Tuesday, June 26, 2012

The march of control



The regime of control tightens inexorably in our schools.

Many of which now have video cameras.
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Police patrols.
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Chain-link fences.
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Random unannounced locker searches.
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Metal detectors.
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Drug-sniffing dogs.
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Networks of informants.
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Undercover police posing as students.
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And a comprehensive system of passes so that there is a record of each student's authorized whereabouts at all times.
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What a perfect preparation for life in a prison or a totalitarian society!
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The result is much what we should expect from any series of technological fixes.
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More control has made the situation far more explosive and not any safer.
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Justifying yet more control.
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It parallels the results of the technological program, more research, more technology.
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Always the next invention or innovation will solve all our problems.
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Just a few more millions.
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Just some more controls and yet more removal of freedoms.
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Life is not actually any more secure, leisurely, or comfortable.
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And the entire edifice teeters on the brink of catastrophe.
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Totalitarianism is the inevitable destination of a society based on the technological program of achieving complete control over reality.
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As a practical matter, the engineering, managerial mindset naturally applies its methods.
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The methods of the factory—to governance as well as to manufacturing, promoting the complete inventorying, tracking, numbering, and classification of the population.
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Its technologies as well lend themselves to control.
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Witness the Orwellian possibilities of biometrics and continuous automated surveillance in the computer age.
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Pull the plug on the electricity supply and what have you got?
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Zilch.
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Because most surveillance systems need electricity.
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As does everything else in our ever more interdependent world.
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So the only offset to Orwellian nightmare is the unexpected.
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Always has been always will.
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We are over due for some corrections.
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We are ready for the entrance of the perfect storms.
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How else can modern man escape the paranoid march of ever more controls?

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