"Welcome to the Machine" - 'The Circle' Comes of Age: Surveillance and the Smart Grid
Dystopian literature has finally found it season.
"Welcome to the Machine"
The Circle Comes of Age: Surveillance and the Smart Grid
Dystopian literature has finally found it season. After blindly goose-stepping towards 1984 and Brave New World for decades, the Left has finally woken up and smelled the soma in their coffee. The Right recognized the dystopia when the Nobel Peace Prize president started droning wedding parties - War is Peace baby, oh yeah!
Libertarians for their part, beginning with at least Ron Paul if not the Founding Fathers, have been warning about it since the beginning - for which they were labeled kooks and conspiracy theorists. But now, finally, faced with irrefutable evidence on all sides, the slumbering masses are waking up to their chains. Well, welcome fellow travellers, welcome to the machine.
Tagged, tracked, manipulated, distracted, drugged and deluded - here is the soundtrack of our dystopian new world, left, right and center:
But this post isn't about the catastrophe of the myopic masses in the USA cluster-bombing our freedoms. It isn't about our own nameless Big Brother deep state populated by plutocrats profiting from the militarized police and surveillance state.
This is about the loving embrace of the final totalitarian system waiting in the wings that is being rolled out overseas right now.
"Open Sesame!"
China has rolled out a computerized social and political control system known as 'Sesame Credit'. Using financial and legal records as well as social media data, citizens will be ranked according to social and political conformity. The higher their ranking, the more privileges and rights they are allowed to have; the lower their ranking, the fewer they are allowed.
The most insidious aspect of the whole system is that it incentivizes "normal" citizens to rank each other, heightening the pressure to conform socially and politically exponentially. It is a delicious combination of emotional blackmail and self-serving virtue signalling whose primary beneficiary is the state.
If you have seen the Black Mirror episode "Nosedive" (S03E01), the social control system depicted now exists, in the real world, right now. This is the dystopian technocratic wet dream the coercive collectivist control freaks have been dreaming of. You can't make this shit up. If we had the future historical treatise describing our world in hand today, we would title it Dystopia Now.
It is also worth noting that the entire Sesame Credit system is being built on a credit system developed by Alibaba, the Chinese version of Amazon. It is a delicious irony that "Open Sesame!" was the magical phrase from Alibaba and the 40 Thieves that unlocked the cave of treasures. The key to wealth and liberation has become the key to total enslavement.
Full Circle
Of course, we already have a prophetic book on our shelves today. It is David Egger's The Circle. The hatchet job of a film based on the book doesn't do the book justice. In a sense, The Circle is the youngest generation's updated version of 1984 and Brave New World, both of which are largely dated because technology has surpassed that which Orwell could imagine and the pleasure-pushing drug and entertainment industries have already pacified or rendered incompetent a majority of citizens in our cowardly new world.
The Circle presents two technologies whose almost limitless potential for abuse is only hinted at but that any thinking individual can easily comprehend. The first is a social credit system linked to constant surveillance called TruYou. This is essentially what Sesame Credit is designed to be.
The second science"fiction" technology presented in The Circle has already been up and running for a while, just most people still aren't aware of the true extent of its capabilities. In The Circle the program is called 'Soul Search' that uses the social network and big data to track and find anyone, anywhere in the world, within 10 minutes.
Here the fictional scene from the film The Circle, included for comparative and educational purposes:
Here the reality in action, called SenseVideo:
This relatively neutral BBC presentation of the technology fails to capture the full extent of it. Here is another video showing a fraction of the surveillance capacity of a single camera given the hyperconnectivity provided by smart devices, computerized automobiles etc. and their integration with the social ranking system:
In the following video, we can deduce more about the capacity of the technology. Absent the smart data being provided from smartphones and cars, the system we are permitted to see can already identify the make, model and color of cars and trucks, read the license plate, describe individuals, track trajectories, identify violations of traffic laws, etc. - all completely automated. I think the reader should be able to extrapolate on what is possible when Big Data from social media, smart devices etc. is incorporated. It is the end of privacy.
Terror-Tech and Turnkey Tyranny
I think everyone who has read this far can see the trajectory of what is coming. I am not the only one to have recognized the very real danger that what is being rolled out in the East is merely a prelude - a test run - for its introduction in the West. The overtures are already being introduced by restricting free speech, the Orwellian Newspeak tyranny and rampant social media censorship.
The bundle of terror-tech being utilized by autocratic governments and the unelected technocratic deep state drones to control the populace is the brave new world of absolute control. The Machine is coming. As long as the population continues to be so easily distracted by bread and games and so easily misled by the empty promises of the political class, this is an unavoidable future.
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Further Reading:
China’s “Social Credit System” Will Rate How Valuable You Are as a Human
All Chinese citizens now have a score based on how well we live, and mine sucks
And in closing, a few classics for your listening pleasure that riff on the current state of affairs:
"Eye in the Sky" by The Alan Parsons Project
"Every Breath You Take" by The Police
"Amused to Death" by Roger Waters
All gifs couresty of Giphy.com: 1234
#informationwar surveillance dystopia 1984 socialmedia
Thanks to @paradigmprospect, this post was resteemed and highlighted in today's edition of The Daily Sneak.
Thank you for your efforts to create quality content!
Thank you @paradigmprospect and @sneakyninja for curating my post! I didn't know about the Daily Sneak, excellent to have more quality curation resources on my list.
Right now it's more accurately The (Almost) Daily Sneak for a little bit. We have a lot going on aside from The Daily Sneak and it makes it a challenge to get an issue out every day.
I read about your article in dailysneak. This is mind blowing article about the governments' intention to control their subjects. I will use the word 'subject' not 'citizens' because this is the reality. Technologies have made rulers so powerful that it has almost become impossible to defy them. They have created a system where their subjects are bound to be dependent on them for everything needed for survival like water supply, power supply, food, security etc. This will never end.
I'm glad you liked this contribution. The situation as a whole does appear increasingly dire as the system is becoming (or has become, depending on where you are) a coercive panopticon state. I am actively seeking remedies and formulating ideas to help reverse the trend towards tyranny in my series Towards Voluntaryism. I started with restoring the educational establishment on the path towards Voluntaryism and am currently working on remedies for governance, should such reading interest you I have hyperlinked the latest contribution. Thanks for your response!
You're welcome!
"Seseme Credit," like with many of Chinese "innovations," is but a poor copy of Western censorship tool using social media. The West has already monetized populist drivel on social media platforms from twitter to facebook that media personalities, athletes, and corporations exploit for monetary gain. Kim Kardishan was the pioneer in marketing through social media, to which now most Western corporate and celebrities are beholden. Who in the West will dare speak against populist/Leftist narrative in public, lest they be crucified in all social media platforms?
Since the communist muck living in the landmass designated "China" have no overarching principles other than blind nationalism and profit, it would be only natural that the CCP use monetary incentive to encourage certain sociopolitical thoughts to pervade their society. The West is not as advanced in its atheism as the East, demonstrated by the Leftist agents using seeming moral high ground to browbeat their opponents into submission. There is a fascinating, and perplexing, tendency of the average Western man who desperately seeks the appearance of piety/virtuousness/morality to the point of tolerating deluded fools rioting through his streets.
It seems the West can neither completely rebel against their Christian God to embrace atheism, nor completely reject Christianity for some other spiritual tradition. The Leftists, having rejected Western heritage, culture, and religion that has propelled the once backwaters of the world into the center of man's universe, possess nothing but self-hatred that must be propitiated hourly via adulation from strangers delivered through digital medium. The Leftists do not value privacy because they do not possess any thing of value and deeply resent those who live in recognition of their self-worth derived from sociocultural heritage and religious belief system.
Excellent commentary. I concur that the western media establishment is the progenitor and innovator of using modern media platforms to exercise social and political control of the masses by drowning out alternative (i.e. free-speech/financially deleterious for vested interested/anti-authoritarian) narratives. No doubt Sesame is built on the infrastructure the west has developed, but the blatant intent to use it to control people is not a viable political narrative in the west (yet).
As to spiritual orientation, atheism is the preferred narrative for centralized state power, as its ultimate consequence is that the state becomes the highest authority and the individual thus has no intrinsic worth outside of its contribution to other human beings as moderated and rewarded by the state.
I think the CCP's obtuse methods are illustration of their limited imagination and aptitude regarding sociopolitical manipulation. The calculus of social control would be the efficiency of state control in relation to resources expended. I can not fathom the cost of CCP's inelegant methods in omni-surveillance, data collection, and enforcement. The bloated department of internal surveillance will likely overshadow expenditures in any other government departments in the near future. Hopefully, the CCP will bankrupt itself out of existence, much like how the USSR collapsed attempting to outspend US in external security apparatus.
I think the West has a more elegant surveillance and censorship method, possibly because these social engineering activities were initially designed to maximize corporate profits, and thus, can be somewhat self-sustaining. The competitive environment under which Western propaganda evolved seems to have provided the Western political establishment with fantastic tools of social engineering. The Western man whole-heartedly accepts surveillance and censorship, under which he is subject, in so far as voluntarily providing personal information on social media engines, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. NSA data collection is a travesty, precisely because such obtuse data collection is unnecessary in a society where a subject's location, preferences, political interests, associations, economic status, etc. can be readily obtained by publicly available social media platforms. The Western man, also, voluntarily self-censors any non-conformist views, lest he be subject to social media exile.
I suppose the "tragedy" of our current world surveillance is that the East with the political will to crush its subjects lack the aptitude and imagination of an elegant surveillance state, while the West possessed with the most sophisticated and advanced methods lack any political will to accomplish anything, other than parrot preferences of computer geeks operating their algorithms from a Silicon Valley basement.
Nicely put! I think however the lack of political will in the West is less a question short-sightedness than rational self-restraint until such time as the Constitution and rule of law is dismantled to such an extent that the plutocrats need fear no possible recrimination by the small percentage of the population that still is aware that it has recourse to the law. Once the rule of law is, ironically enough, dismantled by law-maker marionettes to the benefit of the plutocrats, the hammer will fall in earnest.
Curated for #informationwar (by @openparadigm)
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What an excellent and powerful article man!
We are brothers in spirit for sure and it is a pleasure to meet people like you who ring the alarm bells in such a forceful yet accessible way while we still can.
One has got to be AMAZED at the level of general stubborness when it comes to not noticing anything - let alone questioning the fundamentals. Not sure how you see it, but despite my constant warning of my fellow men, I do not believe any longer that all humans will get it in time. Or that they should. Guess it all comes down to individual cosmology and what one holds the universe to be. On stage however it seems we really are nearing the end of the old chapter.
As unpopular as it may sound, I think we are heading into some sort of two tier society - the ones inside the structure having bound themselves into the legal fiction by consent and unwillingness to question established narratives (be it 'poor' people watching TV or 'highly paid politicians' doing the machine's dirty PR work - they are in the same boat if you ask me). And the ones who dare to see beyond their culture's own artificial restrictions and arbitrary limitations of inhumane curtailing of life, finding a way out of the narratives that seem to bind us - if only by connecting to one another, telling each other about possible ways out of the illusiory prison.
I will greatly enjoy digging through more of your work. Keep it up man, you know the world needs it and all we can do is offering these bits of insights to our human brothers and sisters, even if they spit back at us before they finally see what we meant.
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much love man!
Thank you for the positive response. It does appear as if we have a rather similar perspective. No doubt a majority of the population is too comfortable in their chains and too fearful of consequence to say anything critical of the status quo. As such they are the proverbial frog in the pot. The tragedy of this is that those who try to shake them out of their fugue state of obedience with facts appealing to their rational self-interest are viewed as troublemakers and fear-mongers.
We already are in a two-tier society. Those who are willing to see despite the discomfort and those who are willingly blind for the sake of a false sense of security and convenience. This state of affairs will only be exacerbated as the coercive collectivists operating the control grid starts to turn the thumbscrews. Ultimately, on the current trajectory, it is not hard to imagine severe civil strife. I am very curious if those first subjected to the total control grid will react. It won't be pretty, regardless of if it is capitulation or defiance, for both will bring out the worst in those involved.
Human beings do not react well to captivity, regardless of how spacious the cage.
A very thought provoking posting!
rEsteemed eye love the eye.
Devilishly brillant. 😈
Wow nice your post.
Thanks for sharin
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