They are chasing after votes, but trying not to say anything. Is it a code they speak in or is it the fear that grips their vitals and all that can exit their mouths and enter into the debate are the semi-strangled sounds of the advertising industry, the special advisers, SPADS as they seem to be called. Yes, don’t be so irritating of course it’s the election that I am talking about. Of course politicians need to know what the people are saying though it seems they also need to control the encounters with us poor voters. What’s the deal? What can we hold them to in exchange for our votes? With the demise of party membership and the emasculation of the unions over the last thirty/forty years we have not done ourselves a lot of favours. We have bought into the cult of the individual and the corrupting ways of consumerism. Advertising is the white noise we are tortured with. A narrative of “this could be you”. Which is tempting because most of us have little idea of who we might be; there is the emptiness at the heart of our souls to be filled by drugs or objects of desire.
But what if we were able to tune into the real world? Could we survive an encounter with the real? Maybe we prefer to simply live within our own created reality, praying that it is enough to protect us from any impact of the real. To listen then would seem to be taking a risk. Governments are always calculating as to the dangers that surround them. How to defend their power, how to dress it up as “defending the people”?
In the current Radical Philosophy (May, June) there are a number of pieces about the arcane arts of listening:
‘Historically the National Security Agency (NSA) had been charged with the task of intercepting electromagnetic signals for external intelligence – diplomatic cables, military communications, satellite beams, and so on. But with close of the millennium, civil populations were themselves becoming signal transmitters. The whole world was becoming connected, and creating one in which each of us would soon produce more data than any Soviet embassy of the past’.
So on the one hand there is the huge industry of trawling for big data and on the other hand there is the other huge industry of blasting our eyes and ears with advertising and the powerful and lying messages about how we should vote.
Thank God the election is over but oh my God, what a disaster!
So, yes, listen and tune in to what is the going on.
