It started with the cat. She began hissing and running about the house for no apparent reason. I suspect she was bitten or stung.
There was a sharp escalation when I was doing some reading (yeah I should be avoiding this and enjoying the mountains; call it an addiction) and an emotional revelation hit regarding the state of things. It is a strange state of affairs: slowly the mythology is being peeled back, as empire is revealed for what it is. And as the populace grows more conscious, and a general unease spreads across the land, a material buildup continues quietly in response.
The mass surveillance itself has become a feeding frenzy. They've already built a massive Costco-sized warehouse full of servers to store all of the information. They're collecting everything, so that they have a vast searchable matrix that can be mined for whatever they want whenever they need it. What can you do with that kind of information? You can sell it for insider and blackmail purposes. You can use it for blackmail yourself to gain power (they are stabbing each other in the back left and right; you can bet that is what is behind those sex scandals that make the news). You can use it to assist your corporate sponsors. You can use it to crush dissent (they're classifying environmental, consumer rights, civil liberties, and other progressive activists as terrorists). They're even distributing it to local agencies for law enforcement purposes and covering up the nature of the illegal evidence.
What is puzzling is their fierce tenacity in attempting to maintain a veneer of legitimacy. This is a government that has gone far beyond the rule of law, where might makes right doctrines have been re-established with full force and Enlightenment-based conceptions of human rights and law have been pitched out the window. Why not simply declare the game over and tell everyone they are locking things down? Still going after whistleblowers, still insisting on tortured legal logic and highly intricate propaganda and theater. But then there is perhaps still a mass of people that haven't come to consciousness, though they may be vaguely aware something is wrong. It seems that as much energy as it takes to generate mythology and an air of legitimacy, it is still less energy than ruling by mere brute force.
The whole thing is incredible: the bloodless transformation (well there's plenty of blood but its hidden) of a free democratic society (well it never was but there was at least a better time) into a totalitarian dictatorship. It is the prophecy of all of the paranoid fantasies of Orwell's 1984 coming to fruition. It is all worse than I previously imagined. Hard to comprehend.
Creeping paranoia, and all of this culminating in a violent thunderstorm as the sun went down. Turned out those towering clouds were the crest of a thunderhead; underneath it a cascade of lightning flashes pulsed in the distance. What strange timing! A storybook setting if there ever was one. There's a reason countless dramas feature an increasingly deteriorating set of external circumstances, such as the culmination of a raging storm or the disintegration of the structural integrity of the surrounding environment as the peaking tension plays out in interpersonal dramas. This transformation of a society into something monstrous and the simultaneous increase of environmental chaos is no coincidence. All must take account of one another. Power becomes concentrated and proportionally smaller and powerful, which insulated and in danger (power antagonizes its surroundings by its nature) attempts to assert greater and greater control over a chaotic environment that its very operations are creating. We can expect greater, more spectacular and violent displays of nature due to climate change, and a totalitarian power made abominable by its fear and necessity for control. There is something very symmetrical and self-contained to the whole thing. Remarkable!
On a lighter note, I was woken up by the thunderstorm around 4:30 in the morning as it passed over. Instead of fear and a greater existential dread, it pacified me. It was beautiful. It lit up the darkness with bright blue and white flashes and the trees were outlined black outside the windows as the thunder crashed in waves - it was the sonic equivalent of an ocean wave breaking in tiers due to the tapered surface of the sand beneath it, it made one wonder if similar motions happened in the clouds above due to density variations, the thunder of which becomes a sonic imprint of the physical motions:
The storm passed in time and hovered beyond the trees, arcs of lightning flashing far away in the clouds as they moved on, leaving a serene sunrise in its wake:
That's the thing about these natural cycles: they remind that yes things grow violent and terrifying for the life caught up in them, but there is always another beginning following in its wake.
