I strongly recommend a particularly thoughtful essay by sometime TomDispatch contributor John Feffer at the FPIF website. In it he proposes that we are living in a new construct, something new in our world involving both governmental and corporate surveillance and our own acquiescence in it -- what he calls participatory totalitarianism. Its a complex essay and I urge you to read it yourself. Here are just the final paragraphs. Tom If surveillance was monaural during the Cold War and became stereophonic in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, it is now quadrophonic. It can’t be reduced to the activity of a single state or even a particular government-industrial complex. We are all now embedded in a veritable matrix of surveillance. It has become surround sound. In the Communist era, Hungarian writer Miklos Haraszti wrote about what he called the velvet prison. Under state socialism, he observed, the vast majority of artists accommodated to the strictures imposed from above. We learn to live with discipline, he wrote. We are at home with it. It is a part of us, and soon we will hunger for it because we are unable to create without it. We are at home in the new surveillance state, for we barely register all the cameras, all the targeted advertising, all the intrusions into what had previously been considered sacred private space. We are not passive objects of observation. We are active subjects of our own YouTube channels. This is not inevitable. States like Germany and Brazil are fighting back. Organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation are fighting back. Whistleblowers and journalists are fighting back. So, perhaps when the next Year of the Snake rolls around and we are preparing to shed our skin once again, we will see a shift in the other direction—toward a new economy, a new kind of politics, a new definition of security, and a new way to interact with our fellow citizens that relies on mutual solidarity and not mutual surveillance. alternet.org/world/how-all-us-are-helping-build-participatory-totalitarianism?akid=11892.15725.SWWi-2&rd=1&src=newsletter1000331&t=7&paging=off¤t_page=1
Posted on: Sat, 07 Jun 2014 16:15:01 +0000
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