‘Smart’ Despotism to be Our Inevitable Future?

by Alec Scheer

It is 2020. Flying cars are zipping past tall metallic sky scrapers. A dismal grey, caused by the pollution, is cast upon the cityscape. 

Flashing screens can be seen nearly every block. Apartments, stores, street vendors, commuters, and the tall skyscrapers are dangerously compacted into a small mega-city – truly a chilling Hunger Games-esque scenario.

The city commissioner appears on the screens every hour, disrupting the constant advertisements and videos, to repeat the same well-known fact that the commissioner’s cabinet is keeping close watch over them.

A multitude of cameras can be seen while walking through the city. However, the surveillance state is much worse than the over-abundance of easy-to-see cameras.

There are hidden cameras and microphones throughout the city. There are X-ray devices which can see if you are carrying any substance or weapon the city deems a threat to the “public safety.”

There are retina eye scanning cameras perched in high and undetectable places that have the ability to scan your retina to assess your identity and registered background data, which is a feed from the Commissioner’s monitoring echelon.

The city is also filled with pre-crime detecting software, which is installed in numerous locations throughout the city. It allows the commissioner’s police force to determine who is going to commit a crime, when, where, and how. This enables the commissioner’s officers to stop the crime before it happens.

Undercover police agents walk the streets analyzing the gestures and visible emotions of the city’s citizens, while uprisings are quickly thwarted by police with riot shields, X-ray scanning glasses, high-powered riot weapons, advanced stealth armor, riot helmets, and sound dispersing technology.

The brief and isolated scenario I have just provided to you does not sound too enjoyable, does it? What if I told you this extremely frightening and futuristic despotic dystopia is already here, in some respects?

At the turn of the century our inherent rights to privacy and private property, which were enumerated in the United States Constitution, experienced a smashing blow with the passage of the PATRIOT Act, which was signed by President George W. Bush on October 26, 2001.

The years preceding 2001, all the way up to now, 2013, were met with an ever-growing police state. A mind-blowing surveillance state has become a partner in despotism with the other government manufactured issue: The police state.

In that same year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was established. The DHS has become – and was at its establishment – an utterly corrupt government institution hell-bent on pushing the establishment’s authoritarian direct and non-direct authoritarian goals.

A DHS subsidiary, the Transportation Security Administration, is also another great contributor to the increasing surveillance state. It has made it difficult, in its early days, for people to travel without harassment.

Their practices have been allowed to perpetuate so long that they have made it difficult for travelers to get to their respective destinations without being molested or radiated by their x-ray back scatters.

Furthermore, there have been numerous innovations in technology over the past ten years.

This innovation has led to the creation street lights that have hidden cameras and speakers, which are being used in Farmington Hills, Michigan. The Department of Energy subsidized IntelliStreets, the manufacturer of the street lights, to produce these “spy lights” for this pilot program.