Benefits of Big Brother

Very few contemporary media stay away from discussions on one or another sort of resistance to total digital surveillance. It is fancy to articulate concerns on how Orwell’s Big Brother comes into reality today. The concerns supposedly reflect strong citizenship along with a true spirit of democracy.

Deleting a Facebook account is now called a feat of strength of a human will. An entire industry of camps where people pay for being forcibly disconnected from the internet is gaining momentum. Regular leakages of private data from social networks add fuel to fire. But everything related to anti-surveillance movements reaches us via the very online mass media where numerous reviews of new gadgets occupy top-rated positions.

Any struggle for privacy is meaningless in the context of growing connectivity just because the mighty powers who seek to interconnect all of us through the internet unlikely respect our desire to keep our identities confidential. Moreover, we all fall into a weird ambivalence when trying to limit access to the private data we use data-sharing technologies. Such a schizophrenic state is well known to those who have ever practiced the so-called silent mind.

This is when you try to suspend a stream of consciousness with mental commands coming from the very consciousness. At best, you can fall asleep when your mind gives up in the face of a mental short circuit you forcibly inflict. But usually, your wishful thinking deceives you showing a fake non-thought state you seemingly achieve through an “empty mind” meditation. It is impossible to beat a thought with another thought as like adding fuel to fire cannot extinguish the fire.

Getting rid of illusions regarding our privacy on the internet can deliver a certain therapeutic effect. It can help address the whole situation from a different angle. What if getting out of the global infosphere is impossible at all? And if so, what if playing on the side of the ultimate winner — the Big Brother — is much more beneficial for all of us than resisting it?

It may sound provocative for various fighters for civil rights, but following the mainstream course of the current agenda of globalization is a progressive movement towards better social conditions for the majority of the world population. Almost 8 billion people interconnected through information technologies need quite a powerful system of control and management.

Since we all are still divided by national state borders (except citizens of the European Union), any sort of international legislative control over the interconnected masses is unlikely achievable in the foreseeable future. The obsolete but, at the same time, influential national elites reinforced by both national systems of suppression (police, army, secret services) and international corruption won’t lose an actual physical control over their local populations in the near term.

That’s why there are three main players in the ongoing global game: huge masses of interconnected citizens, national elites, and transnational forces who provide the agenda of globalization — the very Big Brother resisting to whom is so fancy today among quasi-intellectuals from social networks (including the author of these lines as well). Hence, the only sort of control over the whole global population seems more or less possible for Big Brother nowadays despite any diversity in nations, genders, and many other distinguishing human factors — control over data.

It cannot be achieved without making access to our personal data purely conditional. And it has already happened, in fact. The Big Data processing algorithms that continuously collect information about all available users from the internet are intimately familiar with all of us. The trick is that nobody can figure out where the internet starts and where it ends today. Our bank payments are the part of our personal data in the same manner as any other piece of information we deliberately share on the internet for being able to use some online services no matter whether they are free and open-source or chargeable and licensed.

Any entry point from where we get to the internet is arranged to disclose who, when, and where is using it. We use gadgets that all have been designed as rapidly evolving spy bugs from the very beginning. We deliver petabytes of our private content to our social accounts every minute. It is absolutely insane to believe in any digital privacy in such circumstances.

Let’s stop spending our vital energy on defending our seemingly private data. Defending from what? From unauthorized access? But any authorization is an option over which none of us has even a shred of control. We use all available internet options by default unless being professional programmers we can change settings at a level of code where it is fundamentally possible. How many true hackers do you know?

Big Brother is here to stay, like it or leave it. Each of us should choose one of the three available camps for which we will play in further interactions with all other people. This is not about we have any real choice — our unwillingness to choose will put us in one of the camps automatically. But our “free will” matters, nevertheless.

Where can we appear as a result in terms of our conditional freedom within the current digital surveillance?

1. Happy “silent majority” — those who either accept their position for granted or passively choose collaboration with Big Brother without a full awareness of the benefits it brings.
2. Digital rebels whose lack of pragmatism pushes them into a romantic resistance against Big Brother. However, this camp can also include quite pragmatic but, at the same time, short-sighted representatives of various national elites whose intramural lifestyle makes them cling to provincial values of the national state in opposition to globalization. Besides, a tiny group of the “digital refugees” who practice total disconnectedness is also included in the present camp.
3. Active and deliberate followers of Big Brother who clearly understand all pros and cons of globalization with its total virtual transparency. Paradoxically this camp includes the ones who are usually associated with the second camp of rebels such as hackers, anonymous protestants, fighters for various sorts of decentralization, blockchain activists and crypto-anarchists, and many other types of advocates of individual rights whose activities entirely belong to a virtual environment of the internet

While the participants of both the first and second camps are quite self-explanatory, the constituents of the third camp may seem contradictory at first sight. How hackers or, for example, surfers over the darknet can support the Big Brother’s surveillance? This question can arise only between those who cannot embrace such a phenomenon as a global virtual control (total digital surveillance, Big Brother, the eye in the sky — you name it). The short answer to the question can be as “the very existence of both hackers and darknet surfers keeps Big Brother running and evolving”.

One of the closest analogs of it from the offline reality is our immune system. It works well only if some resisting factors such as disease organisms continuously challenge us. Long-term exposure to totally sterile conditions can significantly weaken our immune system, if not destroy it completely. Similarly, the ones who supposedly oppose Big Brother make it stronger at the end of the day. If nobody challenges the global virtual control, it becomes meaningless at its essence.

However, the Buddhist doctrine of acquiescence is highly unlikely inherent in what we understand as a modern society. There will always be those who place individual ambitions above collective interests. Moreover, the whole contemporary discourse is built on the idea of individualism. All official and media resources feed us with constant reminders that each of us is a unique individual having unprecedented features and nice peculiarities.

The human rights as a holy pillar of the Western liberal paradigm make an individual the most appreciated and only pivot around which all the other civilizational phenomena should orbit. That’s why all we do nowadays is adding momentum to individualism and, therefore, strengthening Big Brother as its dialectic counterparty.

The one who can grasp the futility of fighting against both Big Brother and our social conventions is one step from a reasonable choice of the third camp. It can be too much for your personal ambitions to see yourself among the “silent majority”. Your social status can keep you far away from any kind of local national elites. But if your sober logic suggests you accepting full individual transparency in a highly virtualized world of our near future, an active role in the team of Big Brother can bring you true peace of mind.

You will no longer have to worry about any data leakage since you are not going to hide anything from public access anymore. You will be supported by the entire collective strength of the internet geeks, white-hat hackers, and online activists in your resistance to various retrograde bureaucrats from your local national elite. You will become a true citizen of the world having no spatial limitations.

You will succeed even if you hide round-the-clock surveillance of Big Brother deeply into your subconsciousness to stay indistinguishable from any other “unique individual” on the stage. Indeed, you will start living in the future right now if the following rationale finds a path to your awareness: Big Brother is of course not in and of itself evil if we accept it as our common destiny