I was reading a story the other day about the geezers who pulled the great Hatton Garden heist. It is a fun read, but what jumped out to me was how the cops caught these guys. London is so thick with surveillance cameras; you simply cannot escape having your every move documented. In this case, they traced the movement of the car involved via CCTV and figured out who was involved. Then they listened in on their conversations via electronic surveillance.
The thieves had some understanding of this, but as the one detective said, “They were analog criminals operating in a digital world, and no match for digital detectives.” In this case, they managed to knock out many of the cameras, but missed one and that was their downfall. The data from that one camera along with the data tracking the movement of all subjects in Britain now, was enough to solve the crime.
We are just on the cusp of the surveillance state. The looming end of cash will mean all of your financial transactions can be quickly harvested by the state. We have been conditioned for this via the television for years now. Every cop show has the earnest detectives rummaging around in the suspect’s financial affairs without a warrant. Most people think it happens now so when it comes on-line no one will squawk. After all, public safety requires it and who could possibly be against it?
The end of cash has another implication. Without cash, all transactions will be above ground. Implementing block-chain technology means that the history of every bit of currency will be carried with that bit of currency. The black market will have to be a barter economy. The above ground economy will be a permission based system. Fat people will not be allowed to solicit ice cream shops, for example, unless some thin person pays their way. In effect, everyone will be on allowance.
I was watching a show on the Norse the other day. The show was about how researchers are using new technology to figure out where to dig for Norse settlements. Specifically, they use satellite imagining that can “see” in near–ultraviolet. The satellites can also pickup variations in the electromagnetic radiation along the surface of the earth. This lets the researchers identify what is under the grass, noticing old stone and even mud walls. The accuracy of modern satellites is feet so they can just about pinpoint exactly where to dig.
The next generation of satellites will be even better and cheaper. The new Google satellites will be able to see faces at street level. Looking inside structures with the use of the full light spectrum is just around the corner. In the not too distant future, the state will have 24×7 eyes in the sky that can see and hear anything that is happening above ground. Coupled with expanding use of technology like the “Stingray Tracking Devices”, everything you say and do will be in a database at a government agency.
That is the other bit people do not think about right now. You walk around with your mobile phone and it is now reporting your whereabouts to the phone company and the app developers for those things you downloaded. Google has been keeping tabs on you for a long time. In a cash free society where you have to carry a device in order to conduct basic commerce, mandating this sort of tracking is too easy.
Soon enough, everyone will be able to track everyone, thus making all of us agents of the state. That is the genius behind all of this. Organized social pressure is the way populations will be controlled, much in the way cattlemen manage their herds. Once you realize everyone knows what you are doing and saying, even in private moments, you will act in a way that is “appropriate” even when no one is looking.
The brave new world will be safe, at least, unless you say the wrong things on social media. Then you can expect men with guns to bust down your door and haul you off to jail. Even if they only haul away the hard core haters, you can probably expect to have social media audits where you will have to explain your tweets, posts and so forth. You may not have to sit through a tax audit, but you will be sitting through struggle sessions over your internet activity.
That is the thing Huxley could not see clearly, but he had some inkling of this. For those who read the book, you will recall that people, in the future he imagined, were always under scrutiny. Bernard Marx was exiled to the island of non-conformists for what we would today call trolling. Bernard Marx was a contrarian and a jerk, which is pretty much everyone on-line these days. It is also why our betters are berserk over policing the internet. It is easy to see how this will end.
At least in the World State, everyone was high on soma most of the time. Soma is a hallucinogenic similar to peyote. I write most of these posts micro-dosing mescalin so I can tell you the future will not be too bad, except for the giant spiders. Then again, the future promises to include an inoculation against drug use. The day when science can “cure” drug abuse and alcoholism is a lot closer than people realize. Imagine a time when you can drink all the beer you like and never get drunk.
That may sound far-fetched but look at the way our keepers treat vice today. They are endlessly hounding us about our diets, our drinking and our exercise. My fondest memories of my father are of him with a Marlboro in his hand. Today, a gaggle of angry lesbians will assault you if you light up in public. All the things that come natural to men will be banned. That is what awaits the toddlers crawling around on the floors of Western homes right now. No wonder white men are offing themselves at record numbers. The future will suck.
maybe the cloud people will form their own little world and leave the rest of us alone. they will live in a cocoon/cave and we will have the rest. it’s not like they will need us or the land, once they are fully virtualized.
Small business is notorious for running multiple sets of books. Having worked for small business owners now and again over the years, I have seen many different versions of “hiding” the money. I have come to believe that many small businesses were probably never viable without that bit of bookkeeping help. Tracking the currency will shut off the rest of that creative bookkeeping once and for all. As if small business doesn’t have enough problems already.
I personally think that the “freedom” envisioned by self-driving cars is the big illusion. Once self-driving vehicles are the only vehicles allowed on the road you will have no choice but to use a vehicle service. Your movements will be controlled.
As several folks have pointed out, the corruption doesn’t go away. The minimum bet just gets higher. Instead of setting up a shell company to launder your money, now you’ll have to pay a tech in someplace like Nigeria or Pakistan to alter the transaction history. Except you don’t pay a tech because the Cartels or Al Qaeda or some other crime organization muscles their way in and taxes the transaction. Or maybe you set up a criminal SIPRNET with no physical layer connection to the rest of the Internet. Lord knows there is probably enough dark fiber out there, even in the undersea cables.
For the rest of us, maybe we pay a percentage to a trusted operator to convert some of our e-money to scrip. You walk down to the neighborhood 7-11, pay $100 bucks for an item that really doesn’t exist and get $90 in scrip back, which you can now use to buy some reefer or a lap dance. Isn’t that how it works in Argentina, Venezuela, and other Tercero Mundo hellholes? As soon as you get a Pendejo or a Chingaso or whatever they call their worthless currency, you sprint down to the corner money changer and exchange the depreciating-by-the-second crap for dollars.
That reminds me of the food stamp scam someone talked about (might have been Kevin Williamson and I believe it was in Kentucky). People would trade food stamps for soda and that was used as currency.
Like this:
http://www.wsaz.com/home/headlines/WSAZ-Investigates-Cashing-in-on-Food-Stamps-290710771.html
In the future, we’ll be more creative!
From what I’ve heard, laundry detergent is popular as well as a sort of scrip.
Disposable diapers (are there any other kind?)and baby formula are VERY popular among organized shoplifting cartels.
Turning EBT cards into cash is a common ghetto business. The scam where the card holder buys bulk products they sell for cash is more of a white thing for some reason. Blacks will just sell the cards to the local gang bangers for cash. My hunch is the former requires more work, but less interaction with the government. The latter requires the banger to use the card now and the seller has to go to the state and get a replacement.
Once this bleak future arrives, there will be only two places where people will be free: the ghettos and the enclaves of the Cloud People.
You have missed the most chilling aspect.
They can just turn your economic activity off.
If you think being on the “Do not Fly” list is bad,
wait until you are on the “Do not Buy” list.
That’s what the commies did in their later years. They’d just shut you down. No job, no pay, no charities. Pretty soon you’d come around.p
Nah, not going to happen, government employees are eighty-eleventeen times as corrupt and dishonest as the worst Mafiosi ever. They’ll make damn sure there is always a loophole – cash, gold leaves, anonymous MasterCard accounts, whatever.
The world need not be such a horrific place.
But it’s going to take more than pontificating on the internet to stop these things.
Ain’t everbody going to go silently into the heavily surveilled night.
After all, if the surveillance state were as all powerful as you seem to think, England and the rest of Europe would not be having near the problem with EM’s that they are right now.
The inherent incompetence and hubris of the state, leveraged by people with the will to fight, will be what ultimately saves humanity from the busybodies.
But won’t be nobody left to fight if you all just give up without even a whimper, like Z here.
Remember that you were once men. RESIST!
Yes! I’m not going quietly into that dark night….
…and I remember when Total Information Awareness was regarded as impossible, very naughty, and shouted down by all right thinkers.
All the NSA raw data already goes straight to Jerusalem, the Bible was right after all.
Glenn Greenwald pointed out that remarkable act of treason a couple of years ago
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/11/nsa-americans-personal-data-israel-documents
The future will suck for those who like to think their thoughts in private, and notice things. Most people will have no problem with it, and lots of folks — probably a majority — will like it. That was the true horror of Brave New World, and especially 1984 — Big Brother essentially left the proles alone, because machine-produced songs, novels, and feelie films were enough to keep them sedated. Those of us who find that prospect horrifying have always been in a minority; it’ll just be illegal now, instead of merely socially disapproved.
“Political correctness is a war on noticing” – Steve Sailer
The emperor’s new clothes meets the wolf who cried boy.
With the main stream media going all white devil, all the time.
I suspect the day is just around the corner when my GPS turns me in for a speeding violation. My smartphone app dings on my phone to alert me they just booked 50-Euros off my bank account for the infraction. – “Have a nice day and drive safely!”
I drive a Toyota that’s old enough to be entirely mechanical; no digital anything. I suppose they can track me by the rumbling sound the exhaust manifold makes, but I don’t go anyplace that’s all that interesting.
Ha! I was thinking the same thing. Who would care where I go? New Sweatshirt: Too Dull To Track…?
Don’t think you can escape. They will refuse you registration, inspection, and license to drive if your car does not conform.
See the book “Nature’s End”
But, it’s just fiction, so…..
Cancel your data plan and turn off your wireless LAN. Turn off the phone at different times. These schemes to wirelessly surveill you require to participate with an internet connection and a data plan.
I get the feeling the surveillance state will only look at the little guys, at least the ones not doing much. The big fish and the fat cats will somehow remain anonymous, or they are coated in transparent gel so the camera sees through them as if they weren’t there. But then the problem with surveillance is who will do anything about what they see?
Near me there is a housing estate (I think you call them projects in the States, but I may be wrong) and it has a fair number of unemployed people who are paid by the state to not make trouble. One of the things the unemployed do is to buy off-road bikes, unregistered for road use, and ride them around openly on the streets any way they want and occasionally diverting to a large field where they can rip the crops up by doing ‘stunts’ on their noisy bikes. You can hear them in the distance, revving up and roaring off to terrify rabbits and small birds on some otherwise pleasant patch of land. The CCTV of course won’t see them, and even if it did, who is going to do anything?
Now if the revving scum boast about their awful habits on fecesbook there is a chance the fuzz will catch them. But I am not holding my breath on that one.
I do understand of course that talking about this on this blog will tick an electronic box somewhere. From that, maybe Gargoyle or whatever it is called will fund the police to restore law and order. We shall see.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30lKGIdOzQY
Back in my barrio days, a couple of the kids on my block had what we called mini bikes. But it was just one or two kids squirting from driveway to driveway, hoping not to get caught by the cops.
From all the burned out buildings, Baltimore is trying to catch up with Detroit to see who will be the first city to be designated a National Forest.
Like UKer says, a public show is made of arrests and prosecutions of small-timers and cat-burglars. How many of the black rioters in the UK several years ago were hunted down and prosecuted using surveillance footage? These stories of arrests of small-timers using surveillance help shore up the illusion of state competency and control. The reality is that, like Baltimore and Detroit, the state is helpless against large numbers of criminals and would be helpless against large numbers of citizens who revolted. Recall several years ago the LAPD and surrounding agencies mobilized roughly 10,000 to hunt down a fired black cop who shot an officer. They don’t have enough people to mobilize if 1000 to 10,000 start to rebel.
The state is weakening, not strengthening.
Of course none of the closed circuit TVs are watching the mooslim white slavery gangs in your country. It’s a surveillance state for some and free-bird for others.
Banning cash will be like forced collectivization back in the Soviet Union.
But instead of collective farms, too big to fail banks will manage it all.
We will no longer really own anything, because:
“When you deposit funds in a bank account, those funds are no longer yours. You become an unsecured creditor, or lender, to the bank. Many people mistakenly believe that their account balance shows how much they own. This is not so. Instead, it shows what the bank owes you. You merely hold a claim on cash.” via
True ownership will be once again confined to the managerial nobility.
You are correct but magically, when the bank’s records are hacked and altered it becomes your “Identity theft” problem.
Funny that,
Ya, and the IRS doesn’t know a thing about the trillions in tax evasion in evolved in the Panama Papers. Like trillions and the sources of it exists in a vacuum, like it never existed. Lord forbid you mess up by 50 bucks on your return, lord love a duck. How insane does it have to be before we revolt?
Well the fuckers had to steal it all from real sources that created that wealth to begin with. The only place real wealth comes from is by sweat and tears. That is tangible wealth, they wouldn’t be squirreling it away if it didn’t have intrinsic real value. Then they fill the vacuum with fiat and re-sell it back, then tax it again, and again, and…wtf?
That is what the dirt people are for, to pay for the world these sonofabitches skate on paying for. It is nothing less than being screwed twice. They see us as chattel. The scope of criminality and wonton lust is beyond comprehension.
Let it burn.
Burn all to ashes, salt the earth.
The dirt people re-inherent the Earth.
It really can’t happen quickly enough.
When the day comes that I can drink all the beer I want and not get drunk, life will no longer be worth living.
There’s this game for Xbox 360 called “Watchdogs”.
Of course, it’s FICTION, so…..
It was London the first city that begin with the CCTVs in every street fashion, other cities in the World are imitating the English surveillance state.
Maybe is now surprise why two Englishman wrote about the surveillance state future 50 years ago, Huxley and Orwell were seeing Englad future.
I love this post. Here is my version of the future: http://jlepore.fineartstudioonline.com/blog/99934/zone-seven
It’s here. Funny, but a couple years before the NSA shit hit the fan, happened to be at conference where Jacob Applebaum (one of the key Tor developers) took the retired CIO of the NSA to task for all the warrantless info they had clearly harvested from him over the years. It got nasty. Later ended up signing next to him at lunch and his comment was “we’ve arrived at turn key totalitarianism, they are just using people like me for,the beta test”.