The battle to control:

Author: David Blane

Information can now be seen as the new gold worth many trillions of dollars, because if you control the information you clearly can then also control the wealth, which in turn gives you control over the population.

When you short-circuit a populations critical faculty and moral sense, the population will obey authority with no need for force because authority has defined what the population think.

Such control requires the monopolization of information, and it is no wonder that we now find ourselves in the middle of an epic battle for power in cyberspace. On one side are the traditional, organised, institutional powers such as governments and large multinational corporations. On the other are the distributed and nimble: grass-roots movements, dissident groups, hackers, and criminals.

Noam Chomsky pointed out, in both the "old" and "new" world orders the central goal has pivoted around the issue of control by the minority elite who pursue controlling strategies to "engineer" affairs in line with their objectives, such as staying in control by keeping the population contented and docile.

That being said Noam Chomsky is also a prominent member of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, or DiEM25, a Pan-European political movement launched in 2015 by former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis.

The movement's declared aim is to reinvigorate the idea of Europe as a union of people governed with democratic consent rather than what the movement fears the European Union is heading to: a superstate ruled by technocrats issuing edicts.

But what truly is democratic consent, and have we ever truly had it anyway? or more to the point what is a legitimate government past and present anyway when transnational corporations head-quartered on both sides of the Atlantic been deciding all the nuts and bolts issues anyway.

Legitimacy demands above all the consent of the governed. This in turn means that the governed must have the capacity to reject illegitimate authority. But what if they are unable to detect and identify illegitimate rule in the first place? what if the real governing bodies are shadowy entities, known mostly to specialists and which carefully refrain from publicising their activities? What is the citizens recourse? And more to the point when does it actually become important to the citizen anyway if he/she is content in life?

There is a certain hypocrisy, for those like DiEM25 who challenge the past and current systems of control because those systems of control have got us out of the cave and into the most technological advanced civilisation that has ever lived, and of course some parts of the path in history have been brutal and unfair.

Just what is the case for radically changing the system of control, and where is the empirical evidence to support a better system, than we already have, a system which itself has evolved with time and continues to evolve, and better itself.

Technology is neither intrinsically good nor bad. However, the courts expressed the opinion that people must be responsible and held accountable for how it is used. The problem is that technology is almost always ahead of strategy, tactics and the law.

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