It doesn't matter whether Democrats or Republicans are in charge in Washington, whether the politicians in question happen to be chanting "big government" or "small government." No matter what they say, almost all of them bow down before the oppressive powers of the state. They worship (and fund) those powers and, in the process, grant that state-within-a-state ever more powers lest they someday be blamed for another 9/11. Any attempts at "reforms" that might limit those powers turn out, in the end, to be just window dressing. You, the once-upon-a-time citizen, now prospective subject and object of the national security state, are at least theoretically the ultimate grantor of these powers, even if you now seem to have no control over them whatsoever.
This, then, is the sea in which you swim and, in case you hadn't noticed, the nets of corporate and government phishing are in the water, already being drawn up around you.
The Big Brotherness of It All
What I've been wondering recently is why, in a world that usually boggles my mind, this bleak side of it seems so relatively unsurprising to me. Part of the answer may be that the means of tracking, listening in on, and getting to know everything about you, the technological process of creating your dossier (in the case of government) and your profile (in the case of the corporate world), couldn't be newer, but the urge to do so couldn't be older. In my own life, decades before the Internet or email arrived on the scene, I encountered it up close and personal.
Here's a little story about a time when I could still be shocked by such things. Sometime in the late 1960s, at a large demonstration, I turned in my draft card to protest the Vietnam War. Not long after, my draft board called me in. I knew I had a right to look at my draft file, so when I got there, I asked to see it. So many decades later, I have no idea what I thought I would find in it, but I remember just how naà ¯ve I was. At 25, despite my antiwar activism, I still retained a deep and abiding faith in my government. When I opened that file and found various documents from the FBI, I was deeply shocked. The Bureau, it turned out, had its eyes on me. Anxious about the confrontation to come -- the members of my draft board would, in fact, soon be shouting at me -- I remember touching one of those FBI documents (what exactly they were I no longer remember) and it was as if an electric current had run directly through body. I couldn't shake the Big Brotherness of it all, though undoubtedly my draft card had gone more or less directly from that demonstration to the Bureau.
By the time those years were over, I had worked as an editor (and writer) for a small antiwar news service in which there turned out to be an informer who was reporting on us to... yep, you guessed it, the FBI. I had become intensely aware of clicks on my phone that might or might not have been government wiretaps, and it no longer seemed strange that "my" government was intimately interested in guys like me and was out to track and constrain, if not suppress, dissent.
The story of the anti-Vietnam War movement was in significant ways -- and we knew it then -- a tale of wiretaps, widespread government informers, and commonplace agents provocateurs. Of course, the urge of the FBI, under its Director J. Edgar Hoover, to listen in on dissidents of every sort (as well as politicians of every sort) then is too well known to repeat. And as it turned out, the CIA and god knows what other agencies were knee-deep in the Big Muddy of "domestic intelligence" as well.
The problem for the national security state at the time was that the means to listen in, observe everyone, collect dossiers on anyone's communications, contacts, acts, and life were still limited by relatively crude technologies and relatively crude, not necessarily reliable human beings. No longer. Among the many ways the Internet has connected people across the planet, there may be no greater wonder than the intimate ways it has connected governments and corporations to the rest of us. Edward Snowden's NSA revelations are stunning for the sense they give us that a global surveillance state capable of gathering just about any communication or interaction on the planet is not only plausible, but already a reality.
Similarly, the ability of giant Internet companies to learn about your tastes, buying habits, dreams, medical problems, faults, secrets, fears, and loves, and then sell all of the above and more to the highest corporate bidders continues to grow by leaps and bounds. And yet compared to what's coming -- compared, for instance, to the smart machines that will inhabit your future house, watch you, and record endless information about you for marketeers (and someday perhaps, for the government as well) -- the remarkable ways the powers that be can now possess you remain crude indeed.
Heading Out of a World of Shadows and Into a Shadowy World
This was hardly the revolution promised us when the Internet arrived, but it's no less revolutionary for all that. The issue at stake is generally still referred to as "privacy," but I suspect that, in the new communications world, that term is already on life support in an emergency room somewhere. So what does it mean to live like this? What, if anything, is to be done?
I'm hardly an expert on the subject. It's your generation, not mine, that will be forced to make something of this particular mess, if anything is to be made of it and we are not to become the possessions of the national security state and our personalities and traits turned into the personal equivalents of financial derivatives. Still, for what it's worth, I have a feeling that answers won't be found in the river of shadows that is the online world. I doubt you'll be able to encrypt your way out of our present dilemma or hack your way out of it either; nor will you be able to simply ignore it to death. There is, I suspect, only one way to change our lives when it comes to the increasingly oppressive powers of the surveillance state and its corporate doppelgangers: you'll have to step out of that world of shadows and into the increasingly surreal and shadowy world that surrounds and feeds on them.
Screens aren't going to offer you the necessary answers. You won't be able to ask Siri for guidance. No Google search will get you where you need to go. If you want a different world, one in which you can't be taken possession of via your screen, in which you don't more or less automatically come with a dossier and a profile, I think you're going to have to slip those screens back into your pockets or, given that you can be tracked via your smartphones wherever you go (even if they're turned off), maybe into a desk drawer somewhere.
You can't fight a national security state or a corporate selling state, both operating in the shadows via the shadowy world of the Internet -- not when so much of their power, their essential structures, and their operations are located in the perfectly surreal world beyond the screen, the one that they would like to put beyond your reach. That's why, on this grey and overcast day outside this auditorium, my urge is to graduate you from the world of shadows where you've spent so much of your last years into the increasingly shadowy off-screen world where what matters most still exists.
Unfortunately, there is no obvious gate off this campus. When you've snapped the last graduation selfie on that smartphone of yours, when your gowns and caps are returned and your schoolbooks sold off, you'll have to find your own way into our confusing world amid all those shadows. All I can do, graduates of the Internet class of 2014, is wish you luck and say that what you do (or don't do) will matter.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.
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