Surveillor Culture
The builders and operators of such systems as we describe here cannot help but develop an attitude of superiority. That such a situation is inherently dangerous has long been understood, and was most famously expressed by Lord Acton:
And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that. All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Furthermore, if Big Data does make scientific discoveries, it will leave them fully in the hands of organizations that are large and fascistic. That is not a good model for human thriving. Their information advantage will give these groups a material advantage, leading them to be become supremely confident in their systems, their positions of superiority, and the morality of whatever they do.
As noted earlier, the surveillor mindset is already with us, depersonalizing its targets and believing that their proper position is to rule over “little people.”
If this was happening while the demons were still being built, what shall we expect once they are complete, and these techniques are carried out, not slowly and expensively by hand, but with the press of a button?
This dominator mindset is already found at the highest levels of power. For example, Cass Sunstein, for some years the Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs has written openly about manipulating the information that average people (not elite like him) are allowed to see. In his book Nudge, he wrote this:
It is legitimate for choice architects to influence people's behavior.
These “choice architects” are people who control the types of choices that John and Jane Average are permitted to see. This idea has been promoted in high academic circles for some years now. The idea is that people are exposed to too many choices in the modern world, and that having to deal with them makes them nervous and unhappy. So, to help the poor dears, the elite will appoint “choice architects” to control what they are shown.
In a scholarly paper published in 2008, Sunstein promoted direct manipulation, to keep the minds of the little people unpolluted:
Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories.
Government can supply these independent experts with information and perhaps prod them into action from behind the scenes.
Again, if they are willing to do this when it is difficult to do, what can we expect when it requires only the strike of an Enter key?
The Short Step To Total War
Governments in the modern era have enjoyed nearly 100% compliance. Nearly every person in the West does whatever their government requires, and whenever they require it. This has continued long enough that government has become addicted to it. And that means that they will panic if they begin to lose it.
A meaningful level of non-compliance (and/or loss of legitimacy) occurred in the West as recently as the 1960s, when a variety of new influences (the birth control pill, among several others) created a powerful counter-culture movement; a movement that was initially opposed to power. In response, governments, even down to the city level, massively increased their use of surveillance. (Older Baby Boomers may remember this from personal experience.)
Any serious challenge to full compliance would likely elicit a “total war” level of response from government, and Big Data will almost certainly be their primary tool... provided its operators agree with the state's goals.
In the 1960s, surveillance (such as it was then) was followed by expensive and difficult efforts to manipulate non-compliant movements. In the era of Big Data, what follows non-compliance need be only the push of a button, launching attacks on their opponents, on a personal and psychological level.
Big Data's world would be tyranny, writ very, very large. Calling Big Data a demon may be too soft a term.
There are answers to the threat of Big Data, but they require average people to act heroically; to break the inertia that we mentioned earlier. Contrary to popular opinion, this has happened in the past and can certainly happen again. However, these actions, when they occur, will be demonized in public forums and punished excessively[27]. It will be the one existential threat to the new system.
It is to such a set of possibilities that we turn now.
8
Having Eyes That See Not
Man is not always blind.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
The words above are true, even if it doesn't seem like it. Humanity may be blind, willingly blind, for horrible lengths of time, but mankind is not always blind.
Our present culture – the loud, flashing, vapid cloud of noise and fear that surrounds us – not only promotes blindness toward anything outside itself, but requires blindness for its very continuance. And it has been terribly effective at maintaining itself.
Still, man is not always blind.
The West's current systems of rulership, we think the villagers should admit, require the populace to not see... to be too frightened and confused to admit that anything humane could exist outside the status quo. The system assumes that it will always enjoy massive societal inertia and full, automatic compliance... and it is not prepared to deal with changes to this basic condition.
Anyone who has spent time on the subject understands that if governance were sold to the public by reason, rather than by emotion (by fear, mainly), nothing beyond a minimal government could exist. Analysis of facts do not lead to endorsements of the massive political plans; factual analysis of the prognostications of politicians would yield embarrassing results; and how many “leaders” show integrity toward the promises they make before their elections?
For these and other reasons, devotion to the status quo may properly be deemed irrational. It is, if we are to be honest, a sort of cultured blindness.
And beyond all this, we know that humanity has deep problems related to fear, authority and dominance. Consider:
Solomon Asch's experiments in the 1950s showed that 75% of his subjects were willing to say that a clearly correct answer on a test was not the right answer, if other people said so first. (In the control group, with no pressure to conform, the error rate was less than 1%.) In other words, 75% of us are so afraid of other people’s opinions that we are willing to say the equivalent of, “Black is white.”
Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments showed that 65 percent of college students would administer a deadly electrical shock to another person, if ordered by authority to do so.
Phil Zimbardo's prison experiments showed how dominance is inherently (and shockingly) corrupting.
Furthermore, authority is anti-human, simply from a philosophical perspective:
We learn very early that authority is a thing to be accepted, not to be examined. But if we look at it directly, we see that authority is an outsourcing of our thinking. Once authority speaks, our mental processes stop, and we do as it directs. In other words, authority, to whatever degree we accept it, diminishes us. It also offers us cheap self-esteem by joining ourselves to it, thus locking us in place.
The appeal of authority is that it's easier to obey than to think, and especially if you're afraid to think... afraid to make choices and bear responsibility for them. If you hand your mind over to authority, nothing is ever “your fault.”
All of this has a very clear implication:
Authority makes us less conscious, less alive. It makes us morally and intellectually blind.
But regardless of all the above, we've all learned that fear is how things get done. Authority is the way reality is structured. Dominance is irrevocable human nature.
We all know these things; we learned them in childhood. They are, were, and ever shall be. More than that, they stand to become more pronounced under the persistent manipulation of Big Data.
And yet... man is not always blind.
Outside Does
Exist
Rome is gone; a possibility that seemed utterly inconceivable to the people of late antiquity. Indeed, millions of them required a century or more for the truth of it to sink in. But the great Rome did fall apart, and is gone.
Likewise the god-king pharaohs and a hundred other potentates. In their day, they all seemed as lasting as the hills; now they are faintly remembered as primitives, if at all. So it will also be with the high and mighty authorities of our time. Their crescendos of self-praise, like the godhood of Caesar, will fade into the night to be lost forever.
Every system, no matter how powerful it seems, has vulnerabilities, and foments its own opposition. And so, regardless of how far-reaching the new regime of networked power may be (and it is), it carries one great weakness: those who drop out of the system are nearly immune to it. Once the peak conformity of our time breaks – and eventually it will – the power of the networks will break with them.
As we noted earlier, networked power rests on the reflexive conformity of the populace. If people stop seeking loans from banks, they can forget about the credit rating agencies we used in our earlier example. If they use cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, they can forget the demands implicit in the use of banks, dollars and other financial structures[28]. If they homeschool their children, the status quo will be denied its greatest conduit to new minds. And if they use alternate means of communication, the system, including Big Data, runs dry of data and cannot manipulate them[29].
Salvation, then, comes by living outside the system. And for some time now, the best new theorists, whether by analysis or instinct, have been pushing in this direction. Various incarnations of Cypherpunks have been moving this way for a generation or so. Treatises on temporary autonomous zones and creating “second realms” have been circulating[30]. And quite a few people are using cryptography and anonymity technologies to throw sand in Sauron's eye... it's an available way to open some space and live an authentic life.
There is further a fundamental fact that is forgotten: The entire Western world rests – whether people realize it or not – on a foundation that glorifies breaks from the status quo and the forging of parallel paths. That, at the beginning, is precisely what Christianity was, and however much it has sold itself to the state, its roots go back to radicals breaking away from the great power of their day. The greatest expressions of that ideal come to us from the mouth of Jesus, including this one:
That which is highly esteemed among men is an abomination in the eyes of God.
Judaism was the start of this, of course, with its insistence that God speaks to the humble rather than the mighty, and the insistence that justice stands above the ruler.
These are Judeo-Christian fundamentals, and they remain, no matter how badly people are distracted with doctrines of the day and endless theological arguments. Furthermore, the world contains some 2.4 billion people who claim to care about these ideas. If and when they begin to turn from their usual doctrinal quagmires and return to their “not aligned with power” roots, the page turns.
Changes may be arriving already.
So, unity, order, networks of control and mass manipulation do have a Kryptonite: a moral and active counter-culture. The way to defeat the deep slavery of the 21st century is simply to separate from it. And the men and women of the West have an old background in that.
Tomorrow Is What We Make It
Those who stay plugged into the Matrix of networked power and Big Data will be living the life that serves the Matrix-keepers... using them for its own satisfactions. They'll be held in a devolutionary environment, surrounded 24/7 by devolutionary incentives... pretending all the while that they're free and enlightened.
Still, there is something in mankind that knows it's living an inauthentic life, and rebels against it.
As we finish this book, the men and women of the West seem to be cracking open their eyes. The elite class has overplayed their hand since 9/11 and assumed that blind compliance was eternal. Their reputations are declining.
Man may be an animal, but he is not only an animal, and he cannot be relied upon to love blindness forever.
About the authors
Jonathan Logan and Paul Rosenberg are principal operators of the Cryptohippie internet privacy service. (www.cryptohippie.com) They have been at the forefront of the battle for data privacy for more than a decade, being involved with data privacy and security on a daily basis.
Jonathan Logan started hacking at eight years old, when he cracked the copy protection on his cousin's computer. He got his own computer at thirteen, and obtained access to Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) and local ISPs by breaking into a neighborhood splitter. Soon he had his first job, writing BBS security software. Other computer security jobs followed. After some years in the military, university and apprenticeship, he became director of human resources for a software company, and in overlapping time periods built data haven, anonymization and VPN systems. Jonathan provides consultation to people who work in hostile environments, especially concerning communications. He is also a church musician.
Paul Rosenberg has been involved in technical fields since the 1970s. He worked in the construction industry since childhood, becoming a master electrician at 21 years old. He has written more than 50 books on construction and engineering, and hundreds of magazine articles. Paul has served as an expert witness in numerous legal cases and worked as a consultant to a number of organizations. He developed and taught 19 continuing education courses for Iowa State University’s College of Engineering. He also co-founded the Fiber Optic Association and wrote the first standard for the installation of optical fibers in buildings, ANSI/NECA 301. He has been involved with internet and cryptography projects since the 1990s. He is the author of A Lodging of Wayfaring Men, Production Versus Plunder, and The Breaking Dawn, as well as the Free-Man's Perspective newsletter.
* * *
[1] Nor to people who are almost fully powerless. They can be (and often are) abused without recourse.
[2] From his book, Propaganda.
[3] https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/3599#efmARJAWn
[4] February 27, 2011, Wikileaks Global Intelligence files, archive.today/sjxuG
[5] Facebook has 1.65 billion active users, who are extremely heavily surveilled. So, while we maintain that Facebook stands below Google in power and influence, it remains a very, very powerful organization, and a crucially important one to anyone in power.
[6] archive.today/V0fdG
[7] http://www.freemansperspective.com/governments-manipulate/
[8] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/everything-we-know-about-facebooks-secret-mood-manipulation-experiment/373648/
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
[10] See the 2003 documentary The Fog of War.
[11] http://www.freemansperspective.com/cryptohippies-response-to-the-nsas-attack-on-encryption/
[12]There is also the issue of plausible deniability.
[13]A prime example of this is “parallel construction,” by which the NSA leaks information to the DEA or FBI, who creates false and plausible provenances for that information.
[14]Which begs the question: Did they join with intel because they were successful, or did they become successful because they joined with intel?
[15]A euphemism for CIA headquarters, located in Langley, Virginia.
[16] Meaning assassinations.
[17] Vitali S, Glattfelder JB, Battiston S (2011) The Network of Global Corporate Control. PLoS ONE 6(10): e25995. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0025995
[18]By “legitimacy,” we mean the image of the ruler(s) as legitimate – an image that resides in the minds of the ruled and makes them willing to hand over their earnings with a minimum of resistance and grant the ruler(s) the right to initiate violence.
[19] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX0UTB-Foyc
[20]In June of 2008, issue 16.07
[21]Cloud refers here to thousands of remote and inte
rconnected computers, as in cloud computing.
[22]One petabyte is 1015 bytes of data, roughly equivalent to 300 million songs. The DNA sequences of every person in the United States could be stored on one half of a petabyte.
[23]Interview posted at George Washington's blog (http://www.washingtonsblog.com/), June 6, 2014
[24] A second reason is that it would provide far more financial data, upon which the systems of the 21st century thrive. The use of cash provides very little data.
[25] That's not always a bad thing, of course; it works very nicely in situations when we don't have much experience but can see patterns, or if we have to act fast.
[26]See God Wants You Dead, by Sean Hastings and Paul Rosenberg.
[27] Indeed they already have been punished excessively, as in the Ross Ulbricht case.
[28] The same would apply if they used silver and gold in daily trade.
[29] The mass surveillance model depends upon people venturing into the internet unprotected. If internet users began using encryption and anonymizing themselves regularly, both the free stuff business model and the Big Data mass surveillance model would crash.
[30] http://anarplex.net/hosted/files/secondrealm/
The New Age of Intelligence Page 7
