The recent shooting tragedy has pushed to the forefront issues around gun control and monitoring mental health, yet the elephant in the room remains the State sponsored violence that occurs on a daily basis on a much larger scale. The pathology of lone gunmen within a pathological system is only a powerful shock when one believes the system as a whole is basically morally upright. The outrage, fear, and frustration that people are expressing casts into strong relief the the lack of anger, action, culpability, or even interest surrounding the mass murders we are collectively funding, and the environmental violence we are perpetrating, whose scope dwarfs the growing constellation of mass killers we have witnessed over the years. The lack of empathy for babies born with birth defects in Vietnam or Fallujah, the hundreds of thousands of children who died in Iraq during the 90's at the hands of US imposed economic sanctions, the countless civilians killed in our latest Middle East incursions, juxtaposed against Black Friday level consumption and the teary speech of Nobel Peace Prize winning President "I have a drone," is part of the same psychological soup from which Adam Lanza emerges. It is a world where what saddens us is not the depth to which we are all complicit in a culture of violence that spans the globe, but where instead we are fleetingly traumatized when seemingly senseless violence outside of ourselves victimizes individuals that remind us of those humans who we do value.
The current interdependent suffering we are wading through is a sticky societal syndrome, and cannot be "solved" technologically, when technology itself emerges not in some neutral space, but within a context of Machiavellian Realism occurring at a global scale, where, for example, corrupt forces turn the world's food commodities into gambling chips, and corral much of humanity into the futile pursuit of accumulating numbers. Realize that our economies depend upon destabilizing weapons exports. Realize that artificial intelligence research funding primarily comes from the military, and that the majority of financial trades come from unfeeling machines maximizing profit no matter what the human cost. And as the UN drug and crime tzar Antonio Maria Costa laid bare, during the 2008 financial collapse the illegal drug trade provided the needed source of liquid capital to keep our fraudulent way of life afloat. When former UBS banker Bradley Birkenfeld revealed that 20,000 millionaire and billionaire US clients, undoubted beneficiaries of military industrial complex investments, were illegally hiding their money from taxation in Swiss accounts, he was the only one to receive prison time. All things intertwine, and the foundations we have built upon are rotten to the core.
Adam Lanza is a convenient place to point our fingers, a sign post for the deepening augmented reality disconnect, in which we can tell ourselves that we as individuals and as a society are functioning in a sane manner, as we babble on about the endless fictions of pop culture. It is because we have never deeply grappled with the fact that we are a nation built upon land grabs, extermination, and slavery, (at best a passing source of guilt, and at worst something justified in the name of progress) that we collectively ignore the criminally violent, nationally orchestrated, and technologically facilitated behaviors which continue up to this very moment. It is also why we are simultaneously terrified by the implications of an Adam Lanza loose among us, armed with a technology far less destructive than a Hellfire missile, but for most of us living on this side of the Green Zone, far more menacing. Similarly, it is for this reason that things like psycho-pharmaceuticals at the macro scale will at best become a means for shaping desired elite outcomes within an undemocratically forged future, perhaps helping us better cope with the suffocating symptoms of realities we dare not approach. The 2012 NDAA, the Patriot Act, the lack of meaningful reforms and prosecutions after the financial meltdown, the Wallstreet entrenched two party war system, the absence of effective social change in the face of a climate destabilization which is outstripping scientific predictions, should be indicators not of what's to come, but what's already here. Adam Lanza is a mere ripple in the tidal wave. And while predictive analytics search for the next crime hotspot or neighborhood psycho, further empowering our gestating Homeland Security funded police state, the pathological CEO's, international financiers, and government fat cats will enjoy all the protections money, private and publicly funded security, and a brainwashed society can provide. Unless we are willing to make significant changes in our own lives and communities, outside of proposed gun control or health regulations, in all our moments of Shock and Awe, we will continue to depend upon the unstable order that this underlying, participatory violence creates.
The current interdependent suffering we are wading through is a sticky societal syndrome, and cannot be "solved" technologically, when technology itself emerges not in some neutral space, but within a context of Machiavellian Realism occurring at a global scale, where, for example, corrupt forces turn the world's food commodities into gambling chips, and corral much of humanity into the futile pursuit of accumulating numbers. Realize that our economies depend upon destabilizing weapons exports. Realize that artificial intelligence research funding primarily comes from the military, and that the majority of financial trades come from unfeeling machines maximizing profit no matter what the human cost. And as the UN drug and crime tzar Antonio Maria Costa laid bare, during the 2008 financial collapse the illegal drug trade provided the needed source of liquid capital to keep our fraudulent way of life afloat. When former UBS banker Bradley Birkenfeld revealed that 20,000 millionaire and billionaire US clients, undoubted beneficiaries of military industrial complex investments, were illegally hiding their money from taxation in Swiss accounts, he was the only one to receive prison time. All things intertwine, and the foundations we have built upon are rotten to the core.
Adam Lanza is a convenient place to point our fingers, a sign post for the deepening augmented reality disconnect, in which we can tell ourselves that we as individuals and as a society are functioning in a sane manner, as we babble on about the endless fictions of pop culture. It is because we have never deeply grappled with the fact that we are a nation built upon land grabs, extermination, and slavery, (at best a passing source of guilt, and at worst something justified in the name of progress) that we collectively ignore the criminally violent, nationally orchestrated, and technologically facilitated behaviors which continue up to this very moment. It is also why we are simultaneously terrified by the implications of an Adam Lanza loose among us, armed with a technology far less destructive than a Hellfire missile, but for most of us living on this side of the Green Zone, far more menacing. Similarly, it is for this reason that things like psycho-pharmaceuticals at the macro scale will at best become a means for shaping desired elite outcomes within an undemocratically forged future, perhaps helping us better cope with the suffocating symptoms of realities we dare not approach. The 2012 NDAA, the Patriot Act, the lack of meaningful reforms and prosecutions after the financial meltdown, the Wallstreet entrenched two party war system, the absence of effective social change in the face of a climate destabilization which is outstripping scientific predictions, should be indicators not of what's to come, but what's already here. Adam Lanza is a mere ripple in the tidal wave. And while predictive analytics search for the next crime hotspot or neighborhood psycho, further empowering our gestating Homeland Security funded police state, the pathological CEO's, international financiers, and government fat cats will enjoy all the protections money, private and publicly funded security, and a brainwashed society can provide. Unless we are willing to make significant changes in our own lives and communities, outside of proposed gun control or health regulations, in all our moments of Shock and Awe, we will continue to depend upon the unstable order that this underlying, participatory violence creates.
