Counter\u2011insurgency manuals talk about \u201cwinning hearts and minds.\u201d They are not primarily about killing insurgents; they are about shaping the population so the insurgent idea can\u2019t get oxygen. You separate people from unwanted narratives, you manage what they see and hear, you make some choices effortless and others impossibly costly. It is not dramatic. It is architectural.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Canada has built a domestic version of that logic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The emerging layer is not a new silo. It is the control panel for the whole machine: cognitive security<\/strong>. The field\u2019s own language admits the goal is to manage how large groups of people take in and interpret information so that \u201cpre\u2011existing heuristics and interpretive narrative frames\u201d produce the desired conclusions. In plain English, it is about designing the environment so certain thoughts never quite occur.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bill C\u201163, the Online Harms Act, is presented as a child\u2011protection and anti\u2011hate measure. Its harms list includes sexually victimizing children, inducing minors to self\u2011harm, and inciting violence, areas where there is broad public agreement that something must be done. But the bill does something else at the same time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It creates a new enforcement apparatus, a Digital Safety Commission with the power to impose huge fines on platforms, and a set of duties that require intermediaries to\u00a0pre\u2011emptively manage what Canadians see and say<\/strong>. It also expands criminal and human\u2011rights penalties for speech and introduces a \u201cpre\u2011crime\u201d recognizance for people a court believes are\u00a0likely<\/em>\u00a0to commit an online hate offence in the future. With the attorney general\u2019s approval, conditions can be imposed on a person\u2019s future online behaviour based on an assessment of risk, not a completed crime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The civil\u2011liberties groups are blunt: this will have a\u00a0chilling effect on lawful speech<\/strong>. You do not need to prosecute everyone. You just need enough people to watch someone else be prosecuted, or saddled with pre\u2011crime conditions, to learn which topics are dangerous to think out loud about. Platforms, fearing billion\u2011dollar penalties, will over\u2011remove and over\u2011suppress. The environment will quietly narrow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the same time, central banks have been exploring\u00a0central bank digital currencies (CBDCs)<\/strong>, programmable, traceable digital versions of national money. The Bank of Canada says it does not currently plan to issue a digital dollar, but is building the capability \u201cto be ready if needed.\u201d Civil\u2011liberties analyses have spelled out what \u201cif needed\u201d could mean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A Justice Centre report on a potential Canadian CBDC warned that absent strong protections, a central bank digital currency would give government and the Bank of Canada unprecedented insight into \u201cpurchases, donations, investments and other financial transactions,\u201d and the ability to \u201cpunish whatever behaviours the government deems undesirable.\u201d Programmability would allow authorities or \u201cexternal actors\u201d to determine where, when, and what each person is allowed to buy or donate, or to apply targeted sanctions and nudges at the individual level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The report explicitly cites the 2022 Emergencies Act debanking as a proof\u2011of\u2011concept: if the state was willing to freeze accounts under a one\u2011off order, what would it do with a fully digital, fully programmable currency? You would not need to send police to a protester\u2019s house. You could simply ensure their card stops working at the gas pump or the grocery store.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Bank of Canada insists a CBDC could be designed with \u201ca high degree of privacy\u201d and well\u2011controlled disclosure, but concedes that it cannot offer the anonymity that cash does, because that \u201ccould become a vehicle for abusive transactions\u201d such as money laundering or tax evasion. In other words: full anonymity is off the table. The only question is how much traceability, and for what.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Taken together, the pattern is not accidental. It is subtle, proactive counter\u2011insurgency<\/strong> turned inward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Layered on top, you build a\u00a0cognitive\u2011security and \u201conline harms\u201d regime<\/strong>\u00a0whose job is to manage the information environment, and an optional digital currency that makes every transaction contingent on good behaviour. The goal is not to run around arresting dissidents in the old style. It is to make sure their ideas have nowhere to land, and preferably never occur.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is what it means to confine and constrict thinking so certain ideas cannot be formed or tested early on. You don\u2019t have to ban a thought if you can:<\/p>\n\n\n\n At that point, herd management is no longer about pushing bodies around. It is about shaping the cognitive terrain<\/strong> itself. The mind becomes just another piece of infrastructure to be secured.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Additional research from Perplexity<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Instalment 7: The Whole Machine: How It Fits Together Counter\u2011insurgency manuals talk about \u201cwinning hearts and minds.\u201d They are not primarily about killing insurgents; they are about shaping the population so the insurgent idea can\u2019t get oxygen. You separate people from unwanted narratives, you manage what they see and hear, you make some choices effortless […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,460],"tags":[455,49,166,525,51,26],"class_list":["post-2889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alexandra-kitty","category-the-damage-report","tag-bill-c-63","tag-canada","tag-journalism","tag-marc-miller","tag-mark-carney","tag-propaganda"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2889"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2889\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2890,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2889\/revisions\/2890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}From \u201charms\u201d to pre\u2011crime<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Programmable money as enforcement layer<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Confine the space of possible thought<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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