Digital Genocide
We like to think of our cyber presence as an avatar, but more and more, the bone filled meat sacks we call our bodies are the actual avatars.
In 1996, while serving in the State Department, Gregory Stanton, the founding president of Genocide Watch, presented a briefing paper called "The 8 Stages of Genocide". In 2012, he expanded the original eight stages to ten by adding categories of Discrimination and Persecution. Stanton holds degrees from Oberlin College, Harvard Divinity School, Yale Law School, and a Doctorate in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Chicago and served as the Research Professor in Genocide Studies and Prevention at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University until he retired in 2019.
Stanton noted that these “stages” are not necessarily linear, they could happen in any order and some often occur simultaneously:
Classification: People are divided into "them and us".
Symbolization: "When combined with hatred, symbols may be forced upon unwilling members of pariah groups..."
Discrimination: "Law or cultural power excludes groups from full civil rights: segregation or apartheid laws, denial of voting rights".
Dehumanization: "One group denies the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects, or diseases."
Organization: "Genocide is always organized... Special army units or militias are often trained and armed..."
Polarization: "Hate groups broadcast polarizing propaganda..."
Preparation: "Mass killing is planned. Victims are identified and separated because of their ethnic or religious identity..."
Persecution: "Expropriation, forced displacement, ghettos, concentration camps".
Extermination: "It is 'extermination' to the killers because they do not believe their victims to be fully human".
Denial: "The perpetrators... deny that they committed any crimes..."
I do not mean to imply that the United States is on a path to genocide, but there is the potential for a sort of genocide in the virtual or digital world. Three years ago, I proposed that while we may not be exposed to a violent overthrow, our digital image may well be – and with all the talk of a digital US dollar, vaccine passports, the rise and substance of cancel culture, it is becoming entirely possible that genocide may take on a new meaning, something more akin to the class system in India where the untouchables had their existence as people stripped from them. Imagine not being able to earn a living, cut off from medical care, not able to participate in education or society in any way, completely exiled and shut off from the things that define a life. That would seem to be genocide in every aspect but actual death.
In that 2018 article, I noted there are four dangerous aspects to our current situation:
Conversion of the physical being into a digital presence
Loss of individuality due to concentration of information
Conversion of the medium of exchange from gold to fiat currency to electronic notations
Doctrine of proportional response
Digital Presence: Americans like to think of our digital or “cyber” selves as avatars for our physical existence, but it is becoming increasingly apparent that as more and more of our lives are lived on-line, the bone filled meat sacks we call our bodies are the actual avatars. Today, more entities (financial, health, commercial and government institutions) know us as packets of data than as people in the physical world. When we “live chat” or speak via telephone, we never know when or if we are speaking to another human being or a batch of artificial intelligence code. We live in an age when our lives are reduced to numbers for decisions on credit, what rate we will be charged for insurance and how much tax we will pay – and as has been done in China, a social credit system is being inserted into our daily lives. It is being incorporated in fragments so it will be less noticeable, but it is there. Several big investment firms have already announced they will be using ESG scores (a new set of environmental, social, and governance scores) provided by Dow Jones to allow “investment professionals, analysts, and corporations insight into companies’ ESG performance”.
You may not believe you are a digital presence but let me ask – how many people depend on the Internet for Voice Over IP phone service? How many people don’t have a land line at all and have all their contact information stored in a mobile phone? Do you even have a phone book? How many people with whom do you communicate with using email or text as opposed to an actual voice call? When was the last time you talked to a person face-to-face?
Loss of Individuality: Information is being aggregated at a level never seen. Our calls, texts and emails are being recorded and saved. Our health data is digitized, our social media activity is being recorded and analyzed, our driving patterns and credit card usage is saved and recorded – and all for the supposed use to provide us better products and services – even the recent “infrastructure bill” contains provisions to monitor your driving habits for tax purposes.
Entities are in favor of this because they know if behavior can be predicted, a plan can be devised to influence and/or control your behaviors – from shopping to societal interaction, this is the Holy Grail of Big Data – knowing something is worthless unless it can be converted into doing something (or getting someone to do something).
Medium of Exchange: Let me begin by asking you a question – How much hard cash do you have in your pockets right now? How many people use debit or credit cards that rely on electronic transactions? What would happen to you and your family if only hard cash, silver, gold, or barter was accepted as the only medium of exchange? How long would you last? Should it bother you if you have your paycheck direct deposited, all your transactions are either automatic drafts or electronic transfers and the only “money” you see are numbers on a screen or a bank statement that is emailed to you? What happens if the lights go out and you can no longer access your accounts?
Proportional Response: This is something that seems incongruent with the aforementioned issues, but I think it is the reason people aren’t marching in the streets over Facebook, massive data breaches in government and commercial data stores and identity theft. People have been convinced that this stuff is “no biggie” because it often has so little immediate personal effect. If you can be convinced that someone hacking your information is no big deal, then you will respond as if it was exactly that. For example: if you had a $5000 worth of gold stacked in your den and somebody broke in and took it, you would be angry and want to do something about it but if someone hacks your bank or the government and sells information on you to someone else for $5000, you aren’t likely to get too uptight about it.
Why not? Because we have been convinced that it’s just data – but it is YOUR data. You own it as much as you own your own person.
What if - theoretically speaking - there were no guns, no jack-booted thugs or armies rolling down America’s streets “Red Dawn” style, what if it is a simple denial of access to money, information, and services? How many people depend on electronic banking? ATMs? How many on online pharmacies? How many of us depend on the Internet to do our jobs and communicate with our families?
What if the genocide this time is digital?
If you think of Stanton’s Ten Stages in terms of these propositions, a digital genocide certainly seems possible, and it sure appears America is well on the way toward such an atrocity.
I have always said that things that can move forward can always go back. The base level of existence is not mobile phones, the Internet, and iPads. These innovations are not even a blip on the timeline of human existence – just think of how many things within arm’s reach right now did not even exist 5, 10 or 20 years ago (or if they did, had a fraction of the functionality of what we take for granted today). Just think how quickly our digital presence could be imprisoned or controlled by a tyrannical government at the flip of a switch. The modern Brownshirts will be digitally created by people in black rimmed glasses, wearing plaids and stripes together, and eating Hot Pockets.
The base level of human existence is far more savage than our modern sensibilities allow us to contemplate – and our vulnerability to autocracy has never been greater. We have undergone a remarkable centralization of our private and public data and have ceded huge chunks of our transactional existence to electronic systems. I do not fear Russian, Chinese, or Macedonian Server Farm hackers as much as I do American Digital Barons Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook and Bill Gates. The fact they are so powerful and lean progressive bothers me. These guys control technology and information that supports a huge percentage of the American economy.
Any time things are centralized, they become more susceptible to single points of failure – and single points of control. It is not impossible to imagine an Atlas Shrugged scenario where the government gathers a cadre of likeminded industry giants in a cooperative plan to make society “better”, and with everything digitized and online, the flip of a switch could spell disaster. The “glorious revolution” could begin and be over at the speed of light running through a fiber optic cable.
If any of this scares you, it should - because when these things happen, that’s when the shooting starts.
I’m not saying it will happen, I’m just saying the possibility exists.