Sydney Williams- Technology and Politics
A friend recently sent an e-mail in which he pointed out that Apple had installed, without my knowledge, a COVID-19 sensor app on my iPhone. The app notifies me if I’ve been near someone that has been reported as having COVID-19. My iPhone already knows where I am. Now it will know with whom I meet and speak. How soon before it knows if I am with a Communist, a neo-Nazi or a supporter of Trump? At five months shy of eighty, the old man in me says it is good for my phone to know where I am. On the other hand, the libertarian in me says, whoa! Do I really want to live in a society where government, or some organization, tracks my every move and knows with whom I associate?
We live in an extraordinary time, where advances in technology outpace our ability to understand their consequences. Absent a return to a new Dark Age, technological advances will persist. It is the potential to manipulate thoughts and actions that should concern us. “Communism is a monopolistic system, economically and politically. The system suppresses individual initiative, and the 21st Century is all about individualism and freedom. The development of technology supported those directions.” So spoke Lech Walesa in a 2002 interview with Julia Scheeres in a June 2002 interview for Wired. Eighteen years later, technology has advanced beyond what most people thought possible twenty years ago. Today, our every movements can be monitored. Individual freedom has bowed to the happiness of security and the collective promise of Socialism. Over seventy years ago, George Orwell saw this coming: “The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”
Dystopian novels, from H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, George Orwell’s 1984, to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 have shown how a repressive society can be propagandized a utopian future. It is the promise of Socialism, Communism and Nazism, where ends justify means. In words that provide an eerie precursor to the cancel culture that led to the New York Times 1619 Project, George Orwell, in 1949, wrote in his novel 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
The American people have been softened up, made susceptible to state control. Universities have banned conservative speech. Political correctness and identity politics have put a damper on open debate. Violent protest groups, like Black Lives Matter and Antifa, with their demands for blind allegiance, have wrecked the businesses and destroyed the lives of those they claim to represent. The reaction to COVID-19 has been Orwellian, in the herding of people to obeisance without questioning the diktats of government. Forty-three states imposed lockdowns, directing residents to stay home, except for essential needs. In New York, reminiscent of Nazi Germany, COVID-19 residents were placed in nursing homes amidst the uninfected, thereby endangering and killing thousands. Businesses deemed nonessential were closed. Over twenty million American were unemployed by May, up from just over six million in February. Social distancing and masks are commonplace and Vice President Joe Biden has said that if he is elected President masks will be mandated. Schools and colleges were closed. According to the CDC, one in four young people between the ages of 18 and 24 seriously contemplated suicide this summer. A line attributed to Mark Twain is relevant: “It is easier to fool the people than to convince them they have been fooled.” Progress has always relied on the initiative of the individual, not robotic responses of the masses to bureaucratic orders.
A concern about the size and power of government is not new. In a letter dated 27 May 1788, Thomas Jefferson wrote to fellow Virginian Edward Carrington: “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and for government to gain ground.” Any aspirant federal employee wants to see his or her agency expand. Wishes have been realized. The budget of the federal government, now with 2.6 million employees, has grown from 8.7% of GDP in 1960 to 22.2% of GDP today.
What does this portend? California, a blue state run for years by progressive Democrats, may offer a clue. “California,” as resident Victor Davis Hanson wrote this month in National Review, “as some of the Democratic primary candidates bragged last year, is the progressive model of the future.” Not many years ago, the state was known as the “Golden State,” named after the gold rush of 1848 and the fields of golden poppies (Eschscholzia californica) that appear each year across its land. The state’s cliff-lined beaches, giant Redwoods, the magic of Hollywood and its once beautiful cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco lured people from across the country and around the world. Silicon Valley made billionaires of risk-taking technologists. Today, California has more billionaires than any other state. It has the highest GDP of any state (eight highest on a per capita basis). But the state is the most heavily taxed in the nation and has the fourth highest income gap of any state in the union, with one fifth of its residents living below the poverty line. With 12% of the country’s population, it has half the nation’s homeless and a third of its welfare recipients. Its public schools rank near the nation’s bottom, and the state is subject to human-caused droughts and power blackouts. Should this be the model to which we aspire? In his article, Mr. Hanson concluded that California is “now a civilization in near ruins.”
As politics is always about power, allow me to add one more quote from Orwell’s 1984. “Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” For Americans, whose revolution established a republic, that statement may seem amiss, but consider the French Revolution of 1789-1799, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Chinese Revolution of 1949. Beware of promises and the kindness of strangers.
At the Democratic National Convention, President Obama, in seductive mellifluous tones (in contrast to President Trump’s impolitic words), told the world that, with the upcoming election, democracy is on the line. I agree. But the policies of which Party would cause democracy to tremble? Which Party is more likely to use technology to help educate, influence and control the American people? The one that supports individualism or the one that created “Julia’s World?” Which Party advocates lower taxes, less regulation, smaller government and increased self-reliance, and which supports higher taxes, increased regulation, bigger government and greater dependency? Which Party sees immigrants as opportunists, and which sees them as victims? This election is crucial. Democracy is on the line. Is the COVID-19 app on my iPhone a canary in the coal mine? Shall we blindly allow technocratic bureaucrats to intrude in our lives, or should we try to understand the consequences of what technology has done to politics?
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