{"id":38359,"date":"2018-09-27T06:03:19","date_gmt":"2018-09-27T11:03:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=38359"},"modified":"2018-09-27T06:03:19","modified_gmt":"2018-09-27T11:03:19","slug":"empire-of-lies-are-we-the-people-useful-idiots-in-the-digital-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=38359","title":{"rendered":"Empire of Lies: Are \u2018We the People\u2019 Useful Idiots in the Digital Age?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Empire of Lies: Are \u2018We the People\u2019 Useful Idiots in the Digital Age?<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cBack 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.\u00a0The phrase was \u201cuseful idiots\u201d and it applied to a good many people who should have known better.<\/a>\u00a0I 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.\u201d\u2014John Naughton,\u00a0The Guardian<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cWho needs direct repression,\u201d asked\u00a0philosopher Slavoj Zizek<\/a>, \u201cwhen one can convince the chicken to walk freely into the slaughterhouse?\u201d<\/p>\n

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

Call it doublespeak, call it hypocrisy, call it delusion, call it whatever you like, but the fact remains that while we claim to value freedom, privacy, individuality, equality, diversity, accountability, and government transparency, our actions and those of our government rulers contradict these much-vaunted principles at every turn.<\/p>\n

For instance, we claim to\u00a0disdain the jaded mindset of the Washington elite<\/a>, and yet we continue to re-elect politicians who lie, cheat and steal.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Empire of Lies: Are \u2018We the People\u2019 Useful Idiots in the Digital Age? \u201cBack 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.\u00a0The phrase was \u201cuseful idiots\u201d and it […]<\/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":[16631,1787,3460,338,21930,6420,1235,652,5723,765,16945],"class_list":["post-38359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-digital-age","tag-doublespeak","tag-empire-of-lies","tag-freedom","tag-hyprocrisy","tag-john-whitehead","tag-orwell","tag-privacy","tag-rutherford-institute","tag-surveillance","tag-useful-idiot"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38359","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=38359"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38359\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38360,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38359\/revisions\/38360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}