V

I am a technophile...

I always have been, and probably always will be... but recently I have been rethinking technology and its influence on the world around us. A while ago I finally watched Braveheart... this is a story about a man in a very backwards time where there was very little technology, but still there was enough to produce an unbridgeable gap between the peasant and the noble. But the tyranny that existed could not be tolerated by the people, and with the crystallizing power of a great leader, the people turned their world around. The technology of the day meant that many had to die, but eventually the people prevailed. Today we have much more powerful technology, and a much larger gap between the people and the rulers. The great technology I am thinking about is not the great nuclear weapons or laser guided bombs, or chemical warfare or biological vectors. The weapons I am talking about are much more fluid. I am talking about the incredible advances in the power of persuasion. In the days of Braveheart, the people may have been bound, but their minds were always free. Now we have the powers of advertising... these are the powers that can shape the way we feel. And those who control the minds of the people are already in control of their actions. Utopian novels and movies like Aldous Huxley's brave new world, or 1984, or even V is for Vendetta are attempting to warn us against this sort of control, but the problem is that they paint a picture where those in authority have absolute and draconian control.. but these people don't really need to have absolute control, to change the way things happen. They only need to make sure that what the people trust is what they tell them. Allowing a story to leak out into an untrusted source is actually better than trying to keep the story from leaking at all.... because that source, by telling the story, reduces the story to what that source always says, and the common man (the one who actually rules this country) dismisses it as gossip, and nothing more needs to be said. The source may even have evidence, but since the story originally came from an untrustworthy source, it will forever be an "untrue" story. Image is everything. How something is spun is reality. What the people believe is reality (or it will be soon enough). You shape the mind of the people, you shape the world. The absolute rulers have never been those who have the most swords, or the most money, or the most power, but those who have the most influence over the minds of the people.