2022, another 'unwanted AirTag' new year
May the shadow of the Unabomber accompany you wherever you go...
On the last day of 2021 I came across a really happy news
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/30/technology/apple-airtags-tracking-stalking.html
It's funny to see the US being turned into a Digital Gulag where normal people are watched more often than dissidents were in the Gulags of the USSR. Okay. Maybe I'm too old. However, this joke stands because the motherfuckers who run US politics are as old or older than I am.
Obviously this is not an intentional phenomenon. But maybe that's the biggest problem. American politicians are so fat, corrupt, irresponsible, and lazy, that they've let a handful of surveillance capitalism entrepreneurs seize ever-increasing chunks of political power.
This obviously would not happen in the USSR. And here the joke becomes even more acidic. The Soviet system, which placed politics above economics, collapsed. The American system, which places the economy above politics, will not collapse.
The US will turn into an ever-lasting tyranny more and more sophisticated and terrifying than the old USSR. A current version of Dantesque Hell with the phrase written on illuminated panels in every American international airport:
Leave all hope, ye who enter.
The Soviets could only export their way of life using brute force. US already do this, even though military technological sophistication is no guarantee of success (see the case of Afghanistan). Attack drones, robotic soldiers, militarized AI... it can all be hacked.
The white-ass surveillance-obsessed Ape empire is not going to be destroyed by war. It will simply rot in the hands of Russian, Chinese and alien hackers and no one will bother to pay attention to the tragedy of the Americans. Fuck them all. Who really cares?
In the 1990s, in its manifesto, the Unabomber warned Americans that a technology-dominated society was "... permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine." Reading the commented news can anyone say that the Unabomber was wrong?
The ends obviously do not justify the means used by the Unabomber. But now we can reread his words with detachment:
"129. Another reason why technology is such a powerful social force is that, within the context of a given society, technological progress marches in only one direction; it can never be reversed. Once a technical innovation has been introduced, people usually become dependent on it, so that they can never again do without it, unless it is replaced by some still more advanced innovation. Not only do people become dependent as individuals on a new item of technology, but, even more, the system as a whole becomes dependent on it. (Imagine what would happen to the system today if computers, for example, were eliminated.) Thus the system can move in only one direction, toward greater technologization. Technology repeatedly forces freedom to take a step back, but technology can never take a step back—short of the overthrow of the whole technological system."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm
As they drown their world in goods that extract data to be analyzed, bought, sold, employed to create patterns, make predictions, and provide incriminating evidence, Americans brought to life the dystopia predicted by the Unabomber. They cannot claim, nor regain a freedom. This possibility is incompatible with the society dominated by the technologies created by surveillance capitalism and for surveillance capitalism, a system in which human beings cannot have privacy or freedom.
Surveillance capitalism has replaced the old political totalitarianism as the source of collective psychoses. In addition to dehumanizing and exploiting users of digital technologies, technological trinkets and algorithms undermine science, factual truth, and democracy.
But no one can see these invisible enemies who create and shape collective psychoses. They are everywhere and nowhere. In the past it was possible to see and fight a dictator. Now this is not possible, as everyone is connected to invasive sophisticated goods and algorithms that can control their personality, predict their behavior, anticipate their desires, spy on their feelings, and store all this data so it can be used in the future to correlate with other data.
The system is so efficient that it makes some people believe that they will be freer if they merge with computers. Americans are terrified of over-surveillance, but many of them paradoxically applaud Elon Musk. He's a preacher of technological religion, he's filling space with new satellites, and he wants to be Emperor of Mars.
Elon Musk implanted a microchip in his pig brain to get smarter. Microchips can be hacked. Right now someone somewhere is already planning to hack into Elon Musk's artificial brain. He wants to conquer Mars, but a Stuxnet computer virus transmitted over Wi-Fi can drive him crazy.
Fuck him. He himself chose to become a biological appendage of the technology that can and will be used against him. The same can be said for other Americans, because they want autonomous cars, they love smartphones that are used to listen to them and film them without their permission, they like to buy more and more trinkets capable of monitoring everything they do anywhere all the time.
The Unabomber wanted to explode the technological society. His enemy won and now explores and explodes the American dream turning it into a nightmare. No more terrorists need take risks to fuck Americans. They are already doomed to do this to themselves. Ironically, Europeans, Russians and Chinese are no better off.