Excerpt from Welcome to the Machine

Internalized Laws of the Machine (p. 209)

From chapter "The End"

The most dangerous, foolish, and false thing any of us can possibly say is the mantra of, “So long as we do what they tell us, we have nothing to hide, and nothing to fear.” The degree to which we internalize the laws and rules of the machine is the degree to which we have no hope of survival, no hope of escape, and certainly no hope of smashing the machine (which means, once again, no hope of survival). The degree to which we internalize the laws and rules of the machine is the degree to which its control is complete, and self-discipline and self-responsibility become moot.

Toward the end of Orwell’s 1984, a secret policeman says to one of his victims, “The command of the old despotisms was ‘Thou shalt not.’ The command of the totalitarians was ‘Thou shalt.’ Our command is ‘Thou art.’

The control the powerful wish to exert (and the powerless wish to obey) extends not only over the wilderness, but into the most intimate areas of our minds and hearts. If knowledge is power, as the Information Age cliché has it, and as DARPA contends, then if they know us, they can control us.

Technology separates us from nature, and social indoctrination—our training from birth on, our molding into machine-shape—separates us from ourselves. When an “external” entity (either hard-wired, like the mass media or the government, or soft-wired, like my obsession with reading the news, or obeying Officer Friendly) controls the information I receive, it controls my experience of the world. And because my experience of the world controls my actions, whomsoever controls my experience of the world controls me.

Those in power have known that all along. By now, we should know it, too.