Musings on fate, the future, and the struggle between central controllers and freedom lovers, part II

Part I is here

Take driverless cars, for instance. If we were in a less tech-perilous, tyranny-seeking time, I think most of us would be excited about them.

You and I may be skeptical about a specific new technology, but we tend not to be technophobes. We’re not ones who reject the new out of hand. We may not want to buy the first flying cars or be on the first ship to colonize Mars or the Moon, but we probably have friends who do want to and maybe even know a few who will. We jumped on computers years ahead of the average and were getting acquainted on BBSes before the Worldwide Web tempted slower adopters in.

So no, we don’t innately distrust tech.

But what do you think of when you think “driverless car”? Aside from still-unknown hazards on the highway, it’s likely that the first thing you think is: They can be shut off, or otherwise manipulated, by remote control. They’ll be used to stop us against our will or even to prevent us from driving where and when we want. They’ll be programmed for some “greater good” that may be counter to everything we consider good — right down to being programmed to kill us.

And naturally, there are already people — those same kind of people who demand laws mandating “smart” guns — who want laws requiring all cars to be driverless. You know, so we messy peasants can’t go around in control of our own transport. Before the tech is on the market, before it is even fully tested, there are hoity-toity political people who want us forced into them.

And “smart” guns, too, are another example of tech that will be used against us. Enough has been written about that that I don’t have to say more.

And nothing more needs be said here about both Big Brother and Little Brother monitoring every communication, Little Brother compiling and selling our data, and both of them exposing our most intimate information, including our health and financial lives, to any random hacker who cares to have a look. (And the “legitimate,” quasi-legal sharing among corporations and government agencies is probably worse than anything the hackers will ever do.)

But these are just tips of a big, dirty iceberg.

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I mentioned in Part I that, through tech, our lives are rapidly being handed over to central-controlling morons. I call them morons categorically because even if individual central-controllers graduated from Harvard or Stanford or have IQs as big as the population of a small European country, all central-control systems are morons in practice.

This increasing business of attempting to force people to adopt one type of tech, forsaking all others, is one example — one small example — of how dangerous central control via tech is. A while back I lamented how much alike all modern cars are. And that’s the result of channeling car-makers into certain kinds of tech and making it difficult to deviate. How will it be when cars are not only all alike but all remotely trackable and controlable by bureaucrats and state-employed enforcers? And perhaps even by employees of car makers?

This is not only anti-freedom and anti-individual, but by inhibiting initiative, it dumbs the world down. Dumbs everybody down to the perspective of one bureaucratic mindset. And bureaucratic mindsets are always expensive, overly complicated, utterly unprepared for the new and different, and ready to defend to the death whatever idiocy they happen to be attached to. Moronic.

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Health care is an even more scary area where tech is handing us over to the ancient, predictable, moronic mindset that let Galveston be destroyed, created the welfare state and the war on drugs, and was responsible for every failed five-year plan Josef Stalin ever implemented.

Without electronic exchanges, Obamacare would not have been possible. And what has Obamacare done but narrow our choices? To be insured or not? To go to this doctor or that? This hospital or that? To select this coverage or that? To buy a “Cadillac” plan or not? Choose? Hell no. Just comply. This process has long been underway (and we took a real blow when we were denied the choice to refuse to share our health records with government).

And so real options that could have changed medical care and medical insurance for the better are closed off, gradually, degree by degree in the boiling pot. Now imagine all this control over health care information and choices being tried without modern tech. Oh, it could have been done and has been done, but without electronic record sharing and government-run exchanges, the central control couldn’t ever have been exerted with so little difficulty and cost to the controllers.

Sure, Obamacare’s a mess and it’s in the process of imploding. But its very existence has laid the groundwork for something worse — something else that will use tech to limit out choices, track our activities, and ultimately be used to deny us whatever medical care our political and bureaucratic betters don’t think we should have.

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Again, these are just a few examples of tech + government pushing us toward narrower choices and curtailing the most ordinary, even life-sustaining activities.

Could banks have so easily obeyed Justice (sic) Department diktats (in Operation Choke Point) to deny legitimate but controversial businesses access to the financial system if not for the vast, government-connected web of technology?

There’s been a big push the last few years to get rid of the “unbanked,” to make sure everyone is tucked safely within the banking system. Where’s that going to lead? To the so-called cashless society, where every transaction (except those conducted by outlaws, of course) can not only be tracked and investigated, but — at will — controlled.

And that, again, is only a nit when it comes to what tech can and will enable central control freaks to do. Freeze your bank account and credit cards? Cancel your passport? Get you fired from your job? Deny you health care? Prevent you from driving legally. Shut off your vehicle? Every act of tyranny, petty and small is “enhanced” by technology.

Am I saying these things will happen to any one of us? No. Just saying every one of them becomes not only more possible but more likely to happen to some of us at some time.

And I’m not even touching on some of the worst potential scenarios.

I’m also not just talking about the major loss of privacy, autonomy, and personal choice I see looming (either looming or already well under way).

I’m talking about all this formerly individual power being shifted over to morons in moronic centralized systems. And all centralized systems are inherently moronic. Moronic, inefficient, politicized, one-size-fits-all, moralistic (though not moral), corrupt, dinosaur-brained, biblical (in the worst possible sense), and ultimately cruel.

Go back to Robert Conquest’s third law of politics, linked the other day:

The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

Very funny. But in practice, just plain good sense.

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Of course, humans being endlessly inventive and eternally freedom-seeking, Outlaws will arise. Black markets will do what dismal gray government-controled markets cannot. Moronic systems eventually break down (though always too late to prevent catastrophic harm). Black swans appear. The future never turns out like anybody thinks it will.

I’m not saying we’re DOOOOOOOOOMED. I’m just saying that tech — wonderful, glorious, formerly liberating tech — is being used to hand our lives over to ancient, creaking moron systems and the petty moronic creatures who thrive on and within them. Systems that bring out the worst of human nature and encourage the worst humans to rule the best.

And most of us are blind to it. A lot of us are too busy going “wow” to tech or spending our days with our noses buried in it to understand it’s being used to drag humanity backwards into some of history’s darkest, dumbest old ways — but now NEW! and ENHANCED!