whybother.org

We are now living through one of those interesting, though hardly unique or remarkable periods in the history of human delusion when fundamental alterations in existing social, cultural, political and economic arrangements have become as unthinkable as they are inevitable.

It is not that signs of approaching disaster have gone unnoticed. They are sighted with increasing frequency every day. Ours is a time, for example, when a mainstream journal of international capitalism, The Economist, can review a publication characterizing the current structure of global financial markets as a “naturally occurring Ponzi scheme” and, while noting lapses in the author’s scholarship, entirely endorse his dismal conclusions. Yet available responses to this supposedly “natural” and, therefore, ultimately inexplicable and irresistible economic phenomenon seem to be limited to proceeding at exactly what we are doing either more slowly, according to some, or ever more quickly according to many more. Anything else, anything other, any possible change or rearrangement of the constellation of forces and purposes that led us here is simply unthinkable, simply beyond–the great gaping blank that hangs above, below, and haunts the in between of every bit and byte of that great incessant information flow with which our days and nights are inundated.

In the midst of a technological revolution in global communications, it seems that something as basic as understanding, the capacity to think something Other in the face of disastrous dilemmas, the capacity to imagine and discuss implications and consequences, and what might be done about them, is peculiarly missing, as absent from elite as from popular discourse. And it is this absence of understanding, the lack even of the capacity to notice that it has gone, that most characterizes our moment in human history and ranks it alongside other great delusionary periods that have preceded even greater Falls.

While we could debate forever the forces that make for and influence the timing of fundamental, radical, catastrophic change, and the debate is as long, as varied, and as fascinating as human history itself, we certainly don’t need to reach or to imagine any conclusion to this debate to grasp its import. Sudden, extraordinary transformations, true revolutions in human experience are a sufficiently regular feature of the history of every civilization and of the global history of relations among civilizations that we would be remarkable creatures indeed to have escaped, to be living already beyond any possibility of an end to the world as we know it.

Clearly, we have no compelling reasons, other than vainity, to believe we are such demigods. Rather, many of us now alive are more than likely fated, like so many mere mortal men and women before us, to live on and through the end of the world as we now know it. And we are less prepared, intellectually and emotionally, than any generation of at least the last 200 years.

Does no one else think it strange that we have just lived through the passing of a millennium, however artificial the dating, marked almost exclusively by the silence of millennial thought? How is it that no leader, no prophet, no poet, no priest, however elevated or degraded, emerged to paint promises of a bright new chapter in human history for all of mankind? For all the talk of an unprecedented “revolution” in microchip, telecommunications and biological technologies, what vast visions of the technological future were proffered even to begin to compare to the orgy of utopian thought placed before the public at the turn of the last century?

It seems our Technocrats are myopic, for the most they could manage to foresee was the single millisecond separating millenniums past from millenniums future. Our self-styled spiritual and political leaders did no better, saw no further. Silence. Silence reigned everywhere. Y2K was an anticlimax, because nowhere could anyone imagine anything to build up to it or to project beyond it. Absent any significant order of reflective or utopian thought, how could Y2K mean anything other than another tick of the digital clock.

And in America–as if we haven’t been speaking all along of America in the imperial mode of the self-imagined heir of all of “human history”–how do we set about electing the first President of this millennium? Can anyone imagine a greater pair of non-entities than Christian Bush and Gore, each born into a national political family and each deliberately chosen by his hereditary party’s strategists and funders long before the charade of primary electoral threats, duly dramatized, and duly met? Now that they’ve fully figured out how to render even national elections inconsequential for all practical purposes, what will they think of next? How will the fiber-optic cables and airwaves be filled with viewer-attracting photo-ops and sound bites between now and next November? The awesome impossibility of the public relations and media management task boggles the mind. Surely one or the other, probably Christian Bush, must be destroyed by devastatingly irrelevant scandal and personal revelations. Otherwise voter turnout might actually decline below the abysmal to dangerously revealing “why bother?” levels.

Whatever happens, the empty show will go on, as Shakespeare put it, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing. Evening newscasts, interviews of talking heads–clean-cut, pampered, white-faced, maled experts and pontificators of all totem colors and sexes–will drone on and on in increasingly screechy voices that betray a desperate underlying cry for attention to lines and themes and “issues” recycled year after year, decade after decade, with less and less conviction, and more and more genuine surprise that it can still be done, that the jig is not yet up. RealTV, Cops, Jerry Springer, and other parasitic infotainment flotsam will continue to drift to fill the void, with scripts written and awkwardly recited at reading comprehension levels so low even second graders should be embarrassed, serving up endless “real” images and “real” people, chosen seemingly to no other end than to degrade the mass of the viewing American public in their own eyes. It all as if to say, “See, we may not have the answers, but you cannot even turn to each other, to your neighbors, families, friends, co-workers, communities for help, for wisdom, not even for compassionate commiseration.”

And so we, too, must live on through this, our allotted moment in the history of human delusion. Many others have done it through equal or worse years, decades, centuries than these. How and when and what lies on the other side are questions that ought to concern us. But our situation is such that our first concern must be how, where and with whom are we even to begin, to begin to rethink thought, to pick up the pieces that make for understanding. How, where, and with whom are we even to reestablish the need for it?

And Why Bother?

Because in these times, there’s really nothing else to do… nothing that isn’t a stale diversion, delay, procrastination, and avoidance of that fundamental human task of understanding…except possibly to laugh, to laugh with friends, which is perhaps the most human and humanizing of all responses to the otherwise sorry human condition.

The pace of the on-going technological assault upon privacy is dizzying. From every direction–local, state and federal government; business small, large, old and new, profit and non-profit–every animal, vegetable, and mineral that leaves the faintest information trail is now the target of ever more ingenious tracking, trapping, gathering, sorting, cataloging, profiling, data-mining and data-exchanging schemes.

And the already dizzy pace is only going going to pick up after the Y2K hurdle is cleared. The end of the world averted–their world, that is–legions of data-hungry institutions will be able to devote their full attention and the full power of their newly refurbished, Y2K-compliant, fully inter-networked, faster than ever data-crunching arsenal to pursuing the Great Hunt in which we and everything we have, want, see, hear, say, and do are no more than so much digital prey.

Not surprisingly, the most organized and articulate resistance to the assault on privacy can be found on Internet. Since the online and plugged-in are probably the most extensive and intensive users of information technology, they are also the easiest and most affluent prey in the digital forest, leaving information trails as broad as the proverbial "Information Superhighway" itself. Despite heroic efforts to discover and respond to the multiplying threats, even this most organized resistance barely manages to keep up with the assault on privacy that these days seems to race ahead of even the hardware-software revolution itself.

All the major privacy rights sites share a tone of breathless stridency and terror, as if aware that either no one’s really listening or if they are it’s probably too late. Start with the following short list, check them out. Read and follow their maze of links to other sites and endless documents. The "plot" will thicken. You, too, are sure to feel that creepy tingling of justified paranoia travel up your spine, lodging itself somewhere back behind your eyeballs, deep inside your skull, the one place where you can’t see. It’s not somebody that’s watching; it’s almost everybody.

Perhaps the most difficult challenge faced by privacy rights advocates in mobilizing themselves and the general public is deciding where to concentrate their energies and how to characterize the enemy. The assault comes from so many and such shifting directions, and there are seemingly so many unlikely heroes and villains changing places from moment to moment, that it’s easy to get lost and in doing so lose the means of realistically and effectively communicating the situation to the public at large.

For example, in the battle for secure, encrypted online communication for private citizens, major international corporations and especially banking institutions appear firm and powerful allies against the relentless quest of the domestic and national security state for a universal wire-tapping free fire zone. Yet, short of the courts, the federal government, particularly its administrative branch, is the public’s only potentially effective ally against the same corporate and, today especially, banking powers in their drive for universal, cradle-to-grave data exchange over every aspect of their customer’s lives. Of course, this is the same federal government that, in the processes of "reforming" banking law, is opening the door to the sharing of health data among insurers and lenders merged under the same corporate "roof."

Even the champions of privacy themselves are not excluded from this bizarre dance of heroes and villains, since privacy advocates have emerged as formidable opponents of national health care, which under any realistic scheme would require some form of recipient identification and database. Few of these digital-haves who champion privacy at the expense of universal health care bother to reflect that it’s only they, the affluent and well-employed who already have secure health care, who could possibly be scared to death by the prospect of being caught in the act of saving their own and their family’s lives. Those without would be fools not to take the trade-off as a good one. And the inability of the champions of privacy, particularly the ACLU, to see their own privilege is part of their difficulty in reaching the general public.

Another part of the difficulty in getting the message out about Big Brother, perhaps the largest part, is the legacy, the renown of Orwell’s 1984. Orwell’s Big Brother is the State. And that message about the danger of the State hits home in many countries around the world governed by various types of authoritarian, totalitarian, bureaucratic and closed oligarchic regimes. It also hits home in America, where presumably that State is constitutionally less of a threat, due to long-standing traditional suspicion, supremely exploited over the last two decades by Reagan and his right-wing heirs with their slogan, "Get Big Government Off Our Backs."

The problem with the slogan, the problem with the notion that "democracy means everybody taking care of themselves," is obvious, though hardly ever stated publicly, even by Democrats. Disempowering Big Government accomplishes little more than clearing the field for Big Business. The notion that democracy means everybody, from poverty-level single working mothers to a Bill Gates or a Donald Trump or, more powerful still, an AT & T or a Disney, each separately talking care of themselves as best they can without regard for each other, is patently absurd. Yet it’s the standard stuff of our corporate media-orchestrated political discourse.

The champions of privacy know that business databases are as great threat as any government database. But it’s a daunting task convincing average Americans that their precious freedom to shop with supermarket discount cards is only a ploy of Big Corporate Brother. As media pressure to "plug in" mounts, it’s even harder to convince them that they’ve a stake in concealing their browsing choices from new wave Internet marketing scams such as alladvantage.com, which pays users directly to keep adbanners and browsing-trackers on their desktop, or peoplepc.com, which offers a "free pc" and Internet access for $24.95 a month. Peoplepc.com, its operation and television ad campaign massively financed by Japanese venture capital giant SoftBank, has the gall to display as it’s corporate slogan the 1960’s anti-government cry "Power to the People." They might as well hang out a sign: "Orwell’s NewSpeak Spoken Here." But few would notice. By now most Americans, who were capable of outrage at Clinton’s obvious fumbling to conceal his tawdry Lewinski affair, don’t even register the scale of lying that comes their way through advertising. By now, commercials are just entertainment–"The Funniest Commercials You’ve Never Seen"–the way shopping is just something to do with your free time.

"Britain now has among the world’s highest number of CCTV cameras spying on its residents" ("London’s Big, Bad Brothers," Wired, October 19,1999).

In what is thought to be the city’s first Internet lineup of suspects, police posted 72 photos that were taken mainly by closed-circuit TV cameras. The suspects are wanted for inciting riots at the Carnival Against Capitalism on 18 June" ("Bobbing for Hooligans on Web," Wired, November 1,1999).

The following pages show photographs of:

• persons wanted for offences committed on that day who are currently unidentified
• persons who have been identified but not traced
• those who have been arrested, charged with offences, released on bail and subsequently failed to appear at court

City of London Police

Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)

interhack

Privacy Rights Clearinghouse

Privacy Journal

ACLU: Cyber-Liberties

Adbusters

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT)