Surveillance of
private calls and emails. Cameras documenting every move. No habeas
corpus. Unimpeded entry into personal financial records. Voting
machines changing election outcomes with the flick of a switch. Protest
defined as terrorism. Many people hope that the loss of civil rights Americans
have endured since the onslaughts mounted by Bush Administration II is a
political reality that can be reversed through electoral will. Established mechanisms of political power are,
of course, the immediately available means for attempting change. Notions
of citizens’ rights, freedom, and democratic participation are
compelling paradigms that have consistently stirred the bravery of U.S.
citizens – and yet elder political scientist Sheldon Wolin, who taught the
philosophy of democracy for five decades, sees the current predicament of
corporate-government hegemony as something more endemic.
“Inverted
totalitarianism,” as he calls it in his recent Democracy Incorporated, “lies in wielding
total power without appearing to, without establishing concentration
camps, or enforcing ideological uniformity, or forcibly suppressing
dissident elements so long as they remain ineffectual.” To Wolin, such a form
of political power makes the United States “the showcase of how democracy can
be managed without appearing to be suppressed.”
Wolin rightfully
points out that the origins of U.S. governance were “born with a bias against
democracy,” and yet the system has quickly lunged beyond its less-than-democratic
agrarian roots to become a mass urban society that, with distinct 1984 flavorings, could
be called techno-fascism. The role of technology is the overlooked piece
of the puzzle of the contemporary political conundrum.
But what are its
mechanisms of control?
The use of
telecommunications technologies for surveillance is obvious. So are willful
alteration of computer data for public reportage, manipulation of
television news for opinion-shaping, and use of microwave-emitting weapons for
crowd control. Less obvious are what could be called “inverted mechanization”
whereby citizens blindly accept the march of technological development as an
expression of a very inexact, some would say erroneous, concept of
“progress.” One mechanism propagating such blindness is the U.S. government’s
invisible role as regulatory handmaiden to industry, offering little-to-no
means for citizen determination of what technologies are disseminated; instead
we get whatever G.M.O.’s and nuclear plants corporations dish out. A glaring
example is the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that, seeking to not repeat
the “errors” of the nuclear industry, offers zero public input as to
health or environmental impacts of its antennae, towers, and
satellites – the result being that the public has not a clue about the very
real biological effects of electromagnetic radiation. Inverted
mechanization is thrust forward as well by unequal access to resources:
corporations lavishly crafting public opinion and mounting limitless
legal defenses versus citizen groups who may be dying from exposure to a
dangerous technology but whose funds trickle in from bake sales. In his Autonomous Technology:
Technics-Out-Of-Control as a Theme
in Political Thought, political scientist Langdon Winner
points out that, to boot, the artifacts themselves have grown to such
magnitude and complexity that they define popular conception of
necessity. Witness the “need” to get to distant locales in a few hours or
enjoy instantaneous communication.
Even less obvious a
mechanism of public control is the technological inversion that results from
the fact that, as filmmaker Godfrey Reggio puts it, “We don’t use
technology, we live it.” Like
fish in water we cannot consider modern artifacts as separate from ourselves
and so cannot admit that they exist.
Mumford deftly peels away false hope from a social reality based on principles of centralization, control, and efficiency. In 1962 he peered into the future and saw the pentagon of power incarnate: “a more voluminous productivity, augmented by almost omniscient computers and a wider range of antibiotics and inoculations, with a greater control over our genetic inheritance, with more complex surgical operations and transplants, with an extension of automation to every form of human activity.”
Inverted
totalitarianism is both inverted and totalitarian because of the power of modern mass
technological systems to shape and control social realities, just as they shape
and control individual understandings of those realities. Its contemporary
existence is most definitely the result of the efforts of a group of right-wing
fundamentalists who hurled themselves into power through devious means -- but
today’s desperate social inequities, dire ecological predicament, and fascist
politic are the offspring of long-evolving technological centralization and
control as well.
The challenge is to
see the whole and all its parts, not just the shiny new device that
purports to make one’s individual life easier or sexier -- which in itself is a
contributor to the making of political disengagement. The whole is a
Megamachine, with you and your liquid TV, Blackberry, and Prius a
necessary cog.
Forging a survivable
world is indeed going to take a change of administration -- for starters. The
terrifying reality that is mass technological society suggests
more: radical techno-socio-economic re-organization, and to that end
spring visions informed by the indigenous worlds we all hail from, the
regionalism of Mumford’s day, and today’s bioregionalism. Or visions of
the forced localization that Peak Oil, economic collapse, climate
change, and ecological devastation propose. (2008)[i]
In the face of it
all, I waver between a Get-Your-Heart/Community-Garden-in-Order stab at
preparation and a sensibility more akin to Hasta-La-Victoria-Siempre. So long as
there is oppression, I posit while praying to the deities and poking chile
seeds into the soil, there is resistance. So long as there is mass technology
organizing life for efficiency and aggrandizement, there are people who favor
decent values. Humans harbor a deeply embedded knowing when things are
wrong – and a deeply burning fire to set them right. The sentiment of Appalachian folksinger Jack
Herranen rings right:
And if your world don’t fall soon, then
we’ll help to tear it down …
If your world don’t fall soon, then
we’ll help to tear it down.[ii]
Such
thinking brings me back to the Luddites.
This blog is a book. Please feel free to read the next chapter now. Go to the Table of Contents under the introduction on the right side of the page and click on the next chapter.
[i] Chellis
Glendinning, “Every Move You Make,” www.counterpunch.org,
June 19, 2008.
