On Wed, 1 Dec 1999, Charlie Stross wrote:
>
> No, this isn't some half-witted Star Trek Borg implementation. It's
> politics. Noam Chomsky had a point when he observed that the mechanisms of
> political coercion in a nominally democratically accountable state must
> be more subtle than those in a dictatorship.
And they may be so much more "subtle" that they may be relatively ineffective. Look at the Police strategy last night in Seattle. Sure, they had to resort to declaring an emergency, bring in loads of police, but on the other side of the coin, some of the protestors (let us not say the "responsible demonstrators"), had done a fair amount of property damage in the downtown area). Now, the give-and-take of the police moving these individuals out of downtown was interesting to watch. Fire some tear gas and pepper bombs, slowly walk up the block, stop, wait, repeat. Relatively orderly (and boring if you were watching it on prime time for 2 hours).
The "coercion" wasn't particulary subtle and didn't particulary change
the minds of the demonstrators, but it did effectively negate them.
> Try and extrapolate this
Ah, but there is a distinction between someone taking action in
a "shared" space and a "private" space.
> theory to a framework where human nature is maleable and we arrive at
> something very frightening indeed:
You don't want to worry about the "spin-controlled" information sources, you want to worry about the lack of "non-spin-controlled" sources.
>
> "Welcome to eutopia! Everyone you see here is happy and smiling;
> and that's not because there are any mass graves or gulags in the
> background! Unlike all previous totalitarian ideologies, ours is based
> on the abolition of unhappiness. Pissed off? Don't like our way of life?
> Never mind, we'll be able to tune your qualia so that you're perfectly
> happy with the way things are!"
>
> Being able to change what we want implies that _others_ can change what
> we want.
Horse puckies. If you are silly enough to write a public access method for your "wants" and make it available to the net, then you get what you deserve.
In the meantime, if you don't want "others" to "change" what you want, I'd suggest, you immediately move to the Sahara desert miles and miles away from anyone. There you might stand a chance that nobody will talk to you in such a way that your thoughts might be influenced. In fact, I'd strongly suggest you spend the rest of your life meditating. With the white noise of meditation filling up your mind, it will probably be quite difficult for anyone to influence your "thoughts".
Robert