CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Have Flock Cameras Awakened a Sleeping Luddite Giant?

They are watching us, everywhere, all the time. Big government, big tech, the NSA, Blackrock, Oracle, Palantir… The thousand tentacled data Cthulhu known collectively as the surveillance state…

“They” are everywhere. They are all the time. And they are watching. Listening. Recording. Compiling. Filing. Bearing witness to our everything. Constantly.

They are tracking you. They are tracking all of us. Sifting through our emails. Keeping tabs on our movements with those fancy fucking phones they keep pushing on us every few years. Following your car home with actual fucking robots. And using artificial intelligence to make it all run just smoothly enough to crush you before they crush themselves beneath the feral gods they have so recklessly birthed upon a sleeping world.

Roll your eyes and scoff but you know I’m right. People like me used to be “crazy” but now we’re just inconvenient. 1984 is now and it gets worse every day while you scroll through Pornhub on your iPhone and try not to think about it. We can’t pretend like we don’t know anymore. Not after Edward Snowden. Not after Chelsea Manning. Not after Julian Assange and Virginia Giuffre and Wikileaks and the Epstein Files. We quite simply know too goddamn much to go back now. We know “they” know and they know we know.

We know about digital Demogorgons like PRISM, collecting a quadrillion gigabytes of raw data a second from every message you ever sent your grandmother on Facebook and every cat video you ever liked on YouTube and shoving it all into a bottomless silo in the Utah desert for later analysis when you become flagged as a terrorist threat by some backroom rubberstamp court. We know that the Trump Administration that Elon Musk paid for is making that once impossible task of full spectrum surveillance a reality with executive orders giving ambitious AI juggernauts like Palantir a license to use their constantly evolving software to centralize federal databases across agencies into a single monolithic panopticon.

And we know that those same companies and that same technology is being used to make drones semi-sentient murder machines........

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