Democracy is so 20th century… welcome to spyocracy
The media’s coverage of the activities of our governments, as well as the manner it is being reported by media, should leave us with little doubt that we are moving steadily toward a new form of administration: spyocracy, a political system run by those who monitor the activities of the electorate. This is power established and maintained thanks to the ability to know what each and every one of us is thinking, and to prevent certain types of behavior by making us fearful of becoming an object of scrutiny.
Most of the news stories in recent weeks have a common denominator: they are profoundly shocking and should have brought about the fall of the governments concerned. Evidence of the US government’s mendacity, which has emerged in large part thanks to the efforts of ProPublica, the independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest, are infinitely more serious than the Watergate scandal that forced Richard Nixon out of office.
Society’s response has been underwhelming, and one might be tempted to think that the whole thing is an exercise in increasing our tolerance for wrongdoing. In an spyocracy, the government installs and operates listening points in among all telecom operators, constantly requires online companies to provide it with information, or secretly connects to microphones, cameras, or GPS systems to eavesdrop on us. And we’re not just talking about the United States here: the governments of other so-called democracies like the United Kingdom or New Zealand are also spying on their populations.
We can no longer walk, drive, talk, type, and much less enter another country without the government knowing: surveillance, constant spying, is now the way to keep us in order. This is no longer carried out by state institutions, but from huge data processing centers operated by a vast machine beyond our control, and that misinterprets words to deliberately deceive us.
Democracy as we have come to understand it is now an antiquated concept, a system of government that in the face of the development of the internet was beginning to behave erratically, and was overly subject to dangerous controls. Were the secrets that have been revealed in recent weeks meant to remain secret, or were they going to be made public at some point in the future to influence public opinion? Isn’t the development of the spyocracy a reaction by the West to the increased awareness and social consciousness that characterized the Arab Spring? How does a government keep in check a population that is aware of its power? By inhibiting us from behaving in certain ways through the threat of an environment of total surveillance. Finally, in the 21st century, democracy has been “technologically perfected”: welcome to spyocracy.
