The Chips are Down

Ok, so I thought of another thing to write about (I really want to avoid that essay).

The whole biometric chip thing is starting to freak me out. Not so much because I'm afraid some evil dictator will use it to implant the numerical value of his name (which happens to be 666) into the hands and foreheads of the world's population, and thereby damn them all to hell--although I guess if you read Revelations with slavish literality and rotten hermeneutics (like Tim Lahaye), that's as good a way as any to do it.

No, I'm scared of it for the same reason I'm scared of most technology, the Internet included: because I don't know where people will stop.

On the one hand, technological innovations are great. They ease our lives, eliminate labor, increase productivity, and so on. In short, they give man power over nature and, since nature can be a witch (by which I mean another word, which you can figure out. This is, after all a public blog), this can be a good thing: I am generally in favor of having food. But they also give some men power over others: think of the power wielded by a Carnegie or Rockefeller in the early twentieth century, or of a Gates or the House of Saud in the twenty-first. The greater the technological advancement, the more centralized its control and production: an early medieval peasant could hope to manufacture a horse collar or wheeled plow; a village could cooperate to construct a windmill. But what individual could make a combine from scratch, and what small community could hope to make a power plant from its own resources? And so, we are pushed farther and farther towards technocracy.

The chips represent this process accelerated exponentially. The convenience is staggering: no lines, no banks, super-convenient credit. But the sacrifice of freedom is even more so: who would consent to having an outside power able to monitor where you go, when you sleep, what you eat? Who would sacrifice what is maybe the most basic human right--the inviolability of the body--by sticking something foreign in it? Who cares? Big brother is watching, so smile for the camera.

And people--those fool ducklings--don't raise a peep. It's inevitable, don't you know, the long slow progress of modernity and technology. Follow where evolution leads. Don't they read the right books anymore--whatever happened to 1984, anyway? Don't they remember history, or do they think that human nature has really improved that much since Stalin and McCarthy? Failing that, you'd at least think they'd take the hint from the movies, but then maybe people were so caught up in the bad philosophy of (say) the Matrix or V for Vendetta that they failed to notice just how scary those movies are. Or, maybe, just maybe, we've gotten so used to the encroachments of technology that we're unable to lift a finger to oppose it. After all, our phones can track where we are, and our credit cards reveal what, where, and when we buy things, and satellites watch our cars, and so on. Isn't it time to cut all the unnecessary hassle and waste, and simplify? Wouldn't it be more efficient to have one thing--one little chip--that could monitor all that for you? Well?

Maybe it is inevitable. But if the chip is the next step...what comes after that? The answer, of course, is selective genetic engineering of embryos, but I'll leave that for another time.

Fight the man.