No. It’s not your imagination. You’re not a conspiracy hysteric. There is a force out there that is controlling our economic, political and social lives to an extraordinary extent, reducing one of the most sacred traditional rights of a free society, privacy, to increasing irrelevance. To give it a name, call it the MASC — the Marketing-Security Complex.
In a 1961 speech, President Dwight Eisenhower used a term akin to this, the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC), sometimes rendered as Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (MICC), to describe a collaboration of people in the Pentagon and its weapons contractors, along with enablers in congress, who were shaping national spending priorities, foreign policy priorities, and a number of other government-linked priorities in unseemly, and many would argue, highly destructive ways.
Twelve years prior to Eisenhower’s speech, in 1949, George Orwell published his terrifying political dystopia, 1984. It described a society in which a totalitarian government was capable or monitoring virtually all parts of an individual’s private as well as public life.
Put these two together, Orwell’s dystopia with Eisenhower’s Military-Industrial Complex, substituting a present-day anti-terrorism rationale for the MIC’s Cold War one, then add in a huge dose, a very huge dose, of the belief that promoting sales of private company products and services in any and all ways possible is a transcendentally important goal of society. Atop this note the phenomenal development of monitoring and data mining technologies in recent decades. You end with a justification for the MASC and what has made its extraordinary influence possible.
One other factor than comes to the fore here: the lack of effective resistance to the MASC’s astonishing growth. It has been made possible by a combination of fear, greed, and social insecurity.
The fear, of course, has a logical basis, just as did the fear of Soviet expansionism was a logical basis for the Military-Industrial Complex. Communism did seek to dominate the world. Terrorists do want to repeat on a larger scale their 9/11 attack. Yet this is the kind of fear that feeds on itself, invariably leading to the emergence of new possible threats, which generate an ever increasing need for more security-based surveillance, which soon becomes increasingly possible with more effective and intrusive monitoring improvements, which develops technologies that those who wish us harm can themselves adopt and use to threaten us more.
With respect to greed: The MASC’s marketing-based intrusiveness is more acceptable on these shores than almost anywhere else. In his great book, The Gilded Age, Mark Twain noted that before his time (the late 19th century) Americans simply wanted money, but during his time they came to worship it. Only such continued worship, a toxic form of greed, can explain why Americans are willing to permit almost any kind of intrusion related to their personal tastes, where they buy, what they buy, what they read, what they eat, how they vote, what they watch, where they visit, et. al. to be mined and collated into a vastly expanded marketing-based electronic versions of the old East German Stasi’s personal political dossiers.
With respect to social insecurity: You have our national obsession with standing out, being recognized, gaining notoriety for almost anything, fifteen minutes of being famous even if only for being astonishingly idiotic. Within this mind frame, what could seem evil in intruding on one’s privacy? If you’re giving away intimate details of your personal life copiously via social media on a daily basis, the value of privacy is being cheapened anyway. So what if a government security apparatus and marketing data miners are taking away the rest?
It is impossible to list all the ways our lives, public and private, economic and political, social and sexual, are today being monitored, tabulated, analyzed, judged, acted upon. And how utterly pathetic are the attempts to limit these MASC intrusions.
It seems to me that there’s an almost evolutionary trend at work here. An evolutionary road to hivedom. A total interconnection in the name of better commerce and safety from a few crazies.
In the Bible, Esau got a bowl of porridge for his birthright. What are we getting for selling our privacy birthright to the MASC? A purported bit of more security from a small gang of religious fanatics? A higher FICO score so we can get into debt faster?
I feel myself becoming more and more a part of a greater whole. And less of a self that can only exist when separate. Is the growing omnipotence of the MASC that is bringing this about an awful power that should be checked? I truly believe so. But I haven’t the slightest idea of how this might be done.
This author’s soon to be published book: This God-Awful Political Season (In Verse).