PhD (ii): Building the FEARless CITIZEN
Total surveillance security orthodoxies came into their own, post 9/11.
They had to. The horrific theatre of the event dispensed with the lives of thousands in minutes and froze the lives of billions over the next two decades.
It was also easy to implement.
We had two templates which came together that day:
1. Jeremy Bentham’s #panopticon: gb2earth.com/pgtps/space
Here, a philosophy of criminal containment from centuries ago, where the key advantage was that fear was designed into a system that self-regulated criminals into not even daring to think about acting, never mind acting, was shoehorned into the second template: a template which came from a much more recent time.
More here: my 2017 Criminal Justice MA dissertation on a secular Original Sin as a latterday security orthodoxy.
2. What ultimately became Silicon Valley’s contribution to modern democracy — surveillance tech — even as, in the early days of startup and IT/AI, freethinking had not only been sincerely valued but rightfully encouraged and promoted.
And you may say there are exceptions in open source and so forth. And I would fiercely disagree: the admin still lords over the user in Linux as in any other software platform, thus providing a systemised way to initiate control from without, when control escapes us — as it always eventually does.
How it all went wrong: what happens when your own person becomes weaponised as an instrument of modern surveillance-tech process.
The basic concepts of neocrime/dark figure — a grey area of crime which the good guys have traditionally preferred to continue using quite as much as the bad guys will always find in it their natural environment.
So: 9/11 blindsided us all. I would never choose to attribute blame to anyone for this: it was a clear example of how machines used as extensions of creative humans — in this case, evil humans obviously — beat an orthodoxy that says all we need is better and better machines with crimefighting humans as mere extensions of the same.
9/11 and its necessarily terrifying, anti-democratic security philosophy of total surveillance, is not the issue here. What was done was done. Some of it delivered. Some of it didn’t. But I am certain it served to stop what was ready to destroy us all — all people of good faith, that is — within twelve months, if not less.
Where I now disagree firmly, fiercely, ferociously even, is that two decades after — hanging blindly onto this orthodoxy of machine-primacy total surveillance, even when these days it only appears to surveill ourselves in any way efficiently — we continue to allow our security #bigtech corporations to argue that all we need to fight creative criminality is even more machines and even fewer crimefighting humans capable of crimefighting such extreme criminality:
In these two decades, remember, Russia’s Putin has dislocated over and over each and every attempt of Western-style democracies to return to some semblance of the values and missions which other epochs allowed us to aspire to.
And last October 2023, machine-primacy total surveillance permitted Hamas to work for probably a year before launching their catatrosphic attacks, as they aimed — successfully in the event — to upturn the historical narrative all good people have had of the Jewish experience of life before and after World War II.
The wilful and deliberate blanking of nonconformist thinking — not just mine, either— has served to unnecessarily enable Hamas, Russia and Ukraine, Iran, China, North Korea et al. We have refused to learn from events: we have learnt only to use events to remain attached to our now unthinking orthodoxies.
That is, ideas which the brutally single-minded application of security orthodoxies of total surveillance & related — NOT their fact; their application … — have dismissed wholly from serious debate around how to learn from contrary events post-9/11: events which don’t fit the mould, don’t support the rationales behind current bottom lines, and don’t allow us to affirm with any degree of confidence that we respect the enemy at all.
To conclude, this has led us to believe and practise the philosophy that it is enough to pursue the goal of out-spying the enemy, and no longer necessary to invest half as much in out-thinking them.
We continue to rely almost entirely on machines with humans as extensions of the same, whilst our hyper-creative hyper-criminal enemies use machines to extend their terribly inhumanity
This is the second matter I’d like us to revisit. And why once revisited, an issue we have to do something ferociously about.Original webpage from which this is taken can be found here: https://gb2earth.com/phd