Just Finished Reading: Welcome to the Machine – Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control by Derrick Jensen and George Draffan

This was a rather strange book and turned out to be not quite what I was expecting. I have been interested for some time now in the ways societies control their citizens. This has become more acute since the events of 9/11 and the subsequent so-called War on Terror. Governments are increasingly using surveillance and other techniques against their own populations in the name of security. We have yet to witness the end of Government intrusion into our daily lives.

Although this book does indeed cover that area, the problems I had with it far outweighed any interesting or informative arguments it may have contained. Almost from the first page the reader is presented with what is best described as a rabid attack on science, capitalism, rationality and anything that smacked of Western culture. Only, the authors argued, when we turn our backs on these ‘evils’ will we be truly free and fulfil our human potential. Significant parts of this book proved to be a struggle as arguments against technology and capital were layered over each other in what I can only imagine was the vain hope that something would eventually cause a cogent argument to emerge from the mess. Unfortunately this was not the case.

This was a real shame because, beneath all the bile, there are actual arguments to make against the way the West is run and the way Capital pervades, transforms and shatters lives. Whispers of useful critiques drifted through the book like ghosts apparently unseen for the most part by the authors. Without a clearly focused approach they singularly failed to make their arguments stick too often racing ahead into fantasies of dystopian paranoia. I’m sure that this work wasn’t supposed to be funny in any way but I admit that I laughed out loud on several occasions as they presented blue sky theorising as inimical near future or present covert technology which is, in reality, either still years if not decades away or simply too impractical to produce or deploy.

We in Europe and the US are certainly in danger of drifting, or being pushed, into a surveillance society as envisaged in this book but I doubt if such a controlled world is likely or even possible. Human beings are born contrarians who know deep in their hearts that resistance is never futile but is on the contrary truly character building. Some of Jensen’s and Draffan’s fears are not without foundation but I do feel that they protest far too much.