Control Is An Addiction

Lord Acton wrote that power tends to corrupt, but I’m going to say flat out that it does corrupt. I’ll go further and say that it’s an addiction (probably every bit as bad as cocaine), and that the lust for control is one of its primary drivers.

Right now, with big governments – governments with gigantic intelligence operations – trying to grab ever-more surveillance powers, I want everyone to be clear on this. And so I’m going to give you reasons to believe it. Yes, we all feel in our guts that this is true, but I’m going to give you further reasons, because we’ve also been conditioned to conform to power.

With the world on fire and with power freaks at the helm, we no longer have the luxury of doing it the easy way and imagining that power will be kind to us in the end. It’s clear enough that power isn’t our friend, and in truth it never really was.

So, let’s get directly to it. Here’s a passage from a 2014 interview with Thomas Drake, formerly a top executive at the NSA, likening the control of surveillance to mainlining heroin:

In the digital space, you’re “data drug” habit goes exponential, because there’s just so much. You can mainline this all day long. To me, there’s a psychology that’s not often written about: What happens when you have this much reach and power, and constraints of law and even policy simply fade into the woodwork… Which is made worse by the fact that you can’t get enough, there’s never enough, and there’s more coming… You’re high all the time. Because you’re plugged in. It’s now 24/7. There’s no relief from the addiction.

Heroine… addiction… mainlining. The images are all too clear. And it’s this way through the entire operation… through the many, many operations.

Please understand that once surveillance gets going, it turns into a merciless war for ever-more data. This has overwhelmed not only governments, but Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and the rest. Here’s an industry expert named Jennifer Sims, writing in The Future of Counter-Intelligence:

If information is power, then those who master this digital chaos first, and derive meaning from it, will likely gain critical advantages. Intelligence professionals, whether in business or in service to the state, are therefore in a silent race to develop tools for mining and analyzing growing volumes of swiftly moving information and then to use it…

And here’s Craig Mundie, Senior Adviser to the CEO of Microsoft, writing in Foreign Affairs March/April 2014:

Big data” has rendered obsolete the current approach to protecting privacy and civil liberties.

If you’re still minded to believe that it isn’t that bad and that it’s still easiest to be quiet and go along with them, you can get the study I did on this with Jonathan Logan. It’s called The New Age of Intelligence, and it’s available in our store.

More reading, however, isn’t what will turn the tide on this. What will is simply calling things by their real names, over and over and over. You can start with “control is slavery” and figure out what to add on your own. Oh… and Do Not Comply.

Understand, this addiction has no end, and every time people get scared they just ramp it up… because they can, and because they’re addicts. Humans will agree to all sorts of horrific things if you can first get them afraid… and modern media is little more than a fear delivery system.

But we can’t fall for it any longer. This addiction has no end point, and what dies in the end isn’t the addict, but our souls. And if we don’t start taking this seriously, the control addicts of the world get a clear shot at proving Julian Assange right one final time:

If you want a vision of the future, imagine Washington-backed Google Glasses strapped onto a vacant human face—forever.

**

Paul Rosenberg

freemansperspective.com

6 thoughts on “Control Is An Addiction”

  1. To add to Lord Acton, “ power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and power attracts the corruptible. To those who advocate the surveillance state with the statement “ you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide.” I state that it has been my experience that those with nothing to hide have nothing to show. They create nothing.

    1. Ooh, I love that… Those with nothing to hide have nothing to show: they create nothing. Just going with the flow, wherever it takes them… but those who are doing something else… yeah, they’ve got something “to hide.”

      There’s nothing more dangerous than an idea. There’s nothing more powerful than a good idea. There’s nothing more destructive and harmful than a half-baked good idea. If you’ve got good ideas, you’ve got something to hide, because if that gets out before it’s ready… yeah, no, just keep it quiet until it’s ready.

  2. I would suggest that it is not so much that power corrupts as that power attracts the corruptible. There are many people who have no desire for control over others, and they do not seek jobs or positions that give them such power. But there are others who crave such power, and they gravitate aggressively into those positions. I have no easy answer as to how to prevent this, except to eliminate such positions and power, to the extent possible.

    1. I have found this to be true as well, that power attracts corruptible control-mongers.

      The problem isn’t power, and it isn’t even the centralization of power. Not precisely, anyways. The problem is how to manage the centralization of power; how to balance it so that it is directed precisely and to the benefit of the many who give power to the few. The many will always give the few power, because a few are more effective at solving problems than a many. But how do we keep those few on task? What happens if they stray?

  3. There is enormous power in wisdom, yes, and the beginning of wisdom is calling things by their proper names; however, that’s not the end of wisdom, and that alone will not solve our problem. Wisdom is taking right action (cause) to achieve a desirable result (effect). Wisdom is active, not passive.

    On the point of big data, which is a concerning one, what action shall we take? If one wishes to heal the addicted, one must first make sure he is not an enabler of the addiction. Now, I believe Paul is a leader among us in this regard, but since he didn’t make the point here, I’ll do it for him.

    Big data collects from everywhere, yes, but how much of our data do we serve to them on a silver platter? Do we use centralized webmail services? Centralized cloud storage services? Any centralized “cloud” thing at all? Then we’re serving them our data to their home and thus enabling their addiction. To desist of this error, we need to take action to control our own data.

    I look forward to building Single Sovereign Identity systems and doing away with my government ID, but I am in a place and time wherein I cannot simply drop those IDs into the shredder and still manage to live my life and build toward a better tomorrow. But in this day and age, how much do you need your state-issued ID for anyways? Most of what I do is online, and my online identity, on myriad services and platforms and providers, is my email address. So if I claim to yearn for a sovereign identity, one I myself own, but I’ve left my online identity in someone else’s control, then I am lying not only to the world, but more importantly, to myself. So I learned to run my own mail server (I used Mailu, for those who are interested, and the learning curve was gentle. It’s not perfect, but it works for now and I’ll build up more and better later.)

    Meanwhile, I am working to transition a partner organization from Google Docs and Dropbox and the like to NextCloud, because the latter is open source, self-hosted, and still provides functionalities critical to that company like real-time collaborative rich-document editing. They’re businesspeople there, not geeks. They deal with spreadsheets, not code. They need something high level, and no moderately decentralized solution actually works for that yet. Now, I’m taking a lot of flak for supporting a “centralized” web-based solution, but it’s self-hosted, which means that by adopting it, the company is still cutting off the big-data-mongers, and it’s the biggest step in the right direction that they can take in less than half a decade. And let’s be real, folk, a self-hosted web system is still an order of magnitude more decentralized than a public cloud service.

    My point is, stop being an enabler of the data-addicted control freaks. Take your data back, and host your own services on your own servers. It’s not that expensive; I’m doing it on computers from 2009 sitting on a folding table in my basement, and I’m happy to teach anyone who wants to learn how they can do it too.

    1. “But in this day and age, how much do you need your state-issued ID for anyways”

      Everything except voting

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