Total Surveillance: Assault on Electronic Media Freedom

Another Tacoma graffito, seemingly a declaration of love, probably drawn by a young woman, and in any case unique, unlike anything of its kind I have seen anywhere including Manhattan. I photographed it in May 2009, forgot about it, then rediscovered it a couple of days ago. Leica M4, Voigtlander f/1.7 35mm Ultron, Kodak 800 color negative film, exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on picture to view it full size.)

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FORMAL, NAZI-STYLE tyranny remained unnecessary in the United States as long as the One Percent could maintain the Big Lie of “American democracy.” Public opinion was controlled not by a Gestapo – the German acronym for Geheime Staatspolizei (literally, “Secret State Police”) – but by disinformation, misdirection and outright falsehood. The resultant ignorance – the infinitely malleable and thus dependably submissive anti-culture of shrunken consciousness I mercilessly label “Moron Nation” – was maintained by a carefully fostered combination of paranoia, bigotry and xenophobia in which “intellectual,” “subversive” and “traitor” quickly became synonyms. It was perpetuated by an induced ignorance of history – an unabashed contempt for historical knowledge and a vehement hatred of history as a subject – that has no counterpart in human experience. But now, thanks to the quasi-democratic anarchy of electronic media, Moron Nation is ever-so-slowly giving way to something else. What it will be – whether it will be the Internet equivalent of an old-time Ku Klux Klan rally or an USian version of the deservedly legendary Petrograd Soviet  – remains to be seen. But it is the desperate fear of the latter that prompts the Ruling Class to impose what we already recognize as the total surveillance state: the real-world fulfillment of Jewish, Christian and Islamic theology in which a heavenly Führer tracks the lives of every one of us in meticulous, zero-tolerance detail, from the moment we are born until the instant we die. Monitored as we are from cradle to grave, it seems we cannot possibly organize any effective resistance to capitalism and its new paradigm of USian governance, absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Or is that merely what our masters want us to believe?

The bright side of electronic media is not only that it gives us fingertip access to the libraries of the world. It is also how it brings so many of us the increasingly persuasive arguments of both the libertarian Right  and the mainstream pseudo-Left, the words of fierce, often eloquent critics who credibly decry the entire “war on terror” as an extended variation on the old Reichstag Fire. Side-stepping their economic differences, these sources agree the USian Ruling Class is using the threat of Islamic terror to provide an ongoing rational for wiping out  our constitutional rights. Far more inflammatory material generated by the genuine (i.e., socialist) Left is available too, though access is often deliberately hampered by Google. Included in these worth-the-search offerings from the Real Left are the priceless archives of socialism and anarchism defiantly uploaded by the Soviet Union  during its final days and the regularly updated analytical resources of the World Socialist Web Site.  For the determined searcher – that is, one willing to look well beyond the first few Google pages – there are also any number of supplementary sources, both for reference and for breaking news. Thus a vast quantity of material that is definitively challenging One Percent absolutism is now available to more people than ever.

But electronic media has its dark side too, half of which is the built-in, seemingly permanent barrier that prohibits universal Internet access. This is the staggering cost of Internet service in the United States, its prices by far the highest in the world.  While these fees are nominally explained by the obscene salaries of Internet service-provider executives, an equal factor is no doubt Ruling Class insistence on censorship by price, which is motivated by the corporate and political aristocracy's terror of what might happen were the Internet's wealth of material to regularly reach the most viciously exploited members of the industrial world's most economically oppressed, most relentlessly overworked population. Perhaps it is partly in anticipation of Internet-agitated revolution the United States already imprisons more people, whether proportionally or in raw numbers, than any other nation on the planet. 

Predictably then, Internet access by those of us who are lower-income folks age 60 and over – which includes the 62-and-over demographic now being targeted for extermination by murderous cutbacks in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food-stamps – is therefore kept at less than 20 percent by the outrageous monthly rates – as high as $70 or more – charged for USian high-speed Internet. (While the access study linked immediately above was conducted in Texas, nearly identical results – unfortunately not available on-line – were produced by studies in Washington state, which is as allegedly progressive as Texas is demonstrably reactionary.) Thus the common denominator of exclusion from the Internet is poverty – not just amongst the elderly but within all age groups. Obviously, it is no accident those of us who are most savagely victimized by capitalism are those of us who are also most excluded from the Internet's treasure-trove of information.

Nor is it coincidental the USian pseudo-Left stubbornly ignores (and often vehemently denies) the existence of this severely prohibitive class barrier. By so doing, the pseudo-Left not only proves beyond argument its maliciously bourgeois nature, but vividly demonstrates how it serves the One Percent within the broader context of the Ruling Class.

The other dark aspect of electronic media – actually its darkest – arises from the military origin of computers and the Internet itself. From this perspective – the fact the original computers were weapons, and the fact the precursors to the Internet were intended to further the USian agenda of capitalist imperialism and world conquest – we learn all we need to know. The hideous truth is the advent of the total-surveillance state is nothing more than the fulfillment of an implacably tyrannical purpose that existed from the technology's very beginning. To my knowledge, no other writer has dared point this out, nor has anyone mentioned its corollary – that believing mechanisms of death and oppression will ultimately be employed for  human betterment is no less absurd than imagining a nuclear-waste dump can be converted overnight into a vegetable garden. Moreover, the manner in which the instruments of this hitherto-unprecedented tyranny were marketed to the USian public, and the manner in which the public in its consumeroid frenzies of trinket-materialism literally fought to the death over lap-tops, digital cameras and cell-phones, has no parallel in history. Never before have people killed themselves in stampedes for enslavement. But the looming threat of the total-surveillance state has been common knowledge at least since the 1940s – which means Moron Nation knowingly embraced its own degradation, selling itself and its descendants into slavery at every opportunity and by every possible means. That's why, whether from the electronic concentration camp  of today or the grovel-in-filth servitude that is its inevitable tomorrow, only a miracle can rescue us now.

LB/25 August 2013

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