I can deal with anything but the apathy

More and more often I find myself fearing that the central political divide of our time, the crude division between government and business that has become a kind of stand-in for all of our major disagreements, simply won't be relevant anymore. It won't because institutions of all types and kinds will be slowly crushing us in some vast bureaucratic machinery, on the command of distant and shadowy and unaccountable figures that we can neither access or understand. Whether it's the NSA or Google or Chinese hackers, there's forces out there fucking with you that you can't control. Whether you call them government or corporation or conspiracy will prove irrelevant. When Major League Baseball is engaged in all sorts of quasi-legal investigations and influence, we've reached a point of repressive systems, not just repressive governments.

I can deal with fighting this stuff and losing. I can't deal with the proud apathy that pops up around all of this. The terrible thing about being increasingly trapped in these systems— besides the obvious, I mean— is that it makes people more and more likely to act like they have no control. So many people I see are reacting to these many revelations with some version of "there is no alternative." I can at least accept the learned helplessness, that classic Democrat, Droopy Dog "we can't do anything, siiiiiiiigh" attitude. It's a kind of bullshit self-defense, where you are responsible for nothing because you preempt personal responsibility by saying you're bound to fail. But at least it acknowledges these problems as problems. What I truly cannot stand is the studied pose of blase and indifference. "Hey, what revelations are we really seeing here?" Hey, times change. Hey, it's technology, you can't fight it. Hey man, that's the world. It's the worst kind of cool kid pose, where something bad is asserted to be no big deal, because to accept it as a big deal would be to risk the carefully manicured pose of "cool" apathy. That's what I can't stand: watching human rights be given away in the name of posturing.

I called these intrusions authoritarian on Facebook. Somebody made fun of me. "You sound like some conspiracy loon!" I wondered what it would take to convince him of the term's use. How far are you willing to go before you will grapple with how bad things can get? How important is not sounding like "that kind of person"?

The best book ever written about totalitarianism isn't actually 1984. It's A Tale of Two Cities. And in that book, the most commonly repeated image, the central symbol, is of a giant eye. What Charles Dickens understood, and what the book argues, is that there is no such thing as freedom without privacy, that being truly free means being free to do things that you don't want other people to know about. And what I insist is that all the people who are busily denying that these revelations really mean anything recognize: if we give up these rights, we are choosing to do it. Every aspect of this is a product of human choice. We might be trapped in systems. But those systems are made up of human beings, and they are choosing to erode our basic freedom. Nothing can be chalked up to slogans or "the arc of history" or technology or Just the Way Things Are Going to Be. If our rights are getting eroded, it's because we're choosing to let them. Tell that to the defeatists and the apathetic alike.