{"id":1774,"date":"2014-11-18T20:04:29","date_gmt":"2014-11-19T01:04:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=1774"},"modified":"2014-11-18T20:04:29","modified_gmt":"2014-11-19T01:04:29","slug":"the-rutherford-institute-are-we-the-people-useful-idiots-in-the-digital-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=1774","title":{"rendered":"The Rutherford Institute :: Are \u2018We the People\u2019 Useful Idiots in the Digital Age?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.rutherford.org\/publications_resources\/john_whiteheads_commentary\/are_we_the_people_useful_idiots_in_the_digital_age\">The Rutherford Institute :: Are \u2018We the People\u2019 Useful Idiots in the Digital Age?<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: #000000; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: normal;\">\n<p style=\"line-height: 18px; padding: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 14px 0px;\">Back in the heyday of the old Soviet Union, a phrase evolved to describe gullible western intellectuals who came to visit Russia and failed to notice the human and other costs of building a communist utopia. The phrase was \u201cuseful idiots\u201d and it applied to a good many people who should have known better. I now propose a new, analogous term more appropriate for the age in which we live: useful hypocrites. That\u2019s you and me, folks, and it\u2019s how the masters of the digital universe see us. And they have pretty good reasons for seeing us that way. They hear us whingeing about privacy, security, surveillance, etc., but notice that despite our complaints and suspicions, we appear to do nothing about it. In other words, we say one thing and do another, which is as good a working definition of hypocrisy as one could hope for.\u2014John Naughton,<em style=\"font-weight: normal;\">The Guardian<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"line-height: 18px; color: #000000; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; padding: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 14px 0px;\">\u201cWho needs direct repression,\u201d asked philosopher Slavoj Zizek, \u201cwhen one can convince the chicken to walk freely into the slaughterhouse?\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"line-height: 18px; color: #000000; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; padding: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 14px 0px;\">In an Orwellian age where war equals peace, surveillance equals safety, and tolerance equals intolerance of uncomfortable truths and politically incorrect ideas, \u201cwe the people\u201d have gotten very good at walking freely into the slaughterhouse, all the while convincing ourselves that the prison walls enclosing us within the American police state are there for our protection.<\/p>\n<p style=\"line-height: 18px; color: #000000; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; padding: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 14px 0px;\">&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Rutherford Institute :: Are \u2018We the People\u2019 Useful Idiots in the Digital Age?. Back in the heyday of the old Soviet Union, a phrase evolved to describe gullible western intellectuals who came to visit Russia and failed to notice the human and other costs of building a communist utopia. The phrase was \u201cuseful idiots\u201d [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1236,1235,765,786],"class_list":["post-1774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-hypocrisy","tag-orwell","tag-surveillance","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1774"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1774\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1775,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1774\/revisions\/1775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}