Get the Flock Out of Here

Authored by Charles Hugh-Smith via oftwominds,

The government gets the privately collected data and in return dismantles or disables the guardrails that once protected the public from state and private-sector encroachments on privacy.

One of the core traits of a 1984-type totalitarian dystopia is 24/7 surveillance of every prisoner, oops, I mean citizen. Surveillance collects the data that leverages the tools of control: without surveillance, the structures of control do not have the data needed to monitor, track and control the populace in a profitably fine-grained manner.

As I have endeavored to explain, surveillance is no longer the unique purview of the central state; it has been fully privatized for profit by Big Tech and Corporate America, creating a vast, sprawling structure of control I call Privatized Totalitarianism as the mechanisms of data collection and profiting from this data collection are privately owned but the data is for sale to anyone, including government agencies of every stripe.

We thus have a hybrid mix of public and private control structures. The government (with a monopoly on force and declaring what’s legal) has its systems and tools to collect data on the citizenry, and corporations (platforms, monopolies, quasi-monopolies, cartels) have their privately owned and operated “black box” systems and tools to collect data on the citizenry.

Both profit when the privately harvested data is shared with the government. The government gets the privately collected data and in return dismantles or disables the guardrails that once protected the public from state and private-sector encroachments on privacy.

In a centralized system in which power and wealth are concentrated in the hands of the few, everyone in power benefits from this cozy marriage of corporate and state exploitation of data collected by surveillance and whatever is conducted or transacted online, which together increasingly includes every aspect of daily life.

Whatever is digitized can be collected and sold, whatever is surveilled “for our own good” can be harvested and sold, and whatever is sold becomes a means of control.

When it comes to data collection, the more data collected, the greater the profits and the means of control. It’s important to note here that the control structures of Privatized Totalitarianism differ from the rigid enforcement of tradition state-totalitarianism, where no dissent is allowed.

In the marriage of self-serving State and Privatized Totalitarianism, a narrow band of ultra-processed, i.e. carefully curated and controlled “debate” and “dissent” is not just allowed, it’s constantly lauded as “proof” of our “free markets” and “liberty”, in the same way a starchy, grease-soaked, heavily sweetened goo dyed orange is lauded as a “healthy veggie snack.”

Ultra-Processed Life (book)

In both cases, the fake facsimile is highly profitable but destructive over the long term. The individual who falls prey to the ultra-processed snack become ill, and the society that falls prey to the fake facsimile of a “marketplace of ideas freely debated” also weakens to the point of collapse.

In other words, as long as the public dialog remains corralled within the sterile, dead-end “debates” of obsolete, divisive and distracting cliches–left vs. right, socialist vs capitalist, blah-blah-blah–then the centralized concentrations of power and wealth can enjoy watching the peasantry toil away from their castles on the hill, amused by how easy it is to maintain the one-sided status quo with a managed spectrum of phony “debate” and 24/7 data collection and surveillance–all sold as “for our own good.”

Who Will Solve Our Real Problem–The US is a Neofeudal Autocracy

So cameras on every lightpole–for our own good. Cameras above every doorway: for our own good. Drones monitoring traffic: for our own good. Data collected by platforms, Big Box store cameras in the parking lots, and so on: all for our own good.

All to serve you better. Indeed. To serve humans. This reminds us of the classic 1962 episode of The Twilight Zone TV series To Serve Man, in which an alien race visits Earth claiming to bring “peace and prosperity” via their program “to serve man”, which turns out to be a plan to harvest humans as edibles.

We’re being consumed, too, by Privatized Totalitarianism, along with our democracy and liberty. Consider the digitization-enabled surveillance of vehicles I touched upon in Driving Big Brother.

As a thought experiment, let’s go through getting in your car to attend a community meeting. Our new car is a wonder of technology. Yowza! Unbeknownst to us, much of this digital technology is not visible. Neither are the cameras, drones, etc.

While fiddling with the “entertainment”/audio features, we miss our signal turn, and since there’s no other traffic around, we brake hard, pull a quick U-turn and exceed the speed limit to make the meeting on time. The meeting is being held by the Stop Surveillance Now Coalition (SSNC), and it’s being held at a public space rented for the evening. We’re attending because we’re concerned about the steady erosion of privacy and the increasing potential for abuses of power as all this data is sold / distributed without our knowledge or consent.

When one speaker mentions the recent spate of privately installed and operated security cameras being destroyed in “monkey-wrench” fashion, the audience cheers.

The following day, our auto insurance is canceled, the IRS notifies us we’re being audited for the first time in our lives, and the FBI pays us a visit regarding sedition, destruction of private property and various other criminal activities. Hmm, why this sudden truckload of punishments, public and private, being heaped on us?

It’s all legal, because remember, in a Neofeudal Autocracy, what’s moral is what’s legal, and what’s legal is for sale (per analyst Simons Chase) So it’s not just legal, it’s also moral and therefore righteous, because, heh, it’s for our own good. To serve humans. (Yum, you look like a tasty snack!)

Then there’s the marketing onslaught that clutters our inbox as soon as the sun rises. Oh, the irony. Here’s an advert for a device that jams Bluetooth, hmm, I wonder why a retailer suddenly sent this to me? Here’s an advert from a tax service that specializes in dealing with IRS audits. Well, that’s certainly timely, eh?

Experts warn 2.2 million cars could be at risk of hijacking via Bluetooth (via John D.)

Correspondent Christopher M. left a succinct public comment on Medium that describes a key dynamic in the seemingly hopeless task of limiting not just data harvesting and surveillance but the distribution of the data being harvested to the highest bidders in the auction of Privatized Totalitarianism:

“There’s no organized, sustaining, citizen movement powerful enough to push back against the relentless “gravitational pull” of government apparatchiks and corporate interests to monitor and direct every aspect of our lives.”

Well said, Christopher, thank you. The boiled-frog analogy comes to mind, along with the herd milling around in the corral, each believing they’re free-range.

As I noted in AI Is the Apex of Ultra-Processed Life,

Privatized totalitarianism expands without limits: our data is harvested and sold (you “opted in” by using the platform), we’re banned or shadow-banned by black-box-algorithmic private monopolies (you violated the shape-shifting “community standards” that have remarkable overlap with whatever the government is presenting as “the correct choice”), and all this is presented–cue the laugh track–as “free market capitalism” and “individual choice” when it’s actually a Kafkaesque facade masking the reality that the entire system is the opposite of what’s being sold: it’s not authentic, it’s fake. It’s not progress, it’s Anti-Progress. It’s not beneficial to us, it’s malefic, and it’s not actual agency-liberty, it’s a profitable simulation that we sense but can’t quite identify because it’s everywhere.

So here’s the corral labeled “free and open debate.” Just don’t stray or you’ll find yourself shadow-banned or worse. Not by the government–they have their own means (welcome to Digital Siberia)–but by the Privatized Totalitarianism of privately owned and operated corporate platforms whose extraction and exploitation is legal–and for sale to the highest bidder.