SURVEILLANCE EDUCATION: From Pre-School On, Learning To Be A Good Little Citizen Cog
The tools of corporate state surveillance and control are many, beginning with our children in school. From software to pillow talk, the methods are shameless, immoral and -- sadly -- effective.
Cartoon by Mark Taylor / DeMOCKracy.ink
Turning Our Children Into Things For Corporations
Education is meant to be an open ongoing process, not some officially distributed one-size-restricts-all straight jacket.
By Mark Taylor
DeMOCKracy.ink (11/22/24)
The true job of education is to teach how to think, not what to think.
We learn how to think by asking questions, hearing different opinions and open — even contentious — debate. We learn how to think by reading a wide variety of books, essays, poetry and history. Sometimes the process is uncomfortable, even stressful. Education is meant to be an open ongoing process, not some officially distributed one-size-restricts-all straight jacket.
Unfortunately, from Trump’s call for destroying the Department of Education to the identity censorship of woke campus liberals and Born-Again Christian demands to jam the Ten Commandments into the classroom, education in America is on the frontline of national division and collapse.
The quiet threat
But perhaps the biggest threat is the quietest one. The one that most parents have no idea about and most educators don’t fully grasp: the largely unseen interconnected web of software programs being used in schools. What authors Nolan Higdon and Allison Butler bring to light in their book “Surveillance Education: Navigating the Conspicuous Absence of Privacy in Schools,”
As with all tech, the user is — in this case our children — the product, as their online behaviors, interests, performance, quirks, idyl scrolling and mistakes are examined, catalogued, categorized, itemized, ranked and recorded forever. From pre-school on, the lives of our children are being digitized, quantified and marketed and all of it without their permission, even though the information will be used to constrain and commodify their entire lives to the benefit of corporate tech profit and government control.
The focus is on uniformity and quiet compliance; banal conformity and total monitoring.
Add the rapidly morphing technology of Artificial Intelligence into the mix and the schoolroom is becoming yet another profit pit for fascist tech bros like Elon Musk and Peter Theil and a tool of mass surveillance, suppression, control and a sluice gate for the military state.
49-minute video
The Chris Hedges Report (11/20/24)
Any technology created by the US military industrial complex and adopted by the general public was always bound to come with a caveat. To most, the internet, GPS, touch screen and other ubiquitous technologies are ordinary tools of the modern world. Yet in reality, these technologies serve “dual-uses”; while they convenience typical people, they also enable the mass coercion, surveillance and control of those very same people at the hands of the corporate and military state.
Nolan Higdon and Allison Butler, authors of “Surveillance Education: Navigating the Conspicuous Absence of Privacy in Schools,” join host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report. They explore the software and technology systems employed in K-12 schools and higher education institutions that surveil students, erode minors’ privacy rights and, in the process, discriminate against students of color.
“I think we could see that in a pretty short amount of time our classrooms won't be thought of as places of curiosity and inquisitiveness, they will be thought of as places of passively accepting very benal, careful information at the same time they're going to probably look pretty cool because our surveillance technologies — all of our technologies — are very sophisticated looking. They are cutting edge. They are often hand-me-downs … from the military-industrial complex.”
— Allison Butler
“This book challenges these fallacious assumptions and argues that the use of digital media technologies has caused great harm to students by subjecting them to oppressive levels of surveillance, impinging upon their right to privacy, and harvesting their personal data on behalf of Big-Tech.” — From book description
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time when the United States is a service and information economy.”
— Carl Sagan
DASTARDLY DECEIT & DECEPTION: Law Enforcement Targeting Reform Movements
agent provocateur (noun): one employed to associate with suspected persons and by pretending sympathy with their aims to incite them to some incriminating action.
By Mark Taylor
DeMOCKracy.ink (11/22/24)
Get ready folks, while the particular example of heinous police abuse in the short Guardian video, “We Did Not Consent” is from England, there's going to be a lot of this kind of stuff to come as the corporate mind blob ramps up to crush growing resistance movements. Not long ago we witnessed how as the Occupy Movement spread across the country it became heavily infested with police agent provocateurs.
The first I learned of it was in a video of a group of black-hooded "protesters" who disrupted a peaceful protest in Oregon by suddenly rushing in and smashing store windows. Police immediately jumped in and — with little resistance — hauled them off. Video showed the violent “protesters” wearing — surprise — the exact same boots as the cops. Such staged actions smeared the Occupy Movement, eroded public support and excused brutal police crackdowns.
As with the Occupy Movement, the ant-Vietnam War and civil rights movements were riddled with government agents. Famous black photojournalist Ernest Withers documented the civil rights work of MLK, capturing some of the most iconic images of King’s work, including “blood flowing into King’s room from the balcony at the Lorraine Motel”. He was well known and trusted among civil rights leaders. Turns out he was a FBI informant. MLK knew the photographer and -- I am assuming -- let him photograph meetings with organizers and other leaders. Names of those in attendance and information and planning Withers overheard was promptly passed along to the FBI. (Link for excellent podcast on Withers.)
A model for change and call to resist
Pay attention people, it's gonna be worse and AI will add a sinister new twist. Their goal is to create tension, division, rumor and paranoia in protest movements. Study the disciplined labor and radical movements of the early 20th Century, which were firmly grounded in political and economic theory and discipline. As good as it is to do, waving a sign at a protest march is not enough. Especially given what we are in the middle of.
Check out the book ‘If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade And The Missing Revolution’ by Vincent Bevins (author of 'The Jakarta Method' -- another must-read for organizers) and the Chris Hedges interview with Bevins below.
Oh, And As To Police Agent Provocateurs Who Infest Peace And Economic Justice Movements: Shame on you. Perverting your oath in the name of protecting and enriching big money criminals and institutions of oppression is about the most cowardly betrayal of your fellow citizens one can imagine. You are being played and helping to create a world that will harm us all, including you and your family. You’re on the wrong and dirty side of history.
A Final Note Of Warning: Remember, it is not illegal for police officers to lie to you, so if they arrest you tell them only one thing — “I want to speak to an attorney.”
Check out Five Facts About Police Deception & Youth You Should Know.
‘WE DID NOT CONSENT’: A Restaging Of Britain's Undercover Police Scandal Exploiting & Abusing Women Activists
The Guardian (11/20/24)
Undercover police officers have infiltrated UK activist networks and forged relationships with individual women for over 50 years, some fathering children with them. Now, three women – disguised by theatrical masks – who were targeted by ‘spy cops’ seek to take charge of their own stories, restaging emblematic scenes and reclaiming the narrative.
18-minute video
'If We Burn': The Limits Of Mass Protest
The Chris Hedges Report
The Real News Network (4/12/24)
The 2010s were a decade of revolt. From Athens to Atlanta, Santiago to Seoul, a global wave of protest brought masses of people into confrontation with the status quo, demanding an end to neoliberalism, racism, climate change, and more. Yet despite this upswell of grassroots political activity, little lasting, positive change followed. What sparked the past decade of mass protest? Why didn't it result in political transformation?
Vincent Bevins, author of 'If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution', joins The Chris Hedges Report for a retrospective on the decade that set the world on fire, and how to adapt its lessons for the challenges ahead.
58-minute video
“From the so-called Arab Spring to Gezi Park in Turkey, from Ukraine’s Euromaidan to student rebellions in Chile and Hong Kong, acclaimed journalist Vincent Bevins provides a blow-by-blow account of street movements and their consequences, recounted in gripping detail. He draws on four years of research and hundreds of interviews conducted around the world, as well as his own strange experiences in Brazil, where a progressive-led protest explosion led to an extreme-right government that torched the Amazon.” — From book description
“Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like.”
— Ulrike Meinhoft
We need to keep talking about these issues, as so many people only hear about good things about online education and have no idea about how there is little to no privacy protection for students, teachers, and families.
Valuable, absolutely ESSENTIAL information.