TechCrunch | There’s a new playbook for oppression today. Instead of outright
totalitarian rule, you construct the appearance of democracy, while
controlling it by subtly — in some cases perhaps not even consciously —
restricting the options available to individual voters; by controlling a tiered system of “representative” electors
behind the scenes; or by simply outright stuffing the ballot box.
(There can be much sound and fury about the distinctions between the
available candidates, but if you’ve done your job correctly, and made
democracy as awful as possible, in general only establishment candidates
or easily manipulated narcissists will ever be nominated.)
Then
you give your people enough freedom to thrive; to create, to disrupt, to
innovate. And you siphon as much as you can of that created wealth.
You
don’t give them enough to actually seriously challenge the
establishment, of course; to, say, remake the system so that the
siphoned wealth goes to its poor and oppressed people instead of its
silent, invisible masters. That is a red line that must not be crossed.
But the beauties of this system — call it parasitism — is that it is
very rare to encounter a challenger who cannot be co-opted. It
vampire-squids enough wealth for its upper-tier members and their
families to live lives of extraordinary, gilded luxury, without the
unpleasant threat of being assassinated or deposed that comes with
outright fascism or totalitarianism.
These parasitic systems
couldn’t exist without today’s technology. They are mostly networked,
not hierarchical. They watch, they adapt, and they distract. They
construct shell corporations that shuttle gobs of money around the globe
like 747s. And they very rarely need to resort to violence, because,
like the Borg, and like capitalism itself — from which it is distinct,
although there are places where it has been so successful that people
rarely recognize any difference — parasitism usually has the capacity to
absorb all those who confront it.
I’m not saying fascism and
totalitarianism are things we should be completely unworried about.
They’re out there, they’re real, and they’re terrifying. But there are
playbooks for how to fight them. Parasitism, though, seems almost
unstoppable. Presumably the solution is a technological one; let’s hope
it’s discovered soon.
