Whenever I interact with the mainstream of institutional life, I am aware that the totalitarian omni-surveillance agenda continues, and continues... And seems even to have stepped-up in the past few years with the phenomenon self-described as "AI".
Whenever "systems" or procedures are revised, whenever I purchase (or have forced upon me) some new equipment or software the surveillance agenda is ever more obvious. Everything from driving a car to using a computer is getting slower, more complicated, less effective.
And yet - where is it all going?
The original and explicit intention was a global totalitarian society of omni-surveillance, which would lead to micro-control of the masses. But nobody now believes believes that this is a goal worth pursuing; and nobody (except half-baked dystopian fantasists and those they terrorize) now believes that this will happen, or even could happen.
Instead; the System and all its components collapse under accelerating levels of (substantially self-inflicted) personnell incompetence, disaffection, resource-consuming change - plus more and ever-more deliberately-induced chaos.
The omni-surveillance agenda is not going anywhere but towards collapse; everything done to further the agenda actually contributes to its own destruction; because the omni-surveillance society is functionally incapable of sustaining omni-surveillance.
And yet the agenda will not stop! It rolls-on and on; nobody is stepping back, abandoning, nor trying to reverse it!
I see in this a near-total disconnection of cognition; between ideology and reason.
It is literal insanity: psychosis, madness, delirium, dementia - disguised and denied only because its prevalence is near-universal .
On one side there is a utterly vague and goalless gestural morality of official purposes - and on the other there is an absolute (and terrified) a refusal ever to step-back and seriously evaluate what has happened, is happening - and where it is going.
The refusal to think is absolute because people are subconsciously aware that there can be no purpose or point to their lives; because their fundamental assumptions is that there is no purpose or point to reality - and nothing to look-forward-to.
Understanding all this explicitly would only make matters worse.
As of now: the ideological agenda is never within-system but comes from... elsewhere and above; the agenda is always incoherent; and all dominating and powerful institutional agendas are constructed on false assumptions.
Almost nobody has the slightest idea where things are going, they don't want to know, and will not try to find-out; ultoimately because they have no idea where they ought to be going.
Ideologies such as omni-surveillance persist indefinately because: what else is there?
What strong motivation is there to discard one lying incoherent strategy for some other that is no better?
And, after all; if people gave-up on omni-surveillance it would only be to pursue CO2 pseudo-environmenatlaism, or the latest iteration of the sexual revolution, or another of the evil-motivated strategies of totalitarianism; or else to joing the Agents of Chaos in engineering an endlessly escalating forever-war of each-againts-all.
In an assumed not-alive universe and world that lacks all purpose, meaning, direction, or essential personal relevance: what else is there any better than what we now have? So: Roll-On Omni-Surveillance!
In Steiner terms it seems that Ahriman was only ever used to clear the way for Sorath.
ReplyDelete@William. Yes. If Sorathic (spitefully destructive) evil is the ultimate evil; then all other (and partial) forms of evil, will inexirably tend towards it (unless there is repentance).
ReplyDeleteIn Dungeons and Dragons terms (!) all Lawful Evil will become Chaotic Evil over time.
(D&D also has a thing called Neutral Evil, but it doesn't make coherent sense to me. The basic idea is (I gather) something like the Misty Mountain Goblins that Bilbo encounters in The Hobbit - i.e. a society of evil beings, that is somewhat self contained and broadly cooperative among themselves. Neither serving an evil master like Lawful Evil, nor pursuing short term spiteful goals regardless of the outcome like Chaotic Evil. I don't see this as a distinct category, but I think that's the general idea.)
I can't recall where I encountered it, but someone noted that once the state (or System) sees and knows everything via surveillance it won't have the slightest clue of what is really going on.
ReplyDeleteThat idea seems counterintuitive on the surface, but it makes sense to me.
@Frank - That is functionally true.
ReplyDeleteThe other thing, and related to my point in this post - https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2026/09/another-reason-why-mass-media-always.html - is that when They want to Get somebody, they seem not to make any use of surveillance information but instead just make up lies and Get people on that basis.
In D&D lore, the neutral evil entities consider themselves above the categories of Chaos and Law and manipulate both sides in the pursuit of "pure" evil. It makes some sense to me because chaos/destruction can at times serve Good (maybe you wouldn't agree?), but what the true agenda of these entities would be is not clear.
ReplyDeleteAfter some thought- total moral inversion is not Chaos- although chaos might be a necessary step towards that end. I believe that must be the end goal of a purely evil entity.
ReplyDeleteI just bought a new dishwasher, and after they installed it, I discovered the bloody thing is supposed to be controlled by an app on my phone. Grrrrrrr! Never would have bought it if I’d known that.
ReplyDelete@JP - That's actually the most absurdly stupid thing I've heard in a while. I wonder, did anyone of the dozens involved in the decision, manage to convince themselves that that was an improvement over a button?
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