Taking a look around at how scary the world is getting makes me
wonder what it'd be like to wake up after a decade-long coma and take a fresh
look at the surveillance society that's been coming down the pipe since the
9/11 attacks baptized the new century in crazy. Let's say it's 1999 again and
you dropped some windowpane, watched The
Matrix, felt like you just witnessed your autobiography and then jumped off the
roof of your apartment to see if you are indeed "the one". Bad idea...
seemed logical at the time. Anyway, next thing you know you wake up in a
hospital bed and everyone around you looks like they stuck with the blue pill because they're
wearing that ‘bad test result’ face as they tell you it's 2012 and you just
skipped the whole terror decade.
All of it.
Catching up on world history since 1999 would be like reading some
dystopian future sci-fi novel by the likes of Orwell or Dick except you're
reading The New York Times and it's news and all real. Just a quick scan of
early 21st century history would have you longing for the '90s and the happy
days of OJ trials and sex scandals in the Oval Office where the corporate
spokesman in the suit messes up the intern's dress and not the entire direction
of the new century.
The century got defined by 9/11 right from the start and the future was always going to
suck if you were a fan of privacy and keeping your shit on the down low. For a
coma victim nursing a migraine in 2012, the 9/11 attacks sure would look like
some stunt ripped out of one of the shittier Bond movies complete with the
perpetrator being an evil villain millionaire living in a cave lair. Sure, it'd
sound like the dumbest cliché-ridden plot ever if you tried to sell it to
Paramount, but the new reality has a habit of running with the absurd.
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| Bond villain lair or actual news story? This graphic actually appeared in US media in 2001. |
Quite apart from the very bad idea of a land war in Afghanistan and the necessary resource grab in
the Mesopotamian desert, the greatest legacy of the 9/11attacks for the United States will be the
terrorism-industrial-complex that sprung up horribly like an erection at a
nudist funeral. Just nine days after the attacks the largest merger in US
government history occurred when 17 agencies from the Coast Guard to the cops
merged into the colossal Ingsoc that is the Department of Homeland Security.
9/11 was seen as a "failure to communicate and connect the dots" on
the part of everyone with a badge and a 9mm, so centralization and
intelligence sharing in a single giant database was seen as the answer. That,
and a few billion dollars to corporations and private contractors to design and run the software
To keep us safe.
US intelligence agencies have always relied on technology to invent their
way out of a knowledge hole. Since WWII the NSA and CIA have excelled in the areas
of Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and Imaging Intelligence (IMINT), which is
your run of the mill but tech heavy wire-tapping, code-breaking and picture-taking of your "secret" new missile launch facility. From the
U2 spy plane to the SR-71 Blackbird and on to satellites that can read your
golf ball from space, IMINT has never been a problem for the skilled genius of US technology. The weak spot has
always been Human Intelligence (HUMINT). That's a harder pitch for the US
to swing at as it involves spies and agents and assets operating behind enemy lines speaking
and acting like natives. The Israelis are the kings of this simply by the
demographics of the Jewish diaspora. There are native Jews in many countries
and if Mossad wants to know where a nuke scientist's mistress lives, fresh
HUMINT is an encrypted email away. During the Cold War, the US relied on Israel
for HUMINT in exchange for US SIGINT and IMINT. Post 9/11, mass surveillance is
seen by the US as the way to make up for their HUMINT deficiencies, a weakness
the US sees as leading directly to 9/11.
In the new sci-fi dystopia, the police state starts with the cop on
patrol who is expected to "feed the system" with suspicious stuff
that might flag someone as a terrorist.
The problem is, Main Street USA isn't exactly a target-rich environment for
towel-headed mullahs waving AKs and yelling "Allah Ackbar" every time the local 7/11 runs out of pita bread . In order to
justify the billions being spent, the DHS must continually see 'enemies'
everywhere. The enemy morphs into the citizenry itself, be it activist,
protester or anyone with a beef against the prevailing narrative. The primary
weapon of the average cop is the Suspicious Activity Report (SAR), which
includes activities like taking pictures, reading maps, driving while looking
out the window a lot; pretty much anything about you the average donut guzzler
doesn't like. Cop cars are being equipped now with license plate scanners that
not only read every infraction of every passing car but also relay this info along with GPS data to
the centralized database; something that makes every unpaid parking ticket a
shit brick offense.
In the sci-fi dystopia, everyone is a suspect.
In the sci-fi dystopia, everyone is a suspect.
It's no surprise that most of the headline-making F.B.I. busts of terror
plots in the US are perpetrated by a bunch of dumb fuck wannabe al-Qaedas who
end up sleepwalking into an F.B.I.-produced trap, like stars in some twisted episode of MTV's Punk'd where the G-men
supply fake explosives, blasting caps and a party van while co-opting some dip shit
Bin Laden fan to drive into the middle of the sting. The mark gets zip ties instead of cameras and there's no explosion except for the
thud of the perp's skull against the cell wall of a SuperMax as he trys to
figure out why he trusted the 'knowledgeable chemical guy' at Home Depot who turned out to be a bomb tech narc. After you get showcased nabbed, it's a simple matter for the F.B.I. to go on Fox News and tell all
their viewers how they are winning the war
on a noun. Just recently, we learned the evil doers (still operating under the al-Qaeda franchise) are hiding their 'secret plans' for mayhem inside porn images which is the funniest thing I've heard since that idiot tried to blow up a plane with his boxer shorts.
What ever happened to the smart terrorists?
What ever happened to the smart terrorists?
There are currently 72 DHS "fusion centers" planted all around
the US collating and indexing every bit of HUMINT about everyone, trying to
sniff out who might want to hijack a cruise ship, blow up a bridge or chuck a
flaming shit bomb into an Olive Garden. There's been a ten-year building boom
going on around Washington D.C. too as drab-looking four-story buildings sprout
up like whack a moles. Beneath these nondescript Cold War commie-looking structures
are up to ten subterranean floors of who knows what. Nobody knows how much
they've cost – including the US government – because everything is a semi
state/ corporate hybrid of melded privatization and black hole money pit
contracts hidden under a rug of secrecy in the name of national
security. The monitoring of information (SIGINT) between the US, UK,
Canada, Australia and New Zealand (ECHELON) is
well known but the US seems to be hitting it out of the park when it comes to
total communications monitoring of its population. This of course comes in
the form of the recently reported super structure under construction in the
Utah desert, the Stellar Wind server farm that will basically be 'downloading'
the entire Internet every second and sniffing through yottabytes
of our emails and faxes and cellphone GPS data searching for the bad guy with a
plane ticket to New York and a pipe bomb up his hole.
In
the sci-fi dystopia, everyone is a suspect.
And your privacy is the price of your security because what do you have to hide?
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| Sometimes paranoia is just a heightened state of awareness...man. |
Sometimes you need to be a decade out of the loop to truly see the extent
of what's gone down. History happens gradually and things only gain
context when historians hammer events into a coherent narrative usually long
after the fact. Meaning emerges further down the road. For instance, a
Weimar Republic German in a similar coma in say 1926 who woke up a decade later
would wonder why so many of his countrymen were buying into the crazy
bullshit of the angry guy with the mustache. First it was a beer
hall putsch followed by goose-stepping militarism and a power-grab later, the
Reichstag burned down mysteriously and in no time the German Army were partying on
the Avenue des Champs-Élysées thinking "this is awesome but possibly a
bad move in the long run if shit doesn't play out well". The nature of history is that it unfolds gradually
enough that nobody notices the emergent narrative because they're too busy living in it. By the time the story
emerges in context, Army Group South is surrounded by Zhukov at Stalingrad and the Wehrmacht is screwed.
The one thing about the mass surveillance society we're building that
would fry Orwell's brain is the nature of information in the Internet age. Sure
most governments these days see 1984
as an operational tech manual but we're not just living in an age when
just Big Brother is watching; we
ourselves are watching each other with the intense fascination of zoo chimps
fapping at the banana delivery man. The camera culture is so prevalent and
everyone's face so buried in a cellphone that nobody knows what's going on in
his or her immediate vicinity. Except of course when there's a car wreck and then
everyone's phone is uploading footage to YouTube or, if it's really awesome and
messy, LiveLeak.
Part of the sci-fi dystopia is the willingness of the population to be watched.
To be a minor celebrity in the ongoing movie of your own life.
I
was voyeuring on some old
school friends via Facebook the other day and came across this guy I remember
from first grade who used to shit his pants in class just because it pissed off
the teacher and made everyone laugh. I remember the teacher washing his underwear
and me watching it steaming dry on the radiator as he waved his little cock at
the teacher when she turned her back. It was pretty funny when you were seven.
Yeah, I went to Catholic school. Anyway, according to Facebook that guy's a
plumber now (shit makes sense) and just got a divorce from a wife who took the
kids and left him for some douche bag. I know all this because he thought it
would be cool to post all this on his Facebook wall and not keep his shit on
the down low. It's a law enforcement wet dream. No need for gum shoe field
agents anymore, just Google the perp and see where he hangs out and who his
friends are.
Orwell's mind would be blown.
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| Except the cop investigating you or the prospective employer checking to see if you're an asshole. |
Next up to the party: Police Department unmanned aerial drones circling
24hrs a day over every city. Now that's pure sci-fi. It's also handy if you can
control the narrative too. That hasn't been a problem so far. The thing with
wars these days is that the corporate oligarchy are getting really fucking good
at bullshitting. The technology of bullshit is now so ubiquitous that the mass
media totality of Internet, TV, cellphones and 24hr news cycles make it easy to
beam a consensus reality into the ether of our brave new world. We are all
feeder antennae jacking into a whitewash of total information where everything
is up for debate. There's no need to hide anything anymore because anything could be
true because you read it on the Internet.
Case in point: Libya. All the interventionist narrative needed was a bad
guy (Gaddafi); some oil, a possible Euro refugee crisis and some media story
about Gaddafi firing back at the guys trying to overthrow him. Basically, he
pulled a Kent State with attack choppers; nothing the US wouldn't have
done if OWS protesters brought something a little harder-hitting to the party
than sleeping bags and a bong and started wrecking some Bentleys. NATO
precision bombed Gaddafi's armor and the country got handed over to a rag tag
bunch of rebels willing to write favorable oil deals with sleazy Western oil
corps. All this went down live on TV without a single sign-waving long hair on
a street anywhere. That's when you know you've got serious media penetration
and total control of the narrative.
Holy shit! What a time to be alive, right?
That old Chinese curse "may you live in interesting times,"
sure applies today.
I've often wondered what it'd be like to live in other eras. Personally, I've always fancied a stint as a Viking, you know, sailing around with your
mates in a bad ass longship, raping and pillaging in a consequence-free environment but I was born
too late for this and missed out on all that awesome Valhalla action. And it looks like I was born too soon to
hyperdrive around the galaxy on seed ships discovering strange new worlds
and... and raping and pillaging them in a consequence-free environment.
Christ, if we humans ever advance to the level of a space-faring species the
galaxy is screwed. It'll never happen though because we upright apes will self destruct before we get that far. The technological adolescence hurdle of "fission before fusion" is like a universal failsafe to keep the riff-raff out of the star gate club. Any civ must prove they can live 100 years with nukes and not red button each other back to the Stone Age before they gain access to free energy and 'warp drive'. Right now, we ain't gonna be passing that test.
Let's face it, we just might be the scary bad guys in our own dystopian sci-fi
novel that leaves us all wondering...
Who wrote this book?
Everyone is suspect.
Who wrote this book?
Everyone is suspect.
