David Dorrell: Toward the Matrix
As we move towards a hyperintermediated digital future, David Dorrell combs through the entrails of popular cultural forms for clues to what the true social costs may be. Do we run the risk of creating a dystopian, Matrix-like world, as governments and corporations unite to mine the 'real world' for data, profits and control?
How Science Fiction is Building our Dystopian Reality
Agent Smith: Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization. - The Matrix (1999)
YOU’VE JUST WON A DELOREAN DMC-12. Not just any DeLorean but a real, time-traveling, Doc Brown-customized DeLorean. Where would you go if you could go back to the future? What era would you visit? If you found a time you liked would you ever bother coming back to ‘now’ and this precarious period?
The old order of things (for those of us that live in the notionally liberal democracies of what was once called the first world) is rapidly changing; once-strong economies teeter on the edge of collapse; social infrastructure, once the high-water mark of the social-democratic model, is (like the populations and tax base of those countries) both ageing and shrinking; employment is eroding in new and unforeseen ways; the exodus of jobs to ‘emerging economies’ continues apace; notions of stability and permanence are being challenged by new technologies and new practices. The great majority of us will work longer for less (if we have a job) and send more applications and receive more rejections if we don’t. If we are particularly unlucky (or lucky?) we will be forced to earn our state benefits by working for free (as is the case with the British Government’s recently introduced ‘Workfare’ schemes).
The political forecast looks bleak: Nationalism and the right are on the rise throughout Europe (and elsewhere); previously left-leaning countries such as Finland have seen the sudden emergence of a populist right wing (the anti-Euro True Finn party leapt from 4% of the vote to 19% of the vote at the last parliamentary election in 2011); in France Marine Le Pen of the Front National (FN) is more popular in polls than the incumbent socialist President, Francois Hollande. Meanwhile the struggling and straggling economies of the Mediterranean labour under the pejorative acronym PIGS; Spain and Greece bear witness to an infrastructural unemployment rate that is climbing toward 30%. In a growing number of regions within the European Union, youth unemployment sits nearer 50%.
Elsewhere things hardly look better: Millions take to the streets in Turkey to protest against a government that is seen as out of touch and autocratic only to be met by tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets. The sheen is taken off of the so-called BRICs as huge popular protests in Brazil are met with force; a neo-authoritarianism sweeps through Russia (and many of its former ‘satellite’ states) as does a reborn - and worrying - nationalism. India struggles to make sense of its newfound wealth, its endemic poverty – the future rubbing up against the past in a volatile fashion. China’s modern paradox of a One Party Free Market Authoritarian Communist Regime continues to grow.
The highly praised ‘progress’ of the Arab Spring has revealed itself to be a tangle of thorns rather than a blossoming of democracy; Egypt falls backward into another military coup whilst Syria weeps blood at the death of children, the rape of women, the murder of men. Iraq is a post invasion mess, Iran an embargoed pre-nuclear theocracy. Little (if anything) comes out of Bahrain or Saudi other than oil and oppression.
The United States, still the dominant force of our age, sits at the centre of a web of surveillance and state-sponsored terror, its drones raining death from above in the skies of Pakistan and East Africa, whilst in the ‘homeland’ they’re used to spy on the domestic populace. ‘Whistleblowers’ such as Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden are persecuted in their attempts to defend the 4th Amendment. Guantanamo Bay remains open despite Barack Obama’s election promise of closure: Inmates there remain on hunger strike, force fed against their will (and all common decency). Meanwhile the Pentagon sweeps global telecommunications to aid its war on terror with one eye whilst the other winks into existence new terrorists to work for it.
Monsanto, Big Pharma, climate change, fracking, the erosion of civil liberties, the spectre of totalitarianism, human trafficking, child slaves, enhanced interrogation, targeted killing… the list is endless: Was this the future we signed up for? How did we manufacture our consent to this dystopic ‘now’? What wheels have brought us to this lost highway? Why can’t we jump into our DMC-12 and drive our way back to a better future?
“Our images of past, present, and future are part of one superficial plane. All these images are thrown together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle laid out on the same flat table. We can combine them however we like. But we no longer even ask whether the pieces can all fit together. This means that we cannot understand our own situation in the present. So our images of our own situation also tend to be simulacra. We compare our experience to media images. We picture our lives to ourselves as if they were Hollywood movies or episodes in a TV series. All of this pseudo-reality persuades us that the flow of historical time doesn't have anything important to tell us. So we don't even try to locate ourselves in the context of history. We live as if the flow of time doesn't really affect us. Therefore we don't think much about how we could change society in any basic way in the future. Indeed we don't think too deeply about the future at all.” - Ira Chernus
We seem, as a species, on a collision course with a future that appears to have been conjured from our nightmares: Is this our “future” because we simply didn’t think about it hard enough? What are the roots of these dark dreams we have kindled into existence? The future used to seem so bright, so brave, so shiny. When I saw Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 (1968) as a child, it seemed to speak to me of a brave new world that lay just a few years ahead. Yet 2001 came and went – yes, there were “space stations” but the big news was more down to earth: We hadn’t escaped the past. It was medieval thinking that dominated the news on September 11th, 2001 when the past collided with the future at Ground Zero. Who could have predicted that terrorists would use passenger jets to fly into skyscrapers?
In fact, numerous people did (except – apparently - any of the strategists at the Pentagon): Stephen King (writing under the pseudonym Richard Bachman) suggested the scenario as long ago as 1982 in his novel The Running Man (though that scene never made it to the screen in the 1987 film adaptation starring Arnold Schwarzenegger). In King/Bachman’s book (set in 2025) the global economy has crashed and the US is a totalitarian dystopia. The protagonist, Ben Richards, has been blacklisted and can no longer find work and his wife has turned to prostitution to raise money for their sick daughter. In desperation Richards applies to the government-run TV station Games Network in the hope of appearing on the top rated reality TV show The Running Man. The show’s format is simple – the contestant is declared an enemy of the state and released with a 12-hour head start before the Hunters, an elite team of Network-employed assassins are sent out to kill him. Richards is chosen for the game where, if he manages to evade capture/death for 30 days, he will win 1 Billion New Dollars. In the final reckoning – and after discovering that Games Network have killed both his wife and child – Richards hijacks a passenger plane and flies it into the tower that is home to Games Network: The last lines of the book are “...and it rained fire twenty blocks away.”
We’ve seen it all before: So much of our recent past, present, and near future seems to have found a first exposition in fiction – particularly science fiction – that we seem to be heading toward a singularity of some kind, one where the divide between our (increasingly digital) reality and our fantasy would appear to merge together in some soon-to-appear event horizon. Whether this singularity is one that Raymond Kurzweil and his Transhumanist cohort would recognize is another thing entirely.
Science fiction as a genre has roots that extend back in to ancient history, finding early form in fantasy and fairy tales. Isaac Asimov (a giant within the field of science fiction) and American cosmologist, astrophysicist, writer and broadcaster Carl Sagan both considered Somnium by Johannes Kepler to be the first true work of science fiction. Somnium (Latin for dream), written between 1620 and 1630 and published posthumously in 1634, tells the tale of a student of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe transported to the moon by occult forces: Kepler was himself a disciple of and assistant to Brahe between 1600 and Brahe’s death in 1601 so the idea of the ‘student’ in the story may be considered self-referential. Soon after, he took a posting as a math teacher in Linz, Austria. It took three hundred and forty five years before science realised Kepler’s ‘dream’ and man finally landed on the moon, but the distance between science fiction and the future has telescoped over the last hundred years and ideas that one year are ‘fantastic’ are reality by the next.
In the same year that Kepler met Brahe (1600) developments in London were also weaving together dreams of the occult and science to create a new reality. On the 31st December 1600, Queen Elizabeth I of England granted charter to what is considered to be the first corporation, the East India Company. The East India Company finds its genesis in the Royal Exchange of London. This ‘Exchange’ - modeled on the beta version, the Dutch Bourse - is a place where merchants and their warehouses occupy a building which mingled together England's investment bankers and world explorers and where the Crown could regulate international exchange rates and control trade practices.
The need for the ‘Royal Exchange’ itself was born out of developments that stemmed from the English reformation during the rule of Elizabeth I’s father, King Henry VIII. Henry had broken off ties with the Catholic Church after being refused permission by Pope Clement VII to divorce his then wife Catherine of Aragon. This break from Rome and the establishment of the Church of England (via the first Act of Supremacy in 1534) set England on course to become a Protestant country and in doing so put the country at odds with the Vatican and most of Europe. England was also in poor health financially and considered “backwards” by its many enemies on the mainland. Yet this schism was to create a fertile breeding ground for new ideas. By the time Elizabeth ascended to the throne in 1558, England was emerging as the first truly modern nation: Free from the mind control of Rome and in need of money to develop a strong military force, the young queen (Elizabeth was only 24 years old when she took office) surrounded herself with the brightest minds in the Kingdom, men such as Sir Thomas Gresham, Sir Francis Bacon and John Dee.
Gresham rose to become one of the richest men in the Kingdom after manipulating international currency rates (imagine a mix of George Soros and James Bond). Bacon is generally considered to be the philosophical influence behind the dawning Industrial age, his book The New Atlantis can be read as a template for a ‘New World’ in North America, and he is cited as the father of ‘empiricism’ and ‘experimental science’ (Thomas Jefferson considered him amongst the three greatest men to have ever lived). Dee was a mathematician, astronomer, occultist and imperialist – who strenuously promoted Elizabeth’s dominion over North America and was the visionary of a British Empire stretching across the North Atlantic.
Theirs was a radical mix of thinking, marrying leading edge science and the dark arts; Dee who was a master cryptographer, used a black Aztec mirror made of obsidian for ‘scrying’ (the art of divination), and spent most of his time trying to communicate with ‘Angels’ (the Tudor equivalent of the iPhone 5 and Siri?). It is out of this mix of devastatingly bright minds, of new thinking and old ideas, economics and alchemy that the corporation is summoned into existence. As we shall see the corporation employs us as its avatars (and is ultimately a redrawing of our relationship with the Godhead and an abstract of Deleuze’s idea of the body without organs)[1]. Perhaps these first successful breaks with the See of Rome and ideas of ‘Divine Right’ created the ground upon which - only a few hundred years later - Nietzsche’s would announce the ‘death’ of God and the birth of the modern atheist mind-set. If so it also created the breach and vacuum that would eventually be filled by a much darker ‘creation’ of men’s minds…
“Question #1: What would you call beings which (a) don't have physical bodies, (b) seem relatively crafty, and (c) appear to be immortal? A tulpa, a djinn, or a familiar? Ghosts? Spirits? Gods? Demons? How about corporations?” - Paco Xander Nathan, Corporate Metabolism
In his essay Corporate Metabolism Paco Xander Nathan dissects the roots and growth of corporations, describing them as a kind of “organism living in media”; in tracing their development from “alchemy to autopoiesis” he examines the mark left by these Elizabethan masterminds on the growth of the corporate mindset: “Consider how these essential elements for corporate strategy were applied from the earliest period: espionage for acquiring technology, information management, externalization of risk as an incentive for investors, factories and shopping malls, international trade, currency arbitrage, colonial governance, military ties, and even branding. These elements became standard practice within the first two years of corporate history. After four centuries of dramatic growth, the corporate form persists strikingly similar today.” (emphasis added) Is it possible, that in these star-crossed births of science fiction and corporations at the beginning of the 17th century we can perceive the birth of thinking that would gradually bring us to where we are today in this malevolent, black mirrored, pre-Skynet world of drones and failed utopianism?
“…we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex …we recognize the imperative need for this development ...the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist ...Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.” - President Dwight Eisenhower
“We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.” - G.B. Shaw
Paco Xander suggests that the success of the East India Company “becomes an essential key to establishing the military industrial complex called the British Empire.” This now well-worn phrase - military industrial complex - found its birth in the final televised Address to the Nation of President Eisenhower but has found new appeal in the post-9/11, post-Occupy world where the collusion between Government and companies such as Halliburton and Xe (formerly Blackwater) has led to any notion of a reasonable and secure (i.e. safe for the public) division between the military and the corporate world almost meaningless. Almost as meaningless as Barack Obama’s talk of ‘100% Security.’ (A recent cartoon in that bastion of balance and soft satire, The New Yorker, nailed that lie succinctly. It shows an old couple sitting on a sofa in front of a television and the caption reads, “I don’t mind giving up the appearance of privacy to live with the illusion of safety.”)
This militarization of the State is nothing new – from Sparta to Prussia, Stalin’s USSR to the Kim Jongs’ Korea – but this new order of things within Western democracies today smacks of the sinister usurpation of hard-won ‘freedoms’ (including the plebiscite itself) and exposes democracy as a sham and the ascendancy (particularly in the USA) of martial law by stealth. Under the umbrella of ‘homeland security’ (with its coalition of 187 federal departments and private corporate bodies) the American government has initiated the construction of potentially the greatest instrument of social repression in history; via the USA PATRIOT Act 2001 (with its ridiculous bacronym of ‘Uniting (and) Strengthening America (by) Providing Appropriate Tools Required (to) Intercept (and) Obstruct Terrorism Act); the National Security Agency’s (NSA) PRISM and Boundless Informant programmes; the use of drones for domestic surveillance; the drift of power to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA); the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) with its extra-judicial powers and secret courts.
FISA, along with the NSA, present a clear and present danger not just for the liberty of American citizens but also for every person on the planet. They are the long arm of Washington and the Pentagon; mandated to perform their functions on a global level they appear to respect no border as they pursue threats to the US and its interests (which one begins to suspect is ‘everyone, everything, everywhere’). Armed with lethal drones, unregulated and unparalleled surveillance abilities, Special Forces units on the ground, sinister policies such as ‘extraordinary rendition’ and the newly revealed kill list that is the ‘disposition matrix’ (Google it and add your name to a no doubt growing list of evidence that you too are a potential ‘threat’ to Pax Americana 2.0). This is an Empire with a truly global ‘reach.’
To put it another way – if we have become the enemy of the state, is the state now our enemy? The question then remains: who are the players in the game? Are there really two sides to the issue or is the situation more complicated than it first appears? As we enter a new wave of digital immersion from wearable items such as Google Glass and ‘activity trackers’ such as Jawbone Up, to the proposed chipping of US soldiers (offering them Wifi, Bluetooth and FM radio directly into their cerebellum) we must confront an awful truth: every time we tick a box agreeing to terms and conditions we are helping to build a form of digital Sharia for ourselves. We are undeniably and strangely complicit in this Winston Smith moment – and like the anti-hero of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, we too love Big Brother. This future has no opt-out notice. As things stand today, once you have committed to a corporate digital world you have chosen to opt in... permanently.
We now face some hard choices: Accept the fact that Google, Microsoft, Apple et al are in bed with the Pentagon and that everything you do in the digital realm is available for review, or, if you are uncomfortable with the prospect of becoming so much ‘data,’ find a way to detach from it. (On the surface of it the latter seems unlikely, though not impossible: As the BBC recently reported, the Kremlin has just ordered thousands of Euros of electric typewriters; “typewriters were already being used at Russia's defence and emergencies ministries for drafts and secret notes, and some reports had been prepared for President Vladimir Putin by typewriter.” Old tech is threatening to be the new tech of International espionage.)
Certain people, say Transhumanists and ‘Internet’ evangelists (and possibly Mark Zuckerberg), may sneer at such ‘backward’ thinking, believing rather that as we approach the dreamed-of singularity all these tricksy issues will be ironed out at the moment we merge permanently with the machine. The mathematician John von Neumann first suggested the singularity as a point “beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue” in the mid-fifties. Raymond Kurzweil, the scientist and Transhumanist proselytizer, has posited a date for this momentous event at 2045 based on his interpretation (or ‘misinterpretation,’ as many have pointed out) of Moore's Law. The science fiction writer Vernor Vinge has suggested a date of 2030.
Whether thirty-two years away or a mere seventeen, the thought of becoming something akin to one of Star Trek’s Borg dancing away to Kurzweil’s Pied Piper is not exactly appealing (I for one like being human) – and certainly not appealing at all if the world is allowed to continue on its current course. Indeed there would appear to be a distinct lack of science fiction that paints anything but a bleak image of such a fusion of the human species and the AI (and the other necessary technological breakthroughs) that will be required for such a transcendental upgrade of humanity; from Tron to Doctor Who’s Cybermen the outcome (as is nearly always the case in history) of a meeting between a technologically superior civilization and a technologically inferior one is that the former generally wipes out the latter.
THE FEEDBACK LOOP: SIGNAL TO NOISE
Detroit, once the fourth-largest city in the United States and the literal ‘engine’ of the American Dream, is a city in freefall. Its original fortune was based on it being the centre of the world’s automobile industry; it was Motor Town - ‘Mo-town’/Motown: Welcome to the post-Industrial Mad Max world. Whilst still the thirteenth-largest city in the US, today it is also a decaying wreck, a derelict version of its former civic glory. In this bankrupt metropolis its citizens wait 58 minutes for the police to respond to calls (compared to a national average of 11 minutes); only a third of ambulances were in service in the first quarter of 2013. There are approximately 78,000 abandoned buildings in the city. The unemployment rate had nearly tripled since 2000 and the homicide rate was at its highest level in 40 years.
It is exactly this type of scenario that serves as the backdrop to the film RoboCop (1987). Director Paul Verhoeven and writers Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner imagined a 2015 version of Detroit that is on the edge of social, physical and moral collapse. The ‘defence contractor’ mega-corporation Omni Consumer Products (OCP) enters into a contract with the city to run the police force. OCP plans to demolish “Old Detroit” and redevelop it as a high-end utopia called “Delta City.” Mortally wounded during a botched attempt to arrest a local crime ‘boss’ in an abandoned steel mill, veteran police officer Alex J. Murphy (Peter Weller) becomes the ‘test subject’ for OCP’s secret ‘cyborg police’ project – Robocop. (Neumeier claims his inspiration for the film came to him after walking by a poster for Bladerunner (a film in which a human cop kills androids/robots becomes creatively ‘flipped’ into the concept of a ‘robot’ cop who kills humans – a RoboCop).
The film plays with issues of memory (the RoboCop/man-machine Murphy has flashbacks to its/his pre-mechanical human origins), corruption (the senior vice president of OCP is in league with the local crime boss), the dangers of unchecked capitalism (is there any other kind?), identity and notions of ownership and ‘property’ (both buildings and ‘humans’). It also plays with other (more ancient) tropes, such as self-determination, the individual against the system and creation myths (the RoboCop is programmed so that it will not attack any one working for its maker, Omni Consumer Products). In other ways it is also a very modern film (a remake is set for release in 2014 though the ‘action’ has now been ‘future-shifted’ to 2028). All things considered that may be an almost unnecessary temporal shift if, as I suggest, we are witnessing the inexorable rise of a Police State, in which case RoboCop’s original 2015 setting may still be apt. Police forces everywhere are increasingly mechanized – armed with state-of-the art lethal and ‘non-lethal’ weaponry, from the Taser for ‘one-to-one’ situations, to acoustic and microwave cannons for crowd ‘control’ and dispersal. In many ways the police are already quasi-cyborg and the speed with which military armaments are channeled to ‘civilian’ forces appears to be increasing exponentially. ‘Real’ Robocops may be on the street any day now.
RoboCop’s director, Paul Verhoeven (perhaps best known for the 1990 film Total Recall, his adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale) also directed Starship Troopers (1997), an adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s novel of the same name (first published in 1959). Heinlein’s story of a future Earth involved in an interstellar war with giant ‘arachnoid’ entities referred to simply as ‘the bugs’ has been variously criticized as both ‘fascistic’ and advocating ‘militarism.’ Whilst the film certainly plays with these themes – Verhoeven claims to have stolen the opening sequence ‘shot for shot’ from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935)[2] – it also satirises them (and, one suspects, Heinlein himself).
Some of Heinlein’s ideas such as soldiers in powered ‘exoskeletons’ (shades of RoboCop) have been co-opted and researched by defence contractors in the US and its social themes – only ‘citizens’ who have signed up for ‘Federal Service’ are allowed to vote or hold office (a nod to Sparta, perhaps, though Heinlein claimed Switzerland was his ‘model’) – have also had an impact on thinking within the States. His is the first science fiction novel to have appeared on the reading lists at three of the five United States military branches and the military has certainly appropriated many of Heinlein’s ideas – when Starship Troopers was written the US Army was a predominantly ‘conscripted’ army whereas now it is an all-volunteer, high-tech strike force very similar to Heinlein’s vision in the book. As things in the USA edge slowly toward the bankrupt dystopia of, say, RoboCop, with its fascistic melding of police state and corporatism, how long will it be before the vote itself is restricted to only those that have served loyally or ‘behaved well’ (according to some remote, unfeeling algorithm)?
Things often come full circle: Plato described a self-eating, circular being as the first living thing in the universe — an immortal, mythologically constructed entity.
“The living being had no need of eyes because there was nothing outside of him to be seen; nor of ears because there was nothing to be heard; and there was no surrounding atmosphere to be breathed; nor would there have been any use of organs by the help of which he might receive his food or get rid of what he had already digested, since there was nothing which went from him or came into him: for there was nothing beside him. Of design he created thus; his own waste providing his own food, and all that he did or suffered taking place in and by himself.”
The mythical Ouroboros is often represented as a snake eating its own tail: A closed system. A modern version of Plato’s beast would be the Human Centipede, that much-discussed grotesquerie of recent film history in which an evil surgeon’s human victims are ‘sewn’ together - ass to mouth - in a circle of vomit-inducing horror; a new circle of hell. It’s an image so powerful that it found a home in that eviscerator of popular culture: the cult satirical US cartoon series South Park. When we scratch the surface of satire we discover uncomfortable truths: What exactly is revealed to us when South Park meets the Human Centipede? In the episode HUMANCENTiPAD South Park stalwart Kyle Broflovski unwittingly agrees to become a part of a “Human CENTiPAD” after failing to read the full details of an Apple user license agreement. As a metaphor for our individual relationship with corporations (whether outside of the corporate entity or as shareholders/workers within it) we can see here a form of Hegelian sublation (aufheben): We actively support the activities of corporations by ceding to them control of our data. We become slaves to the machine.
WE ARE ALL TAMAGOTCHIS NOW: FROM FARMVILLE TO ANIMAL FARM
As evidence of the fact that we are being trained by corporations to be perfect consumer pets (much as in The Human Centipede, where the evil surgeon attempts to ‘train’ his successfully conjoined ‘creation’) we need only look to some recent developments in the use of data mining of social networks and the parallel development of nation-states ‘selling on’ once ‘private’ data to establish closer ties between the public sector and the private sector. In 2012 Schufa, Germany’s largest credit rating service, started to use information mined from Facebook and other social networks to establish the credit-worthiness of individuals; the public outcry was such that the university handling the research end of the project was forced to bow out and Schufa themselves publically backed away from the idea. But that hasn’t stopped other credit agencies looking at your data, as was reported in The Economist recently:
“…within a year there will be enough evidence to determine if making racist comments on Facebook is correlated with a lack of creditworthiness.
“Facebook data already inform lending decisions at Kreditech, a Hamburg-based start-up that makes small online loans in Germany, Poland and Spain. Applicants are asked to provide access for a limited time to their account on Facebook or another social network. Much is revealed by your friends, says Alexander Graubner-Müller, one of the firm’s founders. An applicant whose friends appear to have well-paid jobs and live in nice neighbourhoods is more likely to secure a loan. An applicant with a friend who has defaulted on a Kreditech loan is more likely to be rejected.
“An online bank that opens in America this month will use Facebook data to adjust account holders’ credit-card interest rates. Based in New York, Movenbank will monitor messages on Facebook and cut interest rates for those who talk up the bank to friends. If any join, the referrer’s interest rate will drop further. Rates and fees will also drop if account holders spend prudently. Efforts [are underway] to define customers ‘in a richer, deeper fashion.’”
In a world of consumer ‘targeting’ (has there ever been anything good about that term as it applies to ‘people’?) and personalized advertising, where once you ‘searched’ for ‘things’ but are now ‘discovered’ via ‘autonomous search’ algorithms (from operating the spotlight to being caught in the spotlight), where we are being trained to ‘sit up and beg,’ what becomes of self-determination and free will? Will it become nothing more than a vague memory? Or was it always an illusion anyway?
Morpheus: The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. Neo: What truth? Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind. - The Matrix (1999)
As we spew data via our membership of social networks, post selfies, update our status, tweet our reactions and post shots we may later regret, we are, perhaps unconsciously, building our own digital cell: What Internet entrepreneur Robert Young has called “…a parallel universe of digital identities.” And it’s not just the impending ‘self-betrayal’ of the social networks we need fear – governments too are colluding in shaping your life in ways that would have been impossible (and even illegal) just a few years ago. Take the recent decision by Prime Minister David Cameron to open up what were once private National Health Service (NHS) medical records to companies such as Google. As the group Genewatch noted in its recent report, ‘A DNA Database in the NHS: Your Freedom Up for Sale?’, “[t]he plan is to make NHS medical records and people’s genetic information available to commercial companies and to use public-private partnerships to build a system where all private information about every citizen is also accessible to the police, social workers, security services and government.”
As we all become a file of readily available ‘1's & 0's’ tracked incessantly by algorithms that show no compassion or understanding for ‘Life 1.0,’ our ‘atomic’ self slowly loses meaning and substance within this uncompromising grid. It is as if we have a wasting disease of some kind, what used to be called ‘consumption’ up until the end of the 19th century. It is worth noting that the word ‘consumption’ first appeared in the 14th century to describe any potentially fatal wasting disease, that is, any condition that ‘consumed’ the body. (The word ‘consumer’ found its genesis around the same time and had the meaning ‘to squander’ - i.e. to waste.) By 1815, at the near peak of the dark Industrial Age, one of four deaths in England was attributed to consumption. By 1839 the disease had been categorized and renamed tuberculosis by J.L. Schönlein.
Is there a better description of capitalism than ‘a wasting disease’ and one that now in its new, mutated end literally seeks to ‘consume’ the body? It is also worth noting that in the same year (1882) that Dr. Robert Koch identified the bacterium responsible for tuberculosis, Edison flipped the switch to the first commercial electrical power plant in history, lighting one square mile of lower Manhattan: This is considered by many as the dawning of the Electrical Age. It is precisely at this point that the ‘old consumption’ morphs into a new identity – consumerism – and the ‘Age of Consumption’ is born: The dark twin to the ‘let there be light’ moment of Edison…
“You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.” - Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (emphasis added)
“…[T]he modest encroachments on privacy that are involved in getting phone numbers or duration without a name attached and not looking at content, that, on net, it was worth us doing. Some other folks may have a different assessment of that. But I think it’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100% security. And then also have 100% privacy, and zero inconvenience. We’re going to have to make some choices as a society.” - Barack Obama
“Better that right counsels be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace.” - Baruch Spinoza, A Political Treatise
In director Tony Scott’s spy-thriller Enemy of the State (1998), Will Smith plays the part of labour lawyer Robert Clayton Dean. Dean inadvertently comes into the possession of evidence exposing the NSA’s involvement in the assassination of Congressman Phil Hammersley (Jason Robards), who has vigorously opposed the passage of new legislation aimed at dramatically expanding the surveillance powers of the US intelligence agencies. Once it is discovered by the NSA that Dean has footage of the assassination on a computer disc, he is put under surveillance. When the surveillance fails to unearth the ‘evidence,’ the NSA falsely incriminate Dean of passing ‘classified information’ to an ex-girlfriend and both his private life and public life are destroyed; his wife throws him out of the family home, he is fired from his job and his bank accounts are frozen. Dean has become an ‘enemy of the state’ and the ‘state’ (in this case the NSA, personified here by Jon Voight’s rogue officer Thomas Reynolds), believing itself ‘above the law,’ brings its full might into play in attempt to crush and if necessary eliminate the individual/citizen.
Much is made in the film of the NSA’s then-operational surveillance system ECHELON - a signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection and analysis network developed to spy on Russia and its allies during the 1960s on behalf of the five signatories - Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States - of the UKUSA Security Agreement (it’s referred to variously in memos as ‘Five Eyes’ and AUSCANNZUKUS).
Aiding Dean in his evasion of capture is a character called Brill, an ‘ex-NSA operative’ played by Gene Hackman, who appears to be reprising his role in the cult spying and surveillance film, The Conversation (1972). As Brill tells Dean, “The government's been in bed with the entire telecommunications industry since the forties. They've infected everything. They get into your bank statements, computer files, email, listen to your phone calls... Every wire, every airwave. The more technology used, the easier it is for them to keep tabs on you. It's a brave new world out there. At least it'd better be.”
Back in the ‘real’ world a committee of the European Parliament concluded in a report published 2001 that “ECHELON was capable of interception and content inspection of telephone calls, fax, e-mail and other data traffic globally through the interception of communication bearers including satellite transmission, public switched telephone networks (which once carried most Internet traffic) and microwave links.”
THIS STATEMENT IS FALSE: ENTER THE PARADOX
“Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all. The pretense that corporations are necessary to the better government of the trade is without foundation.” - Adam Smith (emphasis added)
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing it, doesn’t go away.” - Philip K. Dick
Enemy of the State came out some three years before the committee’s report and three years before Congress gave the NSA greater powers of surveillance via the Patriot Act (which bears an uncanny resemblance to the legislation muted in the film). With this in mind, the feigned ‘surprise’ and indignation of current European leaders to the disclosure in June of the NSA's PRISM and Boundless Informant programs by Edward Snowden seems at best bad acting and at worst a guileless attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of the public: we’ve ‘seen the movie’ – and (at least for now) we can read the report.
Should we therefore take at face value Angela Merkel’s post-Snowden suggestion that the uncharted territory of “the internet” enabled the “enemies” of a free and liberal order “to use it, to abuse it, to bring a threat to all of us, to threaten our way of life”? Who are these “enemies” we can ask and who is the collective “our” she refers to? Are we all now ‘enemies of the state’? Is Merkel’s ‘our’ comprised of us, ‘we, the people’? Or is her ‘our’ those complicit in the carrying out of surveillance on behalf of that ‘state within a state’ - the intelligence services - and those that allow this seemingly un-regulated monitoring of our communications? That group, our elected officials, potentially includes Mrs. Merkel, for as Thomas Oppermann, chief whip for the German SPD is quoted as saying, “Either Merkel knew a lot more than she was letting on – or she knew nothing. Both cases would be a scandal.”
But are we really expected to believe that the German Chancellor (along with the collected heads of the European Union countries and other ‘American allies’) knew nothing of PRISM? If that seems unlikely, then we are forced to conclude that when Merkel and Obama got together recently to discuss these ‘revelations’ in Berlin we were witnessing nothing more than an orchestrated charade – as if we’d walked in on our parents mid-fuck, the bedclothes patted down, clothing re-arranged; ‘nothing to see here,’ so to speak.
Is it possible now to just close the door and forget what we’ve seen, to continue our lives whilst juggling some Orwellian ‘doublethink’ in our minds; we saw it but we didn’t see it? If we do, will we have finally succumbed to ‘policing’ ourselves? The ‘doublethink’ of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is the method by which ‘Big Brother’ directly controls thought: if we open our minds to it now we will have betrayed ourselves… and once the ‘policeman’ is within, how long before we must also torture ourselves, violate ourselves and in the digital world ‘frape’ ourselves in ever more degrading ways? We have something growing inside us: what it is will almost certainly define the future of our species, for better or for worse.
TOWARD THE MATRIX: BODY OF LIES
“Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.” - Blade Runner (1982)
“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” - Benjamin Franklin
Blade Runner was a critical success but a commercial disappointment on its release; now it is considered by many critics as one of the most important and influential science fiction films of the twentieth century. Yet Scott’s next step wasn’t a film but a commercial referencing Fritz Lang’s Metroplis, this time channeled through the totalitarian dystopia of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Row upon row of what look like the inmates of a Gulag stare obediently at the looming televised face of Big Brother on the vast screen suspended above them. From behind them, a blonde young woman dressed in orange shorts and a white singlet enters the frame. She is being pursued by para-military police and carries a sledgehammer in her hands as she runs toward the screen. Big Brother continues to spout nonsense ideology at the ‘slaves’ below. Emblazoned on her vest is the image of a computer: an Apple Macintosh. The Aryan-looking athlete hurls the hammer into the screen, destroying Big Brother. Apple had arrived to save us all from conformity; a ‘new voice’ now promised to show us ‘why 1984 won’t be like 1984.’
The commercial – perhaps unsurprisingly called 1984 – had its one daytime airing during Super Bowl XVIII on January 22nd, 1984; it is credited as having changed how Super Bowl would be used as a media advertising platform. Whether three decades later it is shown to row upon row of wage-slaves in the mega-factories of China’s industrial hinterlands is unknown (though if it were the irony would not be lost on any good Marxist-Communist).
Of course now it is Apple that is increasingly seen as a totalitarian regime: The iron fist in the finely tooled i-glove; the walled gardens; the endless releases, commands and ‘updates;’ the questionable business ethics. The latest round of advertising from Apple makes much of its ‘design,’ its aesthetic philosophy, its intentions, how these come together and ‘enhances each life it touches,’ as if Apple sought nothing more than to create a world of (in the words of R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe) ‘shiny, happy people.’ And then came PRISM. Apple’s (forced?) collaboration with the NSA has taken a huge bite out of its credibility.
Rumours of the Pentagon’s involvement in Silicon Valley are as old as the hills that surround it. And the rumour mill has long held that DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) funded many Silicon Valley start-ups - including Microsoft - and that the Pentagon had a back-door ‘key’ into Office, the world’s most prevalent business programme, effectively making it the world’s most powerful weapon of industrial espionage. Of course all this may be myth, but there is no doubt that the United States’ desire for global hegemony and a new era of Pax Americana extends throughout the world through its corporations. As long ago as the 1990s, British journalist Duncan Campbell and New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager asserted that the United States was exploiting ECHELON traffic for industrial espionage, rather than military and diplomatic purposes and cited numerous evidences. What’s to stop the Pentagon extending its reach by utilizing the Patriot Act to coerce corporations into supplying ‘information’? After all, the US newspaper the Baltimore Sun reported in 1995 that European aerospace company Airbus lost a $6 billion contract with Saudi Arabia in 1994 after the US National Security Agency reported that Airbus officials had been bribing Saudi officials to secure the contract.
As the eminent American literary critic and Marxist political theorist Frederic Jameson has opined, “this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror.”
From the suicides of Chinese workers at factories making i-somethings to drone attacks on civilians runs an increasingly visible thread. The NSA logged 2.3 billion phone conversations and email messages from Americans in the United States in January 2013 alone – a substantial number of which must have been culled from metadata supplied (possibly under duress and the rule of certain dubious laws pertaining to FISA and the Patriot Act) by the likes of Apple, Verizon and Microsoft. What no one other than the Pentagon knows is the scale of the operation: if the figure given is what they’re collecting within the USA per month, how many bytes of the ‘Apple’ are they taking from overseas?
If Edward Snowden is to be believed, then the post-ECHELON world is not solely an American construct: Tempora is the name he has given to the clandestine electronic surveillance program that the British have been operating since 2011 out of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ, as it is commonly referred to in the media). Snowden claims that the two principal elements of Tempora are called “Mastering the Internet” and “Global Telecoms Exploitation” and he has suggested that, if anything, GCHQ is producing more metadata than the NSA - luckily for the Americans, their trusted ally ‘shares’ the data obtained.
The information swept up by Tempora is said to include recordings of telephone calls, the content of email messages, Facebook entries and the personal internet history of users: it is all-pervasive, all-consuming. Perhaps then we should not be surprised that the recent Washington Post profile of General Keith B. Alexander, the director of the NSA, had the headline “For NSA chief, terrorist threat drives passion to ‘collect it all,’ observers say”; the same story also carries the corollary of this “collecting” in the form of a warning from former NSA operative and ‘whistleblower’ Thomas Drake, who suggests that the continuation of General Alexander’s policies would lead to the ‘complete evisceration of our civil liberties.’ Should we simply accept the fact that the trans-national abrogation of our civil rights, of our privacy, by unknown, unelected groups is the new status quo? And if we accept this – this non-election of watchers to watch over us during the endless war on ‘Terror’ – are we admitting that we are all, by default, terrorists? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Microsoft’s recent advertising campaign in the UK bears the legend Some things you’ll share online – some things maybe not. In light of Snowden’s revelation it’s unlikely to withstand much scrutiny from the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), the country’s independent regulator of advertising. We are all transparent now and the complicity of software and hardware manufacturers, phone companies, ISPs, cable companies et al in the State’s harvesting and sifting of our on-line selves is equally laid bare. We have become limpid to those watching, yet we can also see their nakedness. Have both ‘sides’ entered a staring contest where the loser is the one who blinks first?
Footnotes:
[1] French philosopher Gilles Deleuze coined the phrase 'body without organs' in his The Logic of Sense (1969) and expanded on its original meaning in later works with Félix Guattari. Whilst the term is perhaps now 'overloaded' with meaning/s, with regard to my intentions above I refer to it as meaning a 'deeper reality underlying some well-formed whole constructed from fully functioning parts' (source wikipedia).
[2] Riefenstahl's Triumph des Willens is considered one of the great propaganda movies. It documents the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg and intersperses footage of speeches given by Nazi Party members (including Adolf Hitler) with footage of the massed ranks of Nazi supporters (some 700,000 were in attendance).
What do you think?
How far are you willing to let governments and corporations infiltrate into our daily lives?
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