The political response to the crisis at the southern border continues to advance the bipartisan “smart wall,” having been backed by Trump and Biden alike. This bipartisan consensus reaches far beyond the US, as much of the world is similarly speeding along in implementing “digital borders.”

The disastrous situation at the US-Mexico border is, and has been, intentionally produced. Throughout the last several administrations, regardless of campaign and other public rhetoric, the porous nature of the border has remained unresolved. On several occasions, the situation as it has developed has been blamed largely on incompetence and government inefficiency. Though some administrations have been tougher than others in regards to terrestrial migration (under some metrics), the US-Mexico border has not been sealed off so to force entrants to cross through officially recognized and managed ports of entry.

Under the current administration, it has been pointedly obvious that even the sections of the border that do contain physical barriers are being dismantled on purpose, all the while illegal crossings have risen to unprecedented levels. Whatever the motives for this deliberate policy on the part of the Biden administration, the end result has been the widespread characterization of the crisis as an “invasion,” priming the voter bloc usually most concerned with border security – the American Right – for military-style “solutions.”

While the justifications for the frenzied media coverage are based on the actual reality that the border is indeed highly insecure (and has been for some time), the policy responses from American politicians reveal that there is a bipartisan consensus about what must be done. Tellingly, the same “solution” is also being quietly rolled out at all American ports of entry that are not currently being “overrun”, such as airports. That solution, of course, is biometric surveillance, enabled by AI, facial recognition/biometrics and autonomous devices.

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This is an excellent article. It outlines the major goals, actors, and popular fears of the inevitable global surveillance state. What we the people have—and the only thing we have—is the vague will of the masses. With that vague will we can sometimes cancel elite plans or dampen them, as we saw with monkeypox and more recently covid vaxxes.

Our vague will, however, has zero chance of stopping the panopticon, or any of the technology that supports it. Since we the people have never had much more than a vague will which is only rarely successful in doing anything, I see no reason to be especially concerned about an even more efficient spy state. We already all know and have accepted that all of our communications are recorded, so why should we expect the recording to not become even more precise and used for even more controls?

For millennia, large societies have always had kings and queens, elites and slaves. It is no different today. May the best elite win. The only secure hope we have today is that a deeply civilized, very intelligent elite who will rule benevolently, will win. In a reasonable world under a reasonable elite, continued tech advancement and the use of technology to improve human biology will yield a much more intelligent population with more and better options than we have today.

Does this mean surrender? Yes and no: no one surrenders to the inevitable, or everyone does; and the vague will of the masses will act as a weak rudder sometimes. ABN