About a week ago John Robb at Global Guerillas posted a truly frightening little essay called Privatopia, in which he considers what the US might look like under a fully privatized, corporate regime. Robb's not known for his optimism, and he's true to form here: the vision he presents is one in which the entire US government (along with every government around the world) has been sold off at fire-sale prices to multinational corporate interests, with what's left behind mainly functioning to service the national debt. At one point, he mentions that the privatization is popularly but 'incorrectly' termed "The Great Theft".
He goes on to paint a picture in which most of the country is continuously paralyzed by riots and civil disobedience, controlled by a mixture of surveillance technology and mercenary security forces meting out summary justice to criminals (empowered to do so by automated court systems that give their verdicts in seconds, based on evidence collected from the surveillance network.)
There was a time, not so long ago, when I would've positively lusted for a future like this: grim, dangerous, gritty, straight out of the cyberpunk novels I feasted on as a teenager. Now, older and, if not wiser, at least more jaded, the prospect of the future John Robb sees is just deeply, viscerally terrifying. Give it a read, though, because he shows exactly what the New World Order has in store for all of us.
Saturday, January 5, 2008
Privatopia
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Ron Paul's Bright Future As a Martyr
Assassinating Ron Paul would be a really bad idea.
I can see why the elites might find the idea attractive, and - according to Daniel Estulin - are giving it serious consideration. The man wants to dismantle the IRS and the Federal Reserve, the two main pillars of banker control in the US. Loosing those bonds would remove America from New World Order influence as effectively as Ghandi freed India from the British. Beyond that, he'd pull the US back from it's pointless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which would effectively defuse the Third World War they'd been planning in order to consolidate their control over the globe. Ron Paul in the Oval Office would be an unmitigated disaster for their interests ... one from which they might never recover, given various trajectories in technology and the economic and social trends that are being driven by those developing technologies.
But you know what? As bad as Ron Paul might be for them, his assassination would be worse. Over the past several months, a networked political movement has grown around Paul as though a seed crystal were dropped in a prepared solution. The network's composed of an incredible diversity of groups, splinter movements and fringe elements and perhaps most strikingly, a generous helping of previously apathetic non-voting independents, people who have nothing in common save a disgust with traditional politics and entrenched policies. What they want isn't Ron Paul, it's to decisively squelch the fascist puppet government being put in place, before it's too late. Ron Paul is only a focal point for this movement because he's the only politician who wants to do this.
So let's say they go ahead and give the green light, and by bullet, bomb, or 'accident' Paul is shuffled off the political stage. Well, the movement would be thrown into chaos immediately after. But that movement is a creature of the internet, a social network that can coalesce around anything, be it a political candidate or an ideological martyr ... and can do so with blinding speed.
Paul is a great man. That someone as apparently morally pure and benevolent can even exist in this sad and twisted age is an astounding thing, one that is hard to believe until one looks, and sees, a man who is as without sin as any saint of old. Men like Paul are as rare as Ghandi. Alive, he would be a competent administrator and a popular reformer, one who would go down in the history books as one of the greatest presidents the American republic has ever enjoyed. Dead, and the social network that's chosen him as an anchoring point might turn him into a figure of religious adoration. The freedom movement would then become a religion, one as toxic to the roots of the global order as Christianity was to the Roman Empire.
Can they look that far ahead? I suspect they can, for I can, and I'm but one man. That killing Paul would turn him into a martyr is surely a possibility that has occurred to them, and with any luck the risk of that happening is enough to stay their hand. But you know? I don't think it will be. I have very little confidence that Paul will ever sit in the Oval Office; as he approaches the goal, as the movement around him swells, so will panic at the top spread. They will only be able to take so much before the pressure grows intolerable, and, not knowing what to do, they have Paul killed.
That might buy them a year or three, but in the long run it will seal their fates more permanently than a Paul presidency ever could.
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
A WikiConstitution
Ah, a long silence there. This time I have a good excuse, though: I was wandering about in Cambodia for a week.
So, I've been thinking more about the idea of applying a wiki spirit to the creation of law. This is unlikely to happen soon, not down at the level of criminal law or anything else directly enforceable. But that doesn't mean the electorate of the planet can't start to get some practice in, and starting right now. What I'm thinking of is an open project to enumerate a sort of meta-constitution, a document that could be used as a model for constitutions all over the planet.
Now, the probability of some form of world government coming about sometime in the next century, and sooner rather than later, is hard to ignore. Multinational corporations, NGOs, and the UN have almost completed their coalescence into a meta-government of which nation-states are reduced to the status of less-than-sovereign duchies. This need not be a bad thing, and indeed is historically inevitable one way or another: once civilization started happening, the tendency was for larger and larger regions synergetic regions (cities, states, kingdoms and empires) to assert themselves. To predict that eventually one would rise to encompass the entire world is a very straightforward extrapolation of the historical record.
Of course, the first form of global government is likely to be a very bad thing indeed. The thing that is currently emerging is fascist, exploitative, wildly unequal and undemocratic, more like the Assyrian Empire than the United States of America that it will be superseding. It will be as disastrous for America as it is for everyone else subjected to it.
But it needn't stay that way. One possibility is that the internal contradictions of the first global empire will cause it to fall; if the fall is not too bad (economic collapse, rather than a nuclear spasm) something new, and hopefully better, might rise to replace it. Another possibility is that the citizens will reformat it themselves, demanding the imposition of true global democracy to accompany global corporations, global armies, and global bureaucracies.
A global democracy - a demosphere - would need a constitution, or at least a meta-constitution, something that would provide a limiting framework for the sorts of constitutions member-states are allowed to form. Something to enumerate the rights - and the duties - of people and organizations everywhere on the planet. And who better to write that meta-constitution than the people who will live under it? Throw open the doors for a year, a decade, or better yet, forever; allow anyone who wants to add or edit any passage they wish, with the officially adopted portion being that which consists of passages receiving the highest percentage of 'yes' votes.
Now, contrast this with the closest existing thing to a global meta-constitution, the UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights. It's filled with a lot of very nice language about freedoms to this and freedom of that, all rather pleasing if dull to read. There is nothing there to immediately excite distress, though buried at the bottom is an item that allows any and all of those human rights to be revoked if they conflicted in any way with the UN ... an unsurprising condition, given that the document was composed by a small group of thinkers acting at the behest of powerful men, entirely without the consultation of the people it was meant (symbolically, at least) to apply to.
Now, just creating such a thing wouldn't, in and of itself, guarantee it's enforcement. Not directly, at least, and not at first. For a very long time - years, perhaps, but more likely decades - it would be nothing but some pages on the web. But the project could grow, perhaps to the point of millions around the world actively collaborating on the project, with billions more aware of it (and free to jump in whenever and wherever they felt.) The mere act of participating would raise consciousness about our rights in responsibilities in a global state, and that would in turn lend the project a moral weight that would eventually make it impossible to ignore, a global constitutionalist movement that one way or another would need to be confronted. Eventually, it could become the central text of an ideology of freedom and rule of law that pervades the world.
Sunday, December 23, 2007
The Right to Keep and Bear Recording Devices
Throughout history, there have been technologies that are so fundamental to power relationships within a society that their possession and use has been an inevitable bone of contention. The most well-known example of that is firearms. Being in many ways the ultimate personal weapon, a great equalizer that nullifies any advantages of physical size or strength, gun rights are argued endlessly. Some feel that the possession of guns by private individuals is too dangerous, as it raises the lethality of interpersonal conflict, and thus argue for gun use to be restricted to the police and the military; others argue that widespread firearms ownership is the best protection against criminal behaviour and state oppression. In some countries, with weak central governments (or none, as in Somalia), everyone is allowed to possess a weapon more or less by default. In contrast, some countries with strong central governments (Japan, England), have banned them outright. The US has a right to keep and bear arms written into it's constitution (though that right has been steadily eroded, as the central government became more powerful.)
This is not a new battle; pre-gunpowder societies saw similar argument and diversity regarding the use and ownership of all manner of weapons. In some places, everyone was allowed to walk about openly armed; in others, the possession of a weapon was strictly limited to professional warrior castes and nobility. And once again, in general, the strength of central government was a good predictor of the degree to which weapons were restricted.
In terms of the effects of personal combat systems on society, firearms have likely come about as far as they ever will. Great improvements in accuracy might well be made (smart rounds, for instance); completely different propulsion systems used which increase muzzle velocity (say, electromagnetically instead of chemically); but the overall principle of a handheld weapon that makes one human more or less equal to another in combat potential, regardless of physical size or strength, is unlikely to change.
Personal recording devices, on the other hand, are just beginning to make their presence really felt. From their first appearance in the 20th century - expensive, delicate, their use restricted more or less to professionals and hobbyists - they have no proliferated to the point where practically everyone has a digital camera, often built into their phone. Technologies such as the eyeFi are allowing pictures to be instantly uploaded to the web, viewable by anyone. We are entering the age of the participatory panopticon, where everyone is watched by everyone.
Some see this as a dangerous attack on liberty, as they believe the constant surveillance will be exploited by states and corporations in order to build a perfect tyranny where everything - and everybody - is watched, tracked, tagged and thus controlled. They are not wrong to fear this; it is almost a certainty that such surveillance systems are being prepared right now. In some parts of the world, tyranny will be a very real possibility ... especially if the citizenry are not in possession of their own recording devices.
The reasoning is simple. If the people are watching, recording, and sharing information as much or more than the government, it becomes very difficult for the government to engage in criminal behaviour (which surely any attempt to tyrannize, anywhere, should rightly be considered.) Just as a citizen breaking a law will be instantly caught, so an official violating someone's human rights will be instantly known. Tyrannies can't survive such openness, relying as they do on the complicit ignorance of their victim populations.
The conflict over use of personal recording devices has already began. If you doubt this, just try walking around and airport taking lots of pictures. I have no doubt that it will intensify greatly, as more and larger areas become designated 'no-photography' zones. 
(You know, sometimes I wonder if an empty no sign might not be the most apt symbol for the corporate fascism that seems to be the prevailing form of governance at the outset of the 21st century. Someone should make an internet map of number of no-X signs per city block. I'll bet you could correlate that to fascism pretty nicely.)
Conversely, areas where freedom prevails will be those in which sousevailling citizens vigilantly watch their masters from below, immediately punishing even the slightest infraction against human rights, and thus maintaining a healthy balance between rule of law and protection of rights and freedoms. Just as America preserved its famous freedom through two hundred years by enshrining the right to keep and bear arms in its constitution, an inalienable right to record and disseminate whatever one pleases will be an invaluable protection in the future. Freedom of speech, yes, but also freedom of sight.
The dichotomy between freedom and tyranny is closely bound to secrecy and transparency, which are respectively anathema to the one and a necessity to the other. If you want to keep freedom alive in the twentieth century, you're going to have to fight for your right to point a camera at the ones who want to take it away.
Monday, December 10, 2007
WikiLaw
I've thought a lot about how democracy can be improved by utilizing the internet, and one of the main ideas that's always guided me is that in a modern, educated society, citizens should vote, not for people, but for ideas. In other words, citizens should decide the law directly, rather than delegating representatives to do it for them ... those representatives, being human (and moreover, that particular type of human who is attracted to power like a moth towards a flame) will inevitably represent their own interests rather than those of their constituents.
So when I saw this article, the light bulb floating above my head starting blinking like mad:
MOB JURISPRUDENCE When the New Zealand police force said they were open to suggestions about how to rewrite national policing laws, they meant it. In September, they posted the 1958 Police Act online and invited Kiwis and non-Kiwis alike to visit the site and type in their own revisions to the law — extending the concept of “Wiki”-style collaborative writing from encyclopedias to democracy.
This is a brilliant idea, and I'm convinced it could be taken much further than simply culling an advisory document, as the Kiwis used it. A wiki is the ultimate democratic forum: not only can you say whatever you want, you can edit what other people say, expunging their contributions entirely. Now, this is very similar to how bills are created inside legislatures: elected representatives and their staffs add and remove clauses and subclauses until a workable compromise is found, at which point it's put to a vote. The wiki platform could allow this process to be expanded to include the entirety of the citizenry, and in so doing, lead to much better laws. As the saying goes, with enough eyes all bugs are shallow; were the creation of laws to be open-sourced, the final products would be more acceptable to the people who will have to live with them.
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Downloading and Resistance
The corporatocracy relies on its propaganda organs to fight this part of the counterinsurgency operation, but the web of lies they attempt to weave in their subjects' heads wither with just a single exposure to truth. That is so elementary a principle that it almost qualifies as a natural law: truth cancels lies, but lies cannot cancel truth. Still, once you've woken up, and realized with growing horror the depth of the deception in which you've been buried, there's the question of, "Well, what the hell should I actually do, now that I know all of this?"
In truth, all sorts of things: spreading the word to friends and family is a start, as is going out in public and distributing flyers, leaflets, handbills, DVDs. You can start a blog, get a youtube channel, start podcasting or do whatever you can to get in on the production end of the infowar. Anything is good, because the infowar - the process by which people are woken up to the fact that the free world has been occupied by stealth by a consortium of banks and corporations - is half the battle.
But only half. It wasn't long before those under Soviet domination ceased to believe a damn thing their authorities told them, but by the time they woke up it hardly mattered, so total was the control matrix that had been built around them.
Well, then, what to do? Political activism is a possibility, but in the end marches and protests don't accomplish much: the media ignores them, so the public ignores them, which means the corporations can ignore them, and thus nothing changes. The only exception being if there's a riot, in which case they're all over it like flies on corpses: it make the protesters look bad, the violence obscuring whatever point the protesters were trying to make, and it lets the media show images of imperial stormtroopers restoring order with tear gas and rubber bullets, which reminds the populace of who's in charge.
Armed insurgency is an attractive option for some, but it's a futile path, even worse than rioting. Inevitably branded as terrorism, it only serves to drive the public further into the arms of the state, justifying greater revocation of liberty and centralization of power. This, combined with the fact that there's basically no way in hell a ragtag band of insurgents can best the perfection of technology and technique of the military-industrial complex, makes any attempt to resort to violence utterly wrongheaded.
Kevin at Cryptogon has a fascinating essay where he takes up just this subject, and suggests a meaningful way in which war can be waged against the corporatocracy: militant IP piracy.
Who know that downloading music, movies, and software without actually paying for it could be a revolutionary act? Obvious in retrospect, really, but still. I'm going to enjoy expanding my media library even more from here on.
Kevin applies the idea primarily to media and software piracy, but I think it can be taken much further than that. The primary basis of corporacratic power is economic: by controlling the money supply, the control almost everything. To fight against the corporate state, it's economic basis must be undermined. Nothing else can possibly work.
Now here, there are all sorts of angles of attack. Currency is the one: if underground currencies could be spread (for instance, plastic tokens with flakes of gold embedded in them, so that they had actual value in and of themselves), the power of banks would be undercut. A similar angle is to use peer-to-peer banking systems like Prosper for lending and borrowing money, cutting banks out of the transactions entirely and thus helping to starve them. I can well imagine a synergy between peer-to-peer banking and private currencies contributing greatly to undermining the power of banks.
But the economic structure of the corporatocracy is not merely financial; it is also industrial. The means of production now involve massive global supply chains, with a dozen countries involved in the manufacture of virtually every product. On the one hand, this system harnesses division of labor to drive prices lower than ever before in history. On the other hand only huge corporations (guarded by massive navies) can efficiently manage these supply chains. And on the gripping hand*, differences in currency valuations can be used to artificially concentrate industry in one district whilst denuding another entirely.
The tactic Ghandi used to help free India from the British Empire are instructive here: stop buying clothing from the British, sit down at a loom, and make your own. When that practice was widely adopted, one of the principle instruments of economic control over the subcontinent was broken. It wasn't long at all before India was its own country again.
Similarly, rapid prototyping technology is ever-improving. The Fab Lab at MIT is exploring the best ways to learn and interact with a technology that can build anything; the reprap project is concentrating on a rapid prototyper that can print out a copy of itself. It won't be long, no more than a few years and maybe less, before fabbing technology begins to take off, and once it does the industrial wherewithal to rapidly make anything one wants (so long as one has the designs for it) will be available to anyone who wants it.
It's hard to imagine the corporatocracy being able to survive conditions in which they are utterly deprived of the lions share of media, fiscal, and ultimately manufacturing revenues. If you're searching for a reason for why things are accelerating politically like never before, look no further: the technocratic elite that entrenched itself over the past few years is comprised of smart people, and they can see what's coming as well as, hell better than, anyone else. They know that if they don't act soon to lock down the entire planet, they're prospects even ten years from now are grim indeed.
So the next time you want to watch a TV show, listen to an album, go to a movie, or use some software, do freedom a favor and download it. Starve the beast just a little bit, and keep the networks alive and strong for the day when you can download a car instead of Gran Turisumo.
*Kudos to anyone who got that obscure sci-fi reference.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Endgame
Last week Alex Jones' new movie Endgame came out. I suggest you go watch it right now. It may be the most important movie you ever see.
What's it about? Look at the tags attached to this post. Need to know more? Well, here's some reviews: one at the the Daily Llama, one at Smoker's Corner (that's one snazzy background he's got, gotta get me one of those....), and a final pair of reviews by a pair of (formerly) 'good' Bush-voting Republicans. Read those first if you want. Then watch the goddamn movie.
If you don't walk away from this movie without at the very least a cold, paralyzing dread clenching in the pit of your stomach, well, there's probably no hope for you. Preferably, you should finish it filled with a deep and abiding anger, an outrage that burns like an emotional Chernobyl, and a righteous passion to do everything you can to stop the crime against all of humanity whose final stages are being laid right fucking now. You need to see this movie because you need to wake the fuck up, because this really is one of the last warning's you'll get.
Why the hell are you still reading this? Whatever you're doing, or whatever you think you should be doing, it is almost impossible that it is more important than seeing this movie. I don't care if you're getting ready for a job interview or sitting in your cubicle, if you're studying for an exam or about to leave for one, whatever it is, drop it, and go watch the movie.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Stop-Loss and Regime Change
You know, even in Vietnam the troops only had to do one six-month tour. That on its own was enough to fuck a lot of them up pretty badly.
Stop-loss means a lot of soldiers stay quite a bit longer than six months. Not surprisingly, the surge has led to an increase in soldiers detained in Iraq. Some of these guys are going to end up spending years in the middle of a warzone, and when they get back they're going to have trouble adjusting.
Well, there's always Blackwater, if civilian life just doesn't work out for them. Or organized crime (assuming there's any difference). Historically, the lineage of organized crime groups always has it's roots in the end of a large war. The longer the war, the worse the banditry afterwards (and let's not forget, the corporatocracy is promising us a hundred year war.)
And let's not forget, Caeser kept his legions in Gaul for 10 years ... and when he came back, he used them to conquer Rome.
Widgetry
If you look at the bottom of this (and every other) post you'll see that I just installed the Sphere widget. On the off chance you haven't heard of Sphere, it's a search engine that specializes in drawing connections between blogs. If something I write should tickle your fancy, just click on the Sphere link and you'll see posts by other bloggers writing (at least tangentially) related posts.
Sphere: Related ContentFriday, October 19, 2007
Drills Within Drills
Via Truth News, the massive terrorist exercise in Oregon this week (which I wrote about in my previous post), apparently turned - almost - into a real drill when drug-sniffing dogs detected explosive residue:
Portland police cordoned off several blocks around the Lloyd Center, marking off the area with thousands of feet of yellow tape blowing in the afternoon wind. They also shut down MAX trains through the area, and alerted people inside the hotel and surrounding buildings. Some in those buildings chose to evacuate, while others remained in place.
This almost looks like some kind of meta-drill. In the middle of a drill (which everyone knows is just a drill), throw in a situation that abruptly makes it look as though the real thing might actually be happening. The origin of the false alarm is, in this view, not very surprising:
Authorities initially focused on one vehicle, which turned out to be owned by a participant in the Topoff exercise. The car’s owner was quickly located and cooperated, and police later expanded the search to other vehicles on the first floor of the garage. It was windy, Schmautz said, so it’s possible the dogs picked up smells from any of several vehicles in the area.
Do something like this often enough, and eventually your emergency services - and your citizenry - are never sure if something is a drill, a false alarm, or the real thing. In any given situation, they'll either under-react (thinking, in the case of the real thing, that it's just a drill), or over-react (mistaking drills and false alarms for the real thing and throwing their all into it.) Just like confused immune-systems going into overdrive in response to pollen, the societal effects of confused emergency services can be likened to a kind of autoimmune disease.
The bomb scare might have been a false alarm, but it was not an accident.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Drilling for Martial Law
From BBC Channel 4 News:
Three fictional "dirty bombs" are to be the trigger for the biggest terror drill in US history.
More than 15,000 people will take part in the 25 million dollar TopOff 4 exercise which will simulate a series of terror attacks across America.
The Department of Homeland Security said the aim was to "address policy and strategic issues that mobilise prevention and response systems".
PORTLAND, Ore. - It's the largest terror drill in U.S. history, and the nation will have its eyes on Portland.
This week, the city becomes ground zero as a fake dirty bomb goes off on a set resembling the Steel Bridge, covering the city in "make believe" radiation.
Beyond a terror attack, it's also a test for any catastrophic disaster - to prevent the fatal mistakes the nation witnessed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
System-wide failures left thousands in jeopardy as emergency officials at all levels misjudged, mis-communicated and underestimated the storm.
In Portland, new communication plans, equipment and people will be put to the test.
"I'd rather much see if there are things we need to do to improve through this exercise than waiting till a real-life event came," Mayor Tom Potter said.
The mayor will be among 6,000 responders and volunteer victims working on the drill at Portland International Raceway and at local hospitals, where triage stations are ready to evaluate the wounded.
The drill scenario goes like this: terrorists who have been planning attacks in Oregon, Arizona and the U.S. Territory of Guam are able to bring radioactive material into the U.S. The first of three coordinated attacks occurs in Guam with the detonation of a dirty bomb and widespread contamination in a populous area near a power plant. Similar attacks then occur in Portland and Phoenix.
Despite the size of the drill, don't expect to see any real-life disruptions on the roads, highways, bridges or hospitals. Most of the action will be behind the fence at Portland International Raceway and out of sight. The only thing you might see is emergency vehicles racing around town.
If you notice anything unusual and wonder if it is a part of the training exercise, you can call 211. The phone number will be activated on Tuesday.
POWER: At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now.
POWER: Precisely, and it was about half past nine this morning, we planned this for a company and for obvious reasons I don't want to reveal their name but they're listening and they'll know it. And we had a room full of crisis managers for the first time they'd met and so within five minutes we made a pretty rapid decision that this is the real one and so we went through the correct drills of activating crisis management procedures to jump from slow time to quick time thinking and so on.
This is what the enemy does. They carry out terrorist attacks themselves, in order to frighten the population and enact even stricter control. In order to cover the preparations for the strike massive exercises are staged, during which the terrorists, if discovered, can be explained away as part of the drill. Then, when the drill becomes real, the emergency services are already on their toes, ready to respond and limit the damage. Everyone involved promptly forgets that they were just drilling for the exact thing that happened, and fails to take a moment to examine the odds against that happening ... especially when it happens over and over again. If you have a couple of hours to kill, here, go watch Terrorstorm (after you finish reading this, of course.)
Will something very bad happen in Oregon, Phoenix, and Guam this week? Who knows? Not me. Just like most terrorist attacks are real, so are most drills. Then again, history is full of examples of nations using the excuse of military drills to launch an attack on their enemies. Or at the very least, intimidate them. The modern practice of concealing real terrorist attacks on one's own citizenry within fake-but-real drills is simply the latest and most perverse twist in the history of this venerable tactic.
There's a presidential election coming up. Whether the game plan is to
You know, that terror attack will be scheduled for right around the time that the US dollar inflates away to airy nothing, and it's economy with it. It might even be intended as the final nudge that pushes it over the abyss into national bankruptcy. People are going to be sitting in the middle of massive heaps of stuff, most of it owned by someone else, repossesed by the banks in the wake of an epidemic of unpayable credit-card debt (expect Congress, assuming it still operates, to rule all debt invalid, but only when everyone but the rich is utterly bankrupt) ... all that stuff, and unable to get together enough money for food.
I present to you my vision of a future America:
Some cities, contaminated by radiation or infection (or, hey, why not both?), get evacuated, and it's citizens put in refugee camps ... no doubt soon to become labor camps, as Halliburton comes along and offers to 'pay' them to rebuild, well, whatever it decides should be rebuilt. Even in cities (yet) unassaulted by terror, the security apparatus has everything locked up tight as a prison, and defending freedom from terror has become a sick joke. With the economy on the skids, jobs scarce, and wealth massively concentrated in the hands of a small elite, crime has spiked due to sheer desperation (in the sense of true crime, such as theft or violence, rather than violations of the myriad of inane regulations that the criminal code has become); those caught, and not simply killed, are charged with terrorism and added to the labor camps. At some point simple vagrancy might become an offense punishable by conscription. And expect lots of black people to fill the camps in the beginning. After all, they're already the poorest demographic, and the most prone to crime. So it'll look a lot like slavery, though everyone will be too polite to call it that. And hey, this time around it'll be slightly more colorblind: there will be whites in the camps, and latinos, and asians. Slavery might not manage to be morally correct, but politically correct? No problem.
Then there's the possibility of an already ongoing multi-front war in the Middle East having expanded to include against Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan, so that it's now requiring millions of soldiers in order to fight (hello, conscription!) instead of the mere hundreds of thousands it currently involves. The conflict might even proceed well for while, at least if the Chinese come in and throw their industrial weight (idle for lack of rich Americans to sell to) behind their manpower (playing America's role from the last two world wars during the current one: building stuff for the combatants for a while, letting them wear each other down, and then picking a side and going in for the kill.) America's toast if that happens. Then again, China might well continue to support America, as part of a mutual agreement to carve up the world. If that happens, the Empire might well totter on for decades after the final death of the Republic.
Monday, October 15, 2007
The Solar Power Satellite Gets a Good Second Look
Here's the executive summary of the National Space Society report on space-based solar power (SBSP.)
I've been in favor for a long time: SBSP would be environmentally friendly (or at any rate, friendlier than burning fossil fuels), and it would provide such a vast amount of power that raising the entire world to western standards of living would be enormously easier.
But sadly, it's a sign of the times that the penultimate paragraph also plays to the usefulness it would have for empire-building:
For the DoD specifically, beamed energy from space in quantities greater than 5 MWe has the potential to be a disruptive game changer on the battlefield. SBSP and its enabling wireless power transmission technology could facilitate extremely flexible “energy on demand” for combat units and installations across an entire theater, while significantly reducing dependence on vulnerable over-land fuel deliveries. SBSP could also enable entirely new force structures and capabilities such as ultra long-endurance airborne or terrestrial surveillance or combat systems to include the individual soldier himself. More routinely, SBSP could provide the ability to deliver rapid and sustainable humanitarian energy to a disaster area or to a local population undergoing nation-building activities. SBSP could also facilitate base “islanding” such that each installation has the ability to operate independent of vulnerable ground-based energy delivery infrastructures. In addition to helping American and allied defense establishments remain relevant over the entire 21st Century through more secure supply lines, perhaps the greatest military benefit of SBSP is to lessen the chances of conflict due to energy scarcity by providing access to a strategically secure energy supply.
One thing the report doesn't mention - and something I hadn't given much thought to until recently - was that beamed power offers a great method of control, one that is in fact very similar to the water economies of ancient kingdoms. Basically, in a heavily irrigated agricultural system, where there is little rainfall and most water comes from a single source, he who controls that source is the absolute ruler of all. If there's a rebellion in province A, but provinces B and C are loyal, guess who gets cut off when there's a 'drought'? Regions with such a geographic curse inevitably turned into mass dictatorships, with small elites lording it over hordes of ant-like subjects who were little better than slaves. In contrast, areas with rainfall, where farmers could make their living more or less where they pleased and not have to worry about water, slave-states had a harder time getting a foothold. Political evolution was slower, but when it came it was forced to accommodate more local and personal autonomy, and in the end that led to more effective societies.
For all of the other flows on which our lives depend - those of money, information, food, and water - the flow of energy is the most crucial. Cut it off, and every other flow is interrupted; before long life becomes impossible. It's our civilization's equivalent to the water of the ancient world. Now, if the main source of energy for most of the planet is a giant swarm of SBSP satellites beaming power down to the world, whoever controls that power controls the world. Like the kings of old, people or cities or countries could be shut off at will. On top of that, there's the weapons systems this will make possible (orbiting fortresses that can project force anywhere on the Earth in a matter of seconds, and of course, never need to come down). It's easy to see how an empire would rapidly build itself around control of an SBSP.
An empire isn't a foregone conclusion. For one, actually building an SBSP is likely to be a multidecade project (with a large part of the progress being towards the end, perhaps in the midst of a stock-market bomb and the consequent spike in infrastructure construction.) The number of participating organizations, at least initially, is likely to consist of a large number of small private companies. So long as ownership of the swarm does not at some point devolve into the hands of a monopoly, the possibility of an empire is much reduced. Unfortunately, current economic practices tend to produce monopolies - or cooperating oligopolies - across a wide range of corporate endeavor, with market share and capitalization tending to concentrate as an industry matures.
Another factor is that, just because there's a massive SBSP swarm beaming down cheap power, it doesn't mean other sources of power generation disappear. Much of the infrastructure might: all the old coal-fired and nuclear plants would likely be phased out. But nothing would prevent people from setting up their own, ground-based renewable energy systems (rolling out a tarp of solar collectors, deploying a wind turbine kite), or storing energy up against the possibility of the beamed power being interrupted. Still, the limits on the growth of beamed power are pretty forgiving (see: Dyson Sphere) so relying on whatever one can gather on Earth's surface will, over the long run, be an emergency measure upon which economies cannot
Of course, geosynchronous orbit or a Lagrange point - and the Earth's surface - aren't the only place to collect solar power. You can start building collectors on the moon, for instance. Or, if you were really ambitious, Mercury, where there's a nice big, low-gravity source of great building material, and a solar energy flux of 9.13 kW/m^2, which compares nicely to Earth's 1.37 kW/m^2 (and that's in orbit, not the piddling .68 on surface, during the day, when it isn't raining.) If we ever get into space, I guarantee a war will be fought over Mercury ... though that will be a war fought by machines, the beings that will ultimately colonize the world. It's utterly unfit for human habitation (I'm not so pessimistic about the rest of the solar system. My main beef with Mercury is it's complete lack of the volatiles needed to sustain complex organic chemistry.) At any rate, a rush to colonize Mercury - and the rest of the solar system - would be an effective counteragent against empire ... assuming, of course, it were allowed to happen. Earth would become a single state, but it would be just one of many.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
You know, given that the best time to carry out false-flag operations is during exercises specifically resembling the situation that actually happens, I really and sincerely hope that Exercise Vigilant Shield '08 doesn't, you know, happen to coincide with anything ... real.
“North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command along with U.S. Pacific Command, the Department of Homeland Security as well as local, state and other federal responders will exercise their response abilities against a variety of potential threats during Exercise Vigilant Shield ‘08, a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff-designated, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM)-sponsored, and U.S. Joint Forces Command[JFCOM]-supported Department of Defense exercise for homeland defense and defense support of civil authorities missions.
Cooperation from NORAD on down to local authorities?
That's sounds a lot like martial law.
Money as Stock
It's interesting to play with the idea of money. An idea, after all, is primarily what it is: no matter what it's form, whether it's gold or paper or ones and zeroes, money primarily represents a bargain between buyer and seller that it can be exchanged later, with another human being, for something of value. It used to be that this was accomplished by using things that were naturally rare - precious metals, for instance - not because they were of much intrinsic use, but because they were, well, pretty to look at, hard to get lots of, and thus valued as a status symbol. Kings wore what their subjects spent.
Now, we've moved off the gold standard, for the first time in, well, not in history - as some claim - but at least, in the last few thousand years. Instead we use paper tokens. A lot of people call this a fiat currency, though it isn't quite: ultimately, the value of the dollar is linked to oil (the US having made a deal with the Saudis to that effect shortly after Nixon abandoned Bretton-Woods.) Every other currency around the world, equally unsupported by any hard resource, balances off the dollar in an elaborate currency trading system.
It might not be exactly the same thing as a pure fiat system, but it still shares some of the same vulnerabilities, the main one being that the value is subject to fluctuation. Central banks can still print so much money that the value is completely undermined, essentially destroying the currency and, in the process, wrecking the country that used it.
Well, that's money as it currently stands. I've talked before about different kinds of money - having money represent a share of the established public infrastructure, rather than debt - and I'd like to give another one: why not combine money, wages, and shares into the same thing?
Essentially, every time someone receives a dollar (or some number of dollars) from a corporation in wages, they are simultaneously issued one share, which can be used for voting and collecting dividends. The longer someone worked for a company, the more voting power they would accumulate, and the greater their independent financial clout. Of course, if the company were to go bankrupt the stock is worth nothing, so it would behoove said employee to do what he could to ensure the company prospered.
The same principle could also be applied in reverse: every time a company is paid a dollar (or some number of dollars) by a customer, the customer is granted a voting, dividend-paying share. Regular customers would thus gain a say in how businesses are run, and be rewarded for loyal business by reduced prices (their equivalent of dividends.)
I'm not sure how I feel about this idea, to be honest. On the one hand, it would go a long way towards making corporations more democratic, in effect making stakeholder capitalism the economy's default mode of operation. On the other, it could easily lead to a culture where power and wealth accrues to those who with the fiercest loyalty to their corporations, lifetime employees who respend as much of their money as they can in the corporations that employ them, thus doubling their stock.
Bringing Democracy to the Corporatocracy
Watching John Perkins - author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman - giving a speech from about a year ago, he starts talking about changing corporations to make them open, transparent, and democratic. The reason for this is simple: modern governments around the world and especially in the United States are little more than puppets of large corporations, a form of government he calls the corporatocracy. This corporatocracy serves as the true government of the planet, and so long as corporations remain organizationally identical to, say, the Roman Army or feudal Europe, real freedom and democracy are impossible.
Democratic corporations. That's an interesting idea. I remember coming across it for the first time in Bruce Sterling's 1998 cybperpunk novel Islands in the Net, a volume I read many times as a teenager. The main character is a member of just such a democratic corporation, as are most people around the world - except for a few small rogue zones, the islands referred to in the title. Corporations in the novel did not specialize. Each was basically a massive economic cooperative, in which members assigned executive power during open elections, had rights as well as responsibilities, and the freedom to choose what kind of work they would do for the company rather than simply a set of assigned tasks. Of course, they weren't guaranteed to get what they asked for; a large part of the management's job was to review proposals made by those lower in the hierarchy, and decide whether or not to grant them. The longer and better one's record, the more resources one could muster for a given task. It wasn't a perfect deal, but it was a lot better for the people involved than what they'd had before.
The management class and their pet economists will claim that corporate democracy would be a business liability (which it will, to a degree: the rich will not be quite so rich). The reasons for why it's bad will vary. One claim might be that management talent will be lured away from any company that adopts the principles (then again, employees would probably be attracted to such companies, and employee talent can be far more important than management.) Some might claim that it would lead to bad decision making (but, why they should expect closed management hierarchies to be immune to the problems that plague closed societies?) My own feeling is that a truly democratic corporation would be a much leaner, much more efficient economic machine than anything built on the current model, generating far more wealth for far more people, and distributing that wealth with a much more even hand.
Initiatives like this are what give me hope for the future. A global revolution in favor of corporate democracy would be a wonderful thing.
More Truther Bullshit
There's a lot of really rotten labels out there. Think of the genres minted in the nineties. Alternative? What they hell sort of information does that give you about what the music's going to sound like? And 'emo'? Huh? Ah, so the music should be ... er ... emotional? Like, you know, all music is?All indy tells you is that it's music made by people who aren't signed to labels (which would be, er, most musicians, at least when they're smalll.) And hip-hop ... what does that even mean? (yes, I more or less know what hip-hop sounds like, what I'm saying is, the label tells you nothing.)
Labels with no real meaning are a curse; whatever is labeled by them exists in a sort of void, and the end result is a sort of nullity. But labels that do have meanings can in themselves have an effect on the movement they describe. Take 'bolshevik', which meant 'majority' in Russian, even though they weren't remotely a majority the communist party when the formed ... though they soon became one. Meaningul labels are good labels, labels with power. A label is an idea, after all; every time it's used, it associates itself with certain others inside the brain. Choose your own label, and choose it well, and every time your opponents use it they implicitly agree to a piece of your own meta-context, see the world - however briefly - from something like the opposing view.
I'd say 'truther' is one of those really great labels. The movement's most vociferous opponents, after all (self-identified neo-cons, and there's a nicely tautological label that perfectly cancels itself out, setting the movement up for the doublethink on which it thrives), are reduced to spitting the word 'truth' with an unthinking contempt, an act whose psychological effects almost can't help but be toxic. Either one undermines one's own disbelief in the truthers' claims (by consistently associating 'truth' with 'belief that the US government perpetrated 9/11'), and eventually converts; or one's ability to distinguish fact from fantasy is progressively hampered by constant psychological denigration of the very concept of 'truth'.
The effect on the general, undecided public - those who don't really pay too much attention to the debate - will be just as dramatic. With the term 'truther' being constantly hurled as an epithet by one side and happily used by the other, the idea almost inevitably settles in the mass consciousness that 9/11 was an inside job.
So yeah, keep on using 'truther'. Use it with a sneer on your face, or with a smile, or a shrug. But use it, because every time you do, the truth comes a little closer to winning.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Hijacking the Singularity
Death is an engineering problem, and some time over the next few decades it's one we're going to lick. This is something I've believed for a long time - since I was a teenager, I'd say - and I haven't seen anything to dissuade me. If anything, medical technology's progress has been even better than I expected.
Ah, but what of our would-be masters in the New World Order? They're smart people, after all. They wouldn't be where they are if they weren't. They know what the future is bringing as well as I do, as well as anyone does. And there can be no doubt at all that they'll be right at the front of the line to receive the new immortality treatments (well, maybe they'll wait until they've been taken for a test-drive on the bodies of African clinical testing subjects.)
Now, one of the primary drives of any dictator or oligarch is to extend and hold onto their power. They know how they acquired it - by climbing over the backs of the less ambitious, stabbing them in the back when required, making temporary alliances when they had to - and they know how to keep it (stamping on the toes of anyone trying to climb the same ladder they did.) But in ages past, the most any of them could really hope for, long term, was to pass on power to an heir, because do what they might they would eventually be enfeebled, then killed, by the aging process. The argument could be made that this has been a great leveling influence in human history. Dynasties rarely last more than a few generations: being born into wealth and power tends to lead to degenerates on the throne, while at the same time the natural instinct of the nobility to spread their DNA far and wide by screwing every barmaid, servant girl, and prostitute they come close to means that there's a large pool of tough, ambitious people with royal blood coursing through their commoner veins.
Immortality changes that equation, and does so drastically. Suddenly the guys at the top have the prospect of staying at the top, not for a few decades, but for a few millenia. That's got to be one powerful motivator, and I think it goes a long way towards explaining why the new world order's plans seem to have been kicking into high gear these past couple of decades, especially so since the turn of the millenium.
You see, immortality offers the elite the chance to be the elite forever, but only if they can suppress the normal turmoil that ensures a turning over of the social order once every generation or three. The prospect of living forever on top is a pretty sweet one, but the prospect of being the lord of creation one century, only to find oneself just one of the masses the next, must be a frightening one. In a world of eight billion immortals, all wealthy as Midas by our standards (thanks to robots, AI, and nanotech), and all wise as Socrates (thanks to intelligence augmentation and the internet), staying at the top of the heap forever would be pretty much impossible.
There's only one way around that: get rid of the other people. Step one is to substitute mechanical labor for human labor, automating everything with AIs and robots. Once you've pulled that trick - one that we're only a few decades away from - ordinary working folk are pretty well superfluous. Now, we might naturally expect that this would allow the species to cast off the shackles of labor and live in a golden age post-scarcity economy. Those of us within the transhumanist movement have been singing that chorus ever since the 90s.
The elites don't see it that way. They already have all the wealth they could possibly want; they already lead lives unmarred by labor. Robotics, AI, and nanotech have very little to offer them along those lines ... but they could be deeply dangerous to their place at the top of the period. So, once the technology exists to fully automate the economy, they will try and wipe us out. I'm guessing it'll be through some kind of supervirus, or possibly a succession of them. Neutron bombs might see use too. Anything that will remove the human components of the economy without damaging the physical infrastructure.
Don't get me wrong, I'm as much in favor of technology as I've always been. It has the potential to turn our world into a paradise, a heavenly kingdom on earth where mankind lives free of disease, poverty, war, ignorance, famine, and even death ... where every day is the best day of your life, and stretching ahead of you are as many of those days as you want. But living in our midst, controlling our governments and our banks and our churches and damn near every other institution of any real power or influence, are psychopaths whose selfishness has reached an intensity never before seen in human history, men and women who see everything I see ... and want to keep it all for themselves. They plan to hijack the Singularity, and right now, everything is going according to their plan.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
More on the ADS
If you scroll down on this page, there's embedded video of the pain ray in action. The article's worth reading, too ... seems that if they ray's being used, it's advisable to take off contact lenses or glasses (to avoid eye damage), and remove any metal objects from your pockets (to keep hot spots from being created). That could mean that my idea for using a space-blanket could actually be, well, quite dangerous. It also appears that the less-than-lethal 'non-damaging' weapon has higher power settings which can make it, well, damaging.
Oh, how the riot cops are going to love this.
Countermeasures: RFID
RFID (Radio Frequency ID) tags are certain to be a central component of the security state apparatus. If you haven't heard of this technology yet, they are, briefly, very small chips consisting of a capacitor, an antennae, and an integrated circuit. They can be embedded more or less invisibly in almost anything, and once there provide the ability to track the location of the object more or less at will. While this could be incredibly useful (you'll never lose anything ever again), it can also be quite dangerous (everything you have becomes a tracking device.)
Googling 'disabling RFID tags' found me this page, the results of a German Chaos Computer Club workshop, where a bunch of techies got together and figured out how to turn a single-use camera into an RFID zapper. Here's another tutorial page from the same project, this one with pictures. Basically, the device acts as a miniature EMP, frying the RFID's capacitor but without damaging the article the object is embedded in (you can get a similar effect by nuking it in the microwave, but this is likely to start a fire which will damage the tagged object.)
Of course, the RFID zapper can't be used on electronics without frying them, which actually renders it pretty much useless for surveillance countermeasures, unless you're willing to leave home without your cellphone, PDA, laptop, camera, iPod, and other sundry electronic accompaniments of modern life. And you can be damn sure that electronics will be tagged with RFIDs along with everything else.
Just off the top of my head, I can think of three ways around the system, but none of them are perfect. One is to simply take the device apart, extract the RFID tag, and dispose of it. The main drawback is that unless you have an exhaustive knowledge of electronics and maybe access to the device's blueprints, identifying which chip is the RFID is likely to be quite difficult. Maybe even impossible, if the tag is built directly into the device's integrated circuitry. Another possibility is to ignore the RFID tag and hack into the tracking network's database, deleting the relevant serial numbers, switching the objects they refer to, or otherwise rendering the database unreliable. This is probably even more difficult than taking apart the device and looking for the RFID tag. The last solution is to keep your electronics inside a faraday cage (basically, a metal box), which will block the radio signals that trigger the RFID tag, thus hiding it from the surveillance network. This has the great virtue of being the easiest of the three, but it has the serious drawbacks that a) it stops working as soon as you want to actually use the tagged object, and b) it makes a cellphone pretty much useless as in addition to blocking the radio waves that trigger the RFID tag, it blocks the cell's reception (of course, cell phones are a tracking device - and a listening device - unto themselves, but that's an entirely separate problem.)
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Countermeasures
Did you know you can use a cloth soaked in lemon juice to neutralize the effects of tear gas? That, some decent goggles, and lots of padding make you immune to the current crowd-control arsenal (ie, tear gas and rubber bullets.)
Crowd control's going to get a lot more hightech, though. The ADS - Active Denial System - uses microwaves to boil the water directly underneath the skin, giving the device it's moniker, the 'pain ray'. Basically, if you get hit by it, your one and only instinct is to get away as fast as you physically can.
There's lots of other devices coming down the pike, ranging from the darkly humorous (super-slippery 'black ice' that make movement impossible, focused infrasonic beams that make you shit your pants) to the creepy (all sorts of nasty psychotropics that, awesome as they might be in a club environment, would probably suck and suck hard if you're trying to protest against, oh, say, a criminal regime that's usurped power in what used to be a free country.)
And then there's the current favorite, the taser, great against college students asking difficult questions or unarmed women who don't ask 'how high?' when the police say 'jump'.
Now, the justification for the development of virtually all of these devices is to help out with peacekeeping efforts in benighted foreign countries, but basically, these are all riot control weapons. And they're going to make rioting - hell, peaceful protesting - a whole hell of a lot hairier.
Not impossible, though. Countermeasures can always be developed. Take the ADS, the crown jewel in the new crop of crowd control technology. All you'd have to do to block the microwaves is carry a metal shield of some sort (say, a trash can lid); wear thick clothing; or wrap yourself in a foil emergency blanket. If you felt like getting really fancy, you could sew the emergency blanket into your clothing as an additional layer. The tinfoil hat brigade could take on a whole new meaning.
Actually, the emergency blanket technique might well work against tasers, too. Emergency blankets consist of a layer a plastic sandwiched between two very thin sheets of aluminum; the taser's leads would certainly come into contact with the aluminum upon breaking the through the clothing, at which point I'd expect that they'd short out, leaving one very confused cop holding in his hand one very useless little plastic box. Well, he'd probably just commence to beat the shit out of you with his maglite but hey, at least it's something.
The police state being built by the new world order is going to rely on the highest of technologies. That's an arena that the people can't compete in, largely because it's just too expensive. But if you can't do cutting edge, then you go the other way, and fight high tech with low. Bandannas soaked with lemon juice; swimming goggles; and clothing lined with space blankets. There are always countermeasures.