{"id":134677,"date":"2019-06-03T12:00:56","date_gmt":"2019-06-03T11:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=134677"},"modified":"2019-06-01T12:02:57","modified_gmt":"2019-06-01T11:02:57","slug":"speeding-into-the-void-of-cyberspace-as-designed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/06\/speeding-into-the-void-of-cyberspace-as-designed\/","title":{"rendered":"Speeding into the Void of Cyberspace as Designed"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe internet was hardwired to be a surveillance tool from the start.\u00a0 No matter what we use the network for today \u2013 dating, directions, encrypted chat, email, or just reading the news \u2013 it always had a dual-use nature rooted in intelligence gathering and war\u2026.[Surveillance Valley shows] the ongoing overlap between the Internet and the military-industrial complex that spawned it a half century ago, and the close ties that exist between the US intelligence agencies and the antigovernment privacy movement that has sprung up in the wake of Edward Snowden\u2019s leaks.\u201d<\/em>
\n— Yasha Levine, Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cMy Dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place.\u00a0 If you wish to go anywhere, you must run twice as fast as that.\u201d<\/em>
\n\u2013 Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

31 May 2019 – <\/em>Speed and panic go hand-in-hand in today\u2019s fabricated world of engineered emergencies and digital alerts.\u00a0 \u201cWe have no time\u201d is today\u2019s mantra \u2013 \u201cWe are running out of time\u201d \u2013 and because this mood of urgency has come to grip most people\u2019s minds, deep thinking about why this is so and who benefits is in short supply. I believe most people sense this to be true but don\u2019t know how to extract themselves from the addictive nature of speed long enough to grasp how deeply they have been propagandized, and why.<\/p>\n

A key turning point in the creation of this mood of an ongoing emergency and tense urgency was the naming of the attacks of September 11, 2001 as \u201c9\/11.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cQuick, call 911\u201d permeated deep into popular consciousness. The so-called \u201csecurity\u201d it elicited became a cloaked form of interminable terror.\u00a0 The future editor of The New York Times<\/em> and Iraq war promoter, Bill Keller, introduced this emergency phone connection on the morning of September 12, 2001 in a New<\/em> York Times<\/em> op-ed piece, \u201cAmerica\u2019s Emergency Line: 911.\u201d\u00a0 The linkage of the attacks to a permanent national emergency was thus subliminally introduced, as Keller mentioned Israel nine times and seven times compared the U.S. situation to that of Israel as a target for terrorists.\u00a0 His first sentence reads: \u201cAn Israeli response to America\u2019s aptly dated wake-up call might well be, \u2018Now you know.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

By referring to September 11 as 9\/11, an endless national emergency became wedded to an endless war on terror aimed at preventing Hitler-like terrorists from obliterating us with nuclear weapons that could create another \u201cground zero\u201d or holocaust.\u00a0 Mentioning Israel (\u201cAmerica is proud to be Israel\u2019s closest ally and best friend in the world,\u201d George W. Bush would tell the Israeli Knesset) so many times, Keller was not very subtly performing an act of legerdemain with multiple meanings.\u00a0 By comparing the victims of the 11 September attacks to Israeli \u201cvictims,\u201d he was implying, among other things, that the Israelis are innocent victims who are not involved in terrorism, but are terrorized by Palestinians, as Americans are terrorized by fanatical Muslims.\u00a0 Palestinians\/Al-Qaeda\/Iraq\/Iran\/Afghanistan\/Syria versus\u00a0Israel\/United States.\u00a0 Explicit and implicit parallels of the guilty and the innocent.\u00a0 Keller tells us who the real killers are, as if he knew who was guilty and who was innocent.<\/p>\n

His use of the term 9\/11 pushes all the right buttons, evoking unending social fear and anxiety. \u00a0It is language as sorcery. It is propaganda at its best. Even well respected critics of the U.S. government\u2019s explanation use this term that has become a fixture of public consciousness through endless repetition.\u00a0\u00a0 As George W. Bush would later put it, as he connected Saddam Hussein to \u201c9\/11\u201d and pushed for the Iraq war, \u201cWe don\u2019t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.\u201d\u00a0 All the ingredients for a linguistic mind-control smoothie had been blended.\u00a0 Under Obama, it was Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and Russia, and now Trump touts Iran as the great threat.\u00a0 So many emergencies following fast upon each other are enough to make your head spin.<\/p>\n

This sense of ongoing urgency and dread was joined to the fast growing (and getting faster by the day) internet and cell phone world that has come to dominate contemporary life.\u00a0 Permanent busyness and speed \u2013 a state of on-edge nervousness and panic with digital alerts \u2013 are today\u2019s norms.\u00a0 The majority of people live \u201con\u201d their phones with their constant beeps, and the digital media have fragmented our sense of time into perpetual presents that create historical amnesia and digital dementia.\u00a0 In a so-called progressive world of consumer capitalism, the era of what the astute sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has called \u201cliquid modernity,\u201d time itself has become an online transaction, a liquid commodity that flows away faster than a scrolling screen.<\/p>\n

We live in a use-by-date digital world in a state of suspended animation where \u201ctime is short\u201d and we must hustle before our use-by date is past. The pace of private and public life has outrun most people\u2019s ability to slow down long enough to realize a hidden hustler has taken them for a ride to Wonderland where the only wonder is that more people have not gone insane as they slip and slide away on the superhighway to nowhere.<\/p>\n

John Berger, as only a sage artist would, noted this essential truth in his 1972 novel G.<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Every ruling minority needs to numb and, if possible, to kill the time sense of those whom it exploits.\u00a0 This is the authoritarian secret of all methods of imprisonment. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Today the vast majority of people, trapped by the manufactured illusion of speed, are in their cells, quickly texting and calling and checking to see if they\u2019ve missed anything as time flies by.<\/p>\n

Much is said about various types of environmental pollution, but the pollution of speed and its effects on mind and body are rarely mentioned, except to express gladness for more speed.\u00a0 The rollout of 5G technology is a case in point. Mental and physical health concerns be damned. \u00a0Back in the 19th<\/sup> century, when space and time were being first \u201cconquered\u201d by the camera, telegraph, and telephone, these inventions were described as flying machines.\u00a0 Time flew, voices flew, images flew.\u00a0 Soon the phonograph and film would capture and preserve the \u201cliving\u201d voices and the moving images of the living and the dead. It was scientific spiritualism at its birth. Today\u2019s comical research into downloading \u201cconsciousness\u201d to conquer death by becoming machines is its latest manifestation.<\/p>\n

That the clowns behind this speed culture are growing rich on this research at our elite universities that are funded by the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies doesn\u2019t make people howl with sardonic laughter puzzles me. Laughter\u2019s good; it slows you down. \u00a0I just had a good laugh reading an article about scientists wondering why new research \u201csuggests\u201d that the universe may be a billion years younger than they thought.\u00a0 I love their precision, don\u2019t you?\u00a0 My students, in their learned helplessness and desire to be told what to do, have often asked me how long their term papers should be, and when I tell them probably 37 1\/2 words, they look at me with mouths agape.\u00a0 What do you mean? one finally asks.\u00a0 I tell them that writing 37 1\/2 words is much faster than having to think slowly as you write, and when you have nothing left to say, to just stop. \u00a0A fast 37 1\/2 words solves the thinking problem.\u00a0 Maybe you can text me your paper, I often add, even though I don\u2019t do texting.<\/p>\n

On a more serious note, a lifelong student of speed (dromology), the brilliant French thinker Paul Virilio, has shown how speed and war have developed together and how totalitarianism is latent in technology.\u00a0 Few listen, just as they did not listen to Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, Neil Postman, and others who warned of the direction technology was taking us. Nuclear weapons are the supreme technological \u201cachievement,\u201d of course, devices that can eliminate all space and time in a flash. They work fast. \u00a0Virilio says,<\/p>\n

The speed of the new optoelectronic and electroacoustic milieu becomes the final void <\/strong>(the void of the quick), a vacuum that no longer depends on the interval between places or things and so on the world\u2019s very extension, but on the interface of an instantaneous transmission of remote appearances, on a geographic and geometric retention in which all volume, all relief vanish.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As I write, I look down at my wristwatch lying on the desk and laugh.\u00a0 My sister gave it to me after her husband died.\u00a0 He had won it as a member of the Villanova track team that won the 4 man, 2-mile relay at the famous Coliseum Relays in Los Angeles in near world record time.\u00a0 Young men whose bodies were in motion to move across terra firma as fast as possible.\u00a0 No drugs produced in a technological chemical factory to aid them. No gimmicks.\u00a0 Just bodies in motion, unlike today.\u00a0 It is an analog watch that must be wound every day when the sun rises.\u00a0 But my brother-in-law never wound it because he never used it. He was saving it as a stashed-away memento in some sort of suspended time. I like it because it always runs a bit slow, unlike the Villanova flashes. \u00a0I like slow.<\/p>\n

In a brilliant book written in 1999 before the hyper-speed era was fully underway \u2013 Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication \u2013 <\/em>John Durham Peters, while not especially focusing on the issue of speed and technology as does Virilio, indirectly explores the fundamental issue that underlies technology and its control by the elites.\u00a0 The problem with technology is that it is the use of a technique applied to physical things to control those who don\u2019t control the machines. Today that is the Internet and digital technology, controlled by those Virilio calls \u201cthe global kinetic elites.\u201d Many readers might remember the iconic line from the film Cool Hand Luke<\/em> with Paul Newman: \u201cWhat we have here is failure to communicate.\u201d\u00a0 That is our issue.\u00a0 How to communicate, and to whom, and who controls our means and speed of communication.\u00a0 Speed kills genuine communication, which may be its point.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what Peters has to say about the new media of the 19th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n

Media of transmission allow crosscuts through space, but recording media allow jump cuts through time.\u00a0 The sentence for death for sound, image, and experience had been commuted.\u00a0 Speech and action could live beyond their human origins.\u00a0 In short, recording media made the afterlife of the dead possible in a new way.\u00a0 As Scientific American put it of the phonograph in 1877: \u2018Speech has become, as it were, immortal. That \u2018as it were\u2019 is the dwelling place of ghosts. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Despite our advanced technology today, we still die, but we live faster, which is not to say better.\u00a0 We live faster until modern medicine makes our dying slower.\u00a0 Speed grants us the illusion of control, an illusionary sense of stop-time in the midst of techno-time, digital time, pointillistic time where so much is happening simultaneously across the internet and we \u201chave\u201d it at our fingertips.\u00a0 Awash in cultural nostalgia that gives us a frisson of false comfort, we scroll the past as fast as we can.\u00a0 In the small town where I live, urbanites come in droves for nostalgia and create hyper-gentrification.\u00a0 I see them rapidly walking the country roads talking from their cells as bird song, rustling leaves, and lapping water passes them by, the technology serving as a shield from reality itself.<\/p>\n

To realize that the Internet was developed as a weapon and has killed our sense of flesh and blood natural time to exploit us through speed should be obvious, though I suspect it isn\u2019t.\u00a0 The invention and control of the Internet by the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, and their allies in Silicon Valley, as Yasha Levine chronicles in Surveillance Valley, <\/em>is a fundamental problem that deserves focused attention.\u00a0 However, who can slow down enough to focus?\u00a0 As he says, \u201cAmerican military interests continue to dominate all parts of the network, even those that supposedly stand in opposition.\u201d\u00a0 This includes Tor and Signal, two encrypted mobile phone and internet services highly touted by journalists, political activists, and dissidents for their ability to make it impossible for governments to monitor communication.\u00a0 Levine writes,<\/p>\n

While Internet billionaires like Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg slam government surveillance, talk up freedom, and embrace Snowden and crypto privacy culture, their companies still cut deals with the Pentagon, work with the NSA and CIA, and continue to track and profile people for profit.\u00a0 It is the same old split-screen marketing trick: the public branding and the behind-the-scenes reality.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Internet is, as he argues, an \u201cold cybernetic dream of a world where everyone is watched, predicted, and controlled.\u201d\u00a0 It is also where you are reading this, another article that will fast disappear from your mind as a stream of more urgent articles rush into print to push it aside.<\/p>\n

We are homeless modern minds now, exiled from earth time, and if we don\u2019t rediscover our way back to a slow contemplation of our fate and the ontological reality of human being itself, I\u2019m afraid we are speeding into the void.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a> and teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is <\/em>http:\/\/edwardcurtin.com\/<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While Internet billionaires like Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg slam government surveillance, talk up freedom, and embrace Snowden and crypto privacy culture, their companies still cut deals with the Pentagon, work with the NSA and CIA, and continue to track and profile people for profit. It is the same old split-screen marketing trick: the public branding and the behind-the-scenes reality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":89352,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[910,232,120,958,290,331,354,267,487,234,109,287,616,911,70,126],"class_list":["post-134677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-big-brother","tag-capitalism","tag-conflict","tag-control","tag-culture","tag-development","tag-economics","tag-geopolitics","tag-human-rights","tag-media","tag-politics","tag-power","tag-social-violence","tag-surveillance","tag-usa","tag-violence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134677\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}