Raw LLM Responses

"The Carl Marx of our time" ... lol ... just too fitting for an over-educated Harvard professor who writes a whole 500 page book about the big tech surveillance dragnet and mentions nothing about how the two most important companies in this story, Google and Facebook, received startup funding from the government and worked directly with the government from day one for the purpose of building out the mass surveillance grid we now live under. These companies are and always have been government functionaries first and foremost, operating under the mere pretense of private sector ownership. The "surveillance dividend" and the corporate profiteering of predictive data is only the tip of the iceberg—a mostly benign economic cover story for something far larger and more insidious, which conveniently invites sophomoric minds to blame "market forces run amok" for the effects of a plot conceived by shadow government, funded by shadow government, and guided by shadow government, for far more evil purposes than enabling corporate greed. They are building an inescapable prison planet where the mass of humanity is under total surveillance, invisible scrutiny, and personalized manipulation for their entire lives, owning nothing of value as individuals, exercise political power only in an empty ritualized compliance with the status quo, and are rendered incapable of original thought, while the few free thinkers who live on at the margins of society are easily tracked and identified targets for extreme marginalization if not silent elimination. A totalitarian technocratic terror where for the most part, people will be successfully programmed to love their slavery and to hate and fear those who yearn for freedom. Social media will serve as a public pillory for anyone who dares question or doubt the state-approved narrative, leading to social isolation for skeptics, while social credit scores will harshly punish all forms of disobedience to the state—even mental. All behavior, including ostensibly private behavior, will be medicalized, and psychiatry weaponized, with the aim of stamping out thought crimes through systematic brainwashing and institutionalization under the guise of public mental health services. Minor dealings in black markets or the ostensibly private commission of victimless crimes by dissidents will be prosecuted effortlessly through parallel construction and the digital fabrication of evidence, while known violent criminals are allowed to run amok at some algorithmically determined rate that evokes adequate fear of crime in the population without also causing doubt in the efficacy of law enforcement and government authorities. If one should somehow still cling to a seed of rebellion in their soul after suffering all other applicable punishments, their self-driving electric car or rideshare vehicle, long since mandated as the only form of automotive transportation allowed on public roads for reasons of public safety, will be remotely triggered to careen into a concrete wall at 125mph in what nobody will be able to see as anything other than a freak accident. And all of this will not be administered by people flipping switches while surreptitiously observing screens in some unknown government facility—exercising human judgement, however corrupt—but through artificial intelligence systems filtering through a sea of data generated by an inescapable "internet of things" that permeates every aspect of human existence. Surveillance "capitalism" is an absurd canard. None of what we're seeing today, or where we're headed, can be laid at the feet of the individual monetary profit motive and or private ownership of capital. Businesses models like those of Facebook and Google would have never emerged straightforwardly out of market forces and consumer demand. They are private in name only and were conceived to serve government interests; their profits are incidental to their underlying mission, and in many cases trace back to reciprocal largess. The 4th and 5th amendments are dead and gone—empty lies we tell ourselves having known for close to a decade now that the US government's intelligence apparatus collects and stores every email, text, call, photo, video, social media message, etc, that every that inhabitant of the US has ever entered into their phone or computer, and that public-facing officials continually lie to us about the massive and ever-growing scope of their domestic surveillance grid while mercilessly prosecuting the few whistleblowers who gave us even a glimpse towards the truth of it all. Center-staging the story of "how Pokemon Go was used by advertisers to get people to visit local shops and restaurants" while ignoring the far more bleak and sanguinary reality underpinning such superficial phenomena, in a cynical attempt to stoke people's irrational fear of markets and commerce is, sadly, par for the course for American public intellectuals as we collectively circle the drain of fate... a brain-dead rehashing of the quintessential Marxist shibboleth, updated once again for the 21st century.