Waking Life

You Don’t Need a Clock to Know What Time It Is

by RANDALL AMSTER

With each passing day, the news grows increasingly grim. In recent weeks alone, we’ve seen women’s rights under assault as reactionary forces seek to turn the clock back by decades. Half a world away in Afghanistan, corpses are defiled and more are brutally created, without even their ages or innocence sufficient to protect them. Meanwhile, back at home, Congress passes and President Obama signs a new law that further restricts the ability of “we the people” to say or do anything that might stem the tide of the insanity. It’s all such a familiar tune, one that plays out with flawless precision in nearly every turn of the news cycle.

Meanwhile, the blogosphere buzzes along, chronicling the morass and the madness with vigor. The headlines read like an excruciating autopsy of democracy and justice in the late, great United States — and a horrifying blueprint for how to decimate that portion of the planet’s inhabitants who have the misfortune of living atop, amid, or around something that we covet. Naked fascism here and wanton destruction there, with each solidifying the other in our hearts and minds as the gears of consumer culture blithely grind about their business with clocklike precision. Tick: the Dow Jones goes up! Tock: another celebrity melts down! And hardly anyone seems to really know what time it is…

Or maybe everyone does, at least on some level, with a great many simply choosing to ignore the alarm bells in favor of the bells and whistles on their latest consumer gadget. The rising tide (both literal and figurative) that threatens to consume us all is best confronted by ignoring it. The blood on one’s hands comes right off with the newest antibacterial, sanitizing, scented concoction. The news may be forbidding, but it’s merely a minor inconvenience since there are so many creature comforts expressly not forbidden. Tales of disease, despair, and destruction are little more than reality noir stories told to occasionally add a touch of macabre and cinéma vérité to one’s halcyon Netflix queue.

Swipe across that touchscreen, scroll down with that mouse, click that ad banner, pull that lever in the booth, change that channel repeatedly, post a link to that viral video, accept that new credit card offer, text while in that drive-through line, gas up the car and eat up from the microwave. Modern life is a veritable hall of mirrors for narcissists, complete with the rush of affirmation from every “like” attained and text message received with a sonorous chime. It’s all so smooth and slick and seamless, how we’ve gone in less than one generation from people having time to ones being had by it. Yes, you can buy time, share it on vacation, put it on a sheet at work, use it for making a bomb, or turn it into an uncritical magazine — but at the end of the day, there is no longer an end of the day.

We are on the clock, all the time, everywhere we go. The line between work and play has blurred to such an extent that there’s a likely gym at your office and (if there’s not) people are closing deals on handheld devices while at the gym, giving new meaning to the notion of “working out.” Even on social calls one can hear the faint “tap tap” of keystrokes in the background, as an overworked friend multitasks while you’re busy baring your soul between your own multiple, endless tasks. It’s all just so routinely riveting, so crassly compelling, so miraculously mundane, so five minutes ago. Forever a step behind, never quite catching up, no bottom to that inbox, no time to stop and think.

Yet it’s strangely comfortable, after all, ceaselessly cascading from one inconsequential calamity to the next. Can we keep this up, culturally or individually? It’s a new survival-of-the-fittest motif: those who are more cognitively dissonant and functionally distracted will succeed in this brave new world, while those with slower chronometers, active consciences, or stop-and-smell-the-roses ethics are consigned to the breakdown lane on the information superhighway. The fortunate ones whizzing by at 4G (or more) might be tempted into rubbernecking as the broken-down vehicles pile up on the side, but they’re probably too busy texting while driving to notice.

And so it goes. Nero may have fiddled while Rome burned, but we’ve got him beat by a micro-processed mile. The apocalypse is already being televised, routinized, digitized. It’s not coming; it already came and went, and hardly anyone even looked up to take notice. The world ended not with a whimper but a tweet: #IMoverIT. Heck, there’s not even time for punctuation anymore, unless it’s part of an emoticon. theres prolly no need 4 an ! aftr yr doomsday anyway LOL :>)

Seriously? It’s like everyone is pushing toward the bow of the Titanic to snap a photo of that massive iceberg up ahead with their cellphone cameras. Yeah, post that iceberg to your profile, and caption it something ironic like: “Super chunk of ice, way cool!” No matter that the Doomsday Clock stands at five minutes to midnight — that’s an eternity when things move at the speed of micro-circuitry. It’s all an abstraction anyway, a live-action film version of reality; even war is played with joysticks like a cutting-edge video game. There’s no there there anymore; it’s all right here in the palm of your hand. Hickory dickory dock, just mouse over the clock icon for a free music download!

Hey, I love science fiction as much as anyone, and I’m not averse to technology altogether. But technology should be a tool for us to use, not the other way around. Let’s face it: we’re losing the texture of reality, and not even the blatant brutality of ongoing genocide, ethnocide, and ecocide is able to shake us free from our self-imposed slumber at this point in time. Is it too late, in any event? I think not — but the day is dawning and time is running out. We can still correct our course, by learning to use technology for liberatory rather than repressive ends, and by striving to decouple our actual selves from our virtual selves more and more each day. Go on a digital diet, and stick to it.

Ultimately, this move by itself still won’t turn the tide, but at least it puts us back in the mix. The impetus of “forced obsolescence” is a contrivance of the power-mad in our midst, yet we need not stand idly by while their actuaries place us in the “liabilities” column. Come on folks, Christmas morning is over and we need to clean up the living room and put the toys away for a while. Read a book, take a walk, tell a story, share a home-cooked meal, converse with friends and family — anything but the incessant, obsessive, stupefying machinations of the virtual veil. The clock is ticking, the hour is late, the alarm is sounding, and it’s time to wake up and meet the world anew.

2011: A Brave New Dystopia

by Chris Hedges - Monday, December 27, 2010 by TruthDig.com

The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The debate, between those who watched our descent towards corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.

We have been gradually disempowered by a corporate state that, as Huxley foresaw, seduced and manipulated us through sensual gratification, cheap mass-produced goods, boundless credit, political theater and amusement. While we were entertained, the regulations that once kept predatory corporate power in check were dismantled, the laws that once protected us were rewritten and we were impoverished. Now that credit is drying up, good jobs for the working class are gone forever and mass-produced goods are unaffordable, we find ourselves transported from Brave New World to 1984. The state, crippled by massive deficits, endless war and corporate malfeasance, is sliding toward bankruptcy. It is time for Big Brother to take over from Huxley’s feelies, the orgy-porgy and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. We are moving from a society where we are skillfully manipulated by lies and illusions to one where we are overtly controlled.

Orwell warned of a world where books were banned. Huxley warned of a world where no one wanted to read books. Orwell warned of a state of permanent war and fear. Huxley warned of a culture diverted by mindless pleasure. Orwell warned of a state where every conversation and thought was monitored and dissent was brutally punished. Huxley warned of a state where a population, preoccupied by trivia and gossip, no longer cared about truth or information. Orwell saw us frightened into submission. Huxley saw us seduced into submission. But Huxley, we are discovering, was merely the prelude to Orwell. Huxley understood the process by which we would be complicit in our own enslavement. Orwell understood the enslavement. Now that the corporate coup is over, we stand naked and defenseless. We are beginning to understand, as Karl Marx knew, that unfettered and unregulated capitalism is a brutal and revolutionary force that exploits human beings and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse.

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” Orwell wrote in 1984. “We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin uses the term “inverted totalitarianism” in his book “Democracy Incorporated” to describe our political system. It is a term that would make sense to Huxley. In inverted totalitarianism, the sophisticated technologies of corporate control, intimidation and mass manipulation, which far surpass those employed by previous totalitarian states, are effectively masked by the glitter, noise and abundance of a consumer society. Political participation and civil liberties are gradually surrendered. The corporation state, hiding behind the smokescreen of the public relations industry, the entertainment industry and the tawdry materialism of a consumer society, devours us from the inside out. It owes no allegiance to us or the nation. It feasts upon our carcass.

The corporate state does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader. It is defined by the anonymity and facelessness of the corporation. Corporations, who hire attractive spokespeople like Barack Obama, control the uses of science, technology, education and mass communication. They control the messages in movies and television. And, as in Brave New World, they use these tools of communication to bolster tyranny. Our systems of mass communication, as Wolin writes, “block out, eliminate whatever might introduce qualification, ambiguity, or dialogue, anything that might weaken or complicate the holistic force of their creation, to its total impression.”

The result is a monochromatic system of information. Celebrity courtiers, masquerading as journalists, experts and specialists, identify our problems and patiently explain the parameters. All those who argue outside the imposed parameters are dismissed as irrelevant cranks, extremists or members of a radical left. Prescient social critics, from Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky, are banished. Acceptable opinions have a range of A to B. The culture, under the tutelage of these corporate courtiers, becomes, as Huxley noted, a world of cheerful conformity, as well as an endless and finally fatal optimism. We busy ourselves buying products that promise to change our lives, make us more beautiful, confident or successful as we are steadily stripped of rights, money and influence. All messages we receive through these systems of communication, whether on the nightly news or talk shows like “Oprah,” promise a brighter, happier tomorrow. And this, as Wolin points out, is “the same ideology that invites corporate executives to exaggerate profits and conceal losses, but always with a sunny face.” We have been entranced, as Wolin writes, by “continuous technological advances” that “encourage elaborate fantasies of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, actions measured in nanoseconds: a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility, whose denizens are prone to fantasies because the vast majority have imagination but little scientific knowledge.”

Our manufacturing base has been dismantled. Speculators and swindlers have looted the U.S. Treasury and stolen billions from small shareholders who had set aside money for retirement or college. Civil liberties, including habeas corpus and protection from warrantless wiretapping, have been taken away. Basic services, including public education and health care, have been handed over to the corporations to exploit for profit. The few who raise voices of dissent, who refuse to engage in the corporate happy talk, are derided by the corporate establishment as freaks.

Attitudes and temperament have been cleverly engineered by the corporate state, as with Huxley’s pliant characters in Brave New World. The book’s protagonist, Bernard Marx, turns in frustration to his girlfriend Lenina:

“Don’t you wish you were free, Lenina?” he asks.

“I don’t know that you mean. I am free, free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays.”

He laughed, “Yes, ‘Everybody’s happy nowadays.’ We have been giving the children that at five. But wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else’s way.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she repeated.

The façade is crumbling. And as more and more people realize that they have been used and robbed, we will move swiftly from Huxley’s Brave New World to Orwell’s 1984. The public, at some point, will have to face some very unpleasant truths. The good-paying jobs are not coming back. The largest deficits in human history mean that we are trapped in a debt peonage system that will be used by the corporate state to eradicate the last vestiges of social protection for citizens, including Social Security. The state has devolved from a capitalist democracy to neo-feudalism. And when these truths become apparent, anger will replace the corporate-imposed cheerful conformity. The bleakness of our post-industrial pockets, where some 40 million Americans live in a state of poverty and tens of millions in a category called “near poverty,” coupled with the lack of credit to save families from foreclosures, bank repossessions and bankruptcy from medical bills, means that inverted totalitarianism will no longer work.

We increasingly live in Orwell’s Oceania, not Huxley’s The World State. Osama bin Laden plays the role assumed by Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984. Goldstein, in the novel, is the public face of terror. His evil machinations and clandestine acts of violence dominate the nightly news. Goldstein’s image appears each day on Oceania’s television screens as part of the nation’s “Two Minutes of Hate” daily ritual. And without the intervention of the state, Goldstein, like bin Laden, will kill you. All excesses are justified in the titanic fight against evil personified.

The psychological torture of Pvt. Bradley Manning—who has now been imprisoned for seven months without being convicted of any crime—mirrors the breaking of the dissident Winston Smith at the end of 1984. Manning is being held as a “maximum custody detainee” in the brig at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia. He spends 23 of every 24 hours alone. He is denied exercise. He cannot have a pillow or sheets for his bed. Army doctors have been plying him with antidepressants. The cruder forms of torture of the Gestapo have been replaced with refined Orwellian techniques, largely developed by government psychologists, to turn dissidents like Manning into vegetables. We break souls as well as bodies. It is more effective. Now we can all be taken to Orwell’s dreaded Room 101 to become compliant and harmless. These “special administrative measures” are regularly imposed on our dissidents, including Syed Fahad Hashmi, who was imprisoned under similar conditions for three years before going to trial. The techniques have psychologically maimed thousands of detainees in our black sites around the globe. They are the staple form of control in our maximum security prisons where the corporate state makes war on our most politically astute underclass—African-Americans. It all presages the shift from Huxley to Orwell.

“Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling,” Winston Smith’s torturer tells him in 1984. “Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

The noose is tightening. The era of amusement is being replaced by the era of repression. Tens of millions of citizens have had their e-mails and phone records turned over to the government. We are the most monitored and spied-on citizenry in human history. Many of us have our daily routine caught on dozens of security cameras. Our proclivities and habits are recorded on the Internet. Our profiles are electronically generated. Our bodies are patted down at airports and filmed by scanners. And public service announcements, car inspection stickers, and public transportation posters constantly urge us to report suspicious activity. The enemy is everywhere.

Those who do not comply with the dictates of the war on terror, a war which, as Orwell noted, is endless, are brutally silenced. The draconian security measures used to cripple protests at the G-20 gatherings in Pittsburgh and Toronto were wildly disproportionate for the level of street activity. But they sent a clear message—DO NOT TRY THIS. The FBI’s targeting of antiwar and Palestinian activists, which in late September saw agents raid homes in Minneapolis and Chicago, is a harbinger of what is to come for all who dare defy the state’s official Newspeak. The agents—our Thought Police—seized phones, computers, documents and other personal belongings. Subpoenas to appear before a grand jury have since been served on 26 people. The subpoenas cite federal law prohibiting “providing material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations.” Terror, even for those who have nothing to do with terror, becomes the blunt instrument used by Big Brother to protect us from ourselves.

“Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating?” Orwell wrote. “It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself.”