Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother is a powerful book. Go, read it, it will be time well spent — if you have any reason to trust my recommendation at all.
However, it is really a bit too simplistic and black and white, which might be fitting the ‘young adult’ age group he wrote this one for but is another case of lies-to-students. The reality is much more complex. Let me summarize the plot a little, it’s not really a spoiler since no step in it is a real surprise:
- Terrorist attack blows up a bridge in San Francisco.
- The hero, a school-teenager, gets captured by Department of Homeland Security, illegally detained, and later mysteriously released.
- He starts a teenage movement aimed at overloading the automated parts of the security theater which has great success.
- Escalation of countermeasures results in a double-agent in the movement leaking video of DHS officials conspiring to do something — it’s not quite clear what the something is, just that it’s Evil and goes against the US Constitution, as everything else the DHS does really.
- The whole thing gets written up by an investigative reporter, which results in further countermeasures.
- State government decides enough was enough and stops the activity of DHS in the state of California.
- After a short public trial everything gets quietly shuffled under the carpet and the hero starts working on the election to vote the current federal administration out of office.
Does anybody else see something wrong with that picture? Here’s my list:
- The assumption that any organization is explicitly “Evil” is simply wrong, even if good for propaganda, whether Doctorow created this assumption intentionally or not. Organizations just don’t work that way. Whatever reason DHS really has for instituting security theater, it is a very safe bet that a large number of it’s members aren’t thinking they’re up to anything evil, and most of the organization even genuinely thinks what they’re doing is making people safer. What’s even more likely is that the individual agents aren’t thinking at all, but instead reacting reflexively, not realizing what are they doing. They are just in such a position that peer pressure, which exists pretty much independently from any single one of them, incites them to forgo any and all restraint on doing “justice” as they see it. It’s very likely even the bosses have no clue. The phenomenon is called “sensitivization” and is the normal part of a moral panic. The Stanford Prison Experiment plainly shows how this can quickly degenerate into violence and torture. I have no privilege of knowing Stanley Cohen personally, but I can bet he’s banging his head on his table right now, figuratively speaking, for not being more vocal about it when he had a chance… or maybe he’s writing another book. Normally, the moral panics don’t last ten years, but this one was, apparently, deliberately, turned into a state campaign.
- The assumption that one investigative reporter for a newspaper still has the power to turn the whole thing around is, well, too optimistic in my opinion. Can it really happen? Really, truly?
- The assumption that election process still works when all these things can actually occur is just a manifestation of the traditional American belief that it always does. Copious evidence exists that it doesn’t already. Most importantly, if the DHS has the power of unrestricted surveillance, the amount of people who need to be detained to skew the election whichever way they want is minimal. Yet, Doctorow still cannot imagine a proper real revolution that would reinstate the Constitution — or any truly mass dissent.
The real question, which the book doesn’t pose but which should really be thought about, is, can such truly mass dissent even happen, anywhere in the so-called ‘developed countries’… particularly ones which have TV networks, without which moral panics wouldn’t really be possible.
Then again, Cohen’s research shows that when moral panics happen, people assume a priori that the media reports are exaggerated, yet they still cave in. This poses a few very interesting questions on what trust in the media really means in this day and age.
Трудно говорить о карме серьезно. У нее достаточно открыто нет никакого внятного причинно-следственного механизма действия. Тем не менее, так же трудно говорить, что ее не существует. Ее, определенно, меньше чем должно было бы быть, если бы она была универсальным, непререкаемым законом, и тем не менее, периодически она накатывает волнами.
Я не имею в виду какую-то абстрактную карму “из прошлой жизни”, потому что не могу всерьез говорить что прошлые жизни существуют или могли бы существовать. Я имею в виду именно карму в этой жизни, карму даже не столько индивидов, сколько организаций, культур и стран. Возможно это имеет какое-то отношение к “счету за реальность”, а возможно нет. Не могу даже сказать с уверенностью, идентичны ли понятия “плохая карма” и “отрицательная карма”, и ведет ли она себя так же как некая субстанция, которую можно измерить математически.
И тем не менее, я периодически наблюдаю, как людям, организациям, культурам, целым странам приходится впоследствии тяжело и дорого расплачиваться за несоответствие действий декларируемым идеалам — иногда через непосредственные последствия отказа от этих идеалов, а иногда очень и очень косвенно, но тем не менее расплачиваться.
Со стороны чрезвычайно похоже на карму.
I have reported one such case that occurred in Oxford… The patient, a 43-year-old man, was brought into the Accident and Emergency Department following an overdose. He had tried to kill himself because he was afraid he was going to be “locked up”. However, this fear was secondary to a paranoid system at the heart of which was the hypochondriacal delusion that he was “mentally ill”.
He was seen by the duty psychiatrist and by the consultant psychiatrist on call, neither of whom were in any doubt that he was deluded. Indeed, both were ready on the strength of their diagnosis to admit him as an involuntary patient.
(cited from Mind Hacks: This delusion is false)
This very interesting text would be important reading on the topic of reality billing by itself, but it requires some further elaboration.
The only way out of this logical issue is to assume that the concept of delusion has no relation to truth or falsehood. In fact, a delusion might turn out to be actually true, for example, jealousy-induced delusions are more than others likely to be true. In turn, the obvious conclusion from that, that delusion is based on consensus, is not exactly true, or at least, doesn’t tell as much as it should.
The concept of delusion is based on reality, and reality, the way humans actually see it and use it, has a lot to do with consensus, based both on the physical underpinnings and agreement required to actually communicate and divide labor. “To have a delusion” means to exist in a reality that is significantly incompatible with the dominant one, but not just any such reality — only ones living in which results in harmful physical consequences due to incompatibilities should be considered delusions.
Literature is no longer a required school graduation exam subject.
Teaching literature has been a problem in this country for the past hundred years, but the proper solution is, obviously, not to get rid of such an exam completely!
This culture is now officially on it’s way to extinction, I guess I won’t be starting anything new in Russian language anymore. I don’t want to get stuck paying this kind of reality bill.
Oh well.
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Вообще, я за то, чтобы уменьшить долю употребления буквы Ё в русском языке. Не упразднить, как предлагали некоторые, но употреблять умеренно, в ограниченном количестве специальных слов. Ей это идет.
И одно из этих специальных слов — ёкай
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Friday, December 28, 2007
Я видимо чего-то не понял.
Стоило мне вывалиться из реальности на лишнюю неделю как в ней наделали таких дырок что мама родная.
С этими там, наверху, все понятно. Они сами дырка.
А вы-то где живете все… ?
Есть вранье, и есть ложь. Между двумя этими понятиями существует достаточно фундаментальная разница, даже более глубокая чем между правдой и истиной.
Вранье — утверждать, что я вымыл руки перед едой, когда на самом деле этого не сделал. Социальные последствия вранья могут быть велики, хоть и очень редко, но цель его не в нарушении социальной стабильности, а в ее поддержании, сохранении личной свободы, уходе из-под чужого контроля, и так далее. Вранье чаще основывается на том, что не может быть мимо вранья проверено никаким образом, и составляет личную тайну врущего, которую он волен раскрывать или не раскрывать.
Ложь — утверждать что утверждения 2×2=4 и 2×2=5 истинны одновременно в одной системе счисления. Это насилие над реальностью, истиной и логикой, социальный смысл которого не в освобождении от чужой власти, а в закабалении в свою, похищение чужой “реальности” с целью личного использования или насильное втюхивание своей, не принятой в обществе в целом… что, впрочем, суть эквивалентные процессы.
Желающие пронаблюдать вранье могут видеть его ежедневно, поскольку оно составляет неотъемлемую часть нашей жизни.
А где можно сегодня пронаблюдать ложь я рассказывать не буду, потому что не видеть ее будет очень трудно.
