For those -deliberately naïve, poorly educated or just plainly foolish- who consider surveillance & control technologies, as well as the socio-political processes into which these so-called prostheses are embedded, as just inevitable outcomes of biology (read: the evolutionary turn in the human sciences, i.e., blatant Social Darwinism masquerading in its newest costume) -- below a bit of basic material for their own instruction. Unless they are employed by the corporations & the military-intelligence-entertainment complex to spread the gospel, in which case their habit is to ignore anything that would threaten their preciously self-constructed reality tunnels. In a post-9/11 paranoid State -moreover, one whose imperial pretensions are clear symptoms of a waning- in that desert of the Real, in which the basic notions of criticality or historicity have never really had the chance to take root, perhaps it is natural to embrace & swoon over mere gadgets. Fortunately, there is a huge reserve of ideological non-converts, i.e., those multitudes beyond the pale (predominantly) in the Southern Hemisphere who have not been pacified or zombified yet, who will sooner or later provide a welcome surprise in the form of (to the white mans magic) hard to parse counter-technologies, these being much closer to life-as-it-is-really-lived in the human umwelt.
Posted on: Wed, 09 Apr 2014 17:39:04 +0000