A collection of small thoughts. They are connected, but can be considered individually.
1. The Democratic Party was hijacked about four decades ago. It had been a fairly conservative, rural oriented bunch of old men, but became home to American socialism in just a few months. The Republican Party was a lie from the start. It had always been the party of industrial oligarchy, and always pretended to care about people by supporting things which were superficially morally, or superficially supporting moral things, just to make a buck.
Oddly, both eventually agreed on a brand of corporate socialism, with only superficial differences to keep the masses fooled. The system for plundering the nation’s productivity has nearly run its course. Pretty soon it will be naked oppression, and we the people will realize once more, too late, there has been a separate ruling class all along, and we are not a part of it. Some may serve it directly, but the ruling class is wholly different from you and I, and will not shed a tear when it comes time to murder huge masses of us.
2. As this naked oppression rises on the back of a falling economy, I’m wondering how much longer we will have access to the Net, and to blogging like this. I confess the Net has been a very powerful tool in shaping my philosophy and theology, in that it provided the means for me to explore areas otherwise not available to me. It made the long path of study much shorter. I am certain access will change radically, though I can hardly predict just how.
3. I am honestly certain the ubiquity of the Windows operating system will play a major roll in this. That’s because the nature of the Net itself prevents much control. There is a serious vulnerability in our high reliance on DNS as a public infrastructure, but for a great many serious techies, there are ways around that. Serious techies tend not to rely on Windows, simply because they can never control it. That is, hidden within the system are controls which have only been hinted at by the marvelous ingenuity of virus and malware writers. Some are extremely hard to remove, and this is from people who have to discover slowly by determined study how to activate controls buried within the system. How do you think it would be if MS and government agreed to deploy a means of control, with MS’s inside knowledge of what they have created? The final “Doomsday Virus” on Windows will come at the behest of oppressive government, not some clever criminal cracker.
4. On the one hand, as long as this vector of control lasts, government will probably not seek other forms of control on the Internet. I’m guessing here, by the way, the US oligarchy can convince the EU oligarchy and others play along for their own oppressive ends. Thus, at least in the West, things will change only for MS slaves, and it may be Macs will be roped into it. This leaves only the independent Open Source movement, which as a whole would never play along. I am torn by the realization as long as we are few, we are safe. But I want people free. So deeply do I want them free, I am working on a project to offer a Linux which might just tip the balance and convince more people to try it. If some critical mass of people switch away from operating systems vulnerable to external control, the whole thing may get shut down, in a manner of speaking.
5. At the same time, a random collection of geeks are working on protocols which do not rely on wires and fiber as the current system does. On the one hand, we know far too much government business relies on the Internet in all its manifestations. If they cut the wires, they cut off their own primary means of communication. If they restrict access to the wires, they will forever fight the battle to keep all access closed. Fat chance. The brightest minds in the world never work for government, because bureaucracy always attracts losers, so the outsiders always have an edge. These bright minds will always have the advantage in unraveling what the bureaucrats have tried to wrap up tightly. But this will leave out the average Joe Sixpack who is utterly lacking in the kind of hobby obsession which takes advantage of these alternative routes. Even if I do create a Linux distro which draws the masses, the masses will likely fail to fully exploit the advantages. It would require the geeks who write the code and develop the protocols to put it all in easy reach of Joe Sixpack. There is some hope, since most people who defy the system to “pirate” music and movies do get away with it.
6. But a lot of this may make no difference at all for some here in the West. Even the oligarchs probably can’t say what they’ll do beyond general plans, because there are too many variables. That there will be a blood in the streets is inevitable. We are too far down the slope, and there’s no turning back. The entire Western economic system of fiat currency has collapsed, and only the scale of things has kept it from having even more immediate effects. It will not recover, though it may appear to at certain points. The current bureaucratic system of government across the West is incapable of rising to the challenges, pretty much because of the aforementioned lack of talent. Instead, government will seek to maintain it’s current level of consumption in a drastically reduced pool of available resources, and people will rightly conclude this is evil. Conflict is unavoidable, and it will mean agents of enforcement will be caught in the middle, the oligarchy’s buffer zone. Most policemen, sadly, have been so thoroughly conditioned to avoid moral considerations, they will close ranks against the civilian population.
Part of what makes me pessimistic about 2009 is how very much of this has already begun during 2008, and so few people know it. The senseless abuse of police power rose dramatically this past year, but we haven’t seen anything yet.
