(2017)
Foreword:
This opinion piece looks at key interactions between surveillance, the internet, mass media and neoliberalism (economic rationalism) through a mythological lens.
Particularly relevant as I write, with the Sentient World Simulation program well underway and the Internet of Things.
The principles, structures and strategies of neoliberal capitalism work together deliberately and opportunistically for the goal of global, political and economic supremacy, and always for the few ruling the many. However in order for this to happen the masses must be duped (or lulled or coerced or just convinced) into agreements that may not be in their best interests.
I discuss surveillance and the manipulation of consent as an evolving phenomenon, and raise existential questions about freedom, authenticity and meaning, while reflecting on the allegorical narrative of Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, and the Tree of Knowledge at its centre.
Methodology
There are multiple aspects to the topic of surveillance and it was challenging to narrow down a theme for exploration. I settled on writing a dialectic opinion piece that draws inspiration from two versions of the Adam and Eve creation myth; one from Genesis and the other from the Nag Hammadi scrolls.
The Garden of Eden is used as context for discussing surveillance, the manipulation of consent and neoliberal agendas, but it is also used as a narrative device.
My interpretation and definition of a well-known cross-cultural creation myth, is a comparative analysis sourced from various translations. I reviewed a broad range of literature; academic and technical journals, fiction and non-fiction books, news media, religious literature, social and philosophical works, government publications and websites , and I have included in-text hyperlinks.
Civil disobedience in the Garden of Eden
The Christian myth of Adam and Eve has the hapless couple living in ignorance and tilling the garden grounds until a snake tempts Eve to eat from the forbidden ‘Tree of Knowledge for both good and evil’ (Note that the knowledge is ‘for’ both good and evil and not ‘of’ both good and evil.) They are expelled from the garden for disobeying God, and to stop them from eating from another tree…the Tree of Life; the source of their immortality:
“Then the Lord God said, ‘Now, lest [the humans] reach out their hands and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—” therefore the Lord God sent them out from the garden of Eden to work the ground (dust) from which they were taken. He drove out the humans, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned in every direction to guard the way to the tree of life.” (Genesis 3:22b-24)
Clearly, and for unknown reasons, God did not want them knowing stuff and living forever too.
According to the gnostic Nag Hammadi, this garden variety god is not the true God, but a false god, a god of lies. In the gnostic version the imposter god is a god of slavery, surveillance and control (The Gnostic Society Library, 2003). This is a jealous god who imprisons the spark of supreme divine consciousness in matter. Adam and his saviour Eve (the divine feminine archetype) escape the prison of ignorance by eating the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge for both good and evil. The first emotion they experience is shame, as with knowledge comes the loss of innocence, and a sense of responsibility. In the Nag Hammadi creation myth the fall of Adam and Eve represents human consciousness waking from a dream state and its escape from an illusory utopia (Davies, 2005). Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the garden by an imposter god symbolises the awakening human psyche, which collectively shares the knowledge for both good and evil. Up until that moment, Adam is a sleepwalker, a puppet, ignorant of any possibilities outside the garden of the jealous god that is referred to by gnostic Christians as the Demiurge. Eve wakes first and saves Adam from eternal ignorance. They have woken from the appearance of freedom and autonomy because the Garden of Eden is actually a totalitarian surveillance state. Adam and Eve are under the dominating gaze of the Demiurge and just like Bentham’s panoptic prison design, the garden exists to serve its meticulous all-seeing power (Foucault, 1980).
Everybody Knows
‘Free’ capitalist societies ( as opposed to an authoritarian capitalist society as China has become) engage incrementally in covert mass surveillance and data collection and retention, allegedly for public safety and security, however it’s primarily for control, profit and power, as Edward Snowden’s revelations about Prism in 2013, and the anonymous leak of the ‘Panama Papers’ in 2015 clearly revealed. The significance of this covert activity is reflected in the time, effort, money and resources that have gone into government investigations on Julian Assange for allegedly having had sex with a broken condom (The Assange Agenda, 2017). Since then, mainstream media has moved on and the masses in the Garden of Eden seem curiously passive, giving little resistance beyond ‘Clickivism’, a form of pseudo-activism, and behaving in general as if it’s all a big show; a socio-political spectacle.
‘The end result is the reduction of activism into a series of petition drives that capitalise on current events’ (White, 2010). Democracy is in grave danger and everybody knows it, yet most of us are passively disengaged, living the spectacle through our devices and projected images, where we connect through the Tree of Knowledge that occupies the centre of the Garden of Eden.
Debord wrote that the spectacle presents itself as the unquestionable and inaccessible reality that demands our passive acceptance, which is already imposed by the spectacle’s monopoly of appearances. The spectacle is everywhere,
‘The tautological character of the spectacle stems from the fact that its means and ends are identical. It’s the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the globe, endlessly basking in its own glory’ (Debord, 1967).
The battle for minds amidst the spectacle
Unfettered, deregulated capitalism is a lot like the demiurge of the Garden of Eden. It presents itself as the only viable system and traps its subjects by presenting itself as the ideal, free society. We inhabitants of the garden find it increasingly difficult to imagine an alternative reality because we’ve come to believe there’s no other way.
Our systems have become the ‘vast inaccessible realities that can never be questioned’ (Debord 1967).
We’re complacent and live in denial despite witnessing ever-increasing levels of control, a gradual undermining of democratic values, and the narrowing of avenues for community empowerment. Civil rights are systematically dismantled over time to protect the financial institutions that dominate society, and to make citizen dissent more difficult. Elaborate propaganda is disseminated through mass media over generations, creating a political void of disinterest, yet our societies and our experiences therein, are shaped by political decisions made for us despite our civil disengagement, which is very convenient for those with the power and influence to drive political decisions and policy making. It appears to be a long-term strategy that uses a combination of deliberation and opportunism. Governments, which have traditionally represented the will of the people, are undermined with the help of a highly concentrated ownership of mass media and the global political elites they serve (Herman & Chomsky, 1988). Governments have come to represent the will of those who own the means of production, who control the resources, hold the majority of wealth and who can influence public opinion. Over time, the control of state assets is transferred into private hands under the guise of more cost effective management and better efficiency. That’s never the outcome however. The push for privatisation was propelled by a radical squeeze on workers rights and conditions – slipped in under the guise of ‘flexible labour markets’. It is nothing less than the commodification of poverty, made easier because there are fewer advocates who will, or can speak for them. People are distracted, busy surviving and dealing with a cumulative massive increase in information, coupled with a strategic shift of responsibility from those in positions of power, to the individual citizen or rather ‘consumer’.
The majority is self-occupied and fighting to retain composure, in a system designed to covertly transfer power to a minority elite.
More people are being born into servitude than at any other time, with 45.8 million people trapped in some form of slavery (Global Slavery Index, 2016). Few find their way out of their appointed stations in life in a fiercely competitive, profit-driven system (Loewenstein, 2015). The appearance of our society may have changed with new technologies, which once bore the promise of making life fairer and easier, but the agenda remains the same. Set the masses fighting amongst themselves, give them an imagined enemy ‘Other’ and flow all benefits into the hands of a few.
Debord wrote: ‘Contemporary society is both the meaning and the agenda of our particular socio-economic formation. It is the historical moment in which we are caught’ (Debord, 1967)
The rise of the immortal gods: Mass surveillance & God’s Panopticon: (why people accept it)
Forms of surveillance, political propaganda and totalitarian control have existed for thousands of years, as an evolving narrative in human history. Foucault’s panopticon became the leading metaphor for surveillance studies among scholars … and then an odd thing occurred… scholars got bored with it. Either that or they were overwhelmed with surveillance studies, becoming ‘haunted by its omnipresence’ (Caluya, 2010).
For me the panopticon is an overtly religious concept that represents humanity’s desire for protection by an omnipotent deity, which has existed ideologically in human consciousness from the beginnings of civilisation, then institutionalised as a means for regulating conduct through its moral discourses (Foucault, 2007). ‘The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion’ (Debord, 1967).
Our rapidly evolving technologies allow those who own the means of production to replace the idea of God, who has seemingly failed to protect us from evil, with god-like systems that use surveillance technologies as the structure of an all-seeing eye, which in many ways positions the Internet as the mind of God. Satellite angels covering the four corners of the globe and everywhere in-between complete the picture with their capacity for omniscience. This omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent deity is always under construction. It is in a state of constant flux, ready to shape shift into whatever appearance the masses will accept and endorse. Its survival and growth requires the participation of the masses, who are now dependent on it. The World Wide Web has been cast. The many have put their knowledge together and collectively given power to the new system, a cyberspace that functions like a God. I’m not saying this is a bad thing – it’s as good or as bad as the intentions of the people who manage and use the technology, and the direction it will take is yet to be determined. However, the struggle is clear and looks for all purposes like a battle between good and evil.
The networked Tree of Knowledge
The Internet has always needed produsers (Bruns, 2007) and open participation to build the Internet’s knowledge base, which has simultaneously created a data-based crystal ball into the hearts and minds of humanity. Bruns described Web 2.0 or social software as part of an important paradigm shift that would profoundly impact our social practices, legal and economic frameworks, our media and our democratic societies. (Web 3.0 is coming).
Back in 2007 this shift was poorly theorised or understood (Bruns, 2007). The excitement and positivity with which many intellectuals and academics approached the new world order of things was admirable however the intellectual elitism that plagues some of the brightest minds of our time is a democratic Achilles heel. While basking in their own brilliance, their complex theories and fancy terminologies, they seem to ignore the dark undercurrent of neoliberal opportunism and a quiet militaristic supremacy, which is whisking humanity toward a new dystopian destiny. State protections industries aren’t just protecting their citizens or their established geographical borders, but also the state’s economic and military interests.
Surveillance is a key component of intelligence and espionage. The Internet was developed from a military communications technology called ARPANET, a prototype for the Internet that began as a memo nearly 50 years ago (DARPA, 2017).
It is said that no one really owns the Internet, but that depends on the definitions of ownership, i.e. if I had free access to all the data generated through the Internet, and if I could decrypt and store that data or capture it before it was encrypted for later reference or sale, then in a sense I’d own the Internet. Then there’s the access that gatekeepers such as Telstra control; if you don’t pay your bill then you have no access to the net. The greatest value of the Internet is in the information it contains but also in its capacity for the capture, communication and dissemination of information, and the ensuing influence of ideas.
The whistleblowers of our time are in great danger and for good reason. Many governments do not want people to focus on the dark side of global systems operations, however, information settles in strange and fascinating ways in the human psyche and the effects of the panopticon works in both directions. The focus can also go from the many to the few. In countries like China, where slavery is rife (Global slavery Index, 2016) and the memory of revolution is relatively fresh, media and online censorship is a priority (Muller, 2004). Naturally, western neoliberal capitalist governments, as directed by the private political elites and their corporate agendas, periodical push for Internet censorship citing citizen safety and national security, and of course at times that is necessary, but I can’t help wondering if some shadowy demiurge, doesn’t want us eating from the tree of knowledge or sharing ideas too freely.
Afterword
We have never lost the desire or the drive to create a utopian society, and so far all attempts are at the expense of truth, freedom and privacy. Despite resistance, there is also a loss of authenticity, because any individual or group that resists oppression by a dominant ideology does so at risk of being cast as the enemy other. One group’s heaven is another group’s hell.
The Internet is the manifest appearance of the mythical tree of knowledge, placed at the centre of our world, with networked branches that reach all around the globe and we are mesmerised by a plethora of information. As we awaken from this dream, what we do with our knowledge for good or for evil, will determine our future and the future of the planet.
Refs:
Bruns, A. 2007. Produsage, generation C, and their effects on the democratic process.
Bruns, A. 2007, ‘Produsage’, Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI conference on Creativity & cognition pp. 99-106. ACM.
Caluya, G. 2010, ‘The post-panoptic society? Reassessing Foucault in surveillance studies’, Social Identities, vol 16, no. 9, pp. 621-633.
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Davies, S. 2005, The Gnostic Society Library, ‘The Secret Book of John, translation & annotation Stevan Davies, Skylight Paths Publishing, pp 9-14.
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Rozee Cutrone © 2017
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