The Pilgrim Underground: Mammon, Technology, and the Road to Dystopia

19 April 2022

Mammon, Technology, and the Road to Dystopia

https://www.npr.org/2022/03/18/1087446715/heres-how-americans-view-facial-recognition-and-driverless-cars

Some people embrace these new technologies and some don't. Some are concerned with the role they're playing in our lives and are afraid of what they're doing to society. Others are optimistic and filled with hope and even revel in their potential.

We're told that politics seem to be a determining factor in how such questions are answered, in how people respond to the invasiveness of these new technologies. GOP voters don't like such intrusions we're told. My how times have changed, or maybe it's less a question of principle and is instead merely an issue of who's in office. It isn't even politics in the true sense, but rather pure partisanship. It has nothing to do with conservatism. Rather it's simply a question of who gets to wield the power – which faction gets to control the technologies.

The American Right sure liked such intrusions during the Bush era. They supported the creation of the TSA and its power to get into your pants, let alone all the NSA and FBI powers regarding surveillance and data collection. Later they supported the call for body scanners. It doesn't get much more intrusive than that. Officially these more or less naked images and scans aren't retained. I marvel that anyone would actually believe these claims in light of all the revelations brought to us by whistleblowers like Wikileaks and Edward Snowden. The reality is the images are probably run through algorithms. We know the state is building dossiers on everyone. To think our body scans are exempt is just naive. It may take special clearance to get to those images – or not. But regardless the one thing we can be sure of is this – these people do not tell the truth and threaten anyone who reveals just what they're up to. They'll deny what is happening until someone exposes them years down the road. But by then it's too late.

Simple AI technology and the facial scanning equipment utilised by Wal-Mart would be capable of not just tracking you but matching up your vehicle in the parking lot with your face. They can know who you are before you even step foot in their store – and what you're likely to buy. A little data mining will reveal a lot more and while Wal-Mart probably doesn't build the dossier at their headquarters in Arkansas, they can outsource the project and utilise the data – as can many other entities including the state.

If these people are sincere in their concerns, then roll back the Patriot Act, eliminate the TSA, and break-up the Department of Homeland Security – and outlaw all such data collection and surveillance technology in the realm of GPS and cameras.

It will never happen. The budget for DHS is in excess of $50 billion a year and it has over 250,000 employees – let alone contractors and the like. It's a colossus a self-perpetuating machine, a bureaucratic power in and of itself.

In the meantime US society is on a fast track to dystopia. Along with growing social unrest, and calls for the further empowerment of law enforcement, it faces a growing population, stretched resources, disease, and the dangerous and destructive commodification of disease. Along with a breakdown (or rather collapse) in social consensus, American society is under the stress of extreme political polarization and is feeling the strains of Capitalism's Social Darwinist and Utilitarian approaches to economics and ethics. The Right is by no means exempt from these factors and forces. All of these factors are further aggravated by the technological revolution we have experienced over the past thirty years. From the Internet, to mobile phones, to Smartphones, and social media, society is in many respects spinning out of control. Many sense this but no one knows what to do. They can't get the proverbial toothpaste back into the tube. The problem isn't just the technology. That's bad enough but when filtered into the larger social matrix – we have a disaster brewing.

From data collection, to omni-surveillance and endless marketing, we see life reduced to empty materialism and meaningless existence. With the total abdication of privacy, human identity and meaning are commodified, manipulated, and sold. Our televisions, phones, and computers spy on us, everything is tracked, we're barraged with obscene and disgusting ads and our phones ring endlessly with scammers of all varieties on the other end. Mine has rung twice with such calls just since I started re-reading this piece – the same repeated scam calls I get for business loans and a line of credit. And such intrusions and invasions are simply endured in this supposed democracy.

China is undergoing the same kind of degeneration and descent and because of its internal pressures (related to the rapidity of it social change and the sheer size of its population) it is perhaps experiencing it with a greater intensity. Dystopia is already at its door but the chaos is being curtailed by authoritarianism. It's all but inevitable that we'll see something similar here. As others have already noted the social credit system is in its nascent form in this society and even now is on the cusp of intensification. And the Smartphone will be the vehicle for its implementation. Will people abandon them and force a change on society – stripping away the power of the state and the financial interests that control it? Not a chance.

The behaviour of the public is just begging for authoritarian intervention. Just look at the way the role of the police has been transformed over the past thirty years. They're now called for everything – simple arguments, and even kids getting into a scuffle on the playground. There are other factors at work that feed this cultural degeneration – insurance, tort laws and other questions of civil jurisprudence, and in other cases sheer destructive avarice.

Christians had better be thinking through these issues. The blind leaders of the evangelical movement are corrupt and corrupting. They are caught up in their false dreams and under the spell of mammon and consequently they're leading the Church into a ditch. They're not watching out for you. They're not shepherding the sheep. They serve mammon and the political masters that have infiltrated their organisations. As such they're not only leading the church into disaster but in many cases into sin. The world we know is quickly disappearing. While the 'pastors' have been asleep at the helm, spewing out right-wing lies, this mammon-driven society has undergone massive changes. Focusing on the political, they have missed underlying causes and the spiritual issues at stake. They have danced around the symptoms and from time to time decried some social evil, attitude, or lifestyle (I'm talking about things in the realm of materialism, money, technology and definitions of success), but because of their commitment to numbers and money they have been afraid to strike at the decadent foundation and wake up the American Church from its Laodicean mammon-worshipping stupor. It may in fact be too late. The collapse it would seem is already underway. In other cases, their blindness prevents them from seeing what's happening and why. Deceived by the fog of worldview teaching, in many cases they fail to understand just how far they've moved away from the Christianity of the New Testament. Its doctrines and certainly its ethics are foreign to them and when confronted with them they become hostile.

This is not to say the Church won't survive. But as most American Christians associate the Church with institutions and bureaucracies – it will seem like it has collapsed. The Church will carry on but it will be in a different form – hopefully a more Biblical one. And its numbers are going to be a lot smaller. We're already seeing the harbingers of this coming reality. It's a moment of ecclesiastical and cultural doom and dread but one that also provides hope. I for one rejoice that the time may finally come when Christians will no longer be conscience-bound to meet in expansive wasteful buildings and subject to the dictates of corrupt denominational bureaucracies and hireling clerics. Hopefully they will also abandon the mammon dreams of this American idolatry and the heretical myths which undergird it.

But at the same time the price is going to be heavy one and the apostasy is going to be widespread. It's even now knocking at the door.

The Pilgrim Underground

19 April 2022

Mammon, Technology, and the Road to Dystopia

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