If NBC news anchor Brian Williams ever fabricated a mugging tale (someone check the videotape), you can bet the perpetrator was a black kid in a hoodie. Williams’ fanciful flights tend to favor flight, but sometimes they venture forth by sea-yarn — as in Katrina bodies floating by in puddles of poetic license.

Truth to power? No. Power is truth. That’s the Williams Doctrine.

In all cases, Williams prefers soft targets. This makes him something of a bully in addition to being a liar. When he talks about roving gangs in the French Quarter’s Ritz Carlton, the black faces on the perimeters of his imagination are faintly discernible. Flying with big brass, he encounters rocket fire from .

Williams is a pro at demonizing the demonized. He’s a company man through and through who always manages, even in his compulsive deceptions, to butter up the boss side of the bread. As for his hard-hitting reportage on Fukushima (that other GE spewer), well, we await that exposé while cesium supplies last — and they’re going to last longer than us. Still, it would be nice to get a high-production closing shot of the final pink clouds.

America let so many things get away from her. How did so little get pumped up into so much and still struggle to fulfill so little? Teleprompter jockeys became the successive voices of a nation. In the best Pentagon speak, a re-baselining of this baseless hyperinflation is in order, otherwise mission creep gets us World War III in Donbass.

News-Reader Job Requirements (in the post-Williams era):

1) Can you read?

2) Can you sit on a stool for 30 minutes without falling off? (Note: This is not as hard as it sounds; the half-hour is spaced with interminable off-air selling orgies.)

3) Do you have an intelligibility problem? (Note: This is not a showstopper either; Bah-bwa Wah-wah and Tom Bwo-kaw made careers out of having us crane our necks to glean what the hell they were on about — what, no football scores? Ahh, why didn’t you tell us?)

4) Can you stick to your employer’s elaborate tissue of lies and keep your private dysfunctions off-camera?

5) Can you accomplish all of this with a jaw-dropping sense of self-importance and shameless dollops of faux-conviction?

Brian Williams © Shutterstock

Three years before Walter Cronkite (that other striving high school graduate) joined CBS on the way to becoming the most trusted voice in , John-Paul Sartre would pay our sea-to-shining-seas a call. No flies on his nausea, Sartre read our faces in a flash. Fifty years before that most hollow emblem of the willing, when freedom fries would stare up at us from happy meals, Sartre had spied the klieg light apparatus arrayed above our heads, it the Great Implacable Machine:

“Similarly, when a careful arrangement of those melting-pot notions—puritanism, realism, optimism, and so on—which we have been told are the keys to the American character is presented to us in Europe, we experience a certain intellectual satisfaction and think that, in effect, it must be so. But when we walk about New York, on Third Avenue, or Sixth Avenue, or Tenth Avenue, at that evening hour which, for Da Vinci, lends softness to the faces of men, we see the most pathetic visages in the world, uncertain, searching, intent, full of astonished good faith, with appealing eyes, and we know that the most beautiful generalizations are of very little service: they permit us to understand the system but not the people.”

Sartre the stranger marveled at what befuddling and self-dejected mysteries Americans really were, beyond the endless representations the system demanded they make of themselves. And what durable implacability that system has proven to possess — PhD baristas at Starbucks trained to ask with solicitous banality: “venti or grande,” the pathetic visage and appealing eyes of a bulls**t artist pulling down $10 million a year. Yet just as it all happened improbably enough beneath the same Big Tent, it’s also breaking down with eerie simultaneity.

Williams is merely one thread in a fabric that’s fraying from all ends: the petrodollar, supremacy in satrap , central bank monetary levitation, upward mobility, the heartland’s gumption for marching into one Third World cul de sac after another.

All those beautiful generalizations that took so much thinking off our hands are collapsing — the blame for which the BBC’s Adam Curtis tends to lay at the feet of journalism’s increasingly anachronistic tools. (Yes, the storytelling may be broken. But the narratives broke first, leaving the storyteller to storyboard incoherence and irresolution. Collaged jump-cuts and kick-ass tunage can’t paper over the abyss forever.) PNAC ate our exorbitant privilege and then some. Nobody believes us anymore, including ourselves. Silly Straussians, there never was nobility in lies. Beyond good and evil, it’s evil all the way down. America’s submerged in a Katrina puddle like an exquisite waterlogged corpse.

Who can fault a professional liar for trying to keep up? Brian Williams strove to placate the implacable demands of the American mythmaking machine. Possessed of the character flaws the big lie relishes, he made a decent go of it. However, no man can sustain wall-to-wall bulls**t forever. Somewhere, he’s going to slip up and tell the truth, prompting the inevitable questions of veracity. Only a brand, an implacable machine, can stamp out a perfect string of false notes. (“Brian Williams: Personal Branding Got in the Way of the News” — LA Times.) Caught in a big lie, he retreated to a smaller lie, something about protecting the honor of veterans. Whaa? Oh and was a clean war too, don’t cha know?

There are no quick solutions — only vague, new paradigms somewhere off in the future. Put a post-grad egghead in that chair tomorrow and ratings would plummet. Detergent would go begging for answers. Besides, who’d serve the coffee? Under natural lighting, whiter-whites reveal an opacity no clean war would dare tolerate. Things would complexify in a heartbeat. People would recoil. Hell, most people don’t give a damn: entertain us with docudrama shrapnel. If it misses the helicopter, edit it for television and lodge it in your thigh. We’re not keeping score.

“Perhaps nowhere else will you find such a discrepancy between people and myth, between life and the representation of life.”

Looks like Williams got caught in Sartre’s cross-hair. But that’s where a consummate bull-sh***er lives — in the TV glare of yawning discrepancy. If someone had any honesty left, they’d fire him.

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Google Chairman Eric Schmidt made a splash recently at with his quip about the vanishing Internet. Frankly, he does creepy better than obtuse when he all but begged the question about what the hell we’re being kept around for: “We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”

Strip a man of his keyboard and all that remains is a blinking cursor and his wordless nightmares. Perhaps we are the dead already — carbon-based anachronisms awaiting the insidious hand of benign neglect to make our post-mortems official. Have we overstayed into the silicon era such that an artilect now wants our seat on the bus? Google approaches as a guillotine dressed in geek’s clothing.

Humor us, Mr. Schmidt. For you see, typing — or writing, as Truman Capote might allow for the better tappers in our midst — helps us to converge on where you seem dead-certain we already live. Yes, we’re slow, but interiority is such a tough habit to kick. Google Earth is a marvel to be sure. Yet there is no small number of keen minds for whom the non-locality of consciousness defies GPS coordinates. We might even live to survive your Panopticon and have a laugh about it on the other side. So, I’d be careful with that hubris. Some trans-human demigod could swat you absently like a four-eyed mosquito. Then where would your stock options be?

Schmidt is a particularly bad bad actor. He slips easily into an exasperated tone when asked to wax eloquent on that last stubborn fly in the ointment — humanity. It was as clear in the long faces at Davos as it was in Eurogroup Chief Jeroen Dijsselbloem’s withering glare when Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis put food for ’s children before George Soros — we’ve become a vastly populated nuisance. They want us out of here so badly, it hurts.

Imagine Zeus running out of thunderbolts and having to fall back on pushing strings. There would have been a mutiny on Mount Olympus faster than you could say Eurogroup Chief Jeroen Dijsselbloem — maybe even faster. Quantitative easing never got anyone a job who wasn’t already on the BIS Christmas card list. Austerity is a boot out to squash a colony of bugs. In their ham-fisted efforts at herding us, the elite’s faltering touch is showing. Long-term, this may be good. Short-term, it’s incredibly perilous. Never embarrass a faltering elite in broad daylight. Their numbers are too few, and their cognitive hold over we of far larger numbers too tenuous for open monetary farce to prevail for long. You’re only asking for World War III.

Mass denouement has been underway for some time now.

Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Eddie Bernays (the inventor of public relations), saw us as little more than bracketed swirls of subterranean appetites to be mined and monetized. Our irrational pleasure centers were invaded subliminally. This led to what cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han calls the Neuronal Age, where overactive receptors create unnatural fatigue and the sense of unavertable outside entreaties. And boy do we have the pounds to show for myriad uninvited entreaties. People now routinely eat themselves to death. Speaking of entreaties or at least odious treats, no one ever woke up yearning for a twinkie until a twinkie was first made to exist and then advertised onto our burgeoning list of manufactured pleasures.

© Shutterstock

Yes, victimology can be overdone. Nonetheless, we were helped along mightily by cues we never had the explicit option of refusing. Maybe mom didn’t love us enough or dad was a little too stern. Was it the market’s right to sell into our unfillable holes, banishing us forevermore to the husky section of Sears? But for another hug mommy and our asses would look just fine in these jeans. Over the ensuing period, the will to power swept through humanity like a hundred-year war. We’re looking weary and ripe for supersession.

Something is dying to usurp us and usher in the post-consumer age. The anthropic economy was an un-oiled rack of Newtonian gears and pulleys shuttling supply toward demand, groping in the dark for equilibriums, one month producing too much, the next month too little. The surveillance apparatus is not being constructed to better serve us in the sense of a market perfecting its answerability to consumer demand, although that remains the party line. They’re not cataloging our retinas to sell us cereal, in short. For one thing, we are dismally predictable and not nearly the unique snowflakes we often fancy ourselves to be. The average Internet user visits no more than a few dozen unique sites per month. They know us more than well enough by now.

Analyst Daniel Castro of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation recently estimated US tech company losses due to government spying programs could amount to $35 billion by 2016. This is a decidedly post-economic development couched disingenuously as an undesirable consequence. Frankly my dear, what spook gives a damn? Even Senator Ron Wyden noted the suspicious absence of alarm: “When the actions of a foreign government threaten red-white-and-blue jobs, Washington gets up at arms. But, even today, almost no one in Washington is talking about how overly broad surveillance is hurting the US economy.”

This current slow-motion global economic collapse is not scheduled for either a happy ending or a people-pleasing recovery. No, the final business cycle is an abyss-by-design. We are being “descended into” transient serfdom on the way to superfluity. The main actors — central banks — are wringing their hands in premeditated angst as they stagger about “trying everything” alas to no avail; all pure theater to keep the masses spellbound and agape.

All currencies are collapsing against the US dollar, after which the latter will perform the very last swan dive. Then structured economics will vanish. The economy is being put out to pasture. Mad Max barter might play a role on wild, wide stretches of highway. But for the most part, Adam Smith’s invisible hand will be replaced by the Panopticon’s invisible eye.

The great underlying tension that girded capitalism for decades was something akin to the Keystone Cops. Capital was forever teasing out the maddening vagaries of human want, often with humorous results. The landscape is littered with edsels and new coke. Nothing was wasted though. These misfires fed powerful feedback loops. The ultimate goal was never for capital to please man, but for man to furnish capital with the ultimate prize: perfect control. Otherwise, what a way to run a railroad, chasing every Tom, Dick and Harry as though their appetites amounted, in some qualitative sense, to a covetable hill of beans.

Market research, product placement and needs assessment were midterm gestures until manufactured consent could perfect the ultimate gloved fist of demand implantation. Rather than stooping to glean the silly ramblings of the man on the street — as if that mattered — real power looked forward to the day when it would know what the man wanted before he articulated the desire for it. This is Huxleyian dystopia. Consent becomes the organizing principle on the way to the final solution.

Capitalism was the interim stalking horse the bankers used to perfect the final mousetrap. Widely available prosperity was the inducement that coaxed the best minds into an endgame endeavor that ultimately they, nor their families would live to partake. And to think we fell for the myth of sustainable upward mobility. Who can’t feel it in the air? There is a sense now they have all that they need. It’s written all over Schmidt’s smug mug. Covert technology is 30 years ahead of what’s in the public realm.

You see, it was never about serving markets. It was about serving up servitude. The mark of the beast might get you a twinkie when total submission becomes the new coin of the realm. Relax. Most people will enjoy the final act, and they say diet soma is low in calories. Only the poets will suffer.

Until death do us part, comrade.

*[A version of this article was originally published by .]

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When a handful of the world’s wealthiest and most influential people gather to strategically talk about their leadership roles over us — the ostensibly led — the definition of conspiracy is largely fulfilled, even if said strategizing doesn’t entail patently nefarious and undisclosed ends. No doubt much is discussed outside the public forums. Are we, the people, better served by these confabs, or is a ruling class that sings less from the same page more conducive to humanity’s betterment? Much depends on one’s feelings about globalism and consolidated power.

Speaking of consolidation, an Oxfam report released at the same time as this year’s gathering showed that the top 1% are on target to own more than the bottom 99% by 2016. Certainly talking among themselves hasn’t been a pox on the top tier’s pocketbooks. Yet by the ’s (WEF) own reckoning, the world has never been closer to war in the last 25 years. Causal or coincident? How about a three-year Davos moratorium to see if 7 billion grubbies and sweaties might catch some coin?

In his book, The Rich and the Super-Rich, Ferdinand Lundberg proves Alex Jones had precursors who were real grown-ups. Here, he ponders a variation of “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean a Mellon isn’t out to get you”:

“As the various [elite factions] are rivalrous at least in respect to making and retaining money, how and in what way do they act in concert, if they act in concert at all? Do they, in fact, act in concert in imposing faits accompli and policies on the nation?

“To conclude that they more or less loosely act together as a moneybund is to proclaim oneself at once an adherent to what is pejoratively called the conspiracy theory, widely frowned upon by latter-day organizational academics in grey flannel suits … In a broad sense, as it has been observed by unabashed exponents of the conspiracy theory, all history is a conspiracy.”

All history is a conspiracy with limited attendance. Where Jones is the pejorative conspiracist (symptoms: palpable envy, unrequited inferiority and raging paranoia), Lundberg hints subtly at an elitism of untapped democratic potential: “One could hardly have an elite without a mass. If everyone was alert and on his toes, how could an elite ever show itself? The mass itself paradoxically, would be an elite, and perfect high-level democracy would prevail.”

Klaus Schwab © Shutterstock

Little could Lundberg have known in 1968 that the masses would be offered their high-level democratic platform in the form of Internet 1.0. When they failed to rise to their own occasion, emoticons filled the gap. Thus, the same old elite shows itself every year at Davos. We watch them on Google’s YouTube.

This year, they showed up beset by self-doubt. The old mesmerisms aren’t working. Central banks’ stone tablets have clay feet. Capital, not labor, sends the anointed to Davos. Capital is shrinking. Inequality is gapping and gaping.

Fortunately, technology can always be counted on for some diversionary whizz-bang. Google’s Eric Schmidt announced that, far worse than the corporate expropriation that was Internet 2.0, the Internet will soon vanish altogether to be replaced by the perfect panopticon — a million-eyed membrane that will become “part of your presence all the time.” Like the child catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Schmidt goes on to paint his wagon in the rosiest terms [italicized for emphasis]: “Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic. And with your permission and all of that, you are interacting with the things going on in the room.”

The off-hand quality of that italicized part is as unsettling as it is vaguely condescending. The funny thing about surveillance, might say, is that it takes the quietest room and wakes it up to its dynamic potential. Seriously, there’s a lot of that in all of that. In a nearby room, was bemoaning mainstream media’s lost mojo. De-elitized translation? Should consent devolve back to fractious self-manufacture, how will we massage deflationary collapse?

She has a point. Indeed, Davos’ talking points were jumbled as, one day prior to Schmidt, a team of Harvard researchers solemnly announced the death of privacy. If privacy’s dead surely our permission, Mr. Schmidt, is moot. But thank you for pretending to ask.

Winnowing is in the air and at all levels. The Daily Bell a vibe at this year’s conference that the elite may be poised to eat some of their own. If anything, Darwin’s teeth grows sharper with each pyramidic advance. The elite had to clamber over billions of fellow humans in order to win the designation. Absent the underclass there is no rarified altitude to savor. So we both trouble and exhilarate them. They want us here in numbers large enough to validate their elite status. Yet they also want us quiet, preferably in dynamic rooms where they can listen in. They will fight like hell to keep where they are. Check that. They will have us fight like hell to keep them where they are. That’s why this year’s “best of breed” interstate conflict risk is part warning and part promise.

World Economic Forum

Just as to a golden hammer every problem is a golden nail, globetrotters see a world parched for global solutions. If Bono tackled hunger in County Wexford, who would see him? World hunger more befits his world-conquering self-image. (Hint: even when celebrities are doing good things, they’re really mostly looking in the mirror.) The preamble shown at the World Economics Global Risk forum unconsciously betrays buckets of cosmopolitan self-love when it begins: “Technology has created a hyper-connected society. But the way we perceive the world remains fragmented. How can we protect ourselves from the biggest global risks that we face?”

First of all, technology is a tool, not a Founding Father. And is it the Davos “royal we” seeking protection? From whom? Worried much, big guys and gals? There’s that global word again. Alas, those recalcitrant fragments (communities some call them) are where most of us live and work. Our lives are not troubling misperceptions. But thank you for stooping to try.

Localism stores a wealth of solutions. It just lacks scale for global ambitions. A little money down below would help, you know, where humanity lives. Hasn’t Piketty already solved this mystery? Big capital has run away with the entire show, and at an accelerating pace. Big capital, pitiless inhuman beast that it is, needs scale where nobody lives. Where’s Bono?

Monstrous greed, blind as a bat, can offer no solution for profound inequality. Nonetheless, the Global Risks 2015 Insight tries: “[O]ur self-perception as homines economici or rational beings has faltered in the aftermath of the financial crisis.” Rationality is on the ropes because pathologic greed has curtailed all appeals to reason and equitability. According to the WEF, geopolitical risks have overtaken economic ones with striking abruptness. (The report looks forward on a ten-year horizon basis.) War is the climactic economic response to the last petered-out business cycle in a secular trend.

Who’s getting paranoid yet? Alex Jones claims will be necessitated by the elite feeling its mastery slipping. The globalist ratchet always avails the fog of war, tightening further. The Swiss Central Bank just cried major uncle, signaling, in its monetary sanity, the end of an era. Jim Rickard’s currency wars are a prelude to the kind with bullets.

Whether war breaks out in cryptic Lincolnian fashion — “[one party] would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came” — or arrives under the concerted guidance of an untouchable few will hardly matter. The bombs always have a way of finding our backyards.

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