As I write this on Monday morning, a controversy bigger than the Benghazi, IRS and AP scandals of recent times has emerged and evolved in the last few days. As what I report today about it will likely be outdated by the time this is published on Thursday, I will comment on the one thing that I doubt will change in the next few days ― the public response to these events, and the interplay between knowledge and power.
First, some background: The National Security Agency, through a surveillance program called PRISM that began in 2007, has been revealed to have direct access to the central servers of nine major Internet companies, including Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and others. According to The Guardian, which broke this story along with The Washington Post on June 6, the top-secret document leaked to them by former CIA employee Edward Snowden shows that the PRISM program “allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats.” This came only a day after The Guardian revealed that Verizon had been releasing the call records of all its millions of customers to the NSA since April.
The PRISM leaks are among the most important in American history. They have ascertained that the American government has indeed become a deep, dark abyss of private information, with this information on its fingertips from the biggest websites around. Our surveillance state has been confirmed as being as techno-Orwellian as we could realistically have conceived of it to be.
I’ve seen a flurry of links being shared on Facebook in response to this. However, I do not sense shock waves of public outrage. Dialogue about surveillance is not raging all around as a revelation of such magnitude should merit.
Most simply, such a state of affairs is consistent with American depoliticization: We, like a scarily-increasing portion of the world, are a nation of aloof, frivolously instagramming, contentedly snapchatting, hypnotically spectator-sports-and-Game-of-Thrones-and-other-fluff obsessing individuals. Important matters going on in the world don’t matter, because there are enough pleasant distractions in our world to keep us in dispassionate, self-absorbed enjoyment. And of course, we can maintain clean consciences by having sporadic mass-mourning rituals over fundamentally arbitrary tragedies.
In the midst of this whirlwind of action and inaction, we need to reflect on the corollary to this situation, however obvious it may seem: It’s not just that people are happy doing things they don’t care about the government having information about ― also, people aren’t doing things that the government wouldn’t be pleased about. Two sides of the same equation, but viewing depoliticization from this vantage point necessarily leads to reflection about issues that need acting on by common people, and thus turns what was solely cultural analysis into political contemplation.
Indeed, the fact that packs of people aren’t conspiring to stop Keystone XL at all costs, disrupt business as usual for the finance industry or military-industrial complex, or thwart increasing state authoritarianism ― all necessary, and even honorable actions that the government wouldn’t like ― gives a more useful perspective of reality, with its potentially dystopic elements, than an analysis of American apathy seen just for its spellbound decadence.
The apathy may also be because of who is in the White House. I’m certain that if this controversy had occurred during the Bush years, many liberals and progressives who aren’t up in arms over PRISM right now would be. But as Glenn Greenwald, one of the two journalists who broke the PRISM story for The Guardian once wrote, “To many conservatives, Bush could and should be trusted to exercise extreme powers in the dark because he was a Good evangelical Christian family man with heartland cowboy values. To many progressives, Obama can and should be trusted because he’s a Good sophisticated East Coast progressive and family man with urbane constitutional scholar values. It’s lowly reality TV viewing and rank cultural tribalism masquerading as political ideology.” As I’m compelled to repeat again and again, many liberals’ unthinking lionization of Obama is as dogmatic as the fundamentalism that they despise in conservatives.
Knowledge, supposedly, is power, which is why it is considered so dangerous that the government knows so much about us. But with these leaks, we too have knowledge ― of how much the government knows about us. And in the coming days and weeks, if we don’t question our core notions of technological society, power structures, information, etc., and act appropriately toward this issue of surveillance, we will have shown that knowledge is in fact not power. This raises a philosophical question: By not seizing available power ourselves, will we have reversed this supposed truth regarding knowledge and power, and thus disempowered the government’s knowledge of us?
I wish. The truth is that there is a crucial element missing here ― knowledge alone isn’t power ― there has to be a desire to use that knowledge ― here, a will to political power. It is a collective will to power that we are lacking, and as long as that doesn’t change, information that power has about us shall be infinitely more powerful than information we have about power.