Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control

Rating:
Summary: Jensen follows his tradition of great insight into society
Review: Derrick Jensen (of The Culture of Make Believe fame) is one of my favorite authors because he doesn't pander to conservative or liberal politics. He merely looks at the cutting edge of our society, basically the present and near future, and gives his brilliant insight into what that means for us as a country, as a world.

For anyone wondering which way the wind is blowing, read this book. It gives some good information, that I'm sure the average person doesn't know, about where we're headed with all our technological advances.

Rating:
Summary: An intriguing, frightening perspective
Review: How is science contributing to surveillance methods and increasing methods of observation and control in society? Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, And The Culture Of Control could have been considered under 'social issues' but its focus on the uses of science in controlling societies is too important to place elsewhere. From ID chips in cars and consumer products which help gather information on people's preferences to exoskeleton armor which makes soldiers invin-cible, Welcome To The Machine provides an intriguing, frightening perspective on a society increasingly controlled by the technology it uses.


Rating:
Summary: Learn about the machine and learn about yourself.
Review: I woke up this morning at 5:30 AM to finish the last chapter of Welcome to the Machine. By 7:30 AM I was ready to dismantle whatever needs to be dismantled of the machine. Or put another way, I was ready to smash the machine.

In Welcome to the Machine Jensen and Draffan ask the readers some of the most important questions civilized human beings can ask themselves. "Do science, technology, and the military better serve living breathing human beings, or corporations? Do you believe societies power structures have been designed for your best interests? The interests of your family? Your community? Your landbase? What do these structures protect? How do you want to live?"

Jensen and Draffan have made it clear to me who benefits from nanotechnology, biometrics, hidden cameras in dressing rooms, email interception, phone taps, your neighbors telling on you(TIPS), RFID chips, well designed prisons, stored information about you on computer hard drives and a "day after" pill that erases any remorse felt by soldiers who commit the most despicable of atrocities. The name of the game is "top down" management, and those at the bottom definitely benefit far less from science, technology, and surveillance than those at the top.


Participate in the machine; you pay for the research of surveillance technology.
Participate in the machine; you pay for the surveillance technology.
Participate in the machine; you pay for yourself to be watched.


If your part of the machine, read this book!




Rating:
Summary: EXIT THE MACHINE
Review: Imagine a future in which the governmental and corporate sectors have total control over people; where they share full disclosure of all information about you - from what you had for breakfast seven years ago to the type of fantasies you play out in your head when no one is looking - and that they use this information to make sure you stay in line and, of course, to sell you things. Imagine a future where every motion, thought, and act is recorded, analyzed and incorporated into a system of Absolute Control. As Jensen and Draffan show in this book, such a future is rapidly approaching. In fact, it is almost here.

A few up-coming technologies discussed in this bood include: Radio frequency tags (RFID) that have the power to number, identify, catalogue and track every item in the world; mind-reading machines; thought implantation, using a beam of sound transmitted from hundreds of yards away so focused that only one person can hear it; ubersoldiers that can leap buildings, deflect bullets with hard exoskeletons and even become invisible; remote-controlled animals; vehicle tracking systems; nanotechnology; pills for everything - including the suppression of pesky emotions, like fear and remorse; the e-man and uploading the human brain; smart dust; Domestic Control Hover Drones: silent, remote controlled drones capable of chasing people at fifty miles per hour, equipped with video cameras, thermal imaging sensors, microphones which can pick up a conversation at more than a quarter mile, voice transmitters ("Stop, this is the police!") and a stun-gun.

Frightened yet? No worries. "So long as you do what they tell us, we have nothing to hide, and nothing to fear." Right? Along with the authors, I am not so sure about that. The oppressive technologies Jensen and Draffan discuss in this book are downright terrifying. Yet it is really terrifying to know that our government is developing much scarier things behind closed doors. Those technologies we know about are the ones that are supposed to wow us over. However, for me personally, there is nothing awe-inspiring about the prospect of having my thoughts read, hearing Big Brother's voice in my ear, being chased by hover drones, or digitally chipped with an RFID tag. There is nothing inspiring about living inside Bentham's Panopticon. No, so long as we do what they tell us, we have everything to fear.

Yet long before we allow ourselves to be ruled by outward machines, we must submit to the fundamentalist machine religions of Christianity, Science, Capitalism, Bureaucracy and Progress. These institutions obliterate diversity by coercing us into distrusting our own direct experience and defer to experts. The mantras of futility should sound familiar: outside science there is no knowledge; outside technology there is no comfort; outside capitalism there are no economic transactions; outside industrial civilization there is no humanity, and outside the Panopticon there is no security. Outside the system, nothing is imaginable.

Concommitant with the progress of science and technology are the disempowerment of individuals, increasing separation from nature, and the exponential growth of social chaos. As history advances, we are increasingly individualized, stripped naked under the gaze of power. As bureaucracy and its rules of efficiency, quantification and redundancy expand, we experience the death of creativity, spontaneity and hope. Progress becomes a sort of downward spiral, in which all emotion is eradicated "except pain, rage, triumph, and self-abasement," to quote Orwell. "Everything else we will destroy - everything."

Aside from the great pyramids of technology and power, there really isn't much left to destroy. We have already laid waste to the natural world: extinction rates have reached an all-time high, the great forests have been leveled, the climate has been irrevocably altered, and all of the air, food and water we need to life as organic beings have been laced with deadly pollutants. Really, what's left? What is worth saving in this system of destruction?

What the panoptic guards do not want you to know is that there is another way. Indeed, there are many other ways. Thousands of tribal cultures succeeded (and the ones that are left are still succceeding, insofar we let them) in living harmoniously among themselves and the rest of natural world. As the authors note, these cultures were based on gift giving and the maintenance of complex, caring relationships. Our culture, the culture of the machine, is based upon economic relationships characterized by buying and selling. Lawyers are the mediators.

So how do we leave the panopticon? What's the exit strategy? "All it will take for this whole rotten system to collapse is for enough of us to learn to say NO. And to say NO again. And again. And again." Say no to your destructive job, and do something positive. Say no to the global economy, and start living locally. Say no to politics, and stage a revolution. Say no to your car, and walk for a change. Say no to oppression, and exit the machine.

FRIGHTENING

j. william krueger
[e-mail]

Note: If you are new to Jensen, you might want to start with A Language Older Than Words and/or The Culture of Make Believe, two prior works of his that will help ease you into his perspective. As with Welcome to the Machine, they are very profound, original and important work.

Rating:
Summary: Security is Slavery
Review: This book did not turn out to be what I expected, given the publisher's description, but that's okay. This is not an investigative report or in-depth description of new surveillance and tracking technologies. Instead, these new technologies are used as examples in a modern philosophical screed by Jensen (with an unclear amount of input from George Draffan) on the human condition vis-à-vis the modern surveillance state, in a hard-hitting tome that is usually downright fun to read, and often terrifying. So instead of being blandly scientific, what we have here is an exploratory essay that is hugely insightful on the current state of humanity, and is also engagingly polemical, sarcastic, inflammatory, and even condescending in places. The book must be docked one star because the sarcasm and guilt-tripping sometimes sap the power from Jensen's arguments, while his basic points become very repetitive as the book lurches along. The recommendations for improving the current state of humanity are also pretty thin, not reaching too far beyond basic resistance, class struggle, and community. But in the end we do have a truly terrifying vision of how modern technologies in surveillance, information gathering, biotech, and computing are putting the common man under more control than ever. Under the guise of convenience, efficiency, and (especially in the most recent times) security and protection, governments and corporations have more control over the lives of common people than ever before, and it's only going to get worse. Despite the minor weaknesses in this book's particular writing style, you'll find that Derrick Jensen is a brilliant modern humanist philosopher, and if that's what you expect from this book then you'll be pleased - and greatly disturbed. [~doomsdayer520~]

Rating:
Summary: Surveillance Technology and Sociology
Review: This book has two distinct aspects. Nominally the book is about computer identification technologies. That is, everything from bar codes to credit cards with their black stripe on the back to the little gadgets that you put in your car to go through the automatic readers on the toll roads. In their descriptions of this technology both as it presently exists and as it will exist in the next few years the authors are right on. They know whereof they speak and they have done a good job of even projecting the trends.

The other part of the book is on the social aspects of what such technologies might mean to our freedoms in the future. Here I'm not so sure I agree. In their discussion on passports, they talk about the use of passports to control travel into and out of a country. OK, but they didn't do much good at keeping the 9/11 terriorists out. Money has been something that was going to be tracked completely, totally and utterly. But there is more cash money floating around today than at any time in the past. The drug trade doesn't take credit cards, and drugs are a huge business all around the world. I'm reminded of a comment made some time ago about surveillance: Yes, there's a camera watching everywhere, but most of them are broken and the operator is asleep.

Could big brother be watching? You'll have to read the book to see if you agree.