The internet, from its inception, was created as a tool of mass surveillance. Yasha Levine traces the origins of the web in his book, and how its roots in counter insurgency shape its function today.
Shoshana Zuboff wrote (and has talked) extensively (and much more eloquently) on this subject in her 2018 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. You could have had your mind blown (and your tactics for fighting it adjusted) 6 long years ago. Most will remain behind the 8 ball out of sheer stupidity and more alarmingly, laziness. I see (and am dumbfounded by) it virtually every day.
In a nutshell, the most troubling aspect of this is that most people are more than willing to trade precious and hard earn civil rights for a little bit of convenience that they perceive as making their life "easier". Unless (and until) people comprehend the fallacy of this Faustian bargain, I fear we are doomed as a civilization.
I don’t think many people are sensible of compromising their civil rights for the convenience of using the Internet. As you imply, they may be completely ignorant of what’s going on, but nevertheless, as it stands now, I don’t think they sense that using the Internet endangers them in any way.
As I have said before, I think, for most people, it is a combination of ignorance and apathy. Ignorance can (hopefully) be combated by submitting keen insight and indisputable facts (vs. opinion) that can be translated into knowledge by some. But neither effort constitutes activism as Hedges followers seem to believe. As for laziness, I think it is difficult (if not impossible) to control another's inherent embrace of apathy. This fact is probably rooted in Newton's law of motion whereby an object at rest remains at rest, and an object in motion remains in motion at constant speed and in a straight line unless acted on by an unbalanced force.
With regard to ignorance: If you think most people are not stupid, can you cite some facts, or even anecdotal evidence, to support your assertion?
I read Surveillance Valley when it was first published and everything changed inside my thought processes; such a universe shattering shift and the leap of understanding that it propelled was invaluable. Yasha Levine woke me up and the scales dropped from my eyes; giving me an insight guarded by skepticism that was justified. I cannot thank him enough for setting me free from so many traps that have been set since the books inception.
I am always recommending and lending my copy of Surveillance Valley. I keep it next to Whitney Webb’s One Nation Under Blackmail.
Thanks for having him on Chris. I heard Yasha might write another chapter or two updating the occurrences that have landed since his book was first published. I sure hope he has the time to accomplish this. ✌🏼❤️🙏🕉
Thanks to both of you for an illuminating conversation.
Fifteen years ago, during the early frenzy of Facebook, a young enthusiast scoffed at my hesitation to join. I asked what I thought was a hypothetical question: “If the CIA had an invented Facebook, how would it be different?”
I guess we have our answer. I hope that kid reads this book.
My academic mentor was Dr. Ed Wenk, whom I'd met when I was a maritime safety activist. He was a prof of civil engineering and in 1959, at the beginning of the space race, became the first science and technology advisor to the U.S. Congress. Most important to him was the grad program he started at the U. of WA in 1970, the Social Management of Technology. The point was to not let the wow factor of high tech occlude responsibility for the common good. He wanted everyone to ask: how are decisions about technologies made? Who controls which technologies, for what purposes, and what are the likely long term impacts?
Obviously those questions have been brushed aside. Power and money are the only determining factors.
I have come to see one particularly insidious (and wildly successful) method for hijacking a given mind, and that is to embed ideologies suffocatingly close—in one’s own identity, the self. Social media is an especially good Trojan horse in this regard—by providing us each with our own bullhorn and accompanying earplugs, it isolates, plays to, and reinforces the ego-self, fracturing it into pieces and selling it back to us in the form of face creams, cars, guns, tribes, ideologies, and everything in between. The reason this strategy is so successful is because the ego is an inherent blind spot to the mind that coddles it. And it seems that we in the west, with our highly individuated identities and broken empathy, are particularly susceptible to this type of manipulation, largely because we are fooled by the mirage of our own “freedom”.
I have a personal sense of “satisfaction” when I learn something as powerful as this to keep stretching my eyes open to how subtle Empire can be at masking what are “necessary freedoms”…. Despite knowing the power of surveillance is in everything we do, I like knowing I still have a tiny rebellious choice to consume less online by using cash…. Silly I know given the grave nature of today’s book discussion and realities punctuated. Thank you for this powerful investigative journalism. I’m listening
Be we stupid sheep or highly intelligent sheep, big tech and all it's fascist manipulations seem to be shoved into our lives and down our throats weather we like it or not. It's a nauseating fellowship between US Intelligence, the US Military, Big Tech and Fascist Capitalism. And the three big tech stooge guys, they must have been pals in the US Navy.
Thank you to Chris Hedges and Yasha Levine for the perspective provided here. It brought to memory some some intersections of my own history.
1) I remembered a conversation from the mid to late 70s with a guy who had been in Thailand in Army Intelligence, in a low level support position. He was talking about the technologies that they were developing, using the Viet Nam war as a testing ground. He said something roughly like "The stuff we were doing was unbelievable, like from your worst nightmare, the ways they were working on developing ways of killing people remotely." (e.g. across the border)
2) I was during the late 70s-early 80s caught up in the early Stewart Brand (via CoEvolution Quarterly) idealistic possibilities of the computer. I was working for a state Government agency, 1981, while studying programming and computer architecture, this during the era of big IBM mainframes, (pre personal computer) in a "support enforcement" team - a project in gathering data on "deadbeat dads" to enforce alimony/child support payments. There was a team meeting in the "Sysop" room when I first joined and the project started, where we were shown how data from other computers was being accessed. We were told that we shouldn't talk about our jobs, that it fell in a hazy area that was "probably legal". One of the vaguely counter-culture team leads actually quoted Oppenheimer, his take on the question of the morality of what we were doing. he was smiling as he paraphrased: "When you see a project that is so technically sweet, you worry about the other aspects later."
Conspicuous in it's absence, only alluded to at the end by Chris Hedges is the truly dystopian potential of this technology, and the fact that society essentially plays out on the internet in EVERY sphere (communication - both personal and collective, finance, work), and the implications of not just surveillance but control make the scenarios of Orwell and Huxley look cheery.
Perhaps these corporations will be satisfied with "a seat at the table" at this point.
But what of other actors, in the context of a global financial catastrophe coupled with climate crisis and world instability? The 1930s multiplied exponentially.
Imagine something like a Stalinist purge. The application of the parallel cited earlier in a different Hedges report "The machinery is already in place. All it takes is someone to flip the switch."
It's interesting that I have in fact, not seen anywhere, even when commented upon, even a response to an observation regarding the implications for totalitarian control in a society like the contemporary U.S., even a response to the positing that our society effectively "lives" on the internet, our social functions interactions conducted overall more on the internet than in physical face-to-face interactions.
This is in fact an aberrant state of affairs, that we seem blind to, by virtue of being collectively subsumed in that virtual world, with cellphones seemingly grafted onto our upper limbs.
Shoshana Zuboff wrote (and has talked) extensively (and much more eloquently) on this subject in her 2018 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. You could have had your mind blown (and your tactics for fighting it adjusted) 6 long years ago. Most will remain behind the 8 ball out of sheer stupidity and more alarmingly, laziness. I see (and am dumbfounded by) it virtually every day.
In a nutshell, the most troubling aspect of this is that most people are more than willing to trade precious and hard earn civil rights for a little bit of convenience that they perceive as making their life "easier". Unless (and until) people comprehend the fallacy of this Faustian bargain, I fear we are doomed as a civilization.
I don’t think many people are sensible of compromising their civil rights for the convenience of using the Internet. As you imply, they may be completely ignorant of what’s going on, but nevertheless, as it stands now, I don’t think they sense that using the Internet endangers them in any way.
Of course you can't sense what you are ignorant of or oblivious to. That's how stupidity operates.
As I have said before, I think, for most people, it is a combination of ignorance and apathy. Ignorance can (hopefully) be combated by submitting keen insight and indisputable facts (vs. opinion) that can be translated into knowledge by some. But neither effort constitutes activism as Hedges followers seem to believe. As for laziness, I think it is difficult (if not impossible) to control another's inherent embrace of apathy. This fact is probably rooted in Newton's law of motion whereby an object at rest remains at rest, and an object in motion remains in motion at constant speed and in a straight line unless acted on by an unbalanced force.
With regard to ignorance: If you think most people are not stupid, can you cite some facts, or even anecdotal evidence, to support your assertion?
I read Surveillance Valley when it was first published and everything changed inside my thought processes; such a universe shattering shift and the leap of understanding that it propelled was invaluable. Yasha Levine woke me up and the scales dropped from my eyes; giving me an insight guarded by skepticism that was justified. I cannot thank him enough for setting me free from so many traps that have been set since the books inception.
I am always recommending and lending my copy of Surveillance Valley. I keep it next to Whitney Webb’s One Nation Under Blackmail.
Thanks for having him on Chris. I heard Yasha might write another chapter or two updating the occurrences that have landed since his book was first published. I sure hope he has the time to accomplish this. ✌🏼❤️🙏🕉
Thanks to both of you for an illuminating conversation.
Fifteen years ago, during the early frenzy of Facebook, a young enthusiast scoffed at my hesitation to join. I asked what I thought was a hypothetical question: “If the CIA had an invented Facebook, how would it be different?”
I guess we have our answer. I hope that kid reads this book.
amazing conversation!!! Wow, mind-blown!!!
too glad you are interviewing the author of this excellent book: this information needsmore exposure
My academic mentor was Dr. Ed Wenk, whom I'd met when I was a maritime safety activist. He was a prof of civil engineering and in 1959, at the beginning of the space race, became the first science and technology advisor to the U.S. Congress. Most important to him was the grad program he started at the U. of WA in 1970, the Social Management of Technology. The point was to not let the wow factor of high tech occlude responsibility for the common good. He wanted everyone to ask: how are decisions about technologies made? Who controls which technologies, for what purposes, and what are the likely long term impacts?
Obviously those questions have been brushed aside. Power and money are the only determining factors.
I remember that program! (But hadn't remembered the name.)
And yes, the program itself was subsequently eliminated during the ascendancy of neoliberalism.
I have come to see one particularly insidious (and wildly successful) method for hijacking a given mind, and that is to embed ideologies suffocatingly close—in one’s own identity, the self. Social media is an especially good Trojan horse in this regard—by providing us each with our own bullhorn and accompanying earplugs, it isolates, plays to, and reinforces the ego-self, fracturing it into pieces and selling it back to us in the form of face creams, cars, guns, tribes, ideologies, and everything in between. The reason this strategy is so successful is because the ego is an inherent blind spot to the mind that coddles it. And it seems that we in the west, with our highly individuated identities and broken empathy, are particularly susceptible to this type of manipulation, largely because we are fooled by the mirage of our own “freedom”.
Brilliant. Can't wait to read the book.
Thank you for the very interesting interview.
I have a personal sense of “satisfaction” when I learn something as powerful as this to keep stretching my eyes open to how subtle Empire can be at masking what are “necessary freedoms”…. Despite knowing the power of surveillance is in everything we do, I like knowing I still have a tiny rebellious choice to consume less online by using cash…. Silly I know given the grave nature of today’s book discussion and realities punctuated. Thank you for this powerful investigative journalism. I’m listening
Things are always worse than we knew. Truth is the most precious and highly guarded thing in the world. Love and money are more easily had.
Great work Gentlemen
Another great interview, Chris. Thank you very much for this. A very important insight for us all.
Be we stupid sheep or highly intelligent sheep, big tech and all it's fascist manipulations seem to be shoved into our lives and down our throats weather we like it or not. It's a nauseating fellowship between US Intelligence, the US Military, Big Tech and Fascist Capitalism. And the three big tech stooge guys, they must have been pals in the US Navy.
Thank you to Chris Hedges and Yasha Levine for the perspective provided here. It brought to memory some some intersections of my own history.
1) I remembered a conversation from the mid to late 70s with a guy who had been in Thailand in Army Intelligence, in a low level support position. He was talking about the technologies that they were developing, using the Viet Nam war as a testing ground. He said something roughly like "The stuff we were doing was unbelievable, like from your worst nightmare, the ways they were working on developing ways of killing people remotely." (e.g. across the border)
2) I was during the late 70s-early 80s caught up in the early Stewart Brand (via CoEvolution Quarterly) idealistic possibilities of the computer. I was working for a state Government agency, 1981, while studying programming and computer architecture, this during the era of big IBM mainframes, (pre personal computer) in a "support enforcement" team - a project in gathering data on "deadbeat dads" to enforce alimony/child support payments. There was a team meeting in the "Sysop" room when I first joined and the project started, where we were shown how data from other computers was being accessed. We were told that we shouldn't talk about our jobs, that it fell in a hazy area that was "probably legal". One of the vaguely counter-culture team leads actually quoted Oppenheimer, his take on the question of the morality of what we were doing. he was smiling as he paraphrased: "When you see a project that is so technically sweet, you worry about the other aspects later."
Conspicuous in it's absence, only alluded to at the end by Chris Hedges is the truly dystopian potential of this technology, and the fact that society essentially plays out on the internet in EVERY sphere (communication - both personal and collective, finance, work), and the implications of not just surveillance but control make the scenarios of Orwell and Huxley look cheery.
Perhaps these corporations will be satisfied with "a seat at the table" at this point.
But what of other actors, in the context of a global financial catastrophe coupled with climate crisis and world instability? The 1930s multiplied exponentially.
Imagine something like a Stalinist purge. The application of the parallel cited earlier in a different Hedges report "The machinery is already in place. All it takes is someone to flip the switch."
It's interesting that I have in fact, not seen anywhere, even when commented upon, even a response to an observation regarding the implications for totalitarian control in a society like the contemporary U.S., even a response to the positing that our society effectively "lives" on the internet, our social functions interactions conducted overall more on the internet than in physical face-to-face interactions.
This is in fact an aberrant state of affairs, that we seem blind to, by virtue of being collectively subsumed in that virtual world, with cellphones seemingly grafted onto our upper limbs.
A very strange normalcy.