A God called FANG
It should be clear by now that the 21st century is going to be a time of immense change and disruption. Some will see this as a good thing, but others not so much. Naturally, there will be a load of people who will not care either way.
The 22 years of this century have so far brought us 9/11, the Financial Crisis, Isis, Brexit, Trump, and Corona. All this is disruption enough, but none of these things have altered the world as much as the advance of technology. In fact, technology facilitated all those things…
The march of technology has, of course, been going on for decades, but in the last 22 years it has accelerated so rapidly that it now touches almost every aspect of life, including something called the public square. The public square is a term used to describe the space in which people connect, discuss, share, debate, interact, agree and disagree. This used to take place in bars, clubs, pubs, village halls, meetings, festivals, and face to face gatherings of all kinds. Now human connections take place, in some places almost exclusively, online.
This has been enormously disruptive, a change almost unparalleled in human history. This online space is not, as the professional cynic Jeremy Paxman scornfully suggested to David Bowie, way back in 1999, “…just a different delivery system.” WATCH from 9:13 to around 12:06. The Starman knew…
So here we are, all those years later and Bowie’s vision has become more like a nightmare. All because of a God called FANG.
First named by the historian Niall Ferguson, FANG is actually a monster, much more than it is a God, but it is worshipped like a God, by billions of people every day. FANG has four (or five) faces, known as Facebook, Apple (& Amazon), Netflix and Google. FANG is the God of our age. Let us break him down….
Facebook (including its subsidiaries Instagram and WhatsApp) is a business, with a side order of ‘bringing good to the world.’ Its commercial model is to convince you that it is in your own best interest to upload your data and live your life, on its platforms. Your photos, your memories, your passing thoughts, your relationships, your breakups, your experiences, and your breakfast, all of which belong to you, must be, it says, shared online using their platforms, in the ways they determine appropriate. This enables them (but not you) to make a tremendous amount of money when they sell what they have learned from you, back to you. It enables them to take this data and sell it to political campaigns in order to contribute to change they like (the election of Barack Obama) and then act surprised when it is used for change they do not like (Brexit, Trump). It enables them to create problems like ‘Fake News’ so they can offer solutions like ‘fact-checkers’, and to issue ‘Community Guidelines’ which are enforced by a ‘Supreme Court’ all of which can then force conversations and direct public opinion along the lines approved by them. The net effect of Facebook’s presence in the world has not been, as Mark Zuckerberg claims, to connect people, but to divide them like never before. But that is ok for them, because division brings enough money and power to level up their agenda under the new branding of Meta.
Apple’s operating model is to take the brightest and cleverest people from around the world, and then leverage the power of globalisation to take what is invented in the most expensive places on earth and manufacture it wherever is cheapest. Apple is more of a blood-sucking trans-national corporation than any bad old J R Ewing style oil company ever was. Their core mantra, “Designed in California, Assembled in China” is a statement of their values and their priorities, which helped them to increase their total worth to over a trillion dollars in August 2018, and then to double up and become the world’s first two trillion-dollar company a mere two years later.
Amazon, like all other Silicon Valley companies, works to disrupt and destroy existing industries so that it can move in and provide the ‘convenience’ that we are told that we want. But that convenience has led to the destruction of local communities, town centres, independent businesses and small shops across the Western World. Amazon’s original (but no longer their biggest) business was the sale of books. At first, we were all taken in by the expansion of availability and choice. But many are increasingly concerned at the hold Amazon has over what titles they will allow and what ones they promote. Ownership of Amazon has afforded Jeff Bezos sufficient wealth to purchase one of the world leading news outlets, The Washington Post, with enough remaining loose change to indulge his boyhood fantasy of blasting into space in a penis-shaped rocket, all while paying a tiny amount of tax and treating his workers like cattle. More information on Jeff Bezos the man can be found in this clip by the highly respected spiritual teacher Mr P.D. Pie.
Netflix has been a Wall Street sensation, Woke-TV on steroids, its programming almost exclusively distorted to one agenda. They insist on diversity quotas for their programming, and their material they broadcast is firmly Woke-compliant. Go here and tell me that this is not a way to prepare the ground for a Michelle Obama presidential run. And fair enough if she does, but let us not pretend that this kind of content is entertainment, when it is clearly advancing one agenda, while denigrating another.
And finally, we have Google (and its subsidiary You Tube) who are similarly dishonest. Having built the largest collection of information the world has ever known they have proceeded to game the search criteria so that you can only see the information that they want you to see, read what they want you to read and watch what they consider to be appropriate. No government ever stood for election advocating such policies, and if they had they would have never been elected. Yet Google has implemented mass censorship under the radar with a PR strategy that Dr Goebbels would have been envious of.
All this activity, by each face of FANG, adds us to the privatisation of knowledge and the restriction of information, so that everything you see, hear and read can be directed as the high priests of the God FANG, the man-children of Silicon Valley, see fit. This has destabilised Western democracies, weakening them just at the moment when they are under maximum threat from an aggressive China, a country which is the very model of a technological prison. Could such hyper-intelligent people really not see the problem, or is it all intentional?
Confronted with these profoundly negative consequences more and more people recognise that the only way forward now is to break the power of FANG, including that of the lesser Gods known as Disney, Twitter and TikTok. But this is no small task for most people are still in thrall to the God FANG, with many inside these organisations seeing themselves as beyond reproach. The priests and cheerleaders of FANG cannot conceive of themselves doing bad things, because repeat rhythmically with me please, FANG is progress, and progress is always good. In their own eyes they are righteous, and this means that for them (but no one else) the end always justifies the means.
Many will be gripped by the mistaken belief that they can use the technology that is now available from FANG to attain freedom from FANG, but whatever freedom they do attain will be of a very narrow form. If FANG’s growth continues unchecked then it will not be just your access to information that is restricted, but as China teaches us, your access to food, water and heating too. Corona is the catalyst for all this, the Trojan horse which allows all these things to be implemented. No conspiracy theory is necessary here. FANG does not require its servants or worshippers to be free, to be able to move around or even to have jobs. Sure, it requires them to have money, but UBI (Universal Basic Income) will sort that out, coming soon to a town near you. When bad old oil and gas companies had a monopoly at least there was an upside, they were interested in you having freedom so that you would travel to places and buy their product in the process. But FANG will be quite happy if you never leave the house again. This is not a conspiracy, but nor is it a coincidence.
As we have turned away from the Old Gods (in the West this was mainly Christianity), so New Gods have rushed in to fill their place. In the UK we are under the co-rulership of FANG, and a God called the NHS, before which dreams, livelihoods and hopes have been set down in the times of Corona. And of course, these Gods, just like the old ones, are sometimes beneficial, dispensing rewards to their followers. But obedience is the price you must pay in return.
The real problem here though, and what makes this a spiritual matter, is that the God FANG (and lesser Gods like Twitter and the NHS) are not Gods at all, but false idols, created and held up by certain humans in an attempt to gain power and advantage over other humans. FANG has been exalted so high for one reason and one reason only – so that a new priesthood can gain power and exert it over the rest of humanity. To repeat, there is no conspiratorial rabbit hole to go down here. The God FANG, and its priests, never cared about truth, honesty or the wellbeing and success of its users. Witness countless stories of people who spend hours, weeks, month, even years, building up Instagram or Facebook followings, or You Tube channels, only to have them demonetised, shadow banned or just flat taken down at a moments notice with no justification, explanation or right of appeal.
FANG stands for nothing ethical or good. It is a parasite that exists for its own self-interest. Similar could be said of the NHS. In fact, I really must write about that in more depth some time, after receiving many emails from people who feel, how shall we say it mildly, slightly aggrieved at how the NHS has been lionised during the Times of Corona when they themselves had, over many years prior, been treated so badly by it. But that is for another day.
There is probably no simple solution to this, except to let the wheel turn onto the next thing and hope that FANG goes the way of Netscape, MySpace and the Dodo. In the meantime though we can all do small, practical things, to lessen its power and influence over us.
I am clear-eyed about the social media platforms I do use, particularly Instagram, though to be fair I do not use them, I play on them, and observe life through their lens. But really the only way is to either use social media consciously for your own ends or remove yourself from it entirely. FANG needs mindless users that it can throw click bait toward, and it gains strength every time an online mob is activated and tries to shut down opinions it does not like. I recognise the fact that there are some significant and important people who I simply would never have met, but for social media. But this positive does not discount the very considerable negatives associated with such platforms. So, take back control of your social media use. Use it, do not allow it to use you, or delete it. This is harder than it sounds. Only a fool thinks that they are immune from the power of FANG.
Shop local, via a shop’s own website. Every surrender to the convenience of Amazon is a nail in the coffin of your local high street, and a tribute toward the God FANG.
Watch a wide variety of TV and film. Or watch nothing at all. Having been on and off with Netflix through the lockdowns I can see, very clearly, how slanted and propagandistic it is. This is true for many other channels, in which case you need to watch all sides. Or none at all. So here is the challenge: take 48 hours without TV, computer or phone. Your mind will be so much clearer at the end of it.
Use Google judiciously. During my research for Soul Strong I learned that there was a world of difference between the information available online, about any given topic, and what you find when you actually read the source material first hand. In this sense much of the content on Google is deceptive, because for content to attain a good search result it must be curated according to Googles demands. Much of the content on popular sites like Wikipedia (a co-God to FANG) is written by certain types of people with certain points of view, and as a result is good for little more than surface skimming. Still think that Wikipedia is an un-biased source? Go here.
The much-vaunted diversity of views that you are supposed to find online (Wikipedia and beyond) is an illusion, because you only get real diversity when you include people who are ‘problematic.’ You cannot trust the crowd-sourced point of view on any topic because the algorithm makes sure that the crowd does not represent all viewpoints. The algorithm was not put there by the real God, it did not emerge from the ether on the sixth day of creation, and it does not make any attempt to read the hive mind of humanity. The algorithm is deliberately designed by shadowy people, with nefarious intent, and run by an Artificial Intelligence which is by now probably out of control. If all this is too much and you cannot use Google judiciously then delete it and use Duck Duck Go, Qwant, Brave or some other search engine whose God-like status is not (yet) so well entrenched.
Lastly, the power of FANG would not be so great if its worshippers were not so weak within their own mind. FANG increases its influence through bureaucrats, influencers and media cheerleaders, but it feeds on the mindless scrolling of its users, creating situations where you start out looking for X and stumble across Y, but then waste an hour looking at Z. In such cases FANG depends on you interpreting this stumble as some kind of intuitive guidance, whereas in reality you are simply being moving along the lines pre-determined by the algorithm. Maybe FANG is not going away, but to be free, to be whole, to be yourself, we must stop worshipping it. It is not a God; it is the Devil.
