I wrote the following as two separate responses to Tarheel Dem’s recent post Our Current Silliness. Taken together they sketch out a sadly dystopian future for the whole human race if we do not come up with a better approach to governing ourselves than the current [government-by-intelligence-fiat] surveillance state. This essentially secret, supra-national government of unelected specialists has been gradually unmasked over the past several years by several factors. First came the work of the two earliest “leakers,” Julian Assange/Wikileaks and Edward Snowden. It makes little difference whether you consider them individual, conscience-driven heroes or agents of hostile governments, because no matter what their actual motives may have been, the cumulative results of their efforts have been to lay bare the actual surveillance mechanisms by which all technologically advanced states now attempt to control their populations. Their efforts have been followed up and amplified by the recent U.S. election, which has turned into a Spy vs. Spy cartoon of the whole system as it now stands. One set of spies hustled for the U.S. establishment…the one that I call the Permanent Government…in the person of Hillary Clinton and the other set hustled against it, for Donald Trump.
Read on for my view of what is actually happening here:
Tarheel wrote:
Uri Friedman, Defense One: America is facing a dangerous enemy. We just can’t agree who it is.
Among those who believe the U.S. is engaged in an ideological struggle, there is division on the question of which ideology represents the greatest threat to America: ISIS-style radical Islam or Russian-style autocracy.
Yeah.
Well…
Mr. Friedman is suffering from the same two-dimensional thinking as are almost the whole of the rest of the commentators: (And their devoted readers.)
There is clearly a third dangerous enemy.
Let us call it “The Surveillance State” for want of a better label.
This is what is “the greatest threat to America.”
Greater than the just-past-caveman-level ISIS terror with its beheadings, sex slaves and imagined paradises.
Greater than the just-this-side-of-a-totally-failed-state Russian autocracy.
A totally secret, totally powerful, 24 hour/7 days a week/365 days a year surveillance of the minds and utterings of every motherfucker on the planet!!! (Minus the very few who use no digital communications whatsoever, people who are themselves suspect for want of evidence.)
Hitler would be rolling on the floor in orgasm at the prospect of such a weapon…a weapon which is now very close to being totally perfected by the current state of multinational digital information gathering, storage and analysis.
The “Russian” dossier?
Hell…we all got dossiers!!!
What we eat.
What we think.
What we drink.
Our lusts.Our fears.
Our burdens.
Our beliefs.
Aliens got ’em.
Alien to the very core beliefs, the deepest hopes of human beings for eons past.
The Twilight Zone’s To Serve Man?
No.
To control man.
Why?
How?
William Burroughs knew.
Burroughs submits questions to a mysterious oracle named “Control.”
Question: If control’s control is absolute, why does control need to control?”
Answer: “Control needs time.”
Question: “Is control controlled by its need to control?”
Answer: “Yes.”
“Why does control need humans, as you call them?”
“Wait! Wait! Time, a landing field. Death needs time like a junkie needs junk.”
“And what does death need time for?”
“The answer is so simple: Death needs time for what it kills to grow in, for Ah Pook’s sake.”
“Death needs time for what it kills to grow in, for Ah Pook’s sweet sake, you stupid vulgar greedy ugly American death-sucker.”
WTFU!!!
In response to the above comment, Tarheel also wrote:
So tell me the domestic agenda of the surveillance state. My best guess is to ensure the perpetuation of suppression of the suppression of an active left-wing in US politics that denies the increase of equal justice, progressive tax policy, and ample infrastructure.
Oh…I think that it is much broader than that!
I think that computer projections of the near future are telling the controllers that…with the rapid developments in robotics plus the ongoing rise in world population…there is a rapidly approaching crisis point where the U.S. (let alone the rest of the world) simply will not be able to deal with overpopulation combined with rising unemployment. Not on the level that we already laughingly call “The American Dream,” for sure.
It’s already happening, Tarheel. The cultures in this country that…by the use of skin color and other racial markers…were quite purposely kept on the lower end of the financial spectrum by the controllers in order to maintain a working class that could be forced to do the dirty work on the society…have already outgrown their necessity and usefulness in terms of numbers.There are fewer shit jobs being performed by human beings and many, many more people…including recent immigrants…competing to do them.
Lenny Bruce covered this problem in one sentence 50+ years ago, talking about so-called “liberal” dreams of an egalitarian society. “But…but…who’ll clean the shithouse!!!???” he asked.
This is an increasingly valid question. Think about it. Combine these factors… too many people forced to live on the shithouse-cleaner level of society, a booming industry in robotic shithouse cleaners (and above) who work for free 24 hours a day requiring only occasional maintenance, the trappings of the already dead American Dream still being sold 24/7 on the media and what do you get?
You get trouble with a capital T and that stands for…today, at least…Trump!!!
And he is likely the more benevolent side of the equation…again, so far. He just wants to stem the flow of immigrants, throw the more rebellious shithouse cleaners in jaii, (at a profit, of course), and scare the rest of the lower classes into accepting their lot. This is not going to work, especially when those who still have some grasp on their own American Dream realize that they are next as robotics replace more…mental-level…work.
Next up? It won’t be Trump. He’s not smart enough to go that far, although Bannon and others in the administration…Roger Stone, too…certainly are, just as are as many people in the intelligence world. Bet on it. What follows? It won’t be Donald Trump; It will be someone openly advocating some form of culling of the herd.
You watch.
Sooner than anyone expects.
Hitler was a prophet.
A prophet of doom, but a prophet nevertheless.
Watch.
AG
There it is, in all of its frightening glory.
The question is…and it remains an open question…what the fuck are we going to do about it!!!??? I have no answers, myself. Only questions.
So it goes in this quite likely last century of human rule on earth. If the environment doesn’t get us, AI will….unless somebody comes up with a better idea and then manages to get it out there in time to stop the current mechanisms in place from chewing us up and spitting us out.
I am not at all optimistic about our chances, to tell you the truth.
But I do keep trying.
You?
Later…
AG
