This comment from William Osborne, in response to Surveillance Without Just Cause, deserves its own post:
Most Americans no longer care if they are being spied on by their government. We live in a society so transparent they already feel they have no meaningful secrets left. Through social conditioning, government becomes an almost aestheticized ideal of perfection from which we need hide nothing. This surrender and abnegation of the self to idealized authority is in reality a form of nihilism that is the foundation of totalitarianism.
Surveillance and exploitation have been the principle forces that have formulated the mass media’s technologies, purpose, and ethos for at least a century. As such, humans are not served by the media but instead are part of its apparatus. As a collective, humanity becomes the device itself, a fertile field from which wealth is mined. Under total survelliance the individual vanishes.
I think this is why culture jamming has intuitively evolved among some types of social dissidents. Through absurdity, systems of survelliance and control are blocked for at least an instant. Profound ironies result. One seems to be that the best journalists, like Greenwald and Assange, no longer serve the media but rather jam it.
