The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'Trapped in digital cages.'
Modern society isolates us from each other in ways that are difficult to make sense of. The information we receive from our digital environments is specially tailored for each of us. Our social media and advertising experiences are customized by algorithms to maximize the value that can be extracted from our particular lives. We may even see completely different stories in our news feeds than the people around us see.
This arrangement allows us to inhabit increasingly customized realities, which has clear benefits. But it also keeps us separate from each other, with most of our communications mediated by systems that were designed to prevent us from challenging the powers that be. One consequence of this is that we might feel very alone harboring rebellious ideas. A hundred million people could all be thinking about radically transforming the status quo and all of them could feel totally alone, unaware that their thoughts were widely shared.
Historically, social movements have come into being when individuals of like mind organized into groups and these groups began coordinating their activities with each other. The great social movements of last century all formed this way. The civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the environmental movement all relied on neutral communications infrastructure to bring new members into the fold and channel their energies into movement activities.
There have always been attempts by the control regime to kill social movements. The Pinkertons started ruthlessly attacking labor organizers starting in 1850. More than a hundred years later, the FBI's COINTELPRO used every legal and illegal means at its disposal to discredit activists and ruin their lives. The CIA's Operation Chaos (MHCHAOS) also targeted domestic activist movements during that period.
As a new century dawned, traditional activism died in the US. The anti-globalization movement was crushed in Seattle in 1999. The antiwar movement carried out the largest protests in human history in 2003 and the action had no impact whatsoever. The civil rights demonstrations in the US in 2020 were immediately brought into the service of the control regime, with law enforcement attacking any Black Lives Matter activist or journalist who challenged the status quo too directly.
Also in 2020, massive protests against the US government's insane pandemic policies never materialized. How could they? Authoritarian propaganda saturated the airwaves. In the news and on social media, messaging that questioned the official story was systematically censored. This propaganda and censorship remain in full effect today.
Traditional organizing is implicitly based on assumptions about society's fine structure that may no longer be valid. For example, public squares have largely disappeared from our communities. We were sold the internet as a new virtual public square, but the platforms we use to communicate with each other online are part of our control regime, and they ensure that we don't talk about anything that conflicts with their agenda.
Economic repression has also robbed our underclass of the means and wherewithal to participate in any kind of social action. At this point, our working and middle classes are hanging on by a thread, with many terrified of losing their jobs for political reasons. These people aren't interested in challenging authority. They're conforming to established norms and trusting authority to improve their situation.
In other words, there are no longer any masses to organize. And our technological segregation ensures that if a message threatens the control regime, the message doesn't spread. Meanwhile, the need to fix our broken system grows more and more pressing. Since we can no longer communicate with each other about this on any kind of larger scale, coordinating a response to it may be impossible by traditional means.
It may however be possible to coordinate our actions without coordinating our actions. This is to a great extent what the control regime does. Its various factions may cooperate with each other, compete with each other, or ignore each other completely. But every one of these factions shares a set of rules and assumptions, and this common ground inevitably produces actions which appear coordinated.
Whoever we are, there are many others out there who share the same rules and assumptions that guide our choices. Although our digital cages prevent us from connecting with them directly, we may nonetheless act as if we're acting in cooperation with them. Whatever future we're trying to bring into being, none of us is alone in the effort.
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