Michael Anton gets waaaay down deep into the nitty-gritty of what’s beginning to look like The Issue That Just Wouldn’t Die, and continues to live up to his usual lofty standard for excellence.
It really all comes down to two questions - who keeps the lights on? And where does the energy to keep them on come from? Useful electricity does not appear like a bolt out of the blue, it is *produced* - and it isn't produced where Malcolm Bluestar lives, nor anywhere close to his back yard. It, and the materials needed to produce it, come from Mr Redmon's areas. Same case for petroleum distillates like gasoline and diesel, and synthetic rubber for tires, and asphalt for the roads. And the petroleum and natural gas comes from Mr Redmon's bailiwick as well. Without a constant 24/7/365.25 supply of clean 60 Hz sinusoidal AC current, his Twitbook goes away and so does his AI. Very few of his class are mechanically inclined - and it will show. He has no idea how dependent he is on Mr Redmon's people - if he were to find out - an object lesson of two weeks or a month's duration might educate him - he might change his tune... maybe.
"since we don’t have the power to rule you and wouldn’t want to even if we did." Actually, they *do* have the power, if you think about it a bit. No coal, no gas, no oil, no electricity, no food. In the Civil War, an ounce of gold would buy a loaf of bread, because you can't eat gold. And digital curreny is entirely dependent on a constant supply of electricity... The one thing required to rule is the means and ability to project force. That takes energy, usually fossil fuel energy, and that sort of energy is easily converted into flames and smoke. No aviation gas means no F-15s, no diesel or motor gas means no tanks. As for nuclear weapons, their effects are by no means local - see https://oism.org/nwss/nwss.pdf
True, and perfectly excellent points. Makes one wonder: they HAVE to know this, don't they? Do their plans for us account for those cold, unyielding facts? If so, how? The possible answers to those questions are NOT pretty; in fact, they can't be.
I think they probably think they can follow and predict trends with social media - that's the point, after all, total information awareness. The "friends" function on facebook sets out networks of people - and they can do network analysis, and figure out who leads and who follows, just from the interactions. Same case for Twitter, and facebook and twitter would be the easiest targets. Bulk collection is more difficult, that haystack is just too big, it's good for hindsight but not prediction. So at certain levels, there's bound to be some awareness of the situation, but whether that filters up to policy-making levels is quite another question, and all you have to do to assess that is to look at current policy. I think Heinlein once said that "intelligence is for the intelligent." People who exist in policy echo chambers may simply not be aware of things, they can look at a situation and not see what is in front of their eyes, it's "off their radar". They've seen that the current methods of control seem to work, and they concentrate their attention on other matters. And it's obvious from policy that there isn't a lot of "systems thinking" happening - https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/definition/systems-thinking
It really all comes down to two questions - who keeps the lights on? And where does the energy to keep them on come from? Useful electricity does not appear like a bolt out of the blue, it is *produced* - and it isn't produced where Malcolm Bluestar lives, nor anywhere close to his back yard. It, and the materials needed to produce it, come from Mr Redmon's areas. Same case for petroleum distillates like gasoline and diesel, and synthetic rubber for tires, and asphalt for the roads. And the petroleum and natural gas comes from Mr Redmon's bailiwick as well. Without a constant 24/7/365.25 supply of clean 60 Hz sinusoidal AC current, his Twitbook goes away and so does his AI. Very few of his class are mechanically inclined - and it will show. He has no idea how dependent he is on Mr Redmon's people - if he were to find out - an object lesson of two weeks or a month's duration might educate him - he might change his tune... maybe.
"since we don’t have the power to rule you and wouldn’t want to even if we did." Actually, they *do* have the power, if you think about it a bit. No coal, no gas, no oil, no electricity, no food. In the Civil War, an ounce of gold would buy a loaf of bread, because you can't eat gold. And digital curreny is entirely dependent on a constant supply of electricity... The one thing required to rule is the means and ability to project force. That takes energy, usually fossil fuel energy, and that sort of energy is easily converted into flames and smoke. No aviation gas means no F-15s, no diesel or motor gas means no tanks. As for nuclear weapons, their effects are by no means local - see https://oism.org/nwss/nwss.pdf
True, and perfectly excellent points. Makes one wonder: they HAVE to know this, don't they? Do their plans for us account for those cold, unyielding facts? If so, how? The possible answers to those questions are NOT pretty; in fact, they can't be.
I think they probably think they can follow and predict trends with social media - that's the point, after all, total information awareness. The "friends" function on facebook sets out networks of people - and they can do network analysis, and figure out who leads and who follows, just from the interactions. Same case for Twitter, and facebook and twitter would be the easiest targets. Bulk collection is more difficult, that haystack is just too big, it's good for hindsight but not prediction. So at certain levels, there's bound to be some awareness of the situation, but whether that filters up to policy-making levels is quite another question, and all you have to do to assess that is to look at current policy. I think Heinlein once said that "intelligence is for the intelligent." People who exist in policy echo chambers may simply not be aware of things, they can look at a situation and not see what is in front of their eyes, it's "off their radar". They've seen that the current methods of control seem to work, and they concentrate their attention on other matters. And it's obvious from policy that there isn't a lot of "systems thinking" happening - https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/definition/systems-thinking