The Goal of Wholesale Surveillance

[Shandris]

44. Combine the power of being able to cherrypick any situation, word, or phrase out of context...

...and combine it with the awesome power of social manipulation/engineering, applied through social shaming, and you begin to understand JUST how pervasive the threat really is. It's a large part of why although I understand the intent behind the massive press of social shaming, I am against it as an organ of power.

A word from here, a word from there, a search term out of context and suddenly you have 'evidence' that someone did something that doesn't fit the 'modern view' once upon a time. We've already proven that it doesn't matter WHEN it happened (Paula Deen) and that no amount of money can stop it (the guy at Firefox) or even how big the target is (the entire videogame industry), the right words can stir up more people than any force can possibly stop. But it's all based on one belief: that what we're hearing, witnessing, or otherwise being disseminated is actually true.

Now don't get me wrong; Deen and the Firefox guy, I don't support them one iota. Not one little bit. But they were just test cases. They were obvious 'bad people' that no one was going to defend, but the real question was whether the power of social control would be enough to topple them. It was. And who defines what a bad person is? The narrative does. And who gives us the narrative?

The very people who have such a vested interest in keeping track of every little thing said, thought, spoken, or otherwise communicated. We have delivered the most powerful weapon into their hands of our own accord, and even worse...we're proud of ourselves for doing so. Don't think for a moment that just because the narrative is on our side at the moment that it can't and won't change on a dime's notice. Ask any Jewish person about it, as they went almost overnight from 'protected minority class' to 'just another white person'. A week ago, the same thing happened to Eurasians. The lines can be redrawn very, very quickly, and there are companies out there who specialize in doing just that sort of thing by poisoning both sides of the well simultaneously.