There are many of us out here in the urban landscapes of western cities who wind up working for the state/federal level governments of our countries; after all the benefits are often very attractive, and permanent tenure can mean a ‘job for life’ that is very difficult to be fired from.
This is not necessarily a bad situation in itself, I know it is tempting to put on one’s ‘cynical hat’ and consider all government employees parasitical cruisers, and empire builders; it makes sense to recruit high quality candidates and hold onto them in order to provide the highest quality public services possible, sounds reasonable right?
But of course, human nature being what it is, and the corrupting influence of power that has been so constantly observed in human society and documented through history, this situation often comes out as precisely empire building, favoring those whom we like and desire, and of course ideological motivations.
The nature of power, and how this tends to corrupt people is an all too familiar subject, and in these times where the leverage of collective power is blatantly being executed on in front of our eyes many of us have grown numb with the sheer scale of this.
We only have to do a cursory survey of videos on YouTube (despite this platform becoming increasingly mainstream) to observe the excessive deployment of physical abduction, and overt demonstrations of authoritarian methods from the police services in many of our cities, the tremendous energy and intent of our official world to impose a seemingly benign ‘public health’ raft of policies which look disturbingly like tyranny.
I have a good, genuine source of information concerning how state and federal ‘public service’ agencies operate, I have worked in both versions, and for the most dynamic sector: Information Technology.
Because I have also worked extensively in the ‘real world’ this being the realm of private enterprise, mining companies, manufacturing plants, aerospace component fabricators, and of course ‘small business’ I have a unique opportunity to compare just how matters are executed on for both areas.
I can report that working life in these two major sectors is vastly different.
My beginning with professional ‘IT’ work commenced with a large state government agency in fact, so I do have an authentic respect for some of the people who strive to do a good job in these agencies: back in 1996 when the Internet was just beginning to take shape as a public resource, and large networks were still islands of unique technology unable to ‘talk to one another’, the world of LAN/WAN, and IBM Mainframe systems.
I had the foresight to recognise that information technology was going to be the major force in our emerging 21st Century, and being a science kid from the beginning I had a profound interest with this technology, the thing is, all of ‘IT’ is about one principal feature of humanity: Communication.
While this might seem an obvious statement, if you can grasp the scale of what this signifies then you are well on your way to understanding just why forging an empire like ‘Silicon Valley’ represents the ‘keys to the kingdom’.
You see, not only are we completely in the thrall of companies such as Google for access to all of knowledge and information, our systems of governance and the ideas which determine the total shape of our lives are within their dominion.
People simply do not recognise what has taken place.
The trivialisation of the ‘Web’, into being a playground for affluent people to disport their vanities and gouge out money by stealth, a medium of self publication for the terminally egotistical hordes, eCommerce and Social Media, it all conceals an underworld of power.
There are compensations of course: the document management system which was the nascent World Wide Web provided the means for the colossal Silicon Valley Leviathans, but it also works to distribute publications such as this one that you are presently reading, words also have power, and recorded words can endure beyond empires.
‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings look on my works ye mighty, and despair!
We can draw a line of comparison here, the vast power being wielded by the emerging technocrat class, able to bypass our feeble democratic structures, our bleating in the wilderness about ‘human rights’ and ‘free speech’, as they present their climate change/public health gambit, ushering in their revolting dystopian anti-human policies-this will fail, it will fall, just like Ozymandias the stumps of statue, and endless sands of time will be all that is left of their visions, their attempts to overcome human creativity and aspiration.
You and I can bide our time, we can wait until the bodies of our enemies float by on the mystic river, this has been attempted, and sometimes manifested, before now; always they fail, as Ghandi proclaimed.
True justice, true equal opportunity and true vision and skill shall always prevail; because these tyrannical constructions become inept, they fail at their foundations because you cannot build a genuine empire using the blood of the people to mix your mortar, this too shall pass.
