Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control [Paperback]

Derrick Jensen (Author), George Draffan (Contributor)

Book Description

Series: Politics of the Living | Publication Date: July 1, 2004

You could call them the Monkeywrench Gang of the nanotech age. Derrick Jensen and George Draffan are taking down the data mining industry, one converted mind at a time. In the face of RFID chips, consumer tracking strategies, and illegal government wiretapping, Jensen and Draffan are determined to show consumers how to fight back against government and industry to regain their rights, their privacy, and their humanity. In their new book, “Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control,” Jensen and Draffan take a hart-hitting look at the way technology is used as a machine, to control us and our environment. Their results are startling. If the prospect of perpetual surveillance and psychological warfare alarms you, you are not alone. Most people would be disturbed if you told them that everything from their store purchases to their public transit rides are recorded and filed for government or corporate access. But more often than not, the smooth, silent cleanliness of its operation allows the Machine of Western Civilization to go unnoticed. In “Welcome to the Machine,” Jensen and Draffan draw our attention back to its eerie, persistent white noise and take a cold, hard, human look at the cultural conditions that have led us to all but surrender to its hum. Jensen and Draffan, who teamed up in 2003 to expose industrial corruption and destruction in “Strangely Like War: The Global Assault on Forests,” are back to reveal both the terrifying extent of surveillance today and our chilling complacency at the loss of everything from consumer privacy to civil liberties. In this timely and important new collaboration, Jensen and Draffan take on all aspects of Control Culture: everything from the government's policy of total information awareness to a disturbing new technology where soldiers can be given medication to prevent them from feeling fear. They write about pharmaceutical packaging that reports consumer information, which is then used to send targeted drug advertisements directly to your TV.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Derrick Jensen is the prize-winning author of A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, Listening to the Land, Strangely Like War, Welcome to the Machine, and Walking on Water. He was one of two finalists for the 2003 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, which cited The Culture of Make Believe as "a passionate and provocative meditation on the nexus of racism, genocide, environmental destruction and corporate malfeasance, where civilization meets its discontents." He is an environmental activist and lives on the coast of northern California.

Product Details

• Paperback: 296 pages
• Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing (July 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1931498520
• ISBN-13: 978-1931498524
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #467,172 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

41 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars EXIT THE MACHINE, October 3, 2004

By 

J.W.K (Nagano, Japan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control (Paperback)

Imagine a future in which the governmental and corporate sectors have total control over people; where they share full disclosure of all information about you - from what you had for breakfast seven years ago to the type of fantasies you play out in your head when no one is looking - and that they use this information to make sure you stay in line and, of course, to sell you things. Imagine a future where every motion, thought, and act is recorded, analyzed and incorporated into a system of Absolute Control. As Jensen and Draffan show in this book, such a future is rapidly approaching. In fact, it is almost here.

A few up-coming technologies discussed in this book include: Radio frequency tags (RFID) that have the power to number, identify, catalog and track every item in the world; mind-reading machines; thought implantation, using a beam of sound transmitted from hundreds of yards away so focused that only one person can hear it; ubersoldiers that can leap buildings, deflect bullets with hard exoskeletons and even become invisible; remote-controlled animals; vehicle tracking systems; nanotechnologies that can target and destroy a specific group of people; pills for everything - including the suppression of pesky emotions, like fear and remorse; the e-man and uploading the human brain; smart dust; Domestic Control Hover Drones: silent, remote controlled drones capable of chasing people at fifty miles per hour, equipped with video cameras, thermal imaging sensors, microphones which can pick up a conversation at more than a quarter mile, voice transmitters ("Stop, this is the police!") and a stun-gun.

Frightened yet? No worries. "So long as you do what they tell us, we have nothing to hide, and nothing to fear." Right? Along with the authors, I am not so sure about that. The oppressive technologies Jensen and Draffan discuss in this book are downright terrifying. Yet it is really terrifying to know that our government is developing much scarier things behind closed doors. Those technologies we know about are the ones that are supposed to wow us over. However, for me personally, there is nothing awe-inspiring about the prospect of having my thoughts read, hearing Big Brother's voice in my ear, being chased by hover drones, or digitally chipped with an RFID tag. There is nothing inspiring about living inside Bentham's Panopticon. No, so long as we do what they tell us, we have everything to fear.

Yet long before we allow ourselves to be ruled by outward machines, we must submit to the fundamentalist machine religions of Christianity, Science, Capitalism, Bureaucracy and Progress. These institutions obliterate diversity by coercing us into distrusting our own direct experience and defer to experts. The mantras of futility should sound familiar: outside science there is no knowledge; outside technology there is no comfort; outside capitalism there are no economic transactions; outside industrial civilization there is no humanity, and outside the Panopticon there is no security. Outside the system, nothing is imaginable.

Running concomitant with the progress of science and technology is the disempowerment of people, our increasing separation from nature and the exponential growth of social chaos. As history advances, we are increasingly individualized, stripped naked under the gaze of a cold, abstract power. As bureaucracy and its rules of efficiency, quantification and redundancy expand, we experience the death of creativity, spontaneity and hope. Progress becomes a sort of downward spiral, in which every emotion "except pain, rage, triumph, and self-abasement" are eradicated, to borrow from Orwell. "Everything else we will destroy - everything."

Aside from the great pyramids of technology and power, there really isn't much left to destroy in the natural world. We have already laid waste to the earth: We have initiated the greatest extinction in 65 million years, the primeval forests have been largely leveled, the climate has been irrevocably altered, and all of the air, food and water we need to live as organic beings has been laced with deadly pollutants. Really, what's left? What is worth saving in this system of destruction?

What the panoptic guards do not want you to know is that there is another way to live. Indeed, there are many other ways. Thousands of tribal cultures succeeded (and the ones that are left are still succeeding, insofar we let them) in living harmoniously in the natural world. As the authors note, these cultures were based on gift giving and the maintenance of close, face-to-face relationships that encourage egalitarianism. Our culture, on the other hand, the culture of the machine, is based upon economic relationships characterized by buying and selling. Lawyers and shopkeepers are the primary mediators.

How do we leave the panopticon? What's the exit strategy? "All it will take for this whole rotten system to collapse is for enough of us to learn to say NO. And to say NO again. And again. And again." Say no to your destructive job, and do something positive. Say no to the global economy, and start living locally. Say no to politics, and stage a revolution. Say no to your car, and walk for a change. Say no to oppression, and exit the machine.

JWK

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The most depressing author alive, September 12, 2005

By 

Eric Krupin (Salt Lake City, UT) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control (Paperback)

Even as a converted Jensen-ite, there were times during this book when it came across as the "horrible conspiracy theory crazy talk" that the one-star reviewer below described. However, I came to see those moments as rhetorical exaggerations in the service of a deeper underlying truth.

If we agree that Starbucks is not going to be beaming advertising directly into your cerebral cortex any time soon, it behooves us to ask why we're so sure. Because that corporation would certainly have the modesty and decency not to saturate our environment with their product and advertising? Uh... hmm... Because of the fundamental respect they have for our individuality? Well, probably not. (And why should they? If you're getting your coffee at Starbucks, how individual do you think you are?) Because scientists would never lend themselves to such a dehumanizing project? Their record strongly suggests otherwise. Because no one would ever sign up for it? Do you know how many hours of television the *average* American watches in a day to numb them to the alienated misery of their life? [And who says you'll have a choice? How much choice did you have about getting your kid injected with a disease... excuse me, I meant "immunized"? Or having them assigned a tracking number... excuse me, I meant "Social Security number"?] Because it's just too science fictional? Not a safe bet. Could you have imagined 20 years ago how the Internet would change your life? Not just the convenience of book buying on Amazon, of course, but the end of written correspondence and the skyrocketing of identity theft?

If you're honest, I think you'll have to concede Jensen's real point here. Which is that if Starbucks is not *already* beaming advertising directly into your cerebral cortex, it is only because the Machine has not yet provided them with the means for doing so. And that the Machine will *inevitably* seek out this power (or some more cost-efficient alternative) to make you a better-fitting cog for its operation - in the pious name of "boosting the economy" or "homeland security", of course.

So long story short: the Machine is already at least 90% finished "processing" the indigenous peoples of the world, the large fish population, and first-growth forests into corpses (fishsticks and junk-mail brochures are corpses too) - which is its ultimate Product. In the course of that achievement, it has created measurable level of dioxins in the breast milk of every woman on the planet, flushed away millions of tons of topsoil, and set us speeding down the path to irreversible global warming. Our middle-class American hope is that It will be kind enough to stop there - while we can "enjoy" our frozen dinners, SUVs, and "reality shows" - without killing all of us as well.

But a Machine doesn't have feelings. And it has gotten terribly efficient at what it does.

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Security is Slavery, February 12, 2005

By 

doomsdayer520 (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control (Paperback)

This book did not turn out to be what I expected, given the publisher's description, but that's okay. This is not an investigative report or in-depth description of new surveillance and tracking technologies. Instead, these new technologies are used as examples in a modern philosophical screed by Jensen (with an unclear amount of input from George Draffan) on the human condition vis-à-vis the modern surveillance state, in a hard-hitting tome that is usually downright fun to read, and often terrifying. So instead of being blandly scientific, what we have here is an exploratory essay that is hugely insightful on the current state of humanity, and is also engagingly polemical, sarcastic, inflammatory, and even condescending in places. The book must be docked one star because the sarcasm and guilt-tripping sometimes sap the power from Jensen's arguments, while his basic points become very repetitive as the book lurches along. The recommendations for improving the current state of humanity are also pretty thin, not reaching too far beyond basic resistance, class struggle, and community. But in the end we do have a truly terrifying vision of how modern technologies in surveillance, information gathering, biotech, and computing are putting the common man under more control than ever. Under the guise of convenience, efficiency, and (especially in the most recent times) security and protection, governments and corporations have more control over the lives of common people than ever before, and it's only going to get worse. Despite the minor weaknesses in this book's particular writing style, you'll find that Derrick Jensen is a brilliant modern humanist philosopher, and if that's what you expect from this book then you'll be pleased - and greatly disturbed. [~doomsdayer520~]