"The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic." -JFK
It seems a tragic truth that the lie, or perhaps myth, has become more prevalent than the truth. This most recent revelation that the NSA is monitoring every human on earth that they feasibly can has hardly made a ripple in the placid sea of complacency that is the American psyche. I'm not sure if people still buy into the whole terrorism argument as a justification for spying on our own people to a level that makes Hitler and Stalin's governments look like amateurs, or if they are just too busy consuming to read or care. Part of me has to wonder if it isn't all just for marketing purposes that the people in charge have decided to abolish privacy.
Of course it is the machines that do almost all of the actual snooping, just as the they have started to do a good deal of the governments killing. Richard Brautigan once wrote:
"I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace."
I would claim that his vision of the future has proven to be the exact opposite of what is taking place. The environment is more fucked than ever, and fixing to get even more so at a compound rate. Our labors have not ended and set us free; in fact more people are enslaved than ever before. And worst of all, instead of machines of loving grace we have ones of omnipresent authority that watch and kill all according to the dictates of the Oligarchy.
Although it is a very small comfort that at least a few people are willing to ruin the rest of their lives in order to leak the truth about the workings of the Empire, the fact that perhaps a million people were in a position to do so and have remained silent is far more telling. Not only does our modern era breed alienation, it has spawned a dependence on government and technology that will lead us deeper and deeper into the horrifying darkness of Corporate Fascism. I don't think we were tricked, nor were we forced. It came solely from our preference for safety and comfort over all else. All we had to do was ask the question that Juvenile did almost 2,000 years ago- QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES - Who will guard the guards themselves? The answer in our era is apparently no one. And the creepiest part is that the guards are now robots created to control the servile masses.
It seems a tragic truth that the lie, or perhaps myth, has become more prevalent than the truth. This most recent revelation that the NSA is monitoring every human on earth that they feasibly can has hardly made a ripple in the placid sea of complacency that is the American psyche. I'm not sure if people still buy into the whole terrorism argument as a justification for spying on our own people to a level that makes Hitler and Stalin's governments look like amateurs, or if they are just too busy consuming to read or care. Part of me has to wonder if it isn't all just for marketing purposes that the people in charge have decided to abolish privacy.
Of course it is the machines that do almost all of the actual snooping, just as the they have started to do a good deal of the governments killing. Richard Brautigan once wrote:
"I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace."
I would claim that his vision of the future has proven to be the exact opposite of what is taking place. The environment is more fucked than ever, and fixing to get even more so at a compound rate. Our labors have not ended and set us free; in fact more people are enslaved than ever before. And worst of all, instead of machines of loving grace we have ones of omnipresent authority that watch and kill all according to the dictates of the Oligarchy.
Although it is a very small comfort that at least a few people are willing to ruin the rest of their lives in order to leak the truth about the workings of the Empire, the fact that perhaps a million people were in a position to do so and have remained silent is far more telling. Not only does our modern era breed alienation, it has spawned a dependence on government and technology that will lead us deeper and deeper into the horrifying darkness of Corporate Fascism. I don't think we were tricked, nor were we forced. It came solely from our preference for safety and comfort over all else. All we had to do was ask the question that Juvenile did almost 2,000 years ago- QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES - Who will guard the guards themselves? The answer in our era is apparently no one. And the creepiest part is that the guards are now robots created to control the servile masses.
"Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor"
-Marx
