We are at a turning point in the creation of a resistance to the wholesale destruction of our civil rights and social values. This morning The Slog featured a refreshingly amenable formula with which to pinpoint the weaknesses of those who would oppress us. Tonight’s plea is that, equally, we remember how this effortless totalitarianism germinated.
If you haven’t already read AJC Boone’s column of earlier today here, I can’t recommend it too highly. I write that chiefly because, although among the Unwoke Awake there’s not much new in the culturo-constitutional landscape she describes, Boone’s style of delivery has not only (I sense) created a piece of broader appeal than most; she has also delivered a series of soundbites along the way that thoroughly deserve to be adopted by the forces of resistance.
Perhaps the best of the gems in her post is ‘The Blob is all droit du seigneur and no noblesse oblige’. To use an old Lancastrian term, that really is a belter. In turn, her nomenclature for the coming Power Monopoly State – the Blob – is wonderfully evocative: a slimeball of ectoplasmic something or other ungodly that lands on an unsuspecting head, sucks the Citizen into a disgusting bubble of gunk and produces another automatonic shell straight out of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.
However, as it happens I don’t pay for Ms Boone’s contributions to The Slog, and so I must contain my enthusiasm to some extent and try to add to her intuition rather than my outgoings.
If we are to avoid repeating the lessons of history, then we must look carefully at how we got to the approaching dystopia she describes. Here – and as a former adman this pains me – I have to record my firm opinion that a great deal of the problem stems from the arrival of the internet as a new and yet omnivorous medium of global communication….and the way in which the insouciant marketing community exploited it, having shed their moral compass equipment along the way.
Ageing veterans of Slog rants will know that for ten years now I have been banging on about the false promises, three card tricks, silo hideouts, deplorable customer service, forced purchase scams and unutterable arrogance of the entire range from ISPs to direct sales marketing of brands on the wonderful digital super-highway that was going to free us all.
What most of these hobgoblin gargoyles have been doing since around 2004 is reverse the roles of supplier and consumer so treasured in the West: and just as with Boone’s ‘Blobs lording it over Serfs’, these sociopaths did indeed turn the “Sovereign consumer” otf 1960-1980 into undiscerning chicks having pre-masticated gruel forced down their throats.
For years I complained about infuriatingly unreliable software for pc’s, only to receive admonition from Mac owners insisting I was “stubborn” for not switching to the Jobs view of hitech. Do they now think I would’ve spotted the fascism inherent in Bill Gates as early as I did? Those critics took the road of buying themselves out of the problem; therein lies the triumph of the Black Hats. “I’m alright Jack” is a huge dimension of how we got to here.
The outcome is that Milliennials are now maturing in a world that increasingly requires the consumer – the client, right? – to do most of the work – and crawl and grovel to avoid being shut down on social media. A world where useless forums and AI “Help” are laughably presented as real service. A world in which – if you can’t afford the huge premium on Macs – you can have any OS when you buy a pc at retail, so long as it’s Windows 10. A world offering braindead information that is hilariously obscure – “An Unexpected error has occurred”. And perhaps most irritating of all, a world where a sort of Geek St Vitus Dance demands that they change headings and protocols on a weekly basis….but don’t bother to update their own advice: yes, you too can search in vain and ever decreasing circles to find the location of ‘Device Manager’ but that page is now called Hopalong Cassidy.
All of the above is guaranteet to bamboozle the average somewhat technophobic tech consumer. In precisely the same way as Hancock, Whitty, Johnson and Ferguson talk down to us.
I’ll tell you what we see here: we see a corporate class that doesn’t give a flying fuck about the buyers who pay their engorged salaries. And I am at a loss to see so much as a rice paper between that situation, and an overpromoted midget who just approved two largely untested UK Covid19 “vaccines”. I cannot see anything to separate dickheads hiding in online silos, and British MPs who sit in a Commons where bulletproof glass separates them from the taxpayers in the public gallery – while around this august building are layers of anti-ramrod security and armed police.
Words like Kremin and Zil Lane spring to mind.
Serfdom and nosy surveillance began in internet marketing. Without it, the Davos to Pharmafia via Wall Street and CIA axis would, I believe, have been faced with a far more cantakerous public than we have today. And needless to say, without the politicisation of education (with its puerile emphasis on conformity and targets) we would be in even better shape.
Tonight here in rural south-west France, we are in the grip of a tenaciously icy spell. It’s hard to avoid the feeling that the freedoms we value are about to be put in the deep freeze and forgotten.
As I write these words, it seems clear that the rapidly-growing anti-censorship social medium Parler has been deplatformed by the dangerous mill owners at Amazon. Amy Boone’s stark warning could not have been better timed.
The Slog 