I Am The Neo-Luddite: Ultimate Freedom Leads to Ultimate Autocracy
41 minute readFrom the Editors: We have reported and written a lot recently on today’s tech industries and their power. From LBPD sharing license plate data with ICE, to their controversial use of facial recognition software to target protesters, to the misappropriation of pandemic funds for corporate welfare, to the various advanced cameras already employed by the LBPD, to a three-part series on the Universal Basic Income and its tech industry fans and local implications.
Along with analysis and reporting of Long Beach issues, FORTHE intends to be a platform for residents to discuss the broader realities that still affect us. We are open and excited to publish perspectives on larger topics of a national or global or even more abstract scope, so long as they are interesting, well-written, grounded in fact, and remain critical of existing structures. (And, of course, so long as they are written by Long Beach folks!)
With that in mind, we believe this essay from Steven T. Bramble fits the bill. Bramble is a local novelist and member of the publishing collective, ZQ-287. The essay itself is a challenging and thought-provoking piece that can serve as a backdrop to much of our recent reporting on big tech and its growing power and abuses in the city.
We hope you enjoy it.
THE CURRENT STATE OF UTOPIA
Arpanet, a data packet-switching network developed and implemented by the United States Department of Defense (DoD) starting in 1966, was one of the first concrete manifestations of a communication network between computers. By the time the project was decommissioned by the government in 1990, the system had been tooled for privatization and commercial applications. This became the internet.
Despite the story of Arpanet’s development being as complex as the system itself, an aspect which should stand out in the origins of the internet is its inherent militarization. In fact, the internet’s entire set of protocols—the TCP/IP system—was developed by the DoD agency DARPA, or Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
This is the Old Testament version of internet genesis. The version more widely taught by tech evangelists is the one which begins not at the internet’s weaponized birth, but rather at the beginning of the process of dissemination, when the broader public was first being introduced to a product with distinctly utopian underpinnings.
Wired, founded in San Francisco in 1993, was the earliest organ of the tech industry. The magazine’s early philosophizing on the nature and implications of the internet gave rise to a myth of techno-utopianism. The whole ideology, to put it bluntly, was a complete load of bullshit, so there’s not much need to bother with any sort of in-depth examination of its principles. Suffice it to say, you can mainline a dose of its propaganda simply by watching any current commercial of any current tech giant: societal disruption, the horizontalization of politics, obsolescence of institutions, and the destruction of all loneliness.
By and large, techno-utopianism is alive and well in the minds of the global population. Speaking of the U.S. narrowly, this myth has been all but monolithic. There have been only minor revolts. Occupy Wall Street opened a side-critique of electronic escapism to a generation reared on the concept, and the 2016 presidential election finally managed to illustrate some of the societal pitfalls of social media. These and a few less consequential pockets of dissidence notwithstanding, there has been a total dearth of public sentiment to stem the tsunami of unregulated techno-utopianism generated by Silicon Valley and its cadre of plutocratic—perhaps soon to be more properly oligarchic—tech barons.
Of course, this is little more than yesterday’s news. Nowadays, techno-utopianism is simply the public-facing side of the digital world order. Behind the scenes, things are more realistically discussed. The world’s two primary superpowers, the U.S. and China, have already succeeded in establishing total social surveillance states, albeit in two distinct forms. The nations of the European Union, which have secured themselves since WWII by acting as political vassals of their American imperial protector, have had the privilege of modestly regulating the influence of these invasive multinational corporations from the footing of demobilized [1] democratic socialism. Japan is a more rightward-leaning version of the same. India perhaps bears the most resemblance to the American model with its aggressive military stance, democratic-institutional structure, deeply embedded social inequalities, and sprawling homegrown tech sector. As for most other nations with mid-level economies that play strategic roles in geopolitics—a patchwork of increasingly ethnonationalist authoritarian regimes such as Russia, Turkey, Israel, and Saudi Arabia—tech companies have merely provided the newest tools for internal spying and repression. The Global South is also once again lamentably becoming a series of proxy zones in a new Cold War already underway, this time fueled by the race for cyber supremacy.
The ideological front of this new struggle is framed not as a moral dilemma between real freedom and digital servitude, but rather a finicky debate as to who will control the industries of the future, with gauzy considerations for freedom of speech attached as an afterthought.
For those keyed-in to such stuff, some of the sheen is beginning to wear off the old promises of the new utopia. A special edition of the New York Times Magazine in late 2019 felt compelled to strike a new, more sober tone. About those early days of optimism, it reflected that the internet “was going to empower the masses, overthrow hierarchies, [and] build a virtual world that was far superior to the terrestrial one that bound us.”
But then came the official dousing of the flame.
“So the internet didn’t turn out the way we hoped. Now what?”
Not that there isn’t a fresh wildfire of renewed sentiment already burning elsewhere. Today’s bullish thinkers and venture capitalists are looking toward a more seamless and all-encompassing digital experience, powered by the promise of the next industrial revolution. A form of hypermanufacturing will theoretically make construction more inclusive and less wasteful. Automation will free the human race from dangerous drudgery. The virtual will overlay, and, for all intents and purposes, be just as legitimate as, reality. The pivot to renewable energies will stop the ecological collapse. The digitization of money will do away with corruption and equalize the gap between rich and poor. Artificial intelligence will bring on quantum computing and eliminate all inefficiencies.
This new wave of techno-utopianism is understandable. After all, if you subtract the hope embodied by the promises listed above and simply take stock of where we are, the result is a sprawling nightmare that most people do not, and indeed cannot, engage with.
The Economist, in a report on the geopolitical concerns of digital networks and infrastructures growing ever more separate and weaponized, declares that, “Left alone, the world of technology will continue to disintegrate into a splinternet in which digital protectionism is widespread—much as the global financial system fell apart before the second world war. To make sense of all this, it helps to see the political world as one in which technology is beginning to look ever more like geography.”
Innovation is all too often presented to us as a means of outrunning our problems, or worse, as a method of hacking them. The truth is—and the 21st century up to this point serves as a basis for this claim—innovation takes place not on the fringes of power and authority, but directly under their influence. Oftentimes even under their supervision. Innovation is an indispensable facet of competition. To the everyday person, for whom power and competition are a foreign language not easily understood, innovation must be sold in the same way that any ideology must. Awaiting you, dear consumer, is a brighter future, a deeper understanding, an alternate reality, and a cult of belonging.
FREEDOM NO LONGER EXISTS
But towards what Bethlehem does our new tech-world truly slouch? The answer is an ever more contradictory and logically-backwards one. In short, we’re being led toward a world of absolutes, but one in which absolutes shall coexist as many equal elements within a series of closed matrices. Total freedom and total slavery are every day proving themselves socially compatible in practical, if not ideologically pure, terms.
The words freedom and slavery are themselves misleading, in large part because the full panoply of what each came to represent during the early stages of the democratic age no longer applies. The technological systems undergirding human capability and experience are so fundamentally different from those which existed for 18th century Atlantic revolutionaries that much of their vocabulary is being rendered utterly insufficient to deal with present material conditions.
Freedom, in terms of a social contract, was conceived of as the right to be considered a citizen of a nation, giving one’s consent to be governed, rather than as a subject of a proprietary realm of a monarch who held all sovereignty within their personhood. Citizenship came with certain rights, including but not limited to the right to participate in government, the right to choose one’s own profession or start a business, the right to privacy and private property, and, in some cases, freedom of speech. This definition was of course limited because it afforded rights only to those who met certain criteria of identity, and those who were not “full” citizens could be owned as pieces of private property themselves. This is the version of slavery most people today are familiar with, but at the time it was a relatively new capitalistic rationalization of the concept. It also proved to be the most morally heinous.
Although we have been left with deep legacies of inequality which remain torturous and lethal, governmental reforms have expanded access to citizenship and rights (though at an abysmally slow pace and with nearly no concerted effort to undermine abject psychologies of racial prejudice). Now, though, advancements in industrial and consumer technologies are quietly eating away at all the old quill-inked guarantees, replacing them with laser-printed tracts buried under “I Accept” buttons [2].
All this forfeiture of analogue freedoms for the privileges of a new digital existence is leading to a second, mostly unseen social contract designed to override the original, and it is written in legalistic corporate jargon. The more devices a person owns, the more they are subject to perpetual, comprehensive surveillance. The data from that surveillance is then picked up in a massive dragnet and warehoused, protected by a system of corporate and judicial gatekeepers.
In China, where personal liberties are scarce, total political conformity and suppression of speech is a matter of basic policy, and so soon as someone commits an ideological crime they are subject to removal. This kind of internal spying is as old as civilization itself; what is new is the sweeping scope, ease, and immediacy with which it can now be accomplished.
The U.S. has been outfitted for the same type of techno-totalitarianism, all that is required is a leader sufficiently manipulative to gut the dwindling institutional backstops of government and exploit the surveillance apparatus to its full power. Only a few million votes in the 2020 election prevented this from becoming a reality, as Donald Trump had already made substantial progress in hollowing out governmental personnel and replacing them with craven loyalists—hardly a fresh technique in the playbook of dictatorship. The risk has not gone away. Personal liberties may have certain downsides for reaching consensus, but they are imperative for allowing citizens to demand change. Digital privileges are rapidly eroding the organizational potential of normal working people. Worse, they are beginning to stand in for rights in the collective psyche.
Slavery, meanwhile, has (in most cases) become a matter of roving capital. Lean manufacturing gave rise to international supply chains, in which various parts of a product (a car, for example, or an iPhone) are manufactured in many discrete geographical locations before being assembled elsewhere. This system displaced the old Fordism model of manufacturing, in which all resources would be shipped to a single factory where the majority of a product’s parts would then be produced and assembled. Lean manufacturing sparked the current global trend of neoliberal political-economy, in which companies from rich nations set up manufacturing sites in poorer ones with the help of government, hiring local laborers for pittances in comparison to company profits.
This system is rife with examples of slavery performed by oppressed groups and political prisoners. Dispersing capital in such a way has made the fabrication processes of companies difficult to track or regulate, and has also pitted working-class people all over the world in a race to the bottom to earn a wage. The sprawling nature of this order tends to confuse, turning horrific labor exploitation into a strange chain of infinite links not readily understood. This can produce odd, and sometimes even conflicting, messages with regards to oppressed peoples and their struggles for civil rights. Regardless, slavery is an ever-present and continually evolving facet of capital, as well as the dogged shadow cast by ultimate freedom for some.
Citizenship in today’s most digitized nations is, at root, an individual agreement with one’s government to be filed into vast public and private registries which aggregate and organize persons into an overarching system of total social surveillance. To put it another way, citizenship has become the right to be considered by one’s government as a piece of proprietary data. This agreement is secured and reinforced by a vast network of digital and physical infrastructures (individualized mobile devices, ubiquitous cameras, strategic and militarily-protected servers and mainframes, etc.).
The problem with this new formulation is that the shift has been largely spontaneous. Speaking of the U.S. narrowly (though this is more or less how it occurred on a global scale), the social surveillance project was not explicitly a governmental undertaking. Historically, the government saw digitally networked systems primarily through the lens of a military application. The internet itself was conceived of as a tool for aiding geopolitical supremacy, but in its most popular manifestation it has become a social-economic juggernaut that has persistently, and profitably, changed the nature of life on the planet.
That is to say, the most disturbing part of the shift in the spheres of citizenship, governance, and civil rights, is that it took place by popular demand. It’s perfectly understandable that people should have wanted in on the new way of life, but in the very short time it took for digitization to reach worldwide critical mass there were many increasingly dark omens.
The most encompassing of them all came during the mass migration onto social media platforms. In the midst of a social phenomenon, experts and journalists could regularly be heard issuing warnings of the second- and third-order ramifications of pervasive use of such networks. People everywhere—of their own volition—were making the full spectrum of their personal lives available and visible to such entities as corporations, intelligence and law enforcement agencies, hackers, foreign actors, etc. At the time, these concerns were framed in the media with such jargon as “the debate over the right to privacy.” Sadly, the contemporaneous concerns over the gleeful mass forfeiture of privacy, or at least those which broke through into the national conversation, were merely the tip of a truly massive crisis-in-the-making.
The rise of social media is oftentimes referred to as an “upheaval,” but this usage contains a clear techno-utopianist slant. If it was an upheaval, then it was an upheaval of obedience.
Some, however—perhaps even especially those on the left—were eager to declare it the answer to their political hopes. And it was indeed easy to be taken in by the spectacle of it all when global networks had their political coming-out parties. In 2011 the twin movements of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street were supercharged, if not made possible in their entirety, by social media, leading to the rapid mobilizations of enormous numbers of people in the streets across a huge geographical range. These were transfixing events on the global stage, and should their demands have been met they would have been transformative on a much greater scale. Swept up in the moment, millennial activists and freedom fighters quickly began advocating the virtues of their new organizational weapon.
It’s difficult, even in the face of what turned out to be an overwhelming tragedy, not to be sentimental looking back on those ostensibly brighter days. The results seemed clear: the popular will was finding its voice and showing off its potential. People were occupying space, loudly insisting to be heard and to have their agenda given in to. Revolutionary theorizing was making its imprint on the lexicon. Unfortunately, the new revolutionaries had either not yet fully understood, or had not yet fully come to terms with the fact that the very engine which was driving their movements did not belong to them. It was, it turned out, not their weapon after all.
Proof of this can be found in the equal rapidity with which verdant democratic promise dried up, exposing the parched expanse of authoritarian values which had lurked beneath the surface, to say nothing of the bewildering, suffocating systems through which all dissent was either brutally crushed (Arab Spring), or surgically excised (Occupy).
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This cycle of protest has all but turned into a global chronic pathology. Over and over again, we observe uprisings, as massive in size as they are short-lived, sparking across diverse swaths of nations and regions. Continuously, they employ the same strategies. All organization and agitprop take place online in a mostly leaderless, laissez-faire fashion, and this suits the regimes against which these uprisings pit themselves just fine. They have a practically omniscient view of the situation: who amongst the movement holds influence, who is affiliated with whom, internal communications, when and where things are scheduled to happen, whereabouts and routines, the names and locations of family members and friends. Accordingly, these movements are crushed outright, dismantled slowly and covertly, or simply fail to sustain themselves.
THE COMPLETE MILITARIZATION OF SOCIETY
Unfortunately, however, we have come to a place that is much bleaker and far more complex in comparison to those early collisions between politics and the tech industry. As it stands, the Arab Spring has turned into an Arab Winter, leaving small and cancerous dictatorial cliques embedded into decomposing social bodies no matter the scale of the popular will, and as for Occupy, it was stamped out so adeptly by the ruling classes (and, indeed, with the overwhelming consent of American society) that it hardly warrants comparison as a political event [3].
We’re also no longer obliged to merely theorize about the arrival of total tech-autocracies. We now have the luxury of commenting on their real-world manifestations. Correspondingly, cyberwarfare has quietly become the preferred mode of espionage and international combat.
However, it seems the lid is starting to come off. Over the course of 2020, a division of the Russian foreign intelligence service managed to pull off the most intrusive hack of the United States government in history. The hack was what’s known as a supply-chain attack, in which malware is implanted into software very far downstream in the flow of defense products.
In the words of Thomas Bossert, who served as Homeland Security Adviser to former presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, “Last week, the cybersecurity firm FireEye said it had been hacked and that its clients, which include the United States government, had been placed at risk. This week, we learned that SolarWinds, a publicly traded company that provides software to tens of thousands of government and corporate customers, was also hacked. The attackers gained access to SolarWinds software before updates of that software were made available to its customers. Unsuspecting customers then downloaded a corrupted version of the software, which included a hidden back door that gave hackers access to the victim’s network.”
Bossert went on to explain the implications of the hack, both remedial and reactive:
“The actual and perceived control of so many important networks could easily be used to undermine public and consumer trust in data, written communications, and services. In the networks that the Russians control, they have the power to destroy or alter data, and impersonate legitimate people. Domestic and geopolitical tensions could escalate quite easily if they use their access for malign influence and misinformation.
The remediation effort alone will be staggering. It will require the segregated replacement of entire enclaves of computers, network hardware, and servers across vast federal and corporate networks.
The response must be broader than patching networks. The U.S. military and intelligence community must be placed on increased alert; all elements of national power must be placed on the table.”
Up until now, the United States has bracketed cyberwarfare into an unofficial category of traditional espionage in which all governments seek to gather information about their fellow nation-states by covert means. This had been done mostly in the U.S.’s interest of continuing its own cyber-attacks, or at least in being able to declare them legitimate before international consortiums and governing bodies [4].
Ultimately, the evolution of cyber-attacks into just another tactic of conventional warfare—along with their escalating destructive potential—is not the most astonishing aspect of this geopolitical development. Rather, it’s the psycho-social phenomenon taking place in the civilian world which is driving governments across the globe into their current configurations, namely, the ever-deepening penetration of pervasive computing into daily life.
The aforementioned destructive potential of cyber-warfare would be impossible without the near-complete integration and registration of every single individual and—soon—object into a great many series of compatible networks. People continue buying devices which surveil them at all times in almost every way possible, and beyond just doing so willingly, they do so eagerly, if not ravenously, at every opportunity, without fail, opting into well-known systems of corporate and government exploitation which exert more control over their lives all the time in the most brazen, unethical ways. To be clear, this is a matter of universal societal consensus, from the poorest to the richest, the rural to the urban, the privileged to the oppressed [5].
The dream is congealing just in time to wake up to reality. When every object, individual, and system is networked together, the world is a battlefield. In many ways, the future of warfare is civilian society [6]—banks, power grids, hospitals, air traffic control, subways, cars, phones, televisions, virtual assistants, and perhaps even every last physical thing. And although attacks may be few and far between, the existence of a perpetual threat from seemingly infinite vectors will have radicalizing effects on collective and individual psychologies.
In some ways, those effects are already observable. Democratic values have abscessed worldwide, and, like the bygone “right to privacy” debate, chatter has multiplied in every sector regarding the “loss of trust” in society. This phrase is code for the sum parts of a hydra-like crisis already metastasized. If the whole of earth’s history were condensed into a single day, the appearance of humanity occurred less than two minutes to midnight, and if the whole of human history were also then condensed into a day, industrialization occurred at around the same time. To realize that within that infinitesimal span we’ve managed to bring the world to the brink of extinction and ecocide is to understand that something is deeply philosophically wrong. It is, as Eduardo Galeano writes, “el mundo al revés” (“the world upside-down”), in which those who fetishize freedom desire its abolition, and progress is perceived as an endless string of inert innovations.
The product of all these paranoias and stupefactions is a natural yearning on the part of people for their own oppression, and the current manifestations are utterly explicit in that desire. In the U.S., QAnon, a Trump personality cult comprised of heterodox conservative and religious fantasies, seeks as its ultimate end the enactment of military dictatorship. In Brazil, the Bolsonaristas seek the same. In India, the BJP Party headed by Narendra Modi is working toward a Hindu supremacist state with Muslims serving as its societal scapegoat. In many European nations, anxieties over Middle Eastern and African immigrants have renewed the currency of fascist movements. China has backslid into the Great Leader model once typified by Chairman Mao, and there are other examples. Many of these are, or have been, majoritarian political regimes.
“NOW WHAT?”
The paradox of our historical moment is that ultimate digital freedom seems to be leading us into the jaws of ultimate autocracy—a world in which no regime can be unseated and no power structure can fall. It is also a world in which there is less and less to say about the differences between freedom and autocracy, and in this way techno-utopianism has truly acted as an equalizer of ideologies.
The word freedom is intentionally used here in its most fetishized form. Freedom is a nebulous concept, one which can be applied equally to systems of total servitude as much as to systems of total self-determination. The binary presented above—ultimate freedom and ultimate autocracy—is not meant to represent any set of governments or ideals, and much less to serve some narrative of good versus evil. Rather, as societal constructs, the two seem to exist on a continuum, with one feeding directly into the other and vice-versa. What is glaringly apparent when it comes to a modern understanding of freedom, however, is that the vast majority of individuals now conceive of it as being fundamentally linked to the digital world. The permissive conditions of networks and the regulatory state of computerized information have begun to overshadow even such things as voting rights and the independent functioning of institutions in peoples’ minds, especially those on the conservative end of the political spectrum.
The aggravating truth about the 18th century enterprise of freedom that the world’s democracies were founded on was that the emancipation of some seemed to necessitate the enslavement of others, and so soon as one group is unchained, another is marched into bondage. Social positivists, those who believe societal progress is inevitable through the use of the scientific method, may yet discover their name was a misnomer all along, and one can’t help but wonder if pessimism might not emerge as a higher virtue, a more suitable method of meeting the challenges facing us. This was the unpopular ideal of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who was eclipsed in his day by his counterpart Georg Hegel. A society of skeptics is not necessarily a society disunited, just as a society of Luddites is not necessarily one condemned to the Stone Age.
We are in need of a major narratological shift whose sole concern cannot only be comporting itself with what is strictly observable or purely mathematically cogent, but rather with what is equitable, emotionally balanced, holistic, and forward-thinking. Technology must learn to bend its knee and recognize the primacy of nature, finding ways of conforming itself to planetary necessities, or, wherever possible, stepping aside in order to allow for the healthy functioning of earthly engines. A system that is able to incorporate these values into its ethos and governance—a kind of modernization by way of primalization—could once again tip the ideological scales back in freedom’s favor.
Such a switch would undoubtedly require a counter-intuitive kind of de-rationalization process of prevailing values. At the turn of the 20th century, as the first Industrial Revolution was maturing, there came a “growing obsession with efficiency,” as Chris Harman puts it in A People’s History of the World:
“Concern began to switch to intensifying labor and obliterating any pauses in it. An American, Frederick Taylor, introduced ‘scientific management’—the use of inspectors with stopwatches to break down what a worker did into its component actions in order to work out the maximum number of actions a worker could perform in a working day.
Finally, concern with productivity also implied the need for education and literacy. Reading, writing, and arithmetic had been optional for the peasants and farm laborers of pre-industrial societies. But the complex interacting processes of capitalist production now required a literate workforce—if only to read instructions on machinery and labels on packing cases—with a basic level of numeracy and, as important as these two things, ingrained habits of time, discipline, and obedience.
In the early industrial revolution, people had been shocked by the transition from rural life to industrial labor. People could still be amazed by individual innovations, like the motor car or electric light. But they were not shocked any more by a society built on competition, timekeeping, and greed. People no longer realised how bizarre their behaviour would have seemed to their forebears.”
Similarly, the Internet Age retrained the behavior of our generation to correspond to the values of digitization, and there seem to be few left who dare to critique them as bizarre. Yet a new method is precisely what is needed with regards to both individual conduct and systems-creation. As it stands, people have been working feverishly simply to secure and retain a modicum of the old promises of classic liberal democracy, namely, human rights, equality, and representation. However, given the seriousness and scale of the problems we are facing, problems such as ecological collapse, racist power structures, and encroaching techno-authoritarianism, it may become necessary to rethink certain principles of our increasingly antique system of governance for the sake of decisive action, all without giving over to despotism.
Herculean a task as that might be, it is also an opportunity to engender a new notion of freedom. The left’s current tone of dissidence is a step in the right direction, but remains fragmented and subject to virtue signaling rather than virtue formulation [7]. This, too, is a bit of Internet-Age training for our new lives as public figures subject to constant examination. Grievance is not unimportant, but allowed to propagate unchecked it can narrow language and limit consciousness, and along with it understanding, empathy, or even forgiveness.
There is a great need to take both collective hurt and guilt, historical as well as quotidian, and use it to construct a new world. The most satisfying revenge will be the one that sees the attainment of a healthy and inclusive future, and in this way the world might not be turned rightside-up, but unmoored from mere directional orientation. The philosophy capable of bringing this about remains to be seen, though the current worldwide trend of illiberal political movements begs a truly urgent, and pessimistic, question: is autocracy stepping in to provide those answers, and have most people already made up their minds?
FOOTNOTES
[1] Militarily demobilized. Since WWII—which was both the death knell of European colonial empires as well as the starting shot of the American neocolonial era—Europe has had notoriously scant standing armies, and has been able to consistently slash government military spending domestically and as a percentage of their contributions to international diplomatic bodies such as the UN. This is because nowadays European nations very rarely find themselves in situations where they need to independently send their militaries abroad in order to secure trade routes, foreign resources, or privileges within markets overseas; the U.S. has been fulfilling that hard-power obligation for them for over half a century. The social results of Western Europe’s decreased militarization are striking, especially when contrasted with the U.S.: there is not a single country in Western Europe without universal healthcare, labor rights and welfare systems are strong, value is placed on corporate and financial regulation, environmental policy is lightyears ahead, and, not least of all, there is a robust governmental approach to curbing digital surveillance and reining in tech monopolies. Japan enjoys a similar arrangement with the U.S. in which it, too, is militarily demobilized yet is given full access to, and prominence in, the global economy. In the last decade there has been a reversing trend of remilitarization in some of these nations. That trend was hastened during the last four years as a result of Trump’s ultranationalist politics, but is likely to continue even after his departure in large part due to the growing bipolar geopolitical climate of competition between superpowers. [back to essay]
[2] The system now functions in reverse, so it is usually only possible to exchange privileges for rights. As soon as you begin to input data into the system in order to accomplish something, for instance using a credit card to make a purchase, sending an email to communicate, or checking out a library book to read, that data and its content is immediately subject to corporate and government scrutiny. A helpful metaphor is whenever you click an “I Accept” button—the only way you can have any privilege is to forfeit certain rights at the outset. Accordingly, trading back privileges for rights is an arduous, impractical legal process. [back to essay]
[3] To be more precise, Occupy heralded the return of any sort of concerted, mobilized leftist ideology to the U.S. political stage, and it has been followed by other broad-based, essentially leaderless movements such as Black Lives Matter, No Dakota Access Pipeline (NoDAPL), Antifa, and others. Each of these movements has had their own significant successes. Antifa was able to hold the line against various Trump-supporting white supremacist mobs, most notably during the street battle of Charlottesville in 2017. This was a vital, if sometimes controversial, countervailing effort against a movement which sought to use public displays of physical force and hate as a political cudgel. NoDAPL has managed to impede the progress of the building of the Keystone Access Pipeline, as well as draw national attention to Indigenous issues and racist treatment of Indigenous peoples. Black Lives Matter, the most successful and broad-based of any current U.S. leftist movement, has earned hard-fought wins to public policing policy, as well as a whole host of behavioral changes in the private sector. It would not be unreasonable to credit Occupy as the starting template for all these 21st century movements, and as such there are some bitter pills handed down to us that should be taken sooner rather than later. In particular, the bitter pill that Occupy’s greatest strength was also its greatest vulnerability. Online organizing is an incredibly powerful tool, if not the political tool, of the new era, but the left has taken a position that is neither clear nor strong enough when it comes to technology. Given the fact that so many movements have grown directly out of the changing technological landscape, there is a worldwide, ground-level trend of being tech-credulous. This belies many of the long-term dangers of corporate and governmental control of the internet, as well as major international inequalities that have arisen from the tech revolution. When it comes to this issue, time is no longer on our side. Powerful actors and interests have been allowed to set the agenda almost without oversight, and they are indeed defining the parameters of our future as we speak, a future that, as this essay will indicate, threatens to bring in a suffocating wave of widespread militarism and illiberal reactionism. There is a need—not just for the sake of current struggles but for the ones to come—of a deeper understanding of the political implications of tech. [back to essay]
[4] As a necessary aside, it must be pointed out that the United States has been the biggest cyberwarfare aggressor in the world up to this point. The SolarWinds hack is highlighted here in the text primarily because, as Bossert makes resoundingly clear in his op-ed, should the U.S. start to become a frequent victim of cyber-attacks, as is now the case, there is a willingness to escalate retaliatory measures to the level of a traditional military threat—which, in our current Cold War climate, is almost tantamount to suggesting world war. [back to essay]
[5] This is obviously not to suggest everyone has given their explicit consent. A great many people feel uneasy about these issues, and popular discontent has started to brew. There are also traditional and indigenous cultures which object to the modern political, economic, and technological world, but their movements and communities are often small and localized. The extent to which they’re able to come together and unify around issues often depends on digital means of communication. The point, unfortunately, is that even those who intellectually or spiritually reject the technological zeitgeist still find themselves participating in it. [back to essay]
[6] There is reason to believe cyberwarfare will likely reduce the amount of physical destruction and death associated with combat. For instance, it may be unnecessary to destroy a strategic building during an operation when cutting the power might have the same effect. However, this presents the perfect example of the kind of ethically impossible tradeoff people are asked to make regarding technology. War will result in less death and destruction, but only on the condition that militarization and surveillance threats will infiltrate every corner of daily life; or, phrased another way, a God-state in exchange for physical safety. Up to this point, the vast majority of people across the planet have been consistently choosing the God-state in such dilemmas. [back to essay]
[7] Most readers will likely see this as a specific dig at progressive leftists, but centrists are equally, if not more, prone to the reflexive signaling of their own supposed moral excellence, especially as it pertains to their opinions regarding norms, institutional policy, and legality. [back to essay]
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