THE FUTURE OF CRIME
In the nineteen-sixties a group of French radicals called the Situationists suggested that 'freedom is the crime that contains all other crimes'. Things have changed a lot since then, although those at the top of the social heap still believe that the vast mass of humanity are simply cattle to be fattened and slaughtered. It sounds like a cliche, but it's now ten years since 1984 and the hardware for our total electronic control not only exists, it is also completely obsolete.
The industrial economy based around railways, electricity and the car is a historical curiosity. Until recently, the technological innovations revolutionising society were centred on the generation, storage, processing and transmission of information. Today, we are witnessing the rise of a new technological revolution, a bioeconomy dependent upon genetic engineering, nanotechnology and neurocomputers. Obviously, the level of scientific, technological and cultural development within any given society dictates the types of crime that may be committed within it. Among nomadic tribes, the chief crimes are rape and murder. With the establishment of agriculture and the development of a class system, theft became the major concern of those who controlled the fast expanding, and increasingly bureaucratic, legal system.
A lot of would-be trendy magazines and tv programmes like to pretend they're covering the cutting edge of crime by running features on computer hacking. Basically, what these people present as the future of crime is hi-tech theft, with cybernauts ripping off money from bank accounts and credit card facilities. When you think about it, this scenario isn't so different from some farmer of three thousand years ago stealing his neighbour's cow. A theft, is a theft, is a theft, despite the fact that the methodology of larceny is transformed by technological developments.
What isn't being reported by the mainstream media is the way in which biotechnology, based on genetic engineering, is being used to boost the profits of multinational corporations as it simultaneously destroys the health of ordinary people. At its most simple, this consists of drugs like Thalidomide being prescribed to pregnant women in Brazil, despite the fact that Thalidomide is banned in Europe because it causes children to be born without limbs. Biotechnology gets even sicker when it's combined with pre-existing forms of mind control based on psychiatric and electro-shock treatments.
While RoboCop and Terminator were presented to the public as futuristic scenarios, they portray a situation that already exists. The technology required to remake a man or woman, either psychologically or physically, has existed for years. This is where the future of crime really lies, because the police and intelligence services require criminal activity to keep them in a job. While biotechnology is being used to transform the bulk of the population into obedient slaves, the psychological aspect of such mass brainwashing works much more effectively when a minority of individuals are programmed to act as violent psychopaths. The passive majority already accept that the constant surveillance of both public places and cyberspace is fully justified to protect them from those maniacs who threaten the smooth functioning of a well ordered society.
A huge body of publicly available literature exists on CIA experiments such as MK-Ultra, which used LSD as a means of turning ordinary men and women into mind controlled zombies. A number of MK-Ultra test subjects were programmed to slaughter their fellow citizens. Everyone from Luc Jouret and Charles Manson, to Jim Jones and Mark Chapman, the bloke who murdered former Beatle John Lennon, is a victim of coercive psychiatry which transformed them from a regular guy into a murder maniac. During LSD sessions, these future killers were subjected to 'psychic driving', a torture technique which consists of revelations extracted under psychoanalysis being played back over and over again, via a helmet the victim can't remove. In the future, virtually every piece of mayhem to gain widespread publicity will be the involuntary act of some helpless sap whose murderous antics were pre-programmed in a government institution.
Alongside increasingly sophisticated mass murder programmes sponsored by the security services and multinational corporations, there will be resistance from those groups who have already been criminalised for wanting the freedom to party. The Criminal Justice Act, now in force, makes raves illegal and worse is to follow. Fortunately there are still plenty of people about who want to defend themselves from this crackdown. In England, the resistance will be led by the London Psychogeographical Association, who will use games of three-sided football to free people from the shackles of dualistic thinking. Already, the state is preparing to outlaw football played on triangular pitches, with three goals, where a tally of the goals conceded reveals who has won. The shifting allegiances this game brings into play teaches people to break out of the dualistic system of thought that tricks them into becoming victims of the mind control techniques employed by the ruling class.
When three-side football is banned, which will certainly happen in the next two or three years, the London Psychogeographical Association will organise games in abandoned multi-storey car parks and the basements of deserted office blocks. Some games will be played for a full ninety minutes, while others will be broken up by the cops. Anyone arrested will have been told in advance to claim that they are Luther Blissett, a name which has been appearing mysteriously on buildings all over Bologna, Italy, in recent weeks. Some of those who are nicked during games of three-sided football will later reappear among their friends, and with great sadness they will be killed, to free them from the programming that's destroyed their personality and will compulsively drive them to murder anyone who resists the state. This is the future of crime and it demonstrates that the Situationists were right. FREEDOM IS THE CRIME THAT CONTAINS ALL OTHER CRIMES.
First published in G-Spot 14 Winter 1994.
Note: Stewart Home uses exaggeration in his light journalism and humour like those found her not just for humorous effect, but to encourage critical thinking and to reveal how rhetoric works....
Stewart Home interviewed in 2007 about Web 2.0 (and his novel Memphis Underground)
Satiric response to spook mania and paranoia about mind control from 1994
Exposure of a complete nutter suffering from spook mania (from 1995)
Suppression in Russia of Stewart Home book satirising mind control
Light journalism & humour
  
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Stewart Home gives you the naked truth (and really fooled you all coz that's his thumb...).
Millennial Madness & Microchips
I'm utterly sick of techies spouting off about the infobahn as though its mere existence is gonna revolutionise human consciousness. OK, so the fact that most of the hardware was created by the straights of the US military, while the software was designed by hippies bombed outta their heads on drugs, is an amusing paradox. OK, so as a German philosopher once observed, the quantitative eventually becomes qualitative and the information highway has revolutionised the speed with which we can communicate. In its turn, this is having a profound effect on international politics, since world opinion can now be mobilised to protest about the arrest of a dissident in the time it takes to transport someone to a Gulag.
Nevertheless, the majority of people running around cyberspace are boring farts who I wouldn't give the time of day if I met them at my local supermarket. In fact, one of the advantages of the Internet is that it enables me to maintain a distance from people who'd send me screaming home if I met them while I was out shopping. Take, for example, Serdar Argic, who depending on who you believe, is either an insane Turkish Nazi or an artificial intelligence programme that automatically posts messages to any bulletin board on the Internet that mentions Turkey or Armenia. While the rest of the world believes that the Turks have been massacring Armenians, Argic claims events are the other way around. Another fascist nut active on the Internet is Dan Cannon, who denies that the Nazi's murdered six million Jews. Together, Cannon and Argic account for 0.3% of all Internet traffic. In other words, it's as if these two reactionaries where making three out of every thousand phone calls in the world.
Although there are some good guys on the Internet, the most interesting suppliers of electronic information seem to operate outside it. For example, there's Fast Breeder, a haven for crazy anarchist theories and general counter-cultural subversion. Since The Observer called the people who run this operation paranoid, I guess they've gotta be doing something right. If you've got a modem, you can dial Fast Breeder on 0171 820 8339. One of the newest and strangest bulletin boards is the Berlin based House of Seven by Nine Squares operating from 010 49 30 8214786. It is designed in the fashion of an occult memory theatre, consisting of seven floors with seven public and two secret rooms on each.
Of course, there are conspiracy theorists who refuse to go anywhere near all this information. They believe the Internet is part of a plot by the powers planning a one world government to discover the identity of anyone with dissident views and that individuals who call up these alternative sources of information will find themselves thrown into jail in a few years time. However, those happily surfing the Net insist these ideas are at least ten years out of date and that the luddite mentality of conspiracy nuts is closer to 1984 than 2004.
First published in G-Spot 12 Summer 1994. |
