Resist electro-fascism !
‘Fascism is a governmental system based on authoritarian nationalism,’ says WorldAtlas.com. Another element, says FEE.org, is ‘corporatism,’ adding that the 1930s German and Italian models were admired abroad.
Things have moved on and fascism needs to be redefined. With a global economy and multinational corporations, the centralisation of power is in supranational bodies; and in the information age, the authoritarianism once enforced by brownshirts and jackboots is carried out by data manipulation.
Russell Brand’s latest video warns entertainingly of the gathering of your personal information in the Cloud, and its potential to shackle you:
It’s getting brazenly overt.
The other day I wanted to look up a prophetic 1970 film, ‘The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer.’ YouTube has the whole thing online; but it’s age-restricted (I think because we see a woman’s bottom at one point - we see much more on TV these days). Here’s what pops up:
Okay, I’ll say I’m over 18. Once, that would have been good enough, but not now:
How many corporations holding your information have suffered data breaches? Last year, CSO Online listed 15 of the biggest up till then; and we’ve just had another with T-Mobile, affecting 77 million users.
My response, and quite possibly yours, to Google’s demand above is, are you crazy? (On social media I’d be tempted to capitalize and use an obscene word.)
But that’s just about the potential for misuse by third parties. This data gathering is inherently dangerous, even without hackers. Brand’s video above talks about Amazon One, the system using the palm of your hand for ID, and speculates on how this and other new forms of snooping can be correlated to turn from commercial to political ends.
Over six years ago, Klaus Schwab was outlining his plan for going further than that and implanting computer chips into humans:
What sort of world do Schwab and his ilk have in mind?
He didn’t say ‘I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy And Life Has Never Been Better’; that was a future-fantasy by Ida Auken written for the WEF and subsequently erased from its site, though still available here.
But Auken’s vision does seem to chime with what Schwab and his sidekick Yuval Harari are contemplating: ‘hackable animals’ that can be provided for by a giant benevolent entity; as in Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem, we shall all be ‘Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.’
Except:
If you are a super-ruler with eight billion human pets, it might occur to you to ask, why so many? We neuter our companion animals, and have them put down not only to spare their suffering but sometimes to suit our convenience.
If artifical intelligence and other kinds of mechanisation result in a large class of useless people, once their little money has been sucked up to build the palaces of the Übermenschen, what is the point of sustaining them and letting them breed and breed?
The tightening control of us by making things ever more convenient and increasing our passivity as citizens as well as consumers, is the ‘primrose path’ leading the way to global corporatist fascism. Centralised power magnifies the opportunity to do good; but also to do evil.
To quote Thomas Jefferson again:
We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.
How if another Ida Auken were to write a Jeffersonian vision entitled: ‘I Own Just Enough, But I Have Privacy, Am Self-Supporting And My Life Is My Own’?
We can’t go all the way back - pre-industrial America is gone; but we can resist going all the way forward to technological enslavement.