Open Prison.

      We should have learned by now that in this manipulative system the state doesn’t always need physical constraints, a conditioned mind is prison bars enough, to make the individual feel they are free and part of a free and normal society. To the conditioned mind the prison walls are invisible, the illusion of freedom appears so real it is accepted. To keep the illusion alive, the system has its prison warders in the shape of the education system, the media, corporate advertising and state propaganda, that is usually enough to keep the majority of the population reasonably content in their illusion of freedom, and to shape their needs and desires. For those who don't accept this illusion of freedom, then there is always the more brutal loaded judicial system and prison cages of repression.
     We have in most cases willingly assisted in our own enslavement by the embracing modern technology. Not that the technology itself is inherently enslaving, but our acceptance of the belief that the corporate world’s control and development of such technology is progress. Progress, an ambiguous word that can conceal an illusion. Technology has bound us to the owners and developers of that technology. One example, in the not too distant past, games were usually very simple and also very enjoyable. All they required was a ball, a couple of sticks, something to throw, a bat etc. nothing complicated, but enjoyed my millions across the planet. Today games are complicated apparatus that we could never make on our own, to enjoy the new “games” we have to put ourselves in the hands of the corporate bodies that own and control that technology, and with their dictate of progress they will be outdated and you will need to buy into the new and much more sophisticated model. You are on the technology gravy train, not as an enjoyer of the gravy, but as the producer of the gravy, for the few in control to lap up.
     As long as growth is seen as progress, increase in consumption will be necessary, and the powers that be will devise, through their usual conditioning endeavours, ways and means to put new and costly products as symbols of happiness, success and status. A quote from Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”, encapsulates that line of thought. When asked why are the works of William Shakespeare are banned, the controller replies, ‘Because it’s old; that’s the chief reason. We haven’t any use for old things here’. ‘Even when they’re beautiful?’. ‘Particularly when they’re beautiful. Beauty’s attractive, and we don’t want people to be attracted by old things. We want them to like the new ones’”. I think Huxley has thrown us a warning there, as did Orwell, we ignore them at our peril.

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The Omnipresent Surveillance State.

        I, like many others have scribbled away, in anger, at the ever growing threat from the  onslaught of surveillance that is relentlessly entwining every fibre of our existence. It is spreading like a plague, it is insidiously multiplying in the background, growing in sophistication and increasing the state's power over us all. Worse still, it now works with and for the corporate juggernaut. It trolls your personal habits, likes and dislikes and targets you with consumer crap. What the corporate world knows about you will be shared with the state's policing agents. This will be building up a very detailed picture of you, you will be monitored, profiled and assessments made of your loyalty to the state's aims. You are all guilty until proven innocent, and even then, you will continue to be monitored and profiled until the day you die. 

     We have sleep walked into George Orwell's 1984, and we still haven't rubbed our eyes to wake up to this reality, time is running out.

     The following is an extract from a very detail article on the surveillance subject by John W. Whitehead. Though it refers to America, we would be naive in the extreme to harbour the thought that some how we are different in this country, we are not. The spider's web of surveillance, is at this moment monitoring and profiling you and yours. I recommend you read the full article.

The Omnipresent Surveillance State:

--------Here’s what a lot of people fail to understand, however: it’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted. We’ve already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime legislation that cracks down on so-called “hateful” thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on various subject matter.

Say hello to the new Thought Police.
     Total Internet surveillance by the Corporate State, as omnipresent as God, is used by the government to predict and, more importantly, control the populace, and it’s not as far-fetched as you might think. For example, the NSA is now designing an artificial intelligence system that is designed to anticipate your every move. In a nutshell, the NSA will feed vast amounts of the information it collects to a computer system known as Aquaint (the acronym stands for Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence), which the computer can then use to detect patterns and predict behavior.

No information is sacred or spared.
       Everything from cell phone recordings and logs, to emails, to text messages, to personal information posted on social networking sites, to credit card statements, to library circulation records, to credit card histories, etc., is collected by the NSA and shared freely with its agents in crime: the CIA, FBI and DHS. One NSA researcher actually quit the Aquaint program, “citing concerns over the dangers in placing such a powerful weapon in the hands of a top-secret agency with little accountability.”
       Thus, what we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised of the watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers (government bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations).

Clearly, the age of privacy in America is at an end.

      “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”—Orwell

So where does that leave us?          We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers. This is the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction lesson that is being pounded into us on a daily basis.
        It won’t be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.
       To be an individual today, to not conform, to have even a shred of privacy, and to live beyond the reach of the government’s roaming eyes and technological spies, one must not only be a rebel but rebel.
      Even when you rebel and take your stand, there is rarely a happy ending awaiting you. You are rendered an outlaw.

So how do you survive in the American surveillance state?

We’re running out of options.
       As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we’ll soon have to choose between self-indulgence (the bread-and-circus distractions offered up by the news media, politicians, sports conglomerates, entertainment industry, etc.) and self-preservation in the form of renewed vigilance about threats to our freedoms and active engagement in self-governance.
      Yet as Aldous Huxley acknowledged in Brave New World Revisited: “Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it.”

Read the full article HERE: 

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Shopiate Of The Masses.

       I like this slightly altered quote from Not Buying Anything site, it does ring rather true of today, or am I being too pessimistic?

Slightly altering one of Huxley's quotes about pharmaceuticals, it can be seen that consumerism is a drug. It is the ultimate shopiate of the masses.

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method consumer economic model of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. shopping. 

And this seems to be the final revolution.”

- Aldous Huxley

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk