Spaceman Spiff discusses the malign confluence of technocrats and amoral power-seekers (BIRM):
Today’s technocrats, assisted by billionaire tech bros, want to implement a digital surveillance grid that will eradicate any notion of anonymity or privacy forever.
Every major country, including the United States, is working on this with enthusiastic support from governments and their many agents.
The sales pitch is primarily platitudes about protecting people from harm, especially children.
What they seek is the end of the internet as it currently is, which means it will look a lot more like licensed corporate TV than the current free for all. From here their goal is to extend their surveillance operation into every aspect of our lives, from the energy we consume to the food we are permitted to eat.
This will probably cause a lot of damage, but it will ultimately fail.
Tech bro arrogance meets managerial control freakery
We are witnessing a partnership between the technocratic elite, with a limited understanding of technology, and silicone valley titans, who are blinded by the promise of technology.
Each group believes draconian surveillance systems combined with fancy data analysis will solve many societal problems and usher in a new era with them at the helm.
To the technocrats it promises full-spectrum control of all our choices. The food we eat, the material we consume, the ability to travel.
They are salivating at the thought of the ultimate control, the issuing of government-controlled digital currencies they can deactivate on a whim. No steak for the memelords, and no road trips for those without the right carbon profile.
They have been discussing these things for many years with a degree of enthusiasm bordering on mania.
The technologists see a chance to keep in with the powerful, to join the club. If they can be the trusted partner of the visionaries currently wrecking our world they will cash in and perhaps be spared from the concentration camps.
The technologists have powerful tools that promise amazing things. Machine learning, predictive programming, behavioural modelling.
Spotting patterns within trillions of data points is appealing to society’s tinkerers, all the better to predict problematic behaviours and to spot trends. Combined with nudge units and related horrors of social engineering this promises to be the holy grail for a technocratic managerialist regime absolutely convinced it can steer society in enlightened directions, just like they imagine they did during Covid.
It is all very futuristic, and it has clearly impressed our technology gurus as well as those who love control.
But along with the outsized data stores will come outsized cockups they cannot properly plan for.
Climate modelling has promised immense benefits and accuracy for decades and we have yet to see a single successful prediction. Indeed, some of the most famous climate predictions are almost comically wrong but nonetheless trigger endless rounds of funding, chatter, conferences and hubris. Such is the lure of anything that can be adapted to enforce top-down social control.
There have been many attempts to harness technology to predict the stock market, another obvious target. None of them worked either. It doesn’t seem to matter. No one is checking the track record. It is sold on its promise and that works because of who is buying. Or, rather, the type of person who embraces these schemes.
Digital surveillance, digital currencies, digital voting, digital IDs. Everything we do tracked and stored. Such absolute total control would make our superiors into gods as they exploit these powerful tools to direct us towards better versions of ourselves.
There is a delusion at play here. Those closest to this seem lost in their fantasies. They are blind.
