Friday, May 29, 2020

NEW DYSTOPIAN REALITY PROPOSED: MASS SURVEILLANCE AS THE "NEW NORMAL"


Naomi Klein in her thought provoking article published in "The Intercept"  on May 8th, 2020 describes how the State of New York has tasked Bill Gates to "reinvent" New York's post-Covid protocol which would involve a permanent integration of technology into every individual citizen's civic life.  Yup, that's the "new Orwellian normal." Enjoy. Not. 

https://theintercept.com/2020/05/08/andrew-cuomo-eric-schmidt-coronavirus-tech-shock-doctrine/


It has taken some time to gel, but something resembling a coherent pandemic shock doctrine is beginning to emerge. Call it the Screen New Deal. Far more hi-tech than anything we have seen during previous disasters, the future that is being rushed into being as the bodies still pile up treats our past weeks of physical isolation not as a painful necessity to save lives, but as a living laboratory for a permanent — and highly profitable — no-touch future
It’s a future in which our homes are never again exclusively personal spaces, but are also, via high-speed digital connectivity, our schools, our doctor’s offices, our gyms, and, if determined by the state, our jails …
It’s a future in which our every move, our every word, our every relationship is trackable, traceable and data-mineable by unprecedented collaborations between government and tech giants.
If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because, pre-Covid, this precise app-driven, gig-fueled future was being sold to us in the name of friction-free convenience and personalization. But many of us had concerns …
Today, a great many of those well-founded concerns are being swept away by a tidal wave of panic, and this warmed-over dystopia is going through a rush-job rebranding.
Now, against a harrowing backdrop of mass death, it is being sold to us on the dubious promise that these technologies are the only possible way to pandemic-proof our lives, the indispensable keys to keeping ourselves and our loved ones safe …
At the heart of this vision is seamless integration of government with a handful of Silicon Valley giants — with public schools, hospitals, doctor’s offices, police and military all outsourcing (at a high cost) many of their core functions to private tech companies.”
******* 


In closing, some thoughts bear pondering:

Amazing times we live in on multiple fronts. Without firing a shot, those "governing" us have shed us of our fundamental liberties embedded in The Bill of Rights. How will history judge this period? A time when, under the guise of a false "pandemic," we essentially moved towards the destruction of civil society. Specifically, at the state and local levels, decisions were made wherein HEALTHY citizenry were quarantined. A first in human history . Repeat: A FIRST IN HUMAN HISTORY.

Utterly defies commonsense and logic to imprison healthy people in their homes, while demanding nursing homes admit Covid-19 patients. One risks being labeled a 'conspiracy theorist' if one argues that this may have been intentional in order to destroy a booming economy and to assist in spiking the numbers of cases. 
Follow the money. Who benefits? This is beyond sinister. It is evil.

In closing, as mentioned in my earlier post in March, what is of gravest concern to me is the dangerous precedent which has now been set that allows governmental entities, at various levels, to control our behavior all in the name of "public safety/interest." We have embarked on a very slippery slope from which there may be no return: who will decide the acceptable threshold (of death) in the future that, in their short sighted minds, warrants future lockdowns; second; what will be the threshold, and will it be re-calibrated to the absurd and destructive point that more than a cluster of deaths from a flu variant will be an unacceptable "spike"? 


This Wuhan virus has been used as a "weapon" in a manner that Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu would appreciate for it was he who coined the phrase: "The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting."   

Seems like we --the citizenry-- are being subdued on multiple fronts: from government surveillance to "shelter-in-place." 

This seems to have been a test. And we, the people, failed (or passed) depending on one's vantage point.