Cognitive dissonance in an era of high-tech surveillance
In the ongoing debate on the sustainability of high levels of rapid migration in terms of infrastructure and social cohesion, one trend just caught my eye. All of a sudden and from some quite unexpected quarters, we hear talk of deportation, something almost unthinkable outside the fringe ethno-nationalist right until recently. In a radical departure from the old consensus that immigration has to be managed and, when economic and environmental circumstances allow, openly welcomed, mainstream opinion leaders have now started to publicly advocate reversing the last twenty odd years of rapid de-acculturation by sending home unassimilated newcomers in their midst. Bastions of social democracy and global convergence like Sweden and Denmark have changed their tune and begun to deport criminals and long-term welfare claimants with an immigrant background. My main concern has always been with destabilisation or any policy that can undermine the hard-won freedoms and way of life of settled communities to advance agendas that mainly benefit global corporations to the detriment of the little people.
By and large the concept of free movement is a good thing, but like all good things has its limitations. Should the homeless be free to set up camp in your garden or squat in your house while you’re away? Should holidaymakers be free to park their caravans in wildlife reserves or on cultivated fields? Should grown men be free to wander into women’s changing rooms? Should property developers be free to build on parks or green spaces for profit or to accommodate growing demand for affordable housing? There are obvious limits in complex societies on the extent to which we can encroach on other people’s spaces and undermine their self-determination and traditions. Most disputes over land affect less than 1% of the Earth’s total landmass where over half of the global population dwell and most of the other half live in the approximately 12.5% of land considered arable with only a tiny fraction inhabiting remote settlements scattered around the next 30% of resource-exploitable land. That leaves around 56% of the remaining terrain mostly uninhabitable or unused due to extreme conditions such as deserts, tundra or high mountains. Yet that 1% assigned to the urbanosphere is nearly as large as the combined area of France, Germany, Poland and Italy.
The same progressive opinion leaders who hailed the wonders of our interconnected humanosphere, made possible by automotive, aeronautical and cybernetic technology, now want us to scale back to a more sustainable lifestyle, but sustainable for whom? How can they simultaneously promote mass migration to the most highly developed regions of the world and greater restrictions of our freedom to travel around our own neck of the woods? The same big businesses that sold us the dream of carefree motoring, suburban houses and regular holidays abroad, are now selling us smart green technology as millions of middle-class Westerners adapt to a minimalist lifestyle. Historically people have emigrated to find a better quality of life, but with the civilisational decline of the once affluent West that may no longer be the case. Sooner or later, something has to give in the clash between autochthons and international commuters. The mercantile classes behind the 18th and 19th century expansion of European empires have evolved into a network of global technocrats who owe no allegiance to their home countries. They have already pivoted from favouring the Western middle classes in the era of mass consumption to exploiting a vast pool of aspirational migrant labour in the shift from a mixed high-wage and high-skill economy to controlled subsistence micromanaged by tech multinationals. However, if they can pivot once for strategic reasons, they can pivot again and abandon new groups of commoners.
Just as the business elites have betrayed the Western working classes, they can easily ditch their army of globetrotting contingent workers to favour only a much smaller coterie of top-tier engineers and social governance analysts. However, at the dawn of the AI revolution with the transfer of power to a handful of tech giants, we are also witnessing the demise of the global superpower that has dominated the world’s cultural landscape for the best part of a century and reached its pinnacle in the early 1990s after the fall of the former Soviet Union.
The recent Russian occupation of Eastern Ukraine marked a turning point in the balance power between G7-centred international community and the now expanded BRICS bloc, which is in the process of setting up a rival international banking system. Before 2020 the world seemed set on a trajectory of convergence with Africa, China, India and South America all falling within orbit of US-founded tech giants and banking cartels. While the Western middle classes would lose their relative privileges, the emerging technocracy would remain unipolar. Indeed, many critics of a one-world government saw the tech censorship of the lockdown years as a shift towards a more Chinese style of global governance. While the big nations of the Global East and South may have many authoritarian traits, they have not succumbed to woke ideology. The transgender craze with its assault on natural procreation has failed to make inroads in most of Asia, the Middle East and Africa. White guilt has only infected countries with a recent history of colonialism or racial segregation. On current trends, we may soon wonder how long Africans will want to move to Europe or North America.
The whole progressive rationale for mass migration hinged on the challenges of an ageing population with a low birth rate as a means to increase the tax base and allegedly to pay for our pensions. Alas with net migration running at 750,000 a year, the establishment has stopped pretending most newcomers are high-income professionals. The cost of accommodating asylum seekers alone amounted to a staggering 5.4 billion in 2023, while new projections show the average newcomer to the UK will cost the treasury much more in their lifetime than they pay in taxes. If the AI revolution displaces most lower and medium-skilled workers leaving only core competency workers (an upper crust of well-remunerated engineers, scientists, doctors, policy consultants and administrators) as essential workers outside the UBI control grid, there will no longer be any need to import cheap labour or boost the economy artificially through greater aggregate consumer demand.
As we shift from a skills-based consumer economy, affording ordinary workers greater personal freedoms, to a more eco-compliance-driven economy, local governance teams will want to restrict people’s freedom of movement by limiting access to cars, long-distance trains and aeroplanes as we saw in the covid-scare years. The trick is to get everyone within the same control grid, which is much more pervasive in the more developed regions of the world.
We are at a critical juncture in human civilisation. A major geopolitical shift away from the US-centred world order is coinciding with the growing concentration of power in billionaire technotarians who advocate high-tech eugenics and view the masses as little more than zoo animals. Alas I see a split in our technocratic masters. Some are still hedging their bets on the survival of American exceptionalism and mass consumerism. Others are content to adopt the Chinese model of epistocracy with a vanguard group of social scientists manufacturing consent among a pacified populace. Both groups exploit our conflicting desires for free movement and social cohesion to continue to divide and rule. They can pose on the left or on the right. They can advocate open borders or mass deportations, but the end game is still total surveillance.