There is an academic and critic (rare crossover for today’s era) named Darko Suvin who proposed what’s been termed cognitive estrangement, a thing which sets science fiction apart for the ability to use the actual ignorance of readers to sell imaginable technologies. Anyone clouded on the right prescription pharmaceuticals can experience a romantic comedy, but very few will learn firsthand what molecular trans-teleportation might do for example to muscle memory, so, audiences are encouraged to take the author’s word for it. When it comes to today’s technological impresarios of waking life, suspension of disbelief is compulsively awarded by consumers to make the verisimilitude of good intentions maintaining this digital though cultural Holy Grail feel like anything other than the pilot’s black box of our crashing Spaceship Earth that it genuinely is. But the idea that the warden’s long-game is to safely release every last one of his prisoners is a mass hallucination. The reality tunnel is a super highway.
In keeping with its origins, its story bible and business plans, the NSA is completing a new set of multi-billion-dollar tech contracts for its Groundbreaker program, thus more vocally acknowledging the privatization of national security in the same historic sense as how domestic law enforcement has never answered to the public, but rather existed for no other causes but collecting taxes for landowners and reprimanding the slave-castes, even to the extent of manufacturing themselves the opportunities to reprimand said slave-castes. For organic drones, defense is mere consumption. Bacteria logic of devour, or be devoured. The full breadth of power and authority enjoyed by their self-appointed and self-anointed chain of command hangs on the threadbare willingness of the public to uniformly wear the dunce caps of the able fools, and collectively look the other way.
If vaccines work then the vaccinated have nothing to fear but let’s keep giving anti-vaxxers a hard ride. Let’s incriminate abortion, knowing it can still easily be obtained illegally, even just to save one life, but let’s not incriminate gun ownership, knowing it can still easily be obtained illegally, even just to save one life. Which came first, the satellite dish or the cancerous tumor? Let’s own and operate many hundreds of military bases throughout 130+ different nations, largely without permissions, but balk at the idea of the can do no wrong Israeli government or even our special relationship’d British allies having one within our own borders. Much less the European member-states of NATO, who one and all are expected to ask how high whenever Uncle Sam says to jump, despite USA business interests owing more, owing trillions more, currently to the business interests of European nation-states than versa vice. Federal authorities are still putting immigrant kids in cages, but here’s thousands of very serious words more concerning the bold statement that the Conners are still the most relatable family in the annals of sitcom history.
Apple’s Tim Cook’s pot has made a luke-warm attack on the kettle of the data industrial complex, consisting primarily of the billionaire owners of bunkers neighboring Cook’s New Zealand fallout shelter. Because the man is just so gosh-darned concerned, as concerned as the stereotypical pro-lifer is for gunshot victims on soil either domestic or foreign. Instead of the ongoing today where all virtual endeavors are to track, surveil, record, extort and manipulate, the consuming public are only to heed the promising tomorrows, like advancements in fibre optics expected to increase internet speeds as quickly as herbal pills custom-designed to promote the rapid growth of one’s manliness. Always expected to be shocked by the consequences, no matter what they may be, no matter the obviousness of their being the same result of the same inaction that relentlessly always comes from accepting the universe at face value. Veils can be so thin as to be see-through, but everything still must be spelled out aloud inside the iStore’s physical location bound by the circle made of broken knuckle-bones from the hands of 72 virgins on the bottom of a Silicon Valley condo’s drained infinity pool.
Post-9/11 fears gave birth to legislation which eventually devolved to encompass enforcing unprovoked travel bans against innocent civilians for no better reason than that they maintain dual citizenship. It’s led to a widespread mentality that rationalizes dividing families at borders, indulging in mass deportation for the lucky, and mass incarceration as conveniently state-sanctioned slavery for the unlucky. A now-pervasive mentality which also rationalizes constructing physical walls on national boundaries, valiantly declaring total ownership of cultural globalization while fetishing domestic charges of cultural appropriation in spite of culture by design existing fundamentally to be shared. The forces responsible for profiteering the most expensive military in the history of the known world can be really, really predictable in that their endgame can always be counted on being greed incarnated. You can bet good wooden nickels and company scrip on that.
So when Amazon altruistically announces facial recognition to protect the consuming public from the dire menace of immigrants possessing nothing more than the clothes on their backs, much less a truckload of portable servers offering a wealth of spyware, it’s to be expected that so much more than immigrant faces will be catalogued, evaluated and exploited. And that such expansive designs were always the final pursuit, coming from that 1% class where the term “enough” does not exist in their vocabulary by any definition. There is simply no such occurrence as new technology harvested, or even revealed, without military applications fully explored first, from the public or private sector. You don’t fly the first jet-fueled airplane in secret, in theory; but then, we know now that the past 50 years of drone research and development explains pretty much all UFO sightings.
Tech companies whose products continue tracking their consumed public even after the apps have been uninstalled, are making billions in taxpayer monies doing privatized national security on behalf of the federal government, yet everything is totally on the up and up, and anyone who insists that the Slender-man phenomenon is a bullshit joke created by the creepypasta after-school program, they are the real loons.
Meanwhile, and brace yourselves for this, but over in China right now the military-happy business interests of the Chinese government are using *technology* to investigate and purge in the non-commercial sense anti-government, anti-Capitalist, anti-establishment, anti-militancy antiwar dissidents. Only fearsome savages would even vaguely consider committing such fascist atrocities upon their own peoples!
Unlike the normally widely regarded as tech-savvy Swedes, who are implanting corporate microchips inside their persons by the thousands. In Canada, former Ontario privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian is resigning from Sidewalk Labs, shocked to learn their planned smart city is a ghetto for technologist masochism. As though a corporation whose entire business model has always been predominately concerned with electronically tracking, surveillancing, recording, extorting and manipulating user and non-user data contrary to its own public terms and conditions might possibly be the slightest bit interested in monitoring all of public space to go with all of the private space already monitored, archived and coagulated in their data-banks by way of ablest federal grants, corporate subsidies, tax breaks (along with tax forgiveness regardless of national and international tax evasion dwarfing all financial costs for unemployment benefits, food stamps, WIC, Medicare and Medicaid altogether but let’s keep socially insisting that those with absolutely nothing have somehow taken everything) and…generous government contracts. As if just the act of putting unquestioning faith in technology (or anything) were not blind enough, let us all ignore the clear ramifications of expanding the controls of the very people wholeheartedly obsessed with controlling it all.
And then get outraged over the lack of restraint that follows the jar of cookies handed to the 5-year-old me.