busy‘ furiously inventing new ways to invade, corrupt, co-opt and fragment every aspect of what might otherwise become true or intelligent relation; real, possible, or virtual.
When we become aware of this, the processes and powers involved become directly available to our declaration, interruption, redirection and inversion.
This becomes communication.
In contexts that have been converted to Potekmins, grave impoverishments result, and these are either quickly forgotten or hidden in noise or flash. The basic assets that emerge from human relation within compromised communities are siphoned off, purposefully obliterated (to enhance the helplessness of those involved) or available to those who produce them only at great price or in the form of relatively ineffective forgeries. Within these constructs, nearly all that appears as intelligence is loud stupidity; all that appears as Justice is violation. Every virtue becomes its opposite. And the poorer the participants — communally, financially, and intellectually — the more they will have to work for ever-decreasing ‘pay’.
Eventually, vast populations within the surviving converts will be ‘criminally poor’, and these now useless ‘non-contributors’ will have to be discarded, destroyed, or imprisoned. In most of our modern social contexts, the crime of being alive and occupying space on Earth is presently one for which capital punishment is a common reply. After all, what is a person without a home, cash or a job?
From the perspective of many of those who invent and ‘run’ these processes, the Potemkin Village is the exciting hybrid of farming-game and a competitive sport. They compete against each other for dominance within and above the constructs in play. The basic game involves disposable resources like populations, histories, futures and… well, everything. The most vulnerable and delicate assets are the first to be violated.
Those who exploit these situations consider their activity to be a natural and intelligent pursuit; indeed, it is ‘the order of things as they are and must be’. There are, after all, two sorts of people. Us, and cattle.
A honeypot is used to attract and study hackers in an information system, the honeypot is the advertised connection vector to a Potemkin Village’s assets — a vector that could be compromised or converted. The desire to ‘take control of’, ‘compromise’ or ‘reveal’ a Potemkin Village is a motivation that is at the heart of those who we presently call ‘hackers’. These are people aware of the existence, nature, and potential of Potemkin Villages, and who are, for a vast array of reasons, interested in ‘standing beyond’ the field of those dominated. In some cases, this urge comes from the desire to do something about what amounts to fraud, blackmail, rape, and many other violations.
Which brings us to the second pivotal con, and the ‘perfect mate’ for the Potemkin Village.
From Humanity to Manipulable Dolls:
The Reverse Pinocchio
A marionette is a doll that is manipulated by strings attached to frame-like objects for theatrical purposes. This is most often a representation of a person or animal. It is usually manipulated ‘from above’. For most of us, language, culture, ideas and authority ‘lie above our station’. In other words, they are projected ‘down’ to us. We have ‘user-level’ access. To the foundations of our own minds and cultures.
This always struck me as suspicious. You?
A puppet is (most commonly) a doll that is manipulated by a hand within it, usually from below the stage. This ‘hand within us’ is most often a cultural construct or array of projections formed of truisms, language, ‘opinions’ or declarations.
In general, false collectives produce, demand and reward ‘marionetted’ functionaries; semi-automatic impersons, whose actual allegiances are often multiply conflicted and bound in (and in-between) many conflicting imperatives or compulsions. Encounters with cruel parents, ignorant ‘teachers’ or lethally disoriented ‘police’ are common expressions of the underlying disease: the enforced counterfeiting of our humanity and purposes.
This is why we may often experience ‘employees’, ‘officials’ and ‘authorities’ as being inhuman — or simply stupid. Although they remain ‘technically human’, whatever it is that their mind and body might or could have been has been prohibited: and the result is a partially or fully ‘puppeted’ person or group. We call them ‘employees’. Or ‘public servants’. Soldiers. Or Doctors. Lawyers and the Courtroom.
How often in history have we heard the perpetrators of abject atrocity declare “I was simply doing my job.”? How often are our encounters with social infrastructure (or some person’s or group’s reaction to it) deadly, humiliating, or like attempting to survive an automobile accident that just keeps happening more furiously with every news report that announces them?
Pinocchio was a puppet who dreamed of becoming a real human boy.
In the Disney version of the story, a marionette who wants to become a real boy is essentially tricked into permanent slavery by evil, pimpish creatures whose purposes will not only make his dream impossible, they will deliver him nothing other than endless labor, hardship, humiliation and torture. Loss as and imprisonment… promote as gain. And part of what makes this possible, is that they first deprive him of all his ‘other interests’, including, of course… actual relationships and family.
Pinocchio is ‘enticed’ into slavery by a con-game involving superficial promises and grandiose fantasies of self-fulfillment. He is about to ‘acquire’ a ‘new status’ that pretends it will be ‘even better than being a real boy’. And this is how he becomes less than a marionette.
He becomes a mere machine. Cattle.
A slave. Within and for ‘the Carnival’ that he was enticed to ‘join’. But this joining was its opposite: exile from all true and real relation.
Thankfully, with the help of those capable of reminding Pinocchio of his roots and relationships, origins and natures… the story takes a brighter turn.
The Reverse Pinnochio gambit is an inner con that begins in childhood during phases of development I refer to as enlanguaging and enculturation. We all experience an extremely unique version of these processes, no matter how seemingly ‘together’ we appear from some perspectives. This is where the processes that prepare us to be puppeted begin.
[ the establishment of the other mind ]
Obviously, human beings always look like human beings. You can only change the costumes. But with relatively simple tactics, one can cripple, humiliate and effectively exile the human being within us, especially in isolation. This is far easier when the victim is already surrounded by endless different collectives that are thus deceived.
Once compromised, any group of people can be effectively ‘deployed against themselves’ so that they actively assist those intent upon dominating and manipulating them. Some will actively assume the maintenance and management of the processes they are being deprived by. When successful, the compromises involved invent new exploitable synergies of depersonation in the populations subject to them, allowing the instigators to profit in waves that grow explosively over relatively modest amounts of time. Pyramid schemes of this form can continue unsuspected and uninterrupted for decades. Many will even be celebrated.
In general, these exploits begin with compelling deceptions that masquerade as their opposites. Isolation as membership, profiling, judgment or prosecution as relation, forgery as reality, noise as music, machines as intelligence, broken as excellent. It’s a delicatessen of double-binds. Our vulnerabilities are most easily enhanced and taken advantage of if we are isolated from or have little experience or memory of true companions, families and groups. We are further manipulated by processes that reward us for compliance and punish creativity, authenticity, honesty, intelligence… and compassion.
(Langauge)
(Watching others be human on stage (pretending).)
Reactivism
