September 24, 2012
It also recalls the eye-stabbingly depressing tales of women who were depressed enough to commit suicide but also vain enough to provide live updates on Facebook, such as a Taiwanese woman who self-asphyxiated after her boyfriend left her alone for her birthday and a British woman who overdosed on pills while her “friends” left mocking comments.
For many in the modern world, it seems more important to be famous than well adjusted. In an increasingly collectivized digital universe where privacy and individuality are rapidly being erased and technology has herded everyone into an insane state of hyperreality, it has also become more important to try and “save face” than “appear sane,” as in the case of the British man who murdered his wife after she changed her Facebook status to “single.”
Enter the surveillance state to the rescue. They are here to protect us from all those scary people. They are the high-tech voyeurs who keep tabs on these low-IQ exhibitionists. They are the silent lurkers who watch the loudmouth showoffs.
And whether we like it or not”I fail to see that we have any choice”we are paying them billions of dollars to spy on all of us.
Naturally, any murmurs that the government’s main business is not to protect us but rather to consolidate and sustain their own power will be written off as baseless “paranoia,” which is clearly distinguished from the legitimate “fear” they want us to feel toward idiot thugs who hold people hostage merely so they can rack up more “Likes” on Facebook.
But in this case”and maybe I”m paranoid”I sense we have far more to fear from the professional voyeurs than from the amateur exhibitionists.
The exhibitionists may be stupid enough to film everything while they”re robbing, kidnapping, or killing you, but at least they don”t claim the legal authority to do it. The voyeurs are far more intelligent, which is why they cloak such predations in gentler terms such as “taxation,” “incarceration,” and “capital punishment.”
Certainly it’s cuckoo to ever dare question what our friends in the government do with the $50 billion or so we pay them yearly for their “black projects“ that are so top-secret we couldn”t handle the information if it were disclosed. One would have to be wearing a tinfoil hat and receiving AM radio transmissions in their tooth fillings to wonder why the National Security Administration”AKA “Never Say Anything” and “No Such Agency””is building a $2-billion spy center in Utah apparently designed to record everything everyone does on the Internet at all times. One would have to be schizophrenic to worry about the fact that CIA Director David Petraeus recently boasted about how everyday household gadgets will be able to monitor nearly everyone’s actions whether they”re exhibitionists or not.
Don”t worry about the fact that the Department of Homeland Security might suddenly become interested in you should you use any of their flagged keywords during online discussions. And pay no mind to the fact that the Federal Reserve wants to hear what you’re saying about them on Facebook. And blot from your brain the idea that there’s anything Orwellian about the terms “vengeful librarians” and “Total Information Awareness.”
Never in world history has Big Brother had such expansive ability to watch you. And all the hiding places are evaporating like dewdrops in the summer sun. But you shouldn”t care as long as you”re not doing anything wrong, right? Just keep hoping that they don”t keep expanding their definition of what’s wrong.
Don”t let any of this terrify you, because they”re keeping you safe from the terrorists. Stay scared of the small timers and quit being paranoid of the high rollers. Keep sweating about those who might rob you once on Craigslist and pay no heed to those who continually rob you in the name of the law. If you think too hard about any of these things, you might go crazy, which seems to be what they want. So for the sake of your sanity, our protectors would prefer that you don”t think about any of these things.
Just because you”re paranoid doesn”t mean they”re not out to get you. In fact, that’s the reason they’re out to get you.
Image of Big Brother courtesy of Shutterstock
