Like, sorry for obviously doomer posting. Sorry if this sounds like a fed-post to deter people from protesting/organizing - which I don't mean to do by any means. But like... honestly, how is anything going to change? Materially. Logistically.
We're living in a country and a time where you can literally have your life ruined for simply taking your phone with you to a protest. Sentenced with fines or imprisonment. Or at the very least charged with all that shit, and having your life completely fucked over by it. Idk about the rest of you, but I don't think my job would keep me around if I didn't show up one morning because I was arrested at a protest, much less because of the stigma of "unprofessional behavior" that has. And it took months to get the job in my field I have now, and I'm just barely getting by - and this is as someone privileged to have some help from parents and no dependents.
On a larger scale, how the fuck is any protest or action by anyone gonna change things? Anything that ideally would be influential enough to change things (ie [REDACTED] style things) would probably be prevented the moment anyone even considered it, the feds descending on those involved the moment any email sent or plan spoken aloud. How the hell can anything change in this country short of an all out intervention by China or some sort of a unified South American socialist coalition? How can any movement on the ground in the US change shit at this point from inside the oppressive police state we live in? How is any sort of "organizing" or protesting done right now any more effective than electoralism? I mean, remember 2020? Literally shit all came from that.
I just feel so hopeless and conflicted. Is it really worth it going on on the street to a protest and getting my shit rocked by a cop in the fucking juggernaut's armor with a metal baton and bean bag gun, or run over by a pickup truck chud plowing through an intersection if nothing will change like it didn't with 2020 or Ferguson? Is it wrong to have thoughts in my head worrying about the conflict of wanting to have some sort of successful artistic career VS abandoning any sense of bourgeois societal participation and spending my time and what little money I have solely focused on "revolutionary" organization in a country that will ruin me if I do anything besides silently hold a sign, alone, in a public park between the hours of 9am and 5pm?
How do we/I find hope of winning when we live in a literal country-wide panopticon?
I wish this was a fed post. I wish I was getting paid for this. I wish I didn't feel hopeless. I wish I was one of those evil, ghoulish fuckers toasting champagne rn over their hegemonic control as they repress us more and more each day. Instead this is a cry for help from someone who literally doesn't know what they should be doing or risking as we sink deeper in the shit.
Yeah that’s a great example of what I mean.
Scaling up always creates unexpected problems and there has never been a panopticon of this scale before.
I’m sure the worst is yet to come. but at a certain point the info you have has to be parsed by a human mind and every member of the panopticon parsing team has to be completely ideologically committed so they don’t risk a whistleblower or spy. That vetting process will seriously limit the candidate pool, and then they have to stay ideologically committed while staring into the maw of this extra legal nightmare surveillance machinery that they have no reason to believe isn’t watching them too.
Maybe it’s naive but it’s worth considering that atleast part of the reason the State can never seem to use this capacity to actually prevent anything is because a panopticon of this scale is a lot more unwieldy from the inside looking out that it seems from the outside looking in. I mean if that’s the case then doing things like baiting lonely Muslim youths into doing dumb stuff also makes sense. Instead of the rationale being “gladio style strategy of tension” the rationale is “look let’s get some numbers on the board to justify this surveillance apparatus before we get accused of being wasteful and ineffective” because it may seem meaningless but I’m sure the fact the “fed posting” has become a meme in left and right wing online spaces is of some concern to the ghouls at Langley.
Maybe I’m way off base here and we should all definitely practice good and thorough opsec. But I still find myself wondering what the minimum staffing requirements are for a panopticon that watches everyone in the U.S. To be effective and then how easy is it to recruit a team of that size for such a sensitive task.