David Warren considers the evolution of the Nanny State’s arsenal of technological surveillance (supplemented by the Karenstapo):
While it is not in my interest, currently, for gentle reader to get off the Internet, the idea must have occurred to him. In times like these, why put yourself under watch from Big Brother (or, Big Sibling, as he might prefer)? Why surround yourself with his electronic eyes, the way I am presently surrounded by jackhammers?
Granted, Nanny State was devising ways to track its citizens, and to exercise “crowd control,” long before the Internet was invented. But we had the advantage with them, for they were incompetent, often laughably inept. However, Internet-plus-meejah-plus-activists-plus-Guvmint makes a more capable adversary.
I am not recommending a systematic withdrawal from the world. That is for people with a religious calling, or some grave eccentricity. Rather I am thinking of self-defence, in the spirit of buying a gun. Of course, I am writing from Canada, one of the countries where owning a gun is more-or-less illegal; as is any other form of self-defence. (“When seconds count, the police will be here in minutes.”) Though I have noticed that, upcountry, the “No Hunting” signs tend to be used for target practice.
The “other side,” as I see it, which always worked on numbers, now has algorithms. “Artificial Intelligence” can home right in. The Nanny State never took the individual seriously, except when he was offering a threat. Now it is threatened by anything human. It is, as it were, utilitarian in outlook — “the greatest good for the greatest number” — along with other fatuous concepts, unamenable to reason. By its nature, it is positivist, nominalist, relativist, and “idealistic” in a very abstract way.
Whereas we, so far as we are human, take ourselves quite personally. In a clinch, we often prefer our own survival, and the survival of family and friends, to the requirements of a bureaucratic “policy.” That this is “selfish” should be immediately affirmed.
Because the masses are now deprived of a Christian education, they misconstrue the “selfishness” of Christian teaching, which tells us that we ought selfishly to become saints. Our intention should be to get ourselves to Heaven, along with any we know who can be taken with us. But charity is not “selfish,” in ways they understand. Under modern tenets of “multiculturalism,” even fidelity to the old Christian view is decried as a form of selfishness, calling out for persecution. For this is because it is “cultural,” not “multi” — for all the many languages it speaks.
Our enemy wants us to eschew uniqueness, and become instead “diverse” — by which it means homogenized and narrowly interchangeable. Increasingly, this adversary has the means to enforce its arbitrary will.
