It feels more and more like we’re falling backwards into an Orwellian nightmare. A bad dream of such complexity, with so many hi-tech moving parts, that we can’t adequately grasp what’s happening. But it’s definitely there. It’s our new American Collective, and it’s far more than those of us on the Internet being profiled by marketers who want to sell us piles of junk.
All those profiles, some of them drilling deep into who we are, will eventually be pulled together into one massive data bank with the ability to better contain and control us. At the same time, newspapers have been going out of business, with the latest attack against a free press aimed at the Wall Street Journal, for an expose of Donald Trump.
Hopefully, Murdoch and the Journal won’t follow in Shari Redstone’s footsteps, with Paramount’s $16 million dollar payout to DJT’s protection racket. It was the utter castration of a once proud network news operation, with Paramount’s Board of Directors, wielding the scalpel.
Don’t take it personally though, it’s only business, even if it does result in our increased collective ignorance.
Politico reports that more than two-thirds of the country’s newspaper jobs have vanished since 2005. The ax is falling in newsrooms at many local tv stations as well. I know this to be a fact, as some of my friends have been victims of the corporate cost-cutting (p)urge. There is also PBS. Obviously Donald Trump and his minions want that to just go away.
Oversight, the kind provided by a free press and guaranteed by the First Amendment, can be such a pain.
And there you have a couple of fronts in the war against American Democracy, the aggregation of information about each and every one of us via the Internet, while, at the same time, traditional sources of news and information are being shut down or are going under as their traditional revenue streams leave for cyberspace, which increasingly steals the eyeballs of readers and viewers.
Absent professional Journalism, people are getting what they want, and not what they need. It’s the perfect storm for a burgeoning autocracy, all of it fitting nicely into the plans of any traditional autocrat or fascist.
Historically, killing the flow of information provided by a free press is near the top of their primary agendas when subduing a soon to be conquered people, as the oligarchs eat away at our freedoms bit by bit. So little goes with each bite, that it’s hardly noticed. Even if it is noticed, it seems relatively harmless, until you begin to add it all up.
Without a free press we are increasingly ignorant, making it increasingly difficult or even impossible to hold our elected leaders accountable, making it next to impossible to sustain a working democracy. All the while they continue collating new data on each of us. And even with all of this, we still haven’t gotten to the cameras.
It started with security cameras in retail outlets and government buildings, I guess. Then, suddenly, there were cameras at almost every intersection. Cameras, cameras, everywhere, inside and out. But who’s complaining? It was all about keeping us safe, right? It was cost-effective too, using cameras instead of people to keep an eye on things.
That’s what I was thinking as I recently installed our new video doorbell. Something I was prompted to do after that recent home invasion robbery and double murder back in Encino. A video doorbell, only seemed to make good sense. And it works very well, I must say, giving us a running record of everyone who comes to the door, and more. With AI, it remembers faces and cars. Amazing, no? Well, it’s amazing to me. I can remember when we had just one wired phone and it was on a “party line” back in rural Minnesota.
This new era of extreme audio and video coverage is both wonderful and dangerous, as eventually some new “collective” will have gathered not only digital personal profiles on us all, they will have also patched all the cameras together, keeping tabs not just on every damn thing we’ve done, but whatever we happen to be doing at any given moment.
Even now, privacy is a distant memory for those of us old enough to remember what it was.
Live and in color, the collective will be watching and listening. It’s more than something Orwell dreamed up, it’s our new reality, and it’s probably more akin to the Hitler Youth Movement keeping an eye on everything that happened in the neighborhood. That one really snuck up on the Germans, didn’t it?
But in the here and now, nobody seems to be all that worried about it. The big digital information gathering and traditional press killing picture, I mean. Even while Donald J. Trump, files his most recent lawsuit against the press, attempting to discourage and contain allegations of who really knows what with regard to his former good buddy Jeffrey Epstein? If only the government would release all the files, not just from the grand jury, but the complete FBI investigation. Suppose Pam Bondi, will ever do that? Without being ordered to by Trump, I mean.
Again, oversight can be such a pain. All those reporters poking around, with no agenda other than digging out the truth. We can’t have that. Oh, hell no. What we can have is a new collective, armed with our personal profiles while video and audio coverage of our each and every move increases daily, with the installation of each new camera.
Driven by fear, under the banner of “I have seen the enemy and he is us,” we could very well be assisting in the destruction of our free society, as the free press dies and our democratic institutions are torn to pieces while we the people install cameras, both inside and outside our homes, all of them standing by for some massive all in one AI hookup.
Welcome to the new collective, comrade. And please remember, when our free press is gone, our freedom will be going with it. Now that’ll be a real deep state. And they’ll have it all, each and every painful moment of it, on camera.