I think about the USA's response to Edward Snowden's actions this week and, well, shit, it seems like we're approaching some kind of end times. I've doubted myself on similar notions in the past - felt naive and simple - and thought maybe it's just that I'm older and more politically aware and so now notice the same Western Capitalistic human rights infringements that everyone has always noticed. 'Perhaps we were always fucked and at the mercy of our governments' intrusions but now I just pay attention.' But that in itself is naive. To tell myself that Western people in general wouldn't prefer to sit beneath and be comforted by a blanket of disbelief becomes, in itself, a meta-mode of burying my head under the covers. The truth as I see it is a paradox of willing coercion.
The so-called benefits to poor people of advances in technology are the stuff of Philip K. Dick novels, George Orwell... They're a utopianistic lie. 'Everyone' has an i-phone, 'everyone' has internet access, 'everyone' is better off. Well, while the downwardly mobile may have access to these things, they aren't the life enhancements they're touted to be inasmuch as they're modes of social control moving ever closer towards a purity of that definition. They keep us from private, one-to-one interaction (keep us from even knowing how to conduct private interaction) and are, as we have all feared for long enough, subject to the kind of despicable intrusion demonstrated by PRISM project, which has been reading our emails, facebook posts, Skype calls and phone calls for who knows how long.
Of course, the argument is that the American government wants to keep an eye on those who might threaten the security of the so-called free world and that, if we're not doing anything wrong, we'll be fine and so shouldn't care one way or the other. It's here, too, where the civil liberties argument usually falls flat because it posits that our privacy is a right to which we are entitled by the fact of its mere conceptual existence within the so-called free world. This argument sets itself up like skittles for a strike shot from its opponents. 'How can we consider ourselves to be truly 'free' when it is known for a fact that people are utilising technological media to undermine and destroy that freedom?' they ask. It's a cyclical argument not unlike calculating the sum of an alternating infinite series. One hundred minus one hundred plus one hundred minus one hundred plus one hundred minus one hundred and so on... The focus in arguing against the infringement of privacy should not be on definitions of freedom, but on definitions of wrongness (if we're not demonstrating it in our behaviour, remember, we'll all be fine). Bradley Manning's treatment by the US government is quite possibly an indicator of what we can expect to be meted out to Edward Snowden when the US government finally catches up with him because, it has become clear, blowing the whistle on that government fits the American hegemonic definition of 'wrong'. And, I have to say, I do find myself thinking about the safety of calling this into question outside of the confines of my own brain because, by the very suggestion that America's attempt to portray Snowden as an enemy of the people is wrong, do I then by default also become capital-W 'Wrong'? What fate awaits those who disagree?
The big problem with tyranny is that it works. Where's the potential for immense step change when we're stupefied into believing Western propaganda, which teaches us that hard-line leftism is not only a cruel, untenable joke that would drive the world into technological, social and cultural decline but one that would also squash its people under a hammer of social oppression (the irony...)? Centre-leftism gets no less of a raw deal and is painted as hippie-dippy idealism that doesn't take into account the economic realities of treating the people of the world with an overall sense of decency. 'We've got to be horrific to someone - we can't afford not to be.' The argument people consistently fail to give in fear of sounding comparatively stupid is that systemic change is rooted in its very abandonment of contemporary economics and that there is a preparedness for self-sacrifice if it is to lead to peace, equality and relative prosperity for all.
Running off to the woods and living off-grid is ever more appealing, but it feels like a cop-out and the answer to which the right no-doubt hopes all us lefties will resort eventually so that we'll keep quiet in our blissed-out meaninglessness. Of course, there are means of having our voices heard but I really don't know how much a name on a petition means nowadays - it's a fart in the wind. Governments repeatedly respond with a veiled 'fuck you' and go ahead and carry out their plans anyway. And that's because they know there's a weak minority not only of people ready to stand-up for what they believe in but even of those who have some kind of an ideological standpoint. The right has won because it's succeeded in depoliticising the working classes by insisting, through the 'must-have' tack of technology marketing, that they enthusiastically access such vacuous, faux-life-enhancements as Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Outlook and so on. Give people exciting modes of communication (which, handily, can be used to spy on them) with the one hand and they won't complain so much when you take away fair wages, decent housing, healthcare, public spaces, etc, with the other. And, once you get people in the grip of technological (i.e. covert financial) fetishism, it's hard to ever wrestle them from that brainwashed mind-set. No one wants to give up their i-phone, i-pad, i-life. They'd rather give up alcohol and cigarettes, which will soon enough be successfully phased-out because they're being superseded by something that not only pacifies discontent but is allowed to access it directly and squash it.
