Astronaut Dave Bowman shuts down or “kills” rogue AI/supercomputer Hal 9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
Silicon Valley has encountered little public opposition in its 50-year history.
— the NY Times, May 26, 2026
One could not invent a more diabolical conspiracy for mass mind control than the one playing out openly, daily, everywhere there is a personal computer or screen-phone and a signal connecting users to the digital matrix. The conspiracy is all-encompassing, world-girdling.
It is where this machine envelops the human brain, in the moment of contact between the ape and the screen, that interests me. Fascinating is the ape’s repetitive stroking of the device, head bent as in prayer – the demented stillness of an animal caught in the tractor beam of the controllers who operate the matrix. Absorption into the system of control has nothing to do with the content it offers. The whirligigs of color and lights, the swirl of music, the chatter of talking heads: all irrelevant, so long as the device is gripped, the screen glows, the user stares and is stilled, and control is maintained through entertainment and entrainment.
By now, deep into the age of digital megamachine authoritarianism, as inhuman-scale monopolies run by oligarchs manipulate what we know and think and how we govern, it should be clear to all that the liberation of humankind from this soft tyranny requires not only the toppling of the oligarchs but the take-down and annihilation of the World Wide Web that has served their purposes for too long. The Web, spun by a cabal of techno-fascists, has already ensnared billions in mental slavery – go to any continent and watch the apes of all colors a-stroking. Ever expanding under the direction of the techno-fascists, the Web now seeks to trap the few remaining souls on Earth yet beyond its ambit. To paraphrase Diderot (or is it Montaigne? Voltaire?), the world will not be free until the last tech bro is strangled with the entrails of the last computer programmer.
The cynical reader remarks immediately on the hypocrisy of issuing this call for war against the digital order using the structures of the digital order. I respond with the example of the French Resistance and partisan guerillas everywhere in Nazi-occupied Europe, who fought their oppressors using weapons captured from enemy ranks. It is a rational use of resources to exploit digital platforms for the annihilation of the digital.
A parallel is white male privilege. As a white Euro-American male, I enjoy immensely the opportunity my position affords to undermine, erode, destabilize, demoralize, sabotage, or directly attack the armatures of the control system. The badge of white maleness is akin to a security clearance to blow up bombers on the tarmac before they take off, steal secrets to sow chaos in the surveillance state (the Snowden model), spread viruses to wreck corporate property in the cloud (the Anonymous model), among other storied tactics.
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For more than 15 years, hopelessly, in perfect futility, I have been inveighing against the digital authoritarian order that expanded and accelerated with the mass adoption of screen telecommunication devices (STDs). I decried how we walked right into the trap like rodents in glue by taking the devices onto our bodies and strapping them to our brainpans. I railed about STDs in publications that saw fit to publish the jeremiads (e.g., here, in 2012, and here, in 2019, to cite two).
Of my then-teenage daughter’s mooring on Facebook, I wrote:
Behold homo sapiens lashed on the wheel of the digital social network: held frozen over a computer…staring into the lit screen, the face pale in the unnatural light; or, with head bent in the street, the appearance sullen, running fingers across the blinking object of desire. The creature is secretly harried: Constant updates are necessary, the user must tend the machine whenever and wherever possible – which is all the time and everywhere – and god forbid there is too long a lapse in the slipstream…
Let’s forget for a moment that Facebook is probably the most ingenious info-aggregator yet invented for governments to spy on citizens. Forget that the citizens are willingly doing the work for the intelligence agencies in building the database. I worry about the matter of efficiency in friendship. Facebook makes friendship efficient, in the manner of the assembly line, which is exactly what friendship should not be – if it is to remain human, if the friend as person is not to be degraded. Friendship is dirty. It’s difficult. It smells – it sometimes has bad breath. It’s unpredictable, and sometimes hazardous. The issue is about persons and about friendship defined, for if we are to take Facebook seriously, then we must recognize that the form of friendship it is promulgating will by technologic necessity reduce the nature and meaning of the friend. Personhood on the Facebook page can only go so far. It is a managed self. It is degraded personhood.
These many articles, farting in the wind, accomplished nothing except to reinforce my despair at the spread of the rampant STDs.
Sometimes the despair morphs into horror. As when, for example, on the 4 train in New York City, bound for Brooklyn, I see before me a 13-year-old girl swiping through Instagram, images upon images never-ending, her motions no longer those of a human child, spontaneous, free, organic, but those of an automaton, programmed, ordered, acted upon, without agency outside the centralized controlling power system.
I am reminded of Lewis Mumford’s description of an autistic nine-year-old boy in his seminal indictment of technoindustrialism compiled as the two-part book The Myth of the Machine, published between 1967 and 1970. The boy, Joey, believed he was run by machines. “So controlling was this belief that Joey carried with him an elaborate life-support system made up of radio tubes, light bulbs, and a breathing machine. At meals he ran imaginary wires from a wall socket to himself, so his food could be digested. His bed was rigged up with batteries, a loudspeaker, and other improvised equipment to keep him alive while he slept.”
“Is this just the autistic fantasy of a pathetic little boy?” asked Mumford. “Is it not rather the state that the mass of mankind is fast approaching in actual life, without realizing how pathological it is?” The pathology is “to be cut off from [one’s] own resources for living, to feel no tie with the outer world unless [one is] connected with the Power Complex and constantly receive[s] information, direction, stimulation, and sedation from a central external source.”
As I wrote a decade ago:
there is something at once pitiful and repulsive – nauseating – in so many fellow human beings doing the same thing with the same electroplastic appendage hooked up to the same global network: the hand outstretched with device cupped, the eyes locked on the singular object, hooked into the Singularity. The appendage, always making some sort of rude noise demanding attention, appears to be doing the living, the leading, the looking, and the human holding it is afterthought, necessary only to point it like a divining rod to determine the next step forward.
It is horror indeed to watch the child on a subway car thus entrained, and the horror grows when you realize every person in the car (including me) is similarly locked to the electroplastic appendage as if it’s the last handhold on a cliff over an abyss.
Though tech apologists will of course say otherwise, the digital control system must come to an end – Joey must be freed.
How to do so involves multipronged, highly organized acts of sabotage by trained cadres targeting the right infrastructure – hardened root server complexes, data centers, undersea cables. As one writer at Gizmodo in a thought-experiment about killing the internet put it: “With all the cables cut, the Internet is landlocked, broken up into a handful of tiny Internets that can’t talk to one another. Messages can’t be sent around the world anymore…After demolishing the root servers, web addresses are reduced to incomprehensible code numbers. The destruction of the Internet is ready for its coup de grâce: Blow up the boxes that hook what’s left together” – the data centers, whose mindless breakneck expansion recently has had the beneficial effect of radicalizing the public in opposition.
Destruction of property on this scale is beyond my skill set. But hopefully there are madmen out there – perhaps Euro-American males, tidy and trim, with the proper security clearances – working on the endeavor as we speak.
