Civilization

2 Feb, ’07

I found an interesting web site not long back, that informed me that there are 129 people in the United States with the same name as mine (middle name not included). Interesting, but hardly earth shaking. Then, after thinking about it for a moment, I tried to see what other information about me is available on-line, and after a lot of work, I found there is quite a bit. Not only name, age, address, and phone number from numerous websites, but I even found a satellite photo of my house! (My old pick-up is in the picture, so I was home at the time.) Sort of makes me wonder what else can be found out about almost anybody, right off the internet.

Just where does all this information come from in the first place?

Nowdays, thanks to the Patriot Act, the federal government can monitor our e-mails and telephone calls, they can also legally (?) read our snail mail as well. I suppose the next step will be cameras and microphones inside the house so they can make sure I’m not plotting something or other. They collect our educational records, employment records, military records, legal records, tax records, medical records, travel records, library records, financial records, and all the miscellaneous stuff the Census bureau has been asking about for decades. We need licenses to practice a trade, conduct business, drive a car, and in many cases even own a gun, all of which leaves a paper trail which can be gathered up and filed away for future reference. We’re monitored on closed circuit TV, watched by satellites and remotely piloted spyplanes, tracked by GPS units installed in our cars, and photographed by ATM’s. If we use a credit card some computer system instantly knows where we are. Your electric power usage is watched, just in case you start using gro-lites to raise marijuana. We’re monitored by the government and the corporate world by what we purchase. Our dogs, cats, and cows get implanted identification chips, while some newer version allows all those fur bearin’ varmints to be tracked down and located by satellite. Now there’s even a movement afoot to put those chips in people as well. If you just want to get away from it all for a few days… forget it.

Our likes, dislikes, wants and wishes, are determined by the census bureau and a mid-sized herd of anonymous pollsters. Hollywierd and the corporate media generally tell us what and how to think (and then berate us if we don’t agree with them). We’re expected to be “politically correct” in everything we say and do, and are essentially social pariahs if we disagree.

I sometimes wonder if we can even go to the bathroom without some government snooper knowing all about it.

Our politicians use that data to determine what concerns the most of us, and with a few little white lies manage to get themselves reelected. Apparently a lot of bureaucrats use that data in their endless paper shuffling, but I surely can’t figure out what for. In the dollar-ninety-eight words used by the experts, this data collection and compiling effort is called “demographics”, with most of the information available to anyone who’s interested, although not necessarily by the individuals name.

Along with this we’re allowing ourselves to be regulated to death. We need licenses and permits for just about anything we might want to do, and find ourselves saddled with rules and regulations from all sides.

We all consider our personal privacy and personal space to be quite important to our well being. But so many people don’t seem to care one bit about having “the government” looking over their shoulder twenty-four hours a day. For the most part it almost seems like we’re being conditioned to accept constant observation and supervision by Orwell’s Big Brother from the book “1984”. It appears that the end goal is to have us all think and act somewhat like a hive society where the everyone is an identical, interchangeable component. Where the individual means absolutely nothing, where originality and initiative are crimes, and where everything is for the betterment of the hive. There, if you stray from some sort of government established standard pattern, you can quickly be removed as an abnormality, a danger to the body politic. There have been a good number of fictional books written over the years on just this subject, and a few serious studies as well. None of them paint a very pretty picture of such a society, communism carried to its extremes.

Perhaps, with our burgeoning world population, such an overly civilized society may prove necessary to the survival of the species. But I would hope that when that time arrives, we’ve found somewhere else for the anti-social barbarians among us to go.

And personally, I think I prefer being a barbarian.