Revelatur Newsletter, March 18, 2021

“Darkness has a hunger that's insatiable

And lightness has a call that's hard to hear” Amy Ray and Emily Saliers

Introduction: Welcome back readers! In our first piece we examine the massive gap between rights and responsibilities in modern democracies and particularly the U.S. that we call the “contribution debt;” and we propose remedies. In the second we detail the unspoken and unexamined assumptions -- primarily political -- whose hidden nature is constraining political and social progress in the U.S. In the concluding piece, we take a deep dive into the so-called Internet “data privacy” issue through a book on report on The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. Enjoy!

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Eliminate the “National Contribution Debt” with a “National Contribution Covenant”

Summary: this article posits that there exists in modern democracies, and particularly the U.S., a huge and important gap between rights claimed by “the people,” the responsibilities they are willing to accept, and the contributions they are willing to make to society. Further, that this gap ironically benefits the right -- which both notices this problem and decries it -- and penalizes the left, which totally ignores the problem.

The left’s been under the mistaken assumption that the mechanisms of American democracy were stable and unassailable, which is one reason for the excessive focus on rights expansion. The right has been content to pretend they’re fighting the left over rights expansion – that helps mobilize the base for sure. But the real fight has been to erode democratic institutions, check and balances, faith and hope too. This is part of the deliberate, long-term Republican strategy we have detailed in these pages previously. The rights battle is, in the war for the heart of America, one long-term ambush into which the left has been suckered. And just one more example of how the right is winning with superior, asymmetric strategy while outnumbered, and the left thinks it’s winning the key battles while steadily losing the war despite decisive numerical superiority.

It doesn’t matter if you gain all the “rights” possible if you pay inadequate attention to the society, culture, form of government and mechanisms that underpin them. The right has been focusing on seizing those levers of power, while the left has focused almost exclusively on justifying their claim to power and access. This has generated a dynamic in which the left does all of the governance and “social” work, and pays “full price” to uphold the nation, while the right leeches off the surplus generated through this work.

The cure is not to get the right to realize the error of their ways through suasion, nor to engage in continuous fights over those same levers of power -- although for the foreseeable future such battles are critically necessary. Rather, the answer is to rally the entire society to map and link from rights to individual and collective responsibilities whose acceptance by both right and left will re-establish a more just nation and society. Paradoxically, the right will, I think, readily agree to the prescriptions I offer, while the left will protest mightily, although the benefits will redound to the left and the nation as a whole to the great detriment of the right. I fully expect my prescriptions will be criticized as Marxist from the right, and characterized as anti-democratic from the left. So be it. That’s one of the indicators that I’m on the right track!

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Democracies as a rule struggle with the historical, path-dependent, political and systems effects of the disconnect between the automatic granting and enumerating of multiple citizen rights, while at the same time deliberately limiting citizens’ reciprocal responsibilities. In some cases the only actual American citizen commitment is implicit yet not enumerated – that of not breaking the law. The de-linking of rights and responsibilities generates a specific type of injustice – injustice to the nation – which is unfortunately not absorbed proportionally by the nation as a whole but doled out in second and third order effects onto disadvantaged individuals and societal groups. The U.S. shares this challenge, and may in fact be its poster child.

It is interesting to me that this “contribution debt” is most taken advantage of by Republicans and the right in general, whereas they deny this and then project this tendency onto the left, with terms like “welfare queens,” and “free handouts.” Very few Republicans and Trumpists served in the military, for instance, and, starting with the John Kerry Swift Boat travesty, they’ve actually been disparaging towards the military service of individuals. Although of course they love their flyovers reminding them that America was great/is still great/will be great again when the libs go away? And thanking me for my service while simultaneously fomenting and engaging in insurrections to take away my rights and their own that I served so faithfully to preserve.

How did we get here? We posit a very simple sociopolitical hypothesis in three parts: first, that capitalism, supported by neoliberalism as political theology slash ideology slash global organizing principle, has become hyper-efficient at seizing, exploiting and scaling opportunity, in other words it has achieved its logical ideality; second, that illicit service and product providers play a massively under-estimated role and occupy a massively unacknowledged space in the global economy, but contrary to general belief, do not constitute a separate sector from the licit economy but systemically complement it; third, that the vast majority of global citizens cannot and do not participate in any meaningful way in the licit economy, will not (thank God) participate in the illicit economy, and thus have no place in the “real” world that is being constantly portrayed to them through information media.

So what? It is just this disenfranchised global mass and its legitimate discontents that is being vectored by reactionary movements and manipulated by powerful “bad actors” to help them either reinforce a power dynamic they find favorable, or to shatter the existing equilibrium should they find it unfavorable to their interests.

This manipulation and vectoring has achieved its own ideality in support of power, having been refined over 200,000 years and recently amplified by capital, technology, and “best practices.” To sustain this dynamic, multiple myths and instrumentalities have been brought into service. At a national level, myths such as American and British Exceptionalism serve this purpose. Globally, international frameworks such as the “Globalism,” the U.N, Bretton Woods, G7, etc., do similar work. Because this dynamic has gone on so long, myths are no longer required, they are assumed to be true, and lies and propaganda rapidly replace them because they are more effective and scalable than myth. In this manner even hope itself has been hijacked and re-purposed – and in some communities purposely annihilated -- from a realistic expectation of a better life for oneself and one’s successors through dint of hard work and following the rules, to a desperate, grasping need to belong to something, anything, bigger that legitimizes and vectors those base instincts and emotions left after hope has been stripped away.

Now not everybody globally has bought into this zero sum, race to the bottom, ‘get it while it lasts’ cultural imperative. In fact, the majority has not. Unfortunately, the power wielded by the combination of purposeful capital and a determined minority, has also created a new phenomenon - “total knowledge impunity,” wherein the truth no longer matters – and thus does not threaten the bad guys nor empower the good guys – at least in any historical sense.

This modern, amped up, technology-enabled totalitarianism is subscribed to by all major socio-political–economic systems: western Democratic; Russian Oligarchic and China’s “mixed socialist market economy.” The differences between them are dwarfed by the similarities amongst them, and the distinctions between them are only useful and meaningful to academics, and to the ruling regimes themselves who leverage them to generate fear of “the other” and increase their impunity from both accountability and citizen expectations.

How did this happen? Like Rip Van Winkle, we’ve been asleep. While the good people of this world have been fighting for their rights, endeavoring to optimize and balance those rights within political systems, to progress the world for the greater good of all for 250 years, doing the heavy lift of reversing multiple inter-locking vicious systems cycles; so-called “conservatives” have been iterating Machiavellian and judo principles into an art form, encouraging, amplifying, legitimizing and rewarding man’s worst instincts and proclivities -- but worse --parasiting, “free riding” and rent seeking on the abundance created by the good people of the world.

Indeed, this is the biggest lie of all perpetrated by the right -- that unalloyed capitalism, conservatism, the free market, this abstract bullshit -- generated the prosperity and increase in standard of living we now enjoy. Rather, it was the hopes, free will, energy and great good-heartedness of the majority, unshackled from tyrannical political systems that brought us “the good stuff.” What conservatives don’t get is that their ideology, strategy and plans, if realized, would diminish the very prosperity they skim the cream off of. And of course we are already seeing this manifest itself.

The contribution debt has unfortunately come due, and simply trying to reverse the polarity on the vicious cycles won’t work. What is required and what will work -- if we can summon the courage to enact the right laws and educational principles -- is a democracy covenant in which American citizens clearly exercise a set of enumerated rights, so long as they make commensurate contributions outlined in the covenant. Sanction for covenant breaking are mandatory. The system would also be mandatory -- and nationally directed -- with absolutely no state or local play or “opt-in.”

The point would be for American citizens, leveraging participative democracy principles and mechanisms, to re-create a cohesive yet pluralistic American society – a term and concept that has fallen out of fashion. It is difficult to discern where that work might lead us, but to provide some flavor of the types of outcomes we anticipate emerging from that work, we offer the following:

The covenant could include:

• Mandatory Individual Commitments:

• Civics Body of Knowledge Mastery w/SAT-like testing

• National Service

• Non-participation in Subversive Organization Agreement

• Voting

• Periodic Participation in Participative Democracy Efforts (like jury duty)

• Government Commitments:

• Long-term Resource Set Asides

• National Service Options

• Civics Education and Testing Standards and Resources

• New Laws:

• Prohibition on Participation in anti-democratic organizations

• Rights-infringing Communications Limitations (German Volksverhetzung {Incitement to Hatred} Model)

It is perhaps no accident that America’s peak prosperity and economic equality coincided with universal conscription. My father, who hailed from Rochester, NY, always said he learned how to get along with others while in the Army. He met his first Jewish person, black person and southerner through the Army, and he credits that experience with launching his successful government career. Notably, he was a draftee, and probably wouldn’t have volunteered if there were no draft. Full disclosure -- I too am an Army veteran, serving nine years during the Cold War, and a retired government national security objective.

I am not arguing that the draft and national equality and prosperity are singularly, linearly and causally linked, or that we should reinstate the draft. I am arguing that the existence of the draft had effects that closed the gap and debt, thereby increasing both actual and perceptual justice. I am quite certain that that combination, along with other cultural and structural instrumentalities, created a virtuous circle of commitment and contribution that no longer exists. I posit that there is a direct and causal relationship between justice, equality and national prosperity, as well as individual and collective health and quality of life.

While we believe that nothing is more important than justice, and that these proposals are necessary for the survival of American Democracy, they don’t have to get implemented right away. In fact, they shouldn’t. They will only work if Americans participate in the development of this regime. This must be done through participative democracy mechanisms. Let’s put in on a 10-year notional timeline. Let’s find a way to make it appeal to right and left, old and young.

When Americans turn 18, pass the Civics exam and register for national service, we’ll have the equivalent of a Citizenship Party for them. We’ll make it a real national cultural event, re-establishing at least one major nationally integrative cultural event which hopefully in turn leads to many others.

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The Assumptions that are Literally Killing Us

Setting the terms of the debate determines whether there is even really a debate at all.

Before the shouting even starts, the assumptions shared by the parties determine what’s up for discussion, and what isn’t. If you’re arguing over the best way to bury a goldfish, most folks are going to take it for granted that the thing is dead already. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman famously explained this at length in Manufacturing Consent; it is a subset of the overall propaganda model of agenda setting, framing, and boundary setting. It might look like spirited discourse, it might look like debate, but if you’re not digging into the unexamined assumptions, it’s more like theatre than substantive discourse.

Most popular media falls under this category. They yell, they cut off each other’s microphones, they fill up the screen with squares of experts, and it all gives the impression that something is happening, something is surely happening.

We might want to ask ourselves though: what if the goldfish isn’t dead?

Presented in no particular order, the four assumptions that underlie nearly every political debate -- and why they are wrong.

Capitalism is the only way to organize an economy

In the United States, capitalism is treated as a fundamental force of nature, like gravity. One tends not find much debate about gravity’s existence outside the kinds of dark recesses of the internet where people talk flat earths, hollow earths, and visitors from other earths. Unfortunately, deep debates about the merits of capitalism are nearly as rare.

Capitalism is a system whose rules and contours have been shaped not by the laws of science but by the dictates of human beings interested in securing ever-increasing wealth at the expense of any and all other consideration. Given that the short term profit above all else centrality of capitalism is a human invention, it is, of course, amenable to human intervention.

The range of debate on capitalism in the United States typically extends from the right’s argument that we need fewer rules, and ‘why not put kids back in factories’ to the center right economic theory of most of punditry and the Democratic Party apparatus which states that if we’re going to have kids in factories let’s do it in Southeast Asia so we can pretend we don’t know about it. This is glib, of course, until one examines the Congressional voting records and realizes that outsourcing human misery to ensure ongoing quarterly earnings is a remarkably bipartisan policy.

How has this system failed us? In the country with the most fervent dedication to untrammelled capitalism -- the United States -- one might expect income inequality. Forty million people struggle with hunger in the U.S. every year, one in four of them children. Healthcare costs are the number one cause of bankruptcy. Billionaires saw their wealth increase by over a trillion dollars during a pandemic which: saw unemployment hit 15%; resulted in record level of evictions, and caused over 500,000 deaths.

When you incentivize greed, you end up with private prison advocates lobbying against saner drug laws, because they know fewer inmates means less profit. You end up with Amazon and McDonald’s spying on workers to keep them from organizing for higher pay. You end up with Chevron dumping oil into the Amazon. You end up with lies about climate change and you end up with tech giants like Facebook ignoring hate and lies because hate and lies mean more engagement mean more money for Mark Zuckerberg. ‘Externalities’ are destroying the planet, and we’re tinkering around the margins.

Witness the range of debate on the minimum wage, on automation, on labor rights. All of these arguments take place against a framework where private ownership, authoritarian power structures, unrestricted capital flows, and the accumulation of wealth as the greatest good, are accepted as givens.

Capitalism isn’t gravity; it isn’t centripetal force. It’s a human construct. It’s something that we, human beings, made up. Capitalism is something that we, human beings, can...un-make.

It is simply an idea. We can discard ideas when better ones come along. In fact, it is resolutely immoral and untenable for our species and for all the species with whom we share this planet to ignore the fact whose evidence mounts with every freak Ice Storm, continent-wide wildfires: an economic system predicated on extraction and infinite growth is incompatible with the finite world upon which it has been loosed.

If we want healthy ecosystems and healthy people, we have to fundamentally reshape the organizing principle of our lives and livelihoods, and that means we have to take a good hard look at capitalism -- the closest thing America has to a civic religion. We can’t simply hand-wave and wish that somehow, through magic, or trickle down, a system whose foundations are greed and exploitation will result in anything other than harm and heartbreak.

Societies need Police

De-fund the police!

For all Republicans, many centrist Democrats, and every police union in the country, the clarion call of social justice protests sends a shiver up the place where their spines would be were they possessed of the requisite calcium.

It was a whole thing in the 2020 elections: Dems asserting, evidence free, that calls for police reforms somehow hurt them. Republicans, asserting -- without evidence, that every Democrat in the country planned to get rid of all police officers and leave grandma to fight off the roving gangs of bloodthirsty criminals all by her lonesome. Thank god Grandma can get her hands on military grade weapons, otherwise where would we be?

A lot of invective and barbs and bullshit obscure the conclusion we’d all reach if we were looking at the evidence in front of our faces: we don’t really NEED police. Not in the way they currently operate, as a bloated and largely unaccountable, militarized, racist occupying force that terrorizes people while doing little to nothing to actually prevent and investigate crime.

First things first, the thin blue line is all that’s standing between us and Hobbesian cats and dogs living together chaos. It’s nonsense.

Police...don’t really solve crime. Not much of it anyway. If police were a fast food drive through, you would only get a hamburger and fries half the time you went through, at best, and the rest of the time you’d be left holding an empty bag.

Murder is the go-to for this "strawiest" of straw-mans, so let’s examine that one. Murder clearance rates -- not convictions, mind you -- clearance rates, have declined significantly. Clearance rates mean that a case was cleared or closed -- that doesn’t mean the guilty party was held accountable. The national clearance rate for murder: just over sixty percent. Averages obscure some truly horrendous figures as well. For example, the top ten cities with the LOWEST murder clearance rates gave murderers a better than 4 in 5 chance of getting away with killing: 17.5% in Flint, Michigan, 18.8% in Honolulu, HI.

The only other crime for which the national clearance rate breaks the fifty/fifty mark is aggravated assault, 52.3% Everything else: below the halfway mark. Robbery, most property crimes, car theft. Again, not SOLVED. Just closed. You’d be missing out on your hamburger and fries nine times out of ten for most property crimes.

Not to mention the violence. FROM the police, I mean, not just the violence they don’t prevent or hold the perpetrators accountable for after the fact by failing to meaningfully perform the core functions of their job. The killings of Black and Brown people, the casual citizen brutalization, the admitted domestic abuse, the sexual assault. The violence FROM police is epidemic, and rarely held to account.

We don’t need police in their current form. Shorter: De-Fund the Police.

It’s Cool to Spend Seven Hundred Billion Dollars a Year on Killing Machines and call everyone Heroes

Some numbers to start things off. Annual military spending:

US: 1.9 TRILLION

Next closest is China, with 732 billion.

The United States spends as much as the other 14 in the top 15 PUT TOGETHER. Almost ⅓ of the world’ s military spending. I recently saw someone say something on Twitter that bringing up this point is ‘meaningless.’ It’s meaningless that the United States spends trillions of dollars on weapons of war while people wait in two-hour lines for food banks? Not sure how that’s meaningless? Frankly, not sure what could be a more MEANINGFUL statement about our priorities as a country that military spending bills enjoy wide bipartisan support while it took months of protracted negotiations to make sure people didn’t starve to death during a global pandemic.

To wit, that massive COVID bill that not a single Republican voted for (more on that later), that gigantic bill that pundits endlessly examined, -- carries almost exactly the same sticker price as as the lifetime program cost of a SINGLE AIRPLANE - the F35 -- a boondoggle of failed expectations and wastage if ever there were one -- $1.727 trillion.

The entire space race? The thing that put a human being on the moon? $260 billion in today’s dollars. The “War on Terror?” $6.4 trillion and counting. That’s the entire space race, twenty times over. It’s expensive to maintain 800 military bases in over 70 countries around the world, to update a nuclear arsenal, to finance occupation forces and aircraft carriers and tanks and drones and armored personnel carriers.

Jets fly over our sporting events, airlines give shout outs to veterans while they’re boarding, and the word ‘hero’ gets thrown around so often it’s become basically meaningless. The fact that most people don’t think there’s anything strange about any of this is itself indicative of the mindless absorption of militarism into U.S. civic life. There is a collective failure to examine the extent to which military spending prevents necessary investment in other societal priorities like infrastructure or healthcare.

The lesson from Iraq isn’t what a tragedy it was for the United States -- but that for no reason at all, we destroyed another country, leaving nearly a million dead bodies in the wake of an invasion

The Republican Party is a co-equal Participant in Democracy

A two party system, by definition, lends itself to the conclusion that both parties share equal responsibility for maintaining democratic governance. In popular depiction, the Democrats are one branch, the Republicans are another, and sometimes they disagree, but at the end of the day we’re all Americans and we all want what’s best so let’s just put aside partisan identity...and then something.

In reality, the Republicans are a threat to our shared values. It’s time we’re open about what this party is open about. They are openly white nationalist. Openly seditionist. Openly antidemocratic. We write about it all the time here at Revelatur, because it’s impossible to overstate the dangerousness of treating the Republican Party as anything other than a criminal enterprise masquerading as a political party.

The naked corruption of the Trump Administration provides a concentrated exemplar of the current Republican Party’s threat. Racism, xenophobia, the venality, the lawlessness, all culminating in an armed insurrection on January 6th at the Capitol which resulted in eight deaths, a gallows being erected, and direct threats to the lives of members of Congress. Trump and co. lied, cheated, and stole with impunity. Trumpism is Republicanism, there is no daylight between the two. The lawlessness of January 6th runs undiluted through the veins of the entire party.

147 Republicans voted to overturn the 2020 Presidential Election. Zero Republicans voted for an absolutely necessary COVID survival bill. Right now, Republicans are involved in a concerted, coordinated voter suppression effort, making little attempt to disguise the nakedly partisan, racist motivation behind their legislative efforts.

It matters, of course, whether the bills pass, since state legislatures restricting ballot access will have a devastating impact on voter registration, but even if every single one of these laws were struck down it would still be a big deal because it clearly indicates the Republican Party has zero interest in democracy. Fourteen Republicans voted against condemning the coup in Myanmar, and TWELVE Republicans voted against honoring the Capitol police officers who protected The Capitol -- because they objected to the insurrection being referred to as...an insurrection. They’re fighting against COVID safety measures and whining about ‘cancel culture,’ incapable an uninterested in governance, concerned only with the consolidation of oligarchic power no matter the cost to people and planet.

Still, the media persists in their unbreakable embrace of both-siderism. On nearly every Sunday show, we are treated to the farce of polarity, wherein no matter the subject matter, two points of view, equal weight: Democrat says this. Republican says this. Democrat says this, Republican says this. Simply by posting them side by side, one by one, the viewer cannot help but infer equal credence.

It we’re going to survive as a polity, we, every single one of us, must stop treating the Republican Party as the mirror of the Democrats. The Democrats have their problems, but generally speaking they are trying to govern by democratic principles.

The Republican Party is a direct threat to organized human life.

In Conclusion

Our points of view are made up of dozens of assumptions, usually unexamined. And most of them are dangerously inaccurate. Let’s illuminate our assumptions, adopt more accurate, useful and testable ones, and dig into the real work of making changes.

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Big Brother is Bigger, and Closer, Than you Think.

To take a deeper dive into the battle between rights and power, we review and synopsize “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” Shoshana Zuboff’s latest book (we excerpt from and reference here the 2019 softcover version published by PublicAffairs).

First, let’s dispense with the review part: buy this book. Here’s the jacket quote we most align with: “it’s quite possible that the single most important book about politics, economics, culture and society in this century is Shoshana Zuboff’s “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” Fintan O’Toole, Irish Times. It is similar in scope to Hannah Arendt’s work on totalitarianism, but better written, more coherent and decidedly more actionable. From a groundbreaking, expose perspective it is up there with Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” while addressing a more impactful issue.

As you know, Revelatur supports democratic and progressive causes through knowledge gained from the fusion of the scientific method, systems thinking and intelligence analysis. The hypotheses we’ve added to our knowledge neural net based on Ms. Zuboff’s book are that:

➢ Surveillance Capitalism is co-equal with global warming as the twin global, systemic, under-addressed crises threatening the human project;

➢ Surveillance Capitalism as a market phenomenon, neoliberalism as ideology/political theology*, and the rise of global authoritarianism and totalitarianism are systemically linked, resulting in a vicious cycle of norm, trust, truth, freedom, hope, justice and accountability erosion that vitiates the apparent recent progress in global standards of living and expansion of human rights, together forming a powerful ideology of “digital totalitarianism;”

➢ U.S. Republicans and authoritarians globally benefit -- through applied strategy and lack of principles -- from surveillance capitalism, while Democratic and progressive causes are severely constrained by it. Thus, like with global warming, energy for change will not be bipartisan or universal, and the fight will be asymmetric.

*We recently reviewed Neoliberalism’s Demons by Adam Kostco, in which the author posits that neoliberalism: is best categorized as a political theology; results primarily in negative outcomes for the majority of people globally.

What is surveillance capitalism? It is: a market project invented and perfected by Google, quickly joined in that space by Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon; a novel business model that extracts and markets knowledge harvested from internet and IoT (primarily) usage, re-purposed and monetized as “behavioral surplus,” dependent on user ignorance or passive acceptance, and unchallenged claims to “data rights;” “a rogue force driven by novel economic imperatives that disregard social norms and nullify the elemental rights associated with individual autonomy that are essential to the very possibility of a democratic society;” pp. 8-11.

We know you are aware that this is going on. Perhaps though like us you might not be totally aware of the extent, and the monetary, legal and political momentum propelling this project and making it daily more difficult to reverse. In that regard it is also similar to global warming. “In the absence of a decisive societal response that constrains or outlaws this logic of accumulation (of behavioral surplus), surveillance capitalism appears poised to become the dominant form of capitalism in our time.” “How did this happen? Over the centuries we have imagined threat in the form of state power. This left us wholly unprepared to defend ourselves from new companies with imaginative names run by young geniuses that seemed able to provide us exactly what we yearn for at little or no cost.” P. 53. Here here.

As a career National Security Executive with a tour at the National Security Agency, I have been perplexed by the contrast in the outrage over the Snowden releases of information -- revealing well-meaning attempts of a government to protect its citizens and approved in their totality by the President, Justice Department and Congress, and what the surveillance capitalists are doing for selfish ends with known deleterious effects on individuals communities and societies. It makes no sense outside a frame of understanding in which this irrationality as known as a purposeful outcome of business model and Republican strategy.

This is not a Pentaverate-like conspiracy mind you -- it is a systems effect that creates market and political opportunities that get exploited -- this is the neoliberal imperative perfected now to an art form. The exhausted global citizens who provide surveillance capitalists with the “digital exhaust” in the form of behavioral surplus, lacking the knowledge possessed by those harvesting it, are forced to look for pattern and order in this complex world and come up grasping at the straws which are conspiracy theories. Thus adding to the vicious cycle and providing the right yet another opportunity to exploit.

To amplify our perniciousness argument, here is the author: “the essence of the exploitation here is the rendering of our lives as behavioral data for the sake of others’ improved control of us. The remarkable questions here concern the fact that our lives are rendered as behavioral data in the first place; that ignorance is a condition of this ubiquitous rendition; that decision rights vanish before one even knows that there is a decision to make; that there are consequences to this diminishment of rights that we can neither see nor foretell; that there is no exit, no voice and no loyalty, only helplessness, resignation and psychic numbing; and that encryption is the only positive action left to discuss when we sit around the dinner table and casually ponder to hide from the forces that hide from us.” PP 94-95

Worse yet: “personal information is increasingly used to enforce standards of behavior. Information processing is developing, therefore, into an essential element of long-term strategies of manipulation intended to mold and adjust individual conduct.” These trends are “incompatible not only with privacy but with the very possibility of democracy, which depends upon a reservoir of individual capabilities associated with autonomous moral judgment and self-determination.” P. 190.

“The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” adds evidence for many of our Revelatur hypotheses, while invalidating none of them. In fact, we’ve added several new hypotheses in our continuous effort to make sense of our complex world without resorting to shortcuts, conspiracies, logic errors and fallacies. Through this work it is becoming increasingly apparent to us that the problems that plague us and the fault line between us that constrain their resolution are systemic and will thus not yield to traditional “Yankee Ingenuity,” or individuals “pulling themselves up by the bootstraps,” or even good democratic governance. Rather, participative governance mechanisms, crowdsourcing, education system changes, perseverance, as well as innovations in tools and mechanisms will be required to turn vicious cycles into virtuous, reverse the sociopolitical race to the bottom, balance rights and responsibility, and preserve the human experiment globally and “the last best hope of earth” domestically. You’ve got to be in it for the long haul.

We could have easily quoted 10,000 words from the book, it is that frickin’ good. We’ll leave you with just one more: “the key point for our story in the age of surveillance capitalism is that the expansion of opportunities for freedom of expression associated with the internet has been an emancipatory force in many vital respects, but this fact must not blind us to another condition: free speech fundamentalism has deflected careful scrutiny of the unprecedented operations that constitute the ne market form and account for its spectacular success. The Constitution is exploited to shelter a range of novel practices that are antidemocratic in their aims and consequence and fundamentally destructive of the enduring First Amendment values intended to protect the individual from abusive power.” P. 110