|
|
Techno-Fascism
Every
Move You Make
By
CHELLIS GLENDINNING
Surveillance
of private calls and emails. Cameras documenting every move. No habeas
corpus. Unimpeded entry into personal financial records. Voting machines
changing election outcomes with the flick of a switch. Protest defined as
terrorism. Many people hope that the loss of civil rights Americans have
endured since the onslaughts mounted by Bush Administration II is a
political reality that can be reversed through electoral will.
Established mechanisms of
political power are, of course, the immediately available means for
attempting change. Notions of citizens’ rights, freedom, and democratic
participation are compelling paradigms that have consistently stirred the
bravery of U.S. citizens – and yet elder political scientist Sheldon Wolin,
who taught the philosophy of democracy for five decades, sees the current
predicament of corporate-government hegemony as something more endemic.
“Inverted totalitarianism,” as
he calls it in his recent Democracy Incorporated, “lies in
wielding total power without appearing to, without establishing
concentration camps, or enforcing ideological uniformity, or forcibly
suppressing dissident elements so long as they remain ineffectual.” To
Wolin, such a form of political power makes the United States “the showcase
of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed.”
Wolin rightfully points out
that the origins of U.S. governance were “born with a bias against
democracy,” and yet the system has quickly lunged beyond its
less-than-democratic agrarian roots to become a mass urban society that,
with distinct 1984 flavorings, could be called techno-fascism.
The role of technology is the overlooked piece of the puzzle of the
contemporary political conundrum.
What are its mechanisms of
control?
The use of telecommunications
technologies for surveillance is obvious. So are willful alteration of
computer data for public reportage, manipulation of television news for
opinion-shaping, and use of microwave-emitting weapons for crowd control.
Less obvious are what could be
called “inverted mechanization” whereby citizens blindly accept the march of
technological development as an expression of a very inexact, some would
say erroneous, concept of “progress.” One mechanism propagating such
blindness is the U.S. government’s invisible role as regulatory handmaiden
to industry, offering little-to-no means for citizen determination of what
technologies are disseminated; instead we get whatever GMOs and nuclear
plants corporations dish out. A glaring example is the Telecommunications
Act of 1996 that, seeking to not repeat the “errors” of the nuclear
industry, offers zero public input as to health or environmental impacts of
its antennae, towers, and satellites – the result being that the public
has not a clue about the very real biological effects of electromagnetic
radiation. Inverted mechanization is thrust forward as well by unequal
access to resources: corporations lavishly crafting public opinion and
mounting limitless legal defenses versus citizen groups who may be dying
from exposure to a dangerous technology but whose funds trickle in from bake
sales. In his Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-Of-Control as a
Theme in Political Thought, political scientist Langdon Winner
points out that, to boot, the artifacts themselves have grown to such
magnitude and complexity that they define popular conception of necessity.
Witness the “need” to get to distant locales in a few hours or enjoy
instantaneous communication.
Even less obvious a mechanism
of public control is the technological inversion that results from the fact
that, as filmmaker Godfrey Reggio puts it, “We don’t use technology, we
live it.” Like fish in water we cannot consider modern artifacts
as separate from ourselves and so cannot admit that they exist.
Social critic Lewis Mumford was
among the first to make sense of the systemic nature of technology. In
The Pentagon of Power, he identified the underlying metaphor of mass
civilizations as the megamachine. The assembly line -- of factory, home,
education, agriculture, medicine, consumerism, entertainment. The
machine -- centralizing decision-making and control. The mechanical –
fragmenting every act until its relationship to the whole is lost;
insisting upon the pre-determined role of each region, each community,
each individual.
Mumford deftly peels away false
hope from a social reality based on principles of centralization, control,
and efficiency. In 1962 he peered into the future and saw the pentagon of
power incarnate: “a more voluminous productivity, augmented by almost
omniscient computers and a wider range of antibiotics and inoculations,
with a greater control over our genetic inheritance, with more complex
surgical operations and transplants, with an extension of automation to
every form of human activity.”
Inverted totalitarianism is
both inverted and totalitarian because of the power of modern mass
technological systems to shape and control social realities, just as they
shape and control individual understandings of those realities. Its
contemporary existence is most definitely the result of the efforts of a
group of right-wing fundamentalists who hurled themselves into power through
devious means -- but today’s desperate social inequities, dire ecological
predicament, and fascist politic are the offspring of long-evolving
technological centralization and control as well.
The challenge is to see the
whole and all its parts, not just the shiny new device that purports to
make one’s individual life easier or sexier -- which in itself is a
contributor to the making of political disengagement. The whole is a
megamachine, with you and your liquid TV, Blackberry, and Prius a
necessary cog.
|
