CHOMSKY, "BEYOND FASCISM."

FROM Z NET

                        NOAM CHOMSKY, BEYOND FASCISM

Q: If someone suggested that the United States is moving more and more toward forms of fascism, would you find evidence that it is true?

NC: Oh yea, very striking evidence. In fact, I never really expected much from Obama, I thought it was mostly hot air, but one thing has surprised me and that is the intensity of his attack on civil liberties which goes beyond any rational explanation I can think of [unintelligible]… and it shows up in a lot of ways. Some of the ways are very dramatic and not having to do with the Executive Branch, it is the way the society and the economy are developing.

So, for example, a couple of weeks ago there was an article in the New York Times “Business Section,” maybe you saw it, on something called “Google Glass.” Google is manufacturing glasses, they may be on the market already, which have a small computer embedded in them, a tiny computer, which allows you to be on the Internet twenty-four hours a day. That in itself is such an indictment of modern society I don’t even want to talk about it. But, it is worse than that because this device also takes photographs of anything that is going on, and I presume either already or soon it will take recordings of everything that is going on. So everything that is going on around the person wearing this thing goes up on the Internet.

The reporter asked Eric Schmidt, one of the founders of Google, whether he didn’t think this was an invasion of privacy. And his answer I think may be the slogan of the coming age. His answer was “Well, if you are doing something you don’t want to be on the Internet then you shouldn’t be doing it.” I don’t know if fascism is quite the right word, it goes beyond that…this conception that anything has to be public, and to some extent I think that is seeping into the consciousness of young people. I don’t look at Facebook but people who do tell me the exhibitionism of young people is just frightening…anything has to be on the Internet, anything I do. And the conception that everything has to be public goes beyond anything that Big Brother ever thought about.

If you look at the technology journals, like the MIT Technology Review, you see more and more of it coming out. So there was a news item in a recent issue which said that corporations are beginning to be cautious about using computers with parts that are manufactured in China because it is now apparently technically possible to build into the components of a computer some device that detects everything the computer is doing, every keystroke and sends it back to “People’s Liberation Army Headquarters” in China. Well, they did not go on to say that if they can do it in China they can do it here much better. So that holds for every computer that is manufactured here or manufactured by a U.S. corporation, and if it isn’t happening now it could be happening and it may be soon which means that everything you do on your computer goes off to Big Brother into the huge database Obama is constructing in Utah. And, it gets worse.

There was just a report from one of the main robotics labs. They’ve been working for I think ten years trying to develop robots, meaning drones essentially, controlled robots the size of flies. The military has been interested in this because it could mean that you have surveillance of what is going on in your living room or your kitchen and you wouldn’t notice it because it is just a fly up there. That makes everything public. Well again, you can’t call it fascism because fascists never dreamed of it. Orwell never dreamed of it. It is beyond anything. And it is within reach and may be happening. And it is being accepted. We live in a surveillance society of a kind that really has not existed before and it is accepted. Some are more extreme than us, like Britain, cameras everywhere, recording everywhere. Chances are anything you do electronically at least canbe picked up, maybe is being picked up by surveillance systems. And Eric Schmidt’s thesis, which he wasn’t criticizing, he said that is the way it ought to be, could well become the slogan of the coming age unless something is done to prevent it. There can be force behind it too. I’m just talking about the surveillance aspect. Once data is collected that tells you everything about a person, maybe including a lot of fabrication, which also happens, then there is a lot of control that can go along with it.

Q: What you are describing sounds like the worst aspects of a Philip K. Dick novel.

NC: Of?

Q: Philip K. Dick, the science fiction writer.

NC: I don’t know him. But this is worse than any science fiction I know of, and it is real, straight out of the technology journals. It is not science fiction.

Q: What about the psychic effect of knowing that you are living in a society where you understand that you are under constant surveillance, even in terms of the impact on the activist community?

NC: What I think is most worrisome is what I’ve been told at least about children and Facebook, that they are accepting it as legitimate, that you should expose everything to the public.

Q: So, in other words, from our perspective, based on our age, we see that there should be limits, there should be some privacy, but these kids are not seeing that?

NC: That is the impression I get. As I say, I don’t investigate it myself, but I have friends who basically try to monitor their children on Facebook and a lot of them are just appalled by what they see. Things that you and I would never have dreamed of making public. This idea that you somehow have to be in touch with anything that is happening in the world shows up in all kinds of ways.

You may have seen over the winter, there were reports in the press, maybe the Boston Globe, a strange epidemic that was spreading among teenage girls in Boston, and they could not figure out what it was, but there was a lot of illness. They finally traced it. It was fatigue. It was fatigue because the kids were going to bed with their cell phones in their hands so that in case, at three o’clock in the morning, somebody you know had a sandwich you have to know about it, and you can’t let it go so therefore they were not sleeping.

Q: You have got to be joking?

NC: I don’t think it is a joke.