The scale of the panopticon is nauseating once you grasp how big it really is but at the end of the day computers are just plastic and metal. It’s the guys with guns who convert that information into brute force against us. But surveillance can’t magically absolve contradictions like labour and resource shortages, and it won’t somehow make capital invincible. They cling to this idea like medieval kings clung to the idea of alchemy creating the philosopher’s stone, giving them unlimited wealth and power apart from labour, and that was a fantasy.
I think we have a tendency to view information and information technology as magical and having some kind of inherent power, but it’s just data at the end of the day. Literally everything comes from the working class, and when the majority of the working class decides to stop playing along (and they will because if capital was somehow able to somehow just stop wanting to parasitize the working class we wouldn’t be in this mess 500 years later), it simply won’t matter that they can doxx and punish whomever they want because you can’t throw an entire society in jail.
So take heart. The calculus is the same; we may not live to see it, but they will lose, and we know that because historically they always do over a long enough time span. Their fancy toys don’t change the fundamental contradictions, and in fact present their own vulnerabilities that working class movements may exploit.
Yeah. You are right. Capitalists do their best to make us believe that there is no hope of any better system even though they can’t stop creating their own gravediggers. Heck, USA had near total monopoly on power in the post-Soviet era and they managed to fuck it up.
But as you said, technology seems “magical” in a way. It’s hard for me to remember that it isn’t.
The scale of the panopticon is nauseating once you grasp how big it really is but at the end of the day computers are just plastic and metal. It’s the guys with guns who convert that information into brute force against us. But surveillance can’t magically absolve contradictions like labour and resource shortages, and it won’t somehow make capital invincible. They cling to this idea like medieval kings clung to the idea of alchemy creating the philosopher’s stone, giving them unlimited wealth and power apart from labour, and that was a fantasy.
I think we have a tendency to view information and information technology as magical and having some kind of inherent power, but it’s just data at the end of the day. Literally everything comes from the working class, and when the majority of the working class decides to stop playing along (and they will because if capital was somehow able to somehow just stop wanting to parasitize the working class we wouldn’t be in this mess 500 years later), it simply won’t matter that they can doxx and punish whomever they want because you can’t throw an entire society in jail.
So take heart. The calculus is the same; we may not live to see it, but they will lose, and we know that because historically they always do over a long enough time span. Their fancy toys don’t change the fundamental contradictions, and in fact present their own vulnerabilities that working class movements may exploit.
Yeah. You are right. Capitalists do their best to make us believe that there is no hope of any better system even though they can’t stop creating their own gravediggers. Heck, USA had near total monopoly on power in the post-Soviet era and they managed to fuck it up.
But as you said, technology seems “magical” in a way. It’s hard for me to remember that it isn’t.