When The Gates Of Tech Dystopia Snap Shut There’s a viral video clip showing a group of wild boars getting caught in a corral trap. When the gate snaps shut the poor animals run around in a panic, searching in vain for an exit. According to the caption that’s been going around, the trapper waited patiently for five days for the entire sounder to get comfortable enough to take the bait and enter the trap all at once. The gate didn’t close until the final pig walked into the enclosure. And, yeah. That’s pretty much where we’re at right now. We’ve been standing around munching on our bait, enjoying our bread and our circuses, blissfully unaware of the trapper who is patiently waiting for the perfect moment to slam the gate shut on us all. “Man, AI sure is great.” “Check it out, we’re all Miyazaki characters!” “I let ChatGPT choose my outfit for today!” “I wrote a song just by typing in a prompt! Can you believe it? I’m making music!” “We’re ALL artists now!” “Oh shit, the gate just closed!” “They’re listening to everything we say!” “Fuck, there are police drones everywhere!” “They’re putting guns on those robot dogs!” “The state AI canceled my digital money because I tried to start a union!” “I said Free Palestine and now I can’t access the internet!” They’ve been quietly constructing a cage around us this entire time in order to lock us into this capitalist dystopia forever. The oligarchs and empire managers have been rapidly developing technologies that will facilitate mass surveillance and autonomous weapons systems — already being field-tested in places like Gaza — which just so happen to be exactly what the ruling class would require in order to undermine and quash any revolutionary movements which might emerge in response to the ever-increasing abuses and inequalities of capitalism. The trapper is patiently pacing us into accepting mass surveillance, unfettered artificial intelligence advancement, militarized robots, police drones, digital currencies, propaganda, censorship, and the AI-assisted manipulation of the flow of information. And then, when the time is right, the gate will come crashing down. It’s essentially a race between revolution and high-tech totalitarianism. A race between the awakening of public consciousness to the urgent need for revolutionary change, and the ability of our rulers to prevent revolutionary change from ever occurring. A race between our ability to start using the power of our numbers to force an end to the abusive systems under which we live, and the ability of rich and powerful dominators to use surveillance, robotics and AI-assisted control mechanisms to nullify all the advantages we hold over them. And right now our biggest disadvantage is that most of us don’t even know we’re in this race. Our rulers know it, but the average member of the public does not. Most of us are still chewing on the bait in the trap. There is still time. The trap isn’t shut yet. But we need to awaken the other piggies in the pen to the reality of what the bastards have planned for us, and help them understand that the race is underway. Reading by Tim Foley: