False Capital Ethics, Entrapment and the New Fronts for Warfare.
When swatting becomes low-brow, what do the high brow do?
Warfare, bias and misinformation discourse surrounding the Internet has been trapped in two major bubbles: firstly being concerned with social media and how to capitalise on it and secondly, tribal warfare across partisan issues. There has been less work building upon previous media and social theories on the background of these changes. This paper is to be a step forward in that, building upon the works of Baudrillard, Land and Moeller, I wish to scope out the type of capital-based warfare, and create the term “false capital ethics.” (FCE). This is ethics orientated towards capital, and protection of the capital instead of traditional forms of bases of ethics. I rely on Johan Huizinga’s concept of play and ritual as a basis for judging the burgeoning of ethics for two reasons: To nip in the bud the disagreements about the origins for ethics (since play transcends culture) and that it is easy to observe how capital easily inverts the traditional performances of ethics and inserts its own layer. Lastly. I present two types of modern warfare using FCE as a basis, building off the work of Daniel Hill and Stephen Mcleod’s work on entrapment and advocate that their positions are not only outdated, but no longer align with the extra-judicial nature of Internet entrapment, More interestingly, the hypocritical nature of social entrapment from pro-worker, pro-lower-class parties being used against unions, whistleblowers and other anti-corporate interests.
3) False Capital Ethics
Homo Ludens, written in response to the rise of fascism in Europe and the death of ritual and play that Huizinga loved in all his Anglophilic glory, comes at a interesting time for us considering the paranoia of fascism. Huizinga posits that play and ritual are fundamental components of human culture, governed by a set of rules that define their boundaries and significance. To illustrate this, in a efficient example: If I offer you a large sum of money to stab someone you would decline, but if you are a surgeon you would not think twice. Huizinga's framework illuminates this shift, as the surgeon's acceptance of the task aligns with the rules of play (ethics, the oath) and rituals (Hygiene, care) ingrained in the medical profession. Huizinga’s chain, concisely, is that rules of play, beget certain rituals and this leads to culture, from religion to sport, these societal concepts become legitimatised by following this order. So I ask then, what if this order is reversed? What if consumption, capital and governmental systems then dictate the culture, then the ritual then the play? This inversion, is where we see the rise of is false capital ethics (FCE). It is not ethics that come from ritual and play – be it religious ritual, academic play or even just roles in a small village but ethics born from the intercepted layer of play and culture.
False-Capital Ethics come across in multiple fronts, but each has been a ground for different kinds of warfare and has been rapidly growing. In 2022, there were claims of modern imperialism after Mastercard threatened Japanese art website Pixiv Fanbox with denying access to payment processors over art it had deemed inappropriate. Which, one might agree with on the face of it, but the content was not illegal in Japan. Then, a year later, DeviantART fell victim to the same with another standard, then Patreon both of which are hosted in the United states and protected under Section 230 of Title 47. None of this content was illegal, nor were the hosts liable for it, but by attacking at the capital level these procedures are quickly overturned. The role of any sort of arbiter of morality is now on some invisible party that is extra-judicial. This works in the reverse too – after years of investigation, reports and charity pressure concerning illegal content Pornhub did not change its policy until Mastercard and Visa ceased support for their cards. Beyond any ritual or play, culture is then dictated by the flow of capital – an inverse of way social play should develop culture.
Now one could argue that these processes – being able to debank, deplatform and restrict undesirable aspects of “culture” might be considered a net positive. Remember however, how I started this part – the inversion of play, ritual and culture from Huizinga. When we pass this authority over, what becomes the arbiter of the rules of play then, what “grounds” the ritual and behaviour of play and what culture dictates. What we end up with is abstracted from reality social ‘signs’ considered value, as prophesied by Jean Baudrillard. When the entirety of culture is given over to sign values we end up at Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D'Ambrosio ‘Profilicity’[1], in which instead of the age of authenticity or sincerity of role-playing, people (and businesses) must curate profiles filled with sign values that are acceptable beyond reality or utility. No longer does one perform play and ritual into society but the inverse happens.
An example of how this inversion directly affected ethics is the case of Addyi. Now an FDA case study for learning about this exact issue. Tested nearly only on men, Addyi was marketed as the female Viagra – with the downside that the patient could not drink alcohol during the time or suffer a black-out like affect, all for one extra night of satisfaction. The drug originally found no grounds for approval. This changed after being acquired by Sprout Pharmaceuticals. The marketing became sign, not utility value based - targeting NGOs and feminist charities to put pressure on the FDA by claiming sexism in order to strong arm an approval. In retrospective after it was later removed from American markets, there was a range of naval-gazing articles about the case – from Mazure’s criticism of the androcentric safety trials to Manov’s paper on the ideology of Addyi. Everyone had different takes on the level of feminism and what went wrong. None however, touch the deeper, philosophical worry here that permeates from medical ethics, to politics to even digital art. Even so much as ethics itself being enraptured not by ideology – but by culture, creating a fake play and done so with this fake intercepted level of capital.
4) Advertising and the “Culture War”
None of this Is new to any media-theorist philosophers – In Nikolas Luhman’s book Reality of the Mass Media, he explains in his advertising section what once was giving taste to the tasteless is now giving value to the elites – it becomes concerned with “sign” in the same Baudrillard sense. However he notices advertising does not entirely capitulate with capitalism because it is not always economic. What Luhman missed with this and what future writers would pick up on is the advertising using sign to correct culture, and influence from top down. Originally skimming across identification, Luhman instead to choose to chase the red herring of ‘stabilization of a relationship of redundancy and variety in everyday culture’[2]. Yet it is not the reality of this battleground, or where the warfare is going on, because as much cultural schizophrenia[3] and other writings of identification exist for the person engaging with advertising, so does capital and the adverts themselves. An example of this “profiling” of sign values, comes from the 2015-6 controversy called GamerGate. Where emailing sponsors and advertisers with various negative association with their client, regardless of their side on the “culture war”. This is thrown on top of the already messy advertising system where concepts like “beauty”[4] become self-interested sign-values prescribed to you by adverts as a part of culture instead of it being dictated by play or ritual. That is this battlefield, to control the culture from the top, to influence the underlaying “play”. The “culture war” being fought on this capital line is not only absurd and will only result in power being given to the over-arching system, but does not reflect the reality – as both Budweiser and Breitbart have found out.
The wonderful thing about this, is that academics are often guilty of not only continuing this inversion of play but outright ignoring the consequences. The optimistic look of anti-cognitive-bias programs and literature are all from this same inverted top-down corruption. If they edit the culture, at the top most level. Then it will trickle down into the ‘play’ people partake in, leading to systematic change resulting in reality changing. Many of these schemes from this literature insert a layer of capital in between culture and play to force change. With incentives, grants, extra money and an initiatives to get companies to change their advertising and hiring practices. No matter how much the “play” is not partaken in by its customers. This arrogance of “correcting” the play of the so-called ignorant is rampant throughout academia[5]. Many of these academics are gleefully ignorant that giving over such power to dictate play can be turned against them. This all comes to an amusing conclusion when studies show that despite bias-training being worth billions, it does not affect ground level workers[6] or solve any issues because the human reality of ‘play’ in the workplace triumphs.
This both-way identification within the system and capital machine was illuminated in Nick Land’s 1993 Essay Making it With Death, in which after extrapolate from Deleuze a type of identification-based transcendentalism with the machine, makes two key points for us to consider: Firstly, if our identity is plugged into the “machine” (or system in our case) and it gives us a role, are we truly “playing”? A false freedom, a false championing but it is dictated and fed by the wires attached through the body. For Land this comes out as people dancing with false-identities for the machine in which this unites the cocaine socialist and the homeless person within the governmental systems. Secondly, Land draws a line of comparison to this and the Nazis, who had machine built identities, culture and were placed in dictated roles to play – they were too dead to die unable to partake evn in the ritual of death. Recall at the start, Huizinga wrote Homo Ludens in response to the false play of fascism. Further commentators such as CS Lewis were far more explicit in saying manufactured play, is the bell of fascism.
5) Entrapment Warfare
False Capital Ethics is a battlefield on the Internet, fought with multiple techniques and stratagems from both sides of the political spectrum, as well as both governmental or interpersonal. Entrapment, then has grown to be a powerful intersectional tool, targeting either capital and a person’s “profile” instead of the traditional forms of Entrapment. For example McLeod and Hill’s upcoming book concerning entrapment, contains a chapter on the definition of entrapment, as well as the nature of its morality. In the truth table concerning various combinations of definition, several positions concerning non-agent focused or non-judgemental states of entrapment are considered to be logically viable but with no theoretical grounding. They are still rooted in entrapment surrounding vigilante paedophile hunters or police pushing drugs, not the newer extra-judicial grounds of FCE-based entrapment.
5.2) Kamikaze Entrapment.
Kamikaze entrapment is the closest to traditional entrapment. It is simply that a person – or organisation – commits something that will result in the “termination” of both sides. This ranges from American First followers going onto left-wing streams and getting notification bots to say racial slurs – which is against the Terms of Service meaning the both the target and attacker get suspended. This scales all the way up to multiple cases of the “Monkey Crush” telegram groups orchestrating the use of CSAM in order to get websites taken down that document or report their criminal behaviour. CSAM attacks have been very popular since one can instantly report to an upper hosting domain, IP, or any upper-level provider to get something down chain taken down. It’s worth noting that the ranges of these attacks tends to be focused on the false capital ethics layer for it’s ease. Paypal for example, can block both accounts in a transaction if certain words are flagged within them, which has been used against artists. Racial slurs are becoming a weapon for this in the computer science sphere, where a way of protecting software in the open software is to use software licenses that contained racial slurs. Scared of it being found in a big corporation’s code (and damaging their profile), it’s been successfully used in both China and the US from being poached.
5.3) Social Entrapment.
Social Entrapment comes in two flavours. Firstly, as a reinforcement of FCE, it is used to ensure that culture is dictated by capital, consumerism and enforces any play or ritual to follow a set of rules. Secondly, it’s used in direct warfare to force targets to be uncomfortable, answer questions against their will, or be put in humiliating circumstances.
The direct positioning and entrapment of one’s sign values or in Moeller’s case “profile”. Such things can be as harmless as bothering a voice actor for videogames to say their support for current zeitgeists in a character’s voice. Up to widespread acts of hatred under guise of social activism. Such as the case of transgender female Jessica Simpson (Then, Jonathan Yaniv) who, after posting numerous racist tirades about how unfriendly immigrant women are, took multiple immigrant women to a human rights tribunal after they refused to do private beauty work on her due to religious reasons. Then later on, purposely took a dog under the guise of being a service dog, to multiple Muslim-owned food established, only to file lawsuits later when turned away.
As I said with Kamikaze Entrapment, this abstracted from reality or “sign” attacks mean that even political targets can have their “profile” damaged in these abstracted ways which then dis-credit them as “mis-information” regardless of the reality of truth. These interactions near always often favour of the system. An example of this concerns a voice actor for videogames who came into dispute concerning low pay for years of work across a franchise. During the storm, social media users bought up her history of not performing requests for the character voice to say messages about transgender rights, or black lives matter. The tide had turned, after her role was replaced with another woman (who did such capitulations) there became an interesting schism between those who had turned on the original voice actor. Any truth of the matter considering mis-representative offers were drowned out by this sign-value bickering. Let us not get wrong here that it is not the person’s direct opinion, but it’s the use of the opinion, via social means which aided the corporation’s underpaying and the voice actor’s misrepresentation on both sides. For the sake of noting, that “cancel culture” is not social entrapment in it’s entirely, but a outcome of. It is in both peoples – and corporations – interest to keep cancel culture enough alive for the censorship of their opponents.
4) A Note on Misinformation
Both these types of attacks can be turned in Favor of misinformation and censorship warfare. In the realm of AI and safeguarding, the mis-trust of AI has also stemmed from it being unable to produce many racial slurs on command because the safeguards are not for bias or anti-racism reasons but by the same profile-based FCE. However, when the populace interacts with blatantly “safeguarded” information, more mistrust is formed. This can be constantly compounded to create non-content that can only be verified by certain authorities[7]. This purposeful chaos is used to give complete control of the meaning of words away from reality or the persons involved. (Just as advertisements have done to the concept of beauty). Even jokes from The Simpsons reduced down to a word; “Sneed”, has been given immense power to “trigger” censorship without coherency in rationality. This word had been given an absurd power by the exact same means that the advertising was given too much power. This sounds absurd, but this is why things like the European Union’s “Hand book of hate memes” was considered a laughing stock, they couldn’t rationalise how a frog in a clown wig is a hate-speech dog whistle, because it is now on a level abstractionism that it can be attached or labelled by sign-value-association on one’s profile. Kamikaze entrapment is so powerful, because it can completely avoid the actual target, can be done with little repercussion to the attacker, and is often extrajudicial in nature while also being supported by the system covering direct routes of culpability in misinformation control.
5) Conclusion
This paper serves as merely an entryway and introduction for more people who are undertaking projects in this area to not neglect the changing the landscape. It is also to step away from contemporary analytical philosophy on the topic, and to warn of complicity to the system they intend to change. There is a need for a radical look on how applied philosophy is being used, in what direction, and a better separation between capital, social and real realms. Entrapment, serves an example of how not only many such cases of warfare have turned away from classical judiciary or legislative systems, but also more widespread. The provisions of power, value and acceptability are being signed off to undemocratic, untransparent and antagonistic forces. A warning of how FCE maintains this corruption and exercises its authority on culture, inverting the more classical order so that it turns even those who believe they are on the right side of history, against themselves. And that, my philosophical friends, is the system’s neatest trick
Bibliography
· Hirsch, P.B. (2022) ‘The serpent under it: cognitive bias in ethics and compliance training’, The Journal of business strategy, 43(6), pp. 406–409.
· Huizinga, J. (1949) Homo ludens: a study of the play-element in culture by J. Huizinga. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
· Land, N. and Sanchiz, R. (2019). Fanged noumena. Barcelona, España: Holobionte Ediciones, Abril De.
· Luhmann, N. (2000). The reality of the mass media. Cambridge: Polity Press.
· Moeller, H.-G. and D\’Ambrosio, P.J. (2021) You and your profile : identity after authenticity / Hans-Georg Moeller, Paul J. D’Ambrosio. New York, New York: Columbia University Press.
· Saul, J. (2013) ‘Scepticism and Implicit Bias’, Disputatio (Lisbon, Portugal), 5(37), pp. 244.
· Washington, Natalia, and Daniel Kelly, 'Who’s Responsible for This? Moral Responsibility, Externalism, and Knowledge about Implicit Bias', in Michael Brownstein, and Jennifer Saul (eds), Implicit Bias and Philosophy, Volume 2: Moral Responsibility, Structural Injustice, and Ethics (Oxford, 2016; online edn, Oxford Academic, 19 May 2016)
Notes:
[1] (Moeller and D’Ambrosio 2021 p.5)
[2] (Luhmann 2000 p.50)
[3] Peretti, J., 1996. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Negations, 1. It’s interesting to note that Peretti even demonstrated his philosophy by being the co-founder of Buzzfeed.
[4] Article illustrates really early examples of the signing over of “beauty” values to companies and exists only on a sign-value basis.
[5] (Washington & Kelly 2016), (McKenna & Carter 2023 forthcoming), (Saul 2018), all contain examples of dictating, educating and forcibly enlightening the masses to their issues, including calling it a “burden” (W&K2016) to fix people’s bias.
[6] (Hirsch, P.B. 2022)
[7] For example, Adobe's Content Authenticity Initiative which even included govermental funded organisations such as the BBC.