"You launder information like you launder money"
April 2, 2017 6:20 AM   Subscribe

Meet Arron Banks, the triumphant arch-financier of the Brexit machine, his British and offshore business web, overlap with Russia, and his transatlantic alliances [Obs/Guardian].

His Ballardian vision of politics:
Taking us out of Europe was only step one of the big disruption, it turns out. Next up: the party political system, and the destruction of the traditional boundaries between left and right.
His personality, with reality-distortion aura:
Are Banksy and Wiggy trolling me? Using me – a feature writer on a remoaner newspaper – to get this stuff out into the sunlight? But all hopelessly mixed up together? Banks has chucked it all at me: his diplomatic passports and diamond mines, Russians spies, offshore tax havens, circumvention of electoral law. All those individual facts are true, but together it feels like one big confected mess? #Fakenews? Is that what’s going on here? That’s what it feels like. [...] Talking to Banks, my grasp on normal feels slippery.
And how to ge the job done:
"The institutions of government are being systematically dismantled. The relation of citizens to the state is being re-engineered. Trump, the businessman, is redefining them as consumers. Last week the US senate approved the right of telecoms companies to sell their customers’ browsing history – a huge step forward in renegotiating the relationship between individuals and their rights from that of democratic participants to end users. This is government as platform monopoly. Government as modelled on Google and Facebook. And what’s coming is platform democracy, where the company/government retains the right to change the user agreement at any time. And it’s data – the intimate information of you, your personal life, your history, your relationships, your dreams and desires, your thoughts – that’s the source of their power, legitimacy, capital. Harvested, captured, sold, fed into the panopticon: total surveillance, total control, total power."
Related:
posted by runcifex (29 comments total) 22 users marked this as a favorite
 
“I’m pro Putin being actually for his country. It’s not possible to run that entire country as a pure democracy. It’s not possible. The whole history of Russia is that there has to be someone strong in control or it breaks up.”

"Will of the people"...
posted by Catseye at 6:50 AM on April 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


spits
posted by lalochezia at 6:54 AM on April 2, 2017 [3 favorites]


There is no "will of the people" for Del boy Banks and his wide boy cohorts.
This is government as platform monopoly. Government as modelled on Google and Facebook. And what’s coming is platform democracy, where the company/government retains the right to change the user agreement at any time. And it’s data – the intimate information of you, your personal life, your history, your relationships, your dreams and desires, your thoughts – that’s the source of their power, legitimacy, capital. Harvested, captured, sold, fed into the panopticon: total surveillance, total control, total power.
posted by adamvasco at 6:57 AM on April 2, 2017 [6 favorites]


Also worth the read is Carole Cadwalladr's realated article on Andy Wigmore and Robert Mercer.
posted by adamvasco at 7:02 AM on April 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


I'm increasingly convinced that the uber-rich are actually deep-cover communists doing their damnedest to spark international communist revolution.
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:06 AM on April 2, 2017 [12 favorites]


I think it's rational to say that these people are very good at bluffing, being in the business type. They try to make you believe they're more powerful than they are.

But there are two problems.
  1. Even if these particular actors are not The Ones, the road to what they have in mind is now open, and the means more ready than ever. Today's bluff, tomorrow someone may do it.
  2. They may not be able to derive as much power from technocratic control as they claim, but the ambiguity and information asymmetry are themselves a different kind of power. Fear, uncertainty, doubt.
These people are not Roko's Basilisk. Which doesn't make them less dangerous.
posted by runcifex at 7:19 AM on April 2, 2017 [8 favorites]


I'm increasingly convinced that the uber-rich are actually deep-cover communists doing their damnedest to spark international communist revolution.

That, or they thought Jennifer Government was a really great idea.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:46 AM on April 2, 2017 [10 favorites]


Arron Banks is very rich (by what looks like rather swashbuckling means), but if by uber-rich, you mean amongst the top 10 or 100 wealthiest people in the country, then I don't think he's that.

I suspect a better funded Serious Fraud Office and a better funded (and less toothless) Electoral Commission could put paid to a lot of that wealth, too.
posted by ambrosen at 8:00 AM on April 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


And from the journalist's Twitter, quote tweeting the following Tweet: Did Russia fund Brexit? Arron Banks' Russian wife was suspected by MI5 as a spy and where'd he get the money from?

  • So. I didn't ask Arron Banks this question. He asked it and answered it himself. Curious?

posted by ambrosen at 8:06 AM on April 2, 2017


Say what you will about Putin, that guy has accomplished in five years what the old school KGB would go to sleep dreaming about. They probably never knew it would be this easy.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 8:21 AM on April 2, 2017 [6 favorites]


Say what you will about Putin, that guy has accomplished in five years what the old school KGB would go to sleep dreaming about.

Isn't Putin former KGB?
posted by Thorzdad at 9:00 AM on April 2, 2017 [4 favorites]


Forget it, he's rolling.
posted by dr_dank at 9:09 AM on April 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


Who would have thought that, when it arrived, Roko's Basilisk would end up looking like a racist, philistinic slumlord...
posted by acb at 9:13 AM on April 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


This is a guy standing atop a pile of rubble, declaring it to be the most beautiful building ever constructed.

It will be a pleasure to watch it take him with it in the final collapse -- for those of us who are left to see it.
posted by jamjam at 10:26 AM on April 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


Unfortunately, those who are left will see it collapse right on top of them.
posted by lmfsilva at 10:36 AM on April 2, 2017 [3 favorites]


The relation of citizens to the state is being re-engineered. Trump, the businessman, is redefining them as consumers. Last week the US senate approved the right of telecoms companies to sell their customers’ browsing history – a huge step forward in renegotiating the relationship between individuals and their rights from that of democratic participants to end users. This is government as platform monopoly. Government as modelled on Google and Facebook. And what’s coming is platform democracy, where the company/government retains the right to change the user agreement at any time. And it’s data – the intimate information of you, your personal life, your history, your relationships, your dreams and desires, your thoughts – that’s the source of their power, legitimacy, capital. Harvested, captured, sold, fed into the panopticon: total surveillance, total control, total power.
posted by Bella Donna at 11:22 AM on April 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


This is a guy standing atop a pile of rubble, declaring it to be the most beautiful building ever constructed.

I continually remind myself that, no matter what happens to Trump, he'll declare himself the winner. Any action against him has to actively avoid thinking in terms of how Trump will respond to it because Trump's response is always pathologically self-involved optimism.
posted by fatbird at 11:23 AM on April 2, 2017 [3 favorites]


I shouldn't have brought up the Bogeylisk. It's not real.

And sorry about dwelling on it, but ..

My concern has a lot in common with Carole Cadwalladr's in that we fear a technocratic future where a boot forever stamps on the human face. But I always try to remind myself that the Guardian has a well-known elitist bias. I don't mean to bash them, for we all have ours. Instead let me try to think outside the silo.

The "elitist" view in this article is less about judgement than perspective. It focuses on a bunch of power dealers who purportedly treat the masses as commodity objects. This is legitimately fearful, but the perspective is top-down. What about a bottom-up view? For the discontented people, where can they find a voice? A lever into the power mechanism? They've got no deal but this deal offered by the authoritarian cabal.

The world is torn and we are being divided and conquered. The author, being both a journalist and fiction write, might have got a bit speculative, but the critique is poignant because it's on the mark. Controls are tightening everywhere. We're losing our sensitivity of the ties that bridge differences. The powerful are not only getting more powerful but also more abstractly powerful, in a manner we can't relate to.
posted by runcifex at 11:24 AM on April 2, 2017


His characterization of neoliberalism's triumph is blinkered and defective.

"The institutions of government are being systematically dismantled.

This is sufficiently imprecise as to be patently misleading. Different sectors of government in Western Europe and the US, at least, are being differently managed: privatization and rentierism mean that some sectors of government are growing while others that administered public goods are being defunded. It is not a simple or mono-directional trend.

The relation of citizens to the state is being re-engineered. Trump, the businessman, is redefining them as consumers.

This is lazy, stupid, and misleading history. That trend started decades ago, and Trump (who is only a businessman in the loosest of senses) actually hasn't really done anything so ambitious or definite as Banks says. He's conflating existing trends with extant actors out of laziness, stupidity, or an intent to mislead; the GOP is a much more important driving force of neoliberalization than Trump, who has no real agenda of his own aside from self-enrichment in all its forms.

Last week the US senate approved the right of telecoms companies to sell their customers’ browsing history – a huge step forward in renegotiating the relationship between individuals and their rights from that of democratic participants to end users.

Yeah. Sure. This is a negotiation in the same way that being mugged is a fucking negotiation. The machinery of government is being used to dispossess average citizens of their wealth, security, and social benefits by the powerful. Theft, even disguised as legitimate government, is still not a negotiation.
posted by clockzero at 12:01 PM on April 2, 2017 [17 favorites]


This is one of the most chilling interviews I have read in a long time and just has reinforced my plan that after 20 years of living as an EU citizen in the UK it's time to leave.
posted by fordiebianco at 12:02 PM on April 2, 2017 [5 favorites]


"Say what you will about Putin, that guy has accomplished in five years what the old school KGB would go to sleep dreaming about."
They dreamed about it so much there's probably a thousand scenarios where they played it out. But they didn't do it because in 990 of them, Moscow is eventually replaced by a thin smear of red-hot ash on the dirt.
posted by genghis at 12:10 PM on April 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


Needed: a hundred more Panama Papers investigations.
And I don't mean "investigations into who was the leaker."
posted by homerica at 12:22 PM on April 2, 2017 [4 favorites]


Incredible article.
posted by My Dad at 12:43 PM on April 2, 2017


I'm increasingly convinced that the uber-rich are actually deep-cover communists doing their damnedest to spark international communist revolution.

You jest but concentrate enough wealth and you have a world wide politburo engaging in central planning.
posted by srboisvert at 12:49 PM on April 2, 2017 [15 favorites]


I used to argue sincerely but unsuccessfully that the U.S.S.R. wasn't so much Communist as a State-Owned Corporate Monopoly. "USSR Inc." Which explains how Russia wound up run by kleptocrats so quickly.
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:15 PM on April 2, 2017 [3 favorites]


I'm increasingly convinced that the uber-rich are actually deep-cover communists

I suspect either a) they have forgotten that they left the mics on or b) they feel that things have gone far enough that it really doesn't matter. I was going to say something about the "lessons of the guillotine," but listening to the latest series of the Revolutions podcasts shows that the ultra-rich couldn't remember that lesson for even a generation.
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:48 PM on April 2, 2017 [4 favorites]


Increasingly my response to whatever vainglorious self-promotion yahoos like this one indulge in is "no, you're just rich". You're not an 'internationalist', you're just rich. You're not special, you're just rich. You're not important, you're just rich. You're not deep, you're just rich. Wealth is a dirty skirt you hide behind, you colossal ass.
posted by um at 11:28 PM on April 2, 2017 [8 favorites]


I was going to say something about the "lessons of the guillotine," but listening to the latest series of the Revolutions podcasts shows that the ultra-rich couldn't remember that lesson for even a generation.

Living in France relieves you of idealism regarding that as well. You'd think of all people they'd be the ones wary of hierarchies of power and concentration of wealth in the hands of those who deign themselves "superior", but nope. She says as she keeps finding herself in companies where top rungs are all school pals (white men) of top politicians (white men and one blonde white woman, yes, her, omg ugh) who are all pals with people from old noble families. It's not that they don't remember, it's that they think they're learning from what they see as the mistakes of their forbears.
posted by fraula at 3:02 AM on April 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


learning from what they see as the mistakes of their forbears

We will still carry them and the sting will still sink us both
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 7:42 AM on April 3, 2017


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