The concept of the panopticon, the way Michel Foucault put it, has always been interesting to me. COVID really brought it into a new light. These are just some of my thoughts around it, and I'm always curious what other people will say.
It's an old prison idea, a ring of cells and a tower in the middle, and the guard can see you but you can't see if he's even in there, so you act like he always is. After a while you don't need him, you watch yourself. Bentham drew the building. Foucault is the one who showed how the trick leaves the bricks and gets into a whole society, and that part is what stuck with me, because it's cold and it works.
East Germany ran it with neighbors. You never knew who was writing the report, so you talked smaller.
COVID was everything for me. The papers, the apps, the government overreach, and it just didn't stop. Then they programmed citizens to think like that too, like the crazy shit was normal, and people started doing the watching for them.
And it keeps moving. The tower fits in a card now, a bank, a phone, a doorbell, a wifi camera pointed at the street. A neighbor can watch the block and there's no uniform. A lot of the surveillance happening doesn't even look like surveillance, so people don't see the pile. The purchase leaves a file, the phone leaves a trail, and you behave because any of it might get read.
It makes a smaller life. You cut your own sentence so the tower doesn't have to.
Monero is how I try not to walk my family into that yard. Spend without feeding the file.
That's where I'm at with it. What are you seeing?
You are tapping into the right idea.
Surveillance is simply the tool that catalogues data that is used to manage your perception of the environment which then manipulates your behavior.
COVID was only possible through decades of social engineering, specifically applied to the middle-class who, as it turns out, would literally die instead of being socially ostracized.
Decades of state propaganda and school indoctrination warning about extreme radicals has engineered a docile pleasure seeking population that believe in nothing and tolerate tyranny.
Benjamin Franklin once said that a people who trade liberty for security will get neither and deserve it.
The first step of resistance is to reject the entire worldview which all of this is based upon, egalitarian global secular humanism and the worship of science/technology.
I think that's a really valuable way to look at it. I definitely have limited my behaviors based on potential external perception. Especially with the trend of calling lesser and lesser things extremism or domestic terrorism. I remember Snowden posted that a country singer got thrown on a watchlist for performing at one anti-war protest. I think a lot of people under appreciate how important privacy is. Every piece of information you put out there (without great consideration for privacy) can be traced back to you, used to form a profile on your behavior, and then be used to manipulate you. Ads already do this, but there's no reason why it can't apply to even more pernicious things.
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