“The machine throws out anthropomorphic habits of thought”.  (Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise)

IT and telecommunications technology has a grip on us and changes our behaviors, often for the worse. This will allow powers greater than us in society, i.e., the rulers, to change us using this technology and shape us to their ends. No one can doubt this is already happening. One example is people texting and driving in spite of the danger involved; another is how our online behavior is surveilled by commercial interests who then sell information or a profile of your buying habits to merchants. While there has been a lot of protest much of this has been taken in stride or simply taken by most people today. They can do little about it so they go on with their lives. Somehow it seems like the technology itself leads to the acquiescence. This will continue to happen especially as the development of said technology is not democratically planned and mass participation of eventual users plays no part in products being developed. Today the very idea seems outlandish and impossible, but is it not rational to desire a system in which the end users of a technology, especially one changing their way of life, have a say in how it is developed. The smart phone is useful, yes, but how many of us would have wanted it ten years before it was widely marketed if we knew then it would be a constant addiction, obsession, and distraction?

These are notes for dystopian fiction idea I hope to develop further. It is about how IT and telecommunications technology has crept into our lives and how quickly it changes the way we behave and live. It is about how we have lost our privacy, are spied upon, monitored, and how quickly we came to accept this and how much more we will give up as we become captive to technology to which we did not assent. The ideas for it came about one and a half to two years ago, mainly inspired by IT/Internet mental integration in the dystopian novel The Feed and my readings and study of Marx and other economic philosphies. It was not put in any fictional form until the previous blog post. It is based on a general idea about how IT and telecommunication technologies and devices change the social and individual behaviors of their users, mainly because they are directly integrated and interfaced with our minds and bodies. Employees are thereby monitored closely at work by their employers who compile detailed statistics and an overall profile similar to today’s credit rating. This is the ultimate invasion of privacy, the human mind and body but people must acquiesce to it if they want paid work, especially the better-paid and more prestigious jobs. Employment has become physically and mentally exhausting. It is also the sad culmination of the seeming and sometimes understandable acquiescence to the steady erosion and loss or our collective economic and civil rights. How the common people are forced to suffer more and more.

Persons with higher employment ratings, especially from a young age, can attract investors who will pay for further education and training in exchange for a percentage on future income and wealth. In fact, many poorer members of society agree to fund their education this way. Gibraltar Pilot is probably one of these persons.

The fictional middle manager Gibraltar Pilot lives and works in a North American socioeconomic system very different from our own. It is a world that has changed drastically for the worse. It  is a world with an entirely different concept of human and political rights in which those who must work for a living (in far greater numbers than in our own world, or nearly everybody) are considered not to have any intrinsic value as individuals. They have value not as an end but only because they are means to something else: a tolerable standard of living for themselves but more importantly that they are a means to to greater wealth, capital, and power that is in turn used to oppress them further and further. Freedom and the humane concepts of the Enlightenment are dead and buried. Human beings have no worth except that derived from the powerful economic entities and institutions that employ them, for to these they owe their existence and all the blessings of civilization. Individuals have literally become statistics and this has become totally natural to them so much more than we today see our personal worth As Mr. Pilot (in my previous post) described in his introductory bio for his Master’s seminar, employees, or “associates” are comprehensively profiled according to their work performance statistics and are paid according to them. It is a very highly developed “piecework” labor system on an almost global level. An employee profiling and rating system similar to, but even more crucial than, current credit rating systems such Experian are used by companies on an international scale. The system can be gamed and corrupted but this is rare and does not characterize the system as a whole. It is highly reliable and accurate for the most part.

What does characterize this dystopian world is runaway socioeconomic inequality.  The most horrible thing about it is that those on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic system are truly convinced that they deserve their fate, and this to a far greater and more complete fashion that can be imagined today. This is because their entire working life is subject to scrutiny and quantification as it has never before been possible. A readout or profile will convince them of just how poorly they supposedly done, in easy to understand statistics and graphs (in formats ingrained from elementary school–now all corporately owned, of course) that explain just how small a part they play in the scheme of things. Key to this is the fact that all media is in private and very pro-business hands. Here is a society where the “manufacture of consent” has become highly sophisticated art and science. In fact, it is one of the pillars of G. Pilot’s world. This has been brought about very innocuously through marketing science, early 21st Century public research firms, etc. This is crucial because, even though this is a world of near full employment, the vast majority of jobs still suck and do not pay very well, and never will no matter how much one’s genuinely hard work is monitored, quantified, and rated. Some of the compensation individual workers in such menial categories will thus have to be non-monetary: norms of social esteem, high regard by one’ peers, civic awards, vacation paid at a lower rate, etc. This will carry with it real social standing.

The employment rating system is all a scam because persons are only rated as individuals and they are assigned income and any power totally on that basis. It totally devalues the social and historical concept in which production takes place. Since society or any kind of sociality dismissed or downplayed–the triumph of the mistaken ideal of “society does not exist”–workers are atomized and forced to focus on their individual effort and not about what large-scale production in the firm, industries, or societies as a whole–social labor, according to Marx.

Because of the system of labor control, or the maximization of labor power, in Marxian terms, productivity and economic growth have soared in this dystopian world, but far worse than is the case today, most people do not benefit from it.

In spite of what Gibraltar Pilot says about “what’s left of government”, something very much like a privatized state exists in his world. This is a demonstration of a concept I have been ruminating about: in large-scale socioeconomic and political systems, some form of overarching or centralized power will exist–be it public or private, democratic, plutocratic, or authoritarian. Furthermore, oligopoly and monopoly are the long-run fate of capitalism, not a world of small firms in competitive markets. Capitalists and their firms seek to overpower and dominate their rivals and markets. This of course makes a mockery of the laissez faire or marketeer’s utopia of no centralized political authority and total ‘liberty’. Someone is always their to fill the vacuum and empower themselves and their allies by dominating vast swaths of society or maybe the whole thing.  When you finally ‘get government off our backs’ you get powerful private entities ‘on your back’ and these will be far worse than even nominally or partially democratic governments have ever been. It will be the “oligopolists” of Jack London’s The Iron Heel. If you want a current example of this power vacuum left by a powerless and ineffectual government you need look no farther than Mexico and her ‘Narcostate’. Pilot’s world will have learned these lessons of history, however, and will have an extensive security apparatus similar to Margaret Atwood’s “CorpSecCorp” of her MaddAddam trilogy.  Or this security apparatus could turn out to be the last of the public sector, as might be national defense in the world of 2091.

Is this world of 2091 still the United States of America? I don’t know.  Is it still called that it will exist and operate under an entirely new constitution that strips away the humanist trappings and pretensions of the current one. If democracy still exists in this world it will be even more of a sham than it is today or will be a one-party state. Probably it will be dropped altogether under some rationalization that it had become ‘unmodern’ or archaic or quaint. You hear this sort of language today, as when Alberto Gonzalez called the Geneva Convention as “quaint” or as I recently heard that unions are “unmodern” (I don’t remember where but that was the word), or when you hear people today opine that ‘unions were needed at one time but they’re not needed today’.  Worse yet, you hear it when Donald Trump declares the press, as crucial to democracy as the brain is to the human body, “the enemy of the people”. Democracy itself will suffer the same fate, I’m afraid, and nothing will be worse than people letting real political power and control of their destiny slip out of their hands in the name of dishonest and corrupt claim to ‘efficiency’ or ‘streamlining’ or ‘modernizing’ that will surely be part of a campaign to destroy what highly inadequate–and in many ways ceremonial–democratic institutions we do have. It will be the death of our collective self-esteem and the completion of our oppression. Don’t worry though, they will find a way to make this oppression highly enjoyable and marvelously entertaining. In no other way can it be sustained, although the system will be very brutal to those that dare refuse to be a part of it. Fun if you do, painful or deadly if you don’t. In fact, it will lower your employee rating, diminish your life chances, lower your pay even more, etc.

 

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