Near-universal
consensus has it that, sometime around 9/11, the world passed from the Age of Aquarius,
through some vernal equinox noticed by few, straight into the Age of Big Data. That passage
brought about a seismic epistemological shift. To be sure, any links to the
events surrounding 9/11 are coincidental: the real reason for this transition was
the coming of age of enabling technology. To that extent, whatever one may want
to think of 9/11 conspiracy theorists
conjecturing about the tragic events as having been brought on, or at least been
aided and abetted, by someone or something other than al Quaeda: the acts and
omissions after 9/11 point to its utility for the advancement of surveillance,
for which political and civic tolerance could otherwise not have been expected.
Very much the same goes for the speed by which authorizing legislation was
whipped through the formalities of democratic rule-making processes, purportedly
under the influence of those events. But such a pounce on an opportunity of
this magnitude had no doubt have to have been incubated for quite some time, in
lockstep with deep insights into the progress of technology and entirely
independent of whatever statistically unpredictable Black Swan event would one
day trigger its sudden political viability. It did not matter which event or who
or what would cause it. That, in all likelihood, was indeed not known, and it did
not need to be known. It was, in Donald Rumsfeld’s
immortal dictum, one of the “known unknowns.”
The
extent of surveillance capabilities that became available as a result to the
U.S. government and to the other “Five Eyes”
Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand that do not spy on each other (at least
in theory and at least for now) and otherwise cooperate to secure the endurance
of occidental civilization would have been every totalitarian regime’s wet
dream. Perhaps one day, cloning technology may enable resurrection of Feliks
Dzierżyński’s or Lawrentii
Beria’s DNA, or Heinrich Himmler’s,
Erich
Mielke’s or Klemens
Metternich’s, not to mention Joseph
Fouché’s or Philipp
II’s or Kang Sheng’s
or Pol Pot’s – and I
predict the greatest possible unanimity of consensus among all these
distinguished oppressors of the unrestrained human mind: no government can ever
be secure of power without surveillance. So, does it really matter whether the
chicken or the egg existed first, whether surveillance technology eviscerates pre-existing
democratic structures and aspirations (those uncontrollable by powers that be)
or whether it is created by a totalitarian ambition already thus entrenched? The
bottom line remains crisp and clear: information is power.
