Being Watched, Into The Divide

Traveling the last couple weeks to Nevada and Texas, the reaction of people wearing masks and not-wearing masks seemed to shadow a dystopia. Nowhere more so than in airports.

During the summer, if you’d walk around an airport without a mask you'd get looks like, “Do you want to kill someone? How rude and insincere can you be?”

Now, whether in Texas where the mask mandate was dropped, or in Nevada or North Carolina where it still exists, there is basically no reaction. You could walk by someone wearing 3 masks and they’d look at an uncovered face with no concern.

Currently, it seems, for most people who regularly wear masks, it’s done, because well, that is what you do. Not out of fear or any real concern that not doing so is going to get people killed.

Which leads to the question, what else can we be talked into? And forced to obey? This might sound alarmist until you look at things like the growth of the surveillance state.

Which leads to a Wired article I just read about our surveillance society. An unparalleled ability to monitor people and make sure they are doing what they are supposed to. Security cameras, license plate readers, smartphone trackers, drones, not to mention every move on the internet and our computers, and soon they will be coordinated into one super system of surveillance.

As we’ve been talking about the last few podcasts, this is the opposite of being a little wild as were created. This is being tended into an electronic life-stock fence. It will continue to influence our lives and behavior, and will continue to divide.