In H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, the eponymous scientist increases his visibility in society when he turns himself invisible. He grows bold with his invisibility, turning into a murderer and announcing a reign of terror. The invisible-visible inversion comments directly on the relationship between technological progress and society, revealing that the various practices used to control populations become ever smaller, more unseen, while simultaneously becoming more efficient, more total.
The United States is fully in the era of endo-colonization, in which the government subjects its own citizens to the disciplinary measures that were once practiced on colonial populations or in warzones. The United States practiced disciplinary techniques over a century ago in the Philippines, a half century ago in Vietnam, and in Middle Eastern forever wars it created for itself after 911. But now helicopters fly low over American city streets, swooping citizens in displays of might worthy of Hollywood’s Die Hard (1988) in which FBI agents launch a helicopter attack on a supposed terrorist atop the Nakatomi Building. In cities across America, unmarked agents swarm protestors, pull them into unmarked vans, putting them through hours of questions and intimidation. On United States soil, the government has continued to refine and employ military techniques, deterrence techniques, surveillance, and disciplinary techniques, largely through the Homeland Security Administration.
In Pure War, Paul Virilio asserts that America, a power with no designated enemy, is threatened by its own supremacy. Yes, the United States has been in several forever wars, beginning after the World Trade Centers were hit by passenger airplanes, but these are not wars America has to wage. These are wars that the government chooses to continually wage for its own benefit. Maintaining ongoing wars is a way to increase patriotism and simultaneously decrease dissent. Ongoing wars provide a perpetual boost to the economy. The US discovered the benefit of the war economy during WWII when supplying the war machine effectively ended the depression and the leaps in research and development, specifically the nuclear capabilities as a result of the Manhattan project, positioned the country as a military superpower, meaning, of course, that the US was now able to influence politics across the globe in pursuit of securing economic interests. Continuing military interventions ensure that R&D spending results in maintaining a tactical military advantage over other world powers.
Nearly all of the United States’ forever wars are concentrated in the Middle East, a region that does not pose a threat to the United States. America’s most pressing threat is internal. So, lacking a real enemy, the American government turns to endo-colonization. It targets its own population with mechanisms of control that have become almost completely invisible, and this invisibility corresponds to another, the project of minimizing the visibility of targeted populations.
The invisibility of H.G. Wells’ Invisible Man’s, like the near invisibility of the surveillance apparatus, is a tactical invisibility. In contrast to subjugated bodies that are a priori invisible, controlling bodies in the form of sovereign states and corporations choose invisibility to further subjugate those that are always already invisible. Consider the invisible man’s pronouncement of power through invisibility: “And I beheld, unclouded by doubt, a magnificent vision of all that invisibility might mean to a man—the mystery, the power, the freedom” (Wells 1897, 10). Those, like the invisible man, in positions of privilege, with access to technology and in a position of power, can turn invisible or not, either way, they retain privilege and power. Whereas, the subjugated body is always invisible, marked by a disempowering invisibility. The invisibility of the subjugated body is neither chosen nor borne of technology but is amplified by largely unseen surveillance and disciplinary mechanisms, the ideological state apparatus, laws that maintain disenfranchisement, jobs that don’t pay a living wage, and a tacit agreement to keep bodies invisible.
The strategy of keeping wages low ensures that the lower class is funneled into the disciplinary system. Lacking the resources to survive, those in the lower class turn to making money illegally, whether by theft, the drug trade, prostitution, or other illegalities. Given the state’s surveillance apparatus, crime quickly moves “criminals” into the carceral system. In the United States, jails are privatized. The wealthy benefit from the system, maximizing profit by taking advantage of the poor. Instead of building suitable housing and an infrastructure to support the poor, resources are poured into surveillance systems and the concomitant justice system. But the law, used to maintain the disenfranchisement of minorities and the poor, is not just. In the parlance of The Ruthless Rap Assassins, “There ain’t no justice, just us.”
The miniaturization of surveillance and defense mechanisms increases the power and visibility of the state while limiting the agency of its citizens. The increase of surveillance simultaneously renders citizens more visible and removes their visibility. This at first sounds paradoxical, but consider the question, “Who watches and why?” The state renders the subject visible so that it can erase them. Surveillance, leading to arrest and disciplinary measures on the body often leading to death, removes the subject from society, whether by locking in cages, kneeling on necks, or shooting at backs. No matter the degree of surveillance invisible bodies are subjected to, in the end, the goal is to silence the body, to render it ineffective and then gather around, view inert flesh and then cover it over for good as in Wells’ narrative after the invisible man is beaten to death: “There lay, naked and pitiful on the ground, the bruised and broken body of a young man about thirty . . . "Cover his face!" said a man. "For Gawd's sake, cover that face!” (Wells 1897, 274).
Minorities in America are often forced into a non-productive role and simultaneously blamed for the conditions that society has placed them in. A compounding problem is that non-productive bodies are viewed as dispensable in America or, worse, a threat. But few non-productive bodies are truly incapable. Minorities are largely relegated to underfunded educational institutions and, as a result, are disenfranchised from entry into corporate America or other high-income work. Kept in a permanent state of poverty, black and latinx Americans turn to illegalities and are targeted by a racist, for-profit justice system.
The elderly comprise another class of dispensable bodies in America. When the Republican Party discovered that COVID-19 was mortal mostly to those of advanced age—read, to those drawing a check from the social security program and other government pensions like the US postal service’s strained pension—they suggested reliance on a herd immunity tactic. And, yes, mass death of elderly pensioners would take pressure off government budgets. Some governors and other elected officials claimed that grandparents would be willing to die as a sacrifice to save the US economy. Certainly, most officials were thinking in terms of ending the economically destructive shutdown at risk of imperiling susceptible populations when these ideas were floated, but a pandemic that mainly kills those already too sick or too old to contribute to society is something of a eugenicists dream. What is the plan to expose the entire population to a disease that spares the young and the healthy other than a naturally occurring and government-approved eugenics program?
Moving to another largely invisible form of subjugation, the ideological state apparatus in the twenty-first century has been co-opted by the media. The media operates almost invisibly, subtly and consistently guiding public discourse by what is present and what is absent from the continuous media feed. A new version of the technological sublime, the level of control that the media has on society simulates all the original conditions of the sublime, the awe-inspiring beauty of the natural world bordering on terror. The scale of the media’s entrenchment in politics and the lack of a coherent platform, the incoherence of conflicting media properties and simultaneous impact on social, political, economic, and cultural reality terrifies.
Problematically, when we refer to “media,” we are often referring to a handful of individuals that make all the decisions. Rupert Murdoch, for example, owns Fox News, an extremely toxic media property that sells a conservative worldview as alternate reality. But even if Murdoch were to reverse Fox News’ course and abandon their role as conservative sounding board for white grievances, he could not reverse the worldview that his media property has cultivated. Once people have bought into a belief structure, there is no easy exit. Beliefs become an inseparable feature of culture. We have returned to the yellow journalism of the late-nineteenth-century that created the Spanish American War, but now the war machine and the media are both increased in scale and speed. Media and politics play to citizens with distorted thinking. No new argument is needed to launch another war—there are already too many wars to follow. What is one more? And though fact-checking tools and reputable sources are immediately available to anyone, the average citizen’s awareness of the events of the day rests somewhere on the continuum of poorly informed to greatly misinformed. It is easier to accept the distorted reality that you want than whatever is really happening.
The current president of the United States, a former reality television star, has aided America in its transition from the old two-party government, with the right and left trading off in the balance of power, to a system in which traditional politics is pitted against the media. Decisions and information that would have been considered sensitive in the past are released to maximize entertainment value and thus profit. Donald Trump became a viable candidate because of his showmanship, his ability to subsume reality with personality. The showman as president vacillates between disavowing the ideological apparatus completely and claiming that a deep state operates in government, undermining his initiatives and seeking to undermine power, depending on whether the existence of an invisible apparatchik is helpful or harmful to the president’s given position.
Ironically, Donald Trump’s “Fake News” rallying cry is not without merit. The media, and here I include social media as an echo chamber of disinformation as well as more mainstream media, has co-opted the traditional role of government, even resulting in political candidates that hold to completely false narratives like QAnon conspiracy theories touting a connection between so-called deep state officials and Satanic rituals. While some media is indeed fake and other news sources report incomplete or distorted facts, the reality is that in the United States two ideological positions are now in constant collision, a media-driven position that largely distorts reality and the traditional political position which attempts to govern in response to reality. The media-driven position places ultimate value on spectacle—for example, an executive administration that exists to appear that it governs rather than actually govern. The purpose of spectacle—appearing rather than doing—is to maximize profits. Whereas, media’s opposing and traditional political position values the expected role of government, governing to maximize the safety and health of citizens and to maintain the sovereignty and economic strength of the nation. At some points, the aims of media and traditional politics find agreement, but a media-influenced government has, to this point, mostly yielded propaganda and incoherent policies resulting in the breakdown of diplomacy and domestic affairs, from strained US relations with the Eurozone to a marked slowdown of its own postal system. If history serves, then war will not be long in coming. And, indeed, the military-industrial complex that has largely steered foreign policy and served as an important backbone of the US economy since WWII guarantees ongoing wars across the globe.
The Trump administration has worked to decrease the visibility of the state. The argument between big government versus small government is as old as the nation. But in the twenty-first century, big government has taken on a different dimension. Namely, the stakes of government involvement are higher. It is now almost inconceivable to imagine the complete removal of government oversight and involvement in society. Just to raise a couple of issues, millions of citizens rely on the government for healthcare, and governmental regulations are required to ensure the health and safety of Americans—consider that the capacity for industrial pollution.
The Trump administration has worked to decrease the visibility of the state. The argument between big government versus small government is as old as the nation. But in the twenty-first century, big government has taken on a different dimension. Namely, the stakes of government involvement are higher. It is now almost inconceivable to imagine the complete removal of government oversight and involvement in society. Just to raise a couple of issues, millions of citizens rely on the government for healthcare, and governmental regulations are required to ensure the health and safety of Americans—consider that the capacity for industrial pollution.
Donald Trump was elected in part as a result of his swagger and showmanship. His properties looked good, the Trump name gleaming in gold letters on the faces of buildings the world over. People saw themselves in the dark reflective glass of those formidable facades that bore his name. People wanted to associate with a powerful man. Many Americans were energized by his promises to enter politics as a Washington outsider and drain the swamp of career politicians and reduce government involvement at all levels of society. But the Trumpian policy of swamp draining didn’t originate from Trump. Trump’s policy architect was the one-man, alt-right brain trust, Steve Bannon. Bannon’s goal was to incite revolution, to make a sharp break with the United States government as we have known it and usher in an era focused on dismantling the administrative state. In his inaugural address, Trump echoed a line from Bane, a Batman villain, who declared that he had wrested Gotham from the corrupt only to “give it back to you, the people.” Giving government back to the people is a distortion of democracy, where people cede some of their own individual rights in trade for living under the protective sovereignty of a government. Such a trade-off is basic political contract theory. But the Trumpian “giving back” is a giving back that rewards the rich and damages everyone else. Bannon and Trump’s giving back looks like tax cuts for the wealthy, the gutting of social programs, and a return to laissez-faire capitalism. “Give it back to you, the people” reads as a free-for-all, a revoking of the constitutional duty of the chief executive officer, a dereliction of duty.
Once in office, Trump activated Bannon’s policy. In practice, this meant that the Trump administration handpicked leaders of the major departments in the executive branch and gave them the task of massively cutting back the scope of their department’s work. Trump’s executive branch executed all the branches. For example, Trump’s EPA rolled back environmental protections, and Trump’s US Department of Education cut funding to public schools and pushed an agenda of privatized education. Virtually every department in the era of Trump has worked to turn itself invisible. But this invisibility is not invisible at all. An environmental protection agency that doesn’t protect the environment and an Education Department that hacks and slashes education budgets are sorely visible. They are visibly emptied out, dismantled, and the people receive no benefit.
Turning to another aspect of endo-colonization, eugenics programs operate out of sight in the States. Though eugenics programs were brandished most notoriously by Nazi Germany, the death camps standing in as the most visible and awful expression of the government subjecting its population to biopower, the nascence of eugenics programs in the US reaches into the late-nineteenth century. The European nations had adopted eugenics methods in their oversight of colonial lands, most notoriously in the Belgian Congo as recounted in Heart of Darkness. Kurtz’s injunction to “Exterminate all the brutes!” (Conrad 1899, 129) lays bare the imperative to treat the racial other as a non-human.
The US has weaponized its racism into an invisible and horrifying eugenics program, separating children at the border from their parents and never reuniting them and administering mass hysterectomies on Latina women in its ICE detention centers. It is unclear if the parents of detained children were deported, jailed, or summarily executed, but the other side of the Southern border now plays host to squalorous refugee camps. Neither is it clear if the operations are only occurring in a detention center in Georgia or if women in all of ICE’s two-hundred detention centers are subjected to this aggressive expression of eugenics, constituting a sanctioned eugenics program. Sanctioned or not, no eugenics program has ever been made official. If it were, it would likely be received with mixed reviews. Regardless, the racism that fuels the United States’ piecemeal eugenics system is creating lasting disruptions in society. Hate for the other sees through culture, art, and tradition, masking reality with a fantasy of hate, a fantasy that insists that groups of people are worth nothing, are nothing.
The prison system in the US also functions to meet eugenics goals, cutting off mostly non-white men from society, effectively reducing their ability to pass on their genetic material to the next generation. The failure to ensure universal healthcare to all US citizens is another aspect of an ideology that embraces eugenics. Here, wealth is the operative measure for determining who receives care. Though race rears its head again here as well, as non-white peoples are in a wealth disparity with white people in America. Keeping minorities locked away and not ensuring healthcare to all passively pushes the countries’ eugenics program forward. In the United States, all is not visible. All is not well.
Once in office, Trump activated Bannon’s policy. In practice, this meant that the Trump administration handpicked leaders of the major departments in the executive branch and gave them the task of massively cutting back the scope of their department’s work. Trump’s executive branch executed all the branches. For example, Trump’s EPA rolled back environmental protections, and Trump’s US Department of Education cut funding to public schools and pushed an agenda of privatized education. Virtually every department in the era of Trump has worked to turn itself invisible. But this invisibility is not invisible at all. An environmental protection agency that doesn’t protect the environment and an Education Department that hacks and slashes education budgets are sorely visible. They are visibly emptied out, dismantled, and the people receive no benefit.
Turning to another aspect of endo-colonization, eugenics programs operate out of sight in the States. Though eugenics programs were brandished most notoriously by Nazi Germany, the death camps standing in as the most visible and awful expression of the government subjecting its population to biopower, the nascence of eugenics programs in the US reaches into the late-nineteenth century. The European nations had adopted eugenics methods in their oversight of colonial lands, most notoriously in the Belgian Congo as recounted in Heart of Darkness. Kurtz’s injunction to “Exterminate all the brutes!” (Conrad 1899, 129) lays bare the imperative to treat the racial other as a non-human.
The US has weaponized its racism into an invisible and horrifying eugenics program, separating children at the border from their parents and never reuniting them and administering mass hysterectomies on Latina women in its ICE detention centers. It is unclear if the parents of detained children were deported, jailed, or summarily executed, but the other side of the Southern border now plays host to squalorous refugee camps. Neither is it clear if the operations are only occurring in a detention center in Georgia or if women in all of ICE’s two-hundred detention centers are subjected to this aggressive expression of eugenics, constituting a sanctioned eugenics program. Sanctioned or not, no eugenics program has ever been made official. If it were, it would likely be received with mixed reviews. Regardless, the racism that fuels the United States’ piecemeal eugenics system is creating lasting disruptions in society. Hate for the other sees through culture, art, and tradition, masking reality with a fantasy of hate, a fantasy that insists that groups of people are worth nothing, are nothing.
The prison system in the US also functions to meet eugenics goals, cutting off mostly non-white men from society, effectively reducing their ability to pass on their genetic material to the next generation. The failure to ensure universal healthcare to all US citizens is another aspect of an ideology that embraces eugenics. Here, wealth is the operative measure for determining who receives care. Though race rears its head again here as well, as non-white peoples are in a wealth disparity with white people in America. Keeping minorities locked away and not ensuring healthcare to all passively pushes the countries’ eugenics program forward. In the United States, all is not visible. All is not well.
But polarizing attitudes in America due to hyper-nationalist, racist, and fascist undercurrents and the resultant destabilization in American life and politics should not come as a surprise. Alexis de Tocqueville reasoned that America’s greatest obstacle was a desire for personal gain over the common good. Resistance to the common good expresses itself as xenophobia, fear of the other, and engenders a people easily manipulated by demagogues, tyrants that turn to fascism to stay in power, all the while promising to deliver freedom and a return to the values that once made the country great, which is shorthand for white supremacy and the unrestrained capitalism of company towns, child labor, and mining disasters.
Violence is a linking motive for America’s polarization and destabilization. In his book America, Jean Baudrillard recorded his thoughts about the country during an extended visit to the states as a postmodern update to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Baudrillard’s America is essentially a travel journal where he, among other things, remarked that speeding across the desert was similar to the experience of watching the timelessness of film. For Baudrillard, America operated as a precession of simulacra, a land of demolition and detonation where violence holds sway. The desert’s timelessness doesn’t reflect beauty so much as it reflects the site of absolute violence—a nuclear weapons testing site—just as film juxtaposes beauty with the inexorable end, an end doubling as the end of the feature film and the end of existence.
We find ourselves detached in a digital, post-truth world. The United States both created this reality and suffers from it. Our privacy has vanished, our freedoms have diminished, leaving us exposed to extra-constitutional power like the NSA’s data collection programs and the Homeland Security surveillance and disciplinary apparatus, ostensibly created to combat terrorism. But terrorism, whether originating domestically or from foreign sources, pales in comparison with the unmitigated level of power that the state exposes its citizens to by operating the very disciplinary apparatus meant to safeguard citizens from terrorism. Do we dare to utter the unspoken, which is that the US has cultivated a need to protect itself from Middle Eastern terrorist organizations for several decades? Consider that the United States has continued the longstanding tradition of orientalizing the Middle East. Edward Said explained that part of the United States’ transfer into the role of world superpower was to take over colonial oversight from the previous European masters. Since the 1970s, the United States has had an outsized role in policing the Middle East, fighting wars and maintaining forever wars in Lebanon (1982-1984), Libya (1986, 2011, 2015-present), Kuwait and Saudi Arabia (1990-1991), Afghanistan (2001-present), Iraq (1990-1991, 2003-2011, 2014-present), North-West Pakistan (2004-present), Syria (2014-present), and Yemen (2015-present). Ongoing engagement in war with multiple countries has created a similarly unlimited threat to the safety of the United States. The declaration of war anywhere is simultaneously the declaration of war at home.
As a result of waging forever wars, the United States’ greatest product is paranoia. Every fear is viable. We fear terrorists who go to flight school to learn how to take off but not to land. We fear the capacity of ISIS to radicalize our own citizens via YouTube and Reddit. The vast scale of America’s prison systems is symptomatic of paranoia. Consider that the US has the largest prison system in the world, playing host to over two million prisoners. Paranoia is expressed in building walls on the Mexican-US border. So too increasing defense and military spending. So too maintaining Guantanamo Bay Naval Base as a torture institution. So too more than six thousand nuclear warheads ready for launch. Those missiles are primarily armed and aimed for deterrence purposes. This position of deterrence is the default position in America, deterrence and xenophobia. The missiles are a machine for maintaining the operation of our global capital empire. The US never meant to make the world safe for democracy. The goal was to make American corporations flush with capital while maintaining a status quo for its citizens.
The institutions that the US relies on to keep it safe are mostly invisible to the public, including prisons, missile silos, underground bunkers, and offshore military bases. But physical institutions are not enough. Afraid of attack, the US collects intelligence everywhere. They scan the skies and the oceans with radar to track the passage of ships, planes, submarines. Passengers are X-rayed before boarding passenger planes. The NSA records the telephone conversations and text message conversations of Americans. Cell phones track the movement of citizens. Credit and debit cards report citizens’ spending habits. Bank accounts monitor the movement of capital. Citizens are seen by satellite more clearly than neighborhood watch programs. The US army even attempted to train soldiers in remote viewing techniques so they could psychically ascertain threats to the nation from hundreds or even thousands of miles away. But policing a population of 328 million is hard. Some people slip through the cracks. Others are radicalized on the internet by bad actors. Some people are born crazy. Some people are desperate or driven mad by forces they cannot control.
Because of the increased speed of information, transportation, and the rapid generation of wealth in the global economy, empires will rise and fall more quickly. Regardless of its attempts to maintain power by spying on its citizens, like all empires, the United States will decline in power. The US will not always dominate the globe with the twin powers of its economy and military. And that decline may occur sooner than later. The United States has already set a course to move away from its role as world superpower. Soon America will join Greece, Italy, and England, mythologizing the past, painting scenes of Raj nostalgia, recycling Hollywood noirs from the golden era of Hollywood’s culture factory. Americans will do little more than emit carbon and export culture while glaciers melt, toxic barrels leak, and plastic islands in the ocean slowly expand.
The United States is headed toward a couple of major crisis points. First, the Internet did not do what we hoped it would, which is democratize society, giving all that is good and virtuous more visibility. Instead, the digital world weaponized the public sphere, giving airtime to conspiracies and the worst among us, including demagogues, cyberbullies, and jihadists. The Internet has exposed the population of liberal societies to radicalization. The media will likely never learn from the mistake of publishing Adolph Hitler's views while he was on trial for the Beer Hall Putsch, an attempted hostile takeover of the Weimar Republic. Rather than responding in shock, many Germans were sympathetic to Hitler’s message, so the trial galvanized the future führer’s popularity. In the twenty-first century, we can expect more fragmented social discourse, which translates increasingly to government policy benefiting the biggest donor—even if that donor is a foreign entity. Public opinion is already divided and will only continue to fragment.
Global warming is the other crisis point, a decidedly worse problem than the weaponization of ideas made widely and immediately available over the Internet. We are headed toward a major extinction event, and many people reject it out of hand. Indeed, the increasing tendency for the average person to reject the position of scientists and specialists or to never even hear accurate reporting as a result of political and media-driven initiatives will drive climate change. But perhaps all of that detachment will lead to widescale frustration with the virtual information ecosystem. Perhaps communities will unplug from an overload of mass media to focus on local issues. Confucian wisdom describes the strength of any society by the strength of the family, a small but incredibly important social unit. So, it is likely that our detachment in the mediasphere will lead us back to these more organic communities where we can reject false narratives and simultaneously invest in each other and the earth, air, and water around us. For example, the climate crisis would be resolved if every home was powered by solar panels and equipped with a carbon scrubber.
Violence is a linking motive for America’s polarization and destabilization. In his book America, Jean Baudrillard recorded his thoughts about the country during an extended visit to the states as a postmodern update to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Baudrillard’s America is essentially a travel journal where he, among other things, remarked that speeding across the desert was similar to the experience of watching the timelessness of film. For Baudrillard, America operated as a precession of simulacra, a land of demolition and detonation where violence holds sway. The desert’s timelessness doesn’t reflect beauty so much as it reflects the site of absolute violence—a nuclear weapons testing site—just as film juxtaposes beauty with the inexorable end, an end doubling as the end of the feature film and the end of existence.
We find ourselves detached in a digital, post-truth world. The United States both created this reality and suffers from it. Our privacy has vanished, our freedoms have diminished, leaving us exposed to extra-constitutional power like the NSA’s data collection programs and the Homeland Security surveillance and disciplinary apparatus, ostensibly created to combat terrorism. But terrorism, whether originating domestically or from foreign sources, pales in comparison with the unmitigated level of power that the state exposes its citizens to by operating the very disciplinary apparatus meant to safeguard citizens from terrorism. Do we dare to utter the unspoken, which is that the US has cultivated a need to protect itself from Middle Eastern terrorist organizations for several decades? Consider that the United States has continued the longstanding tradition of orientalizing the Middle East. Edward Said explained that part of the United States’ transfer into the role of world superpower was to take over colonial oversight from the previous European masters. Since the 1970s, the United States has had an outsized role in policing the Middle East, fighting wars and maintaining forever wars in Lebanon (1982-1984), Libya (1986, 2011, 2015-present), Kuwait and Saudi Arabia (1990-1991), Afghanistan (2001-present), Iraq (1990-1991, 2003-2011, 2014-present), North-West Pakistan (2004-present), Syria (2014-present), and Yemen (2015-present). Ongoing engagement in war with multiple countries has created a similarly unlimited threat to the safety of the United States. The declaration of war anywhere is simultaneously the declaration of war at home.
As a result of waging forever wars, the United States’ greatest product is paranoia. Every fear is viable. We fear terrorists who go to flight school to learn how to take off but not to land. We fear the capacity of ISIS to radicalize our own citizens via YouTube and Reddit. The vast scale of America’s prison systems is symptomatic of paranoia. Consider that the US has the largest prison system in the world, playing host to over two million prisoners. Paranoia is expressed in building walls on the Mexican-US border. So too increasing defense and military spending. So too maintaining Guantanamo Bay Naval Base as a torture institution. So too more than six thousand nuclear warheads ready for launch. Those missiles are primarily armed and aimed for deterrence purposes. This position of deterrence is the default position in America, deterrence and xenophobia. The missiles are a machine for maintaining the operation of our global capital empire. The US never meant to make the world safe for democracy. The goal was to make American corporations flush with capital while maintaining a status quo for its citizens.
The institutions that the US relies on to keep it safe are mostly invisible to the public, including prisons, missile silos, underground bunkers, and offshore military bases. But physical institutions are not enough. Afraid of attack, the US collects intelligence everywhere. They scan the skies and the oceans with radar to track the passage of ships, planes, submarines. Passengers are X-rayed before boarding passenger planes. The NSA records the telephone conversations and text message conversations of Americans. Cell phones track the movement of citizens. Credit and debit cards report citizens’ spending habits. Bank accounts monitor the movement of capital. Citizens are seen by satellite more clearly than neighborhood watch programs. The US army even attempted to train soldiers in remote viewing techniques so they could psychically ascertain threats to the nation from hundreds or even thousands of miles away. But policing a population of 328 million is hard. Some people slip through the cracks. Others are radicalized on the internet by bad actors. Some people are born crazy. Some people are desperate or driven mad by forces they cannot control.
Because of the increased speed of information, transportation, and the rapid generation of wealth in the global economy, empires will rise and fall more quickly. Regardless of its attempts to maintain power by spying on its citizens, like all empires, the United States will decline in power. The US will not always dominate the globe with the twin powers of its economy and military. And that decline may occur sooner than later. The United States has already set a course to move away from its role as world superpower. Soon America will join Greece, Italy, and England, mythologizing the past, painting scenes of Raj nostalgia, recycling Hollywood noirs from the golden era of Hollywood’s culture factory. Americans will do little more than emit carbon and export culture while glaciers melt, toxic barrels leak, and plastic islands in the ocean slowly expand.
The United States is headed toward a couple of major crisis points. First, the Internet did not do what we hoped it would, which is democratize society, giving all that is good and virtuous more visibility. Instead, the digital world weaponized the public sphere, giving airtime to conspiracies and the worst among us, including demagogues, cyberbullies, and jihadists. The Internet has exposed the population of liberal societies to radicalization. The media will likely never learn from the mistake of publishing Adolph Hitler's views while he was on trial for the Beer Hall Putsch, an attempted hostile takeover of the Weimar Republic. Rather than responding in shock, many Germans were sympathetic to Hitler’s message, so the trial galvanized the future führer’s popularity. In the twenty-first century, we can expect more fragmented social discourse, which translates increasingly to government policy benefiting the biggest donor—even if that donor is a foreign entity. Public opinion is already divided and will only continue to fragment.
Global warming is the other crisis point, a decidedly worse problem than the weaponization of ideas made widely and immediately available over the Internet. We are headed toward a major extinction event, and many people reject it out of hand. Indeed, the increasing tendency for the average person to reject the position of scientists and specialists or to never even hear accurate reporting as a result of political and media-driven initiatives will drive climate change. But perhaps all of that detachment will lead to widescale frustration with the virtual information ecosystem. Perhaps communities will unplug from an overload of mass media to focus on local issues. Confucian wisdom describes the strength of any society by the strength of the family, a small but incredibly important social unit. So, it is likely that our detachment in the mediasphere will lead us back to these more organic communities where we can reject false narratives and simultaneously invest in each other and the earth, air, and water around us. For example, the climate crisis would be resolved if every home was powered by solar panels and equipped with a carbon scrubber.
If our society moves into a Confucian refocusing of family units and community building at the local level, then a great reckoning must still be made with how we view invisible members of society, or again, how we view those people within society that we have made invisible. Otherwise, the refocusing will be all for naught, or, likely, will only serve to crystallize even more deep-seated racist beliefs.
So, where has our society gone wrong in its thinking concerning the invisibles? The tenets of critical race theory can guide us here. Critical race theory’s prime understanding is that race is a construct used to oppress non-white people. W. E. B Du Bois concedes that, yes, races are distinguished by physical differences, but he finds that races are primarily defined by “common history, common laws and religion, similar habits of thought and a conscious striving together for certain ideals of life” (Du Bois 1897, 9), which is to say that meaningful racial differences are cultural. By dividing people into arbitrary categories, targeted populations can more easily be termed undesirable then ghettoized and policed. Indeed, one of the first operations of discipline and surveillance mechanisms involves classification. And in our surveillance state, the movement and habits of all citizens are tracked. All of the work to make citizens visible ensures that those the state deems invisible remain so.
So, where has our society gone wrong in its thinking concerning the invisibles? The tenets of critical race theory can guide us here. Critical race theory’s prime understanding is that race is a construct used to oppress non-white people. W. E. B Du Bois concedes that, yes, races are distinguished by physical differences, but he finds that races are primarily defined by “common history, common laws and religion, similar habits of thought and a conscious striving together for certain ideals of life” (Du Bois 1897, 9), which is to say that meaningful racial differences are cultural. By dividing people into arbitrary categories, targeted populations can more easily be termed undesirable then ghettoized and policed. Indeed, one of the first operations of discipline and surveillance mechanisms involves classification. And in our surveillance state, the movement and habits of all citizens are tracked. All of the work to make citizens visible ensures that those the state deems invisible remain so.
We may wonder, is a breaking point on the way where our media-influenced governments stop being functional? Perhaps the COVID-19 pandemic could lead to such a situation. We must consider where the breaking point is for the American economy and the global economy.
The US started to feel like it was heading for a complete breakdown of functionality during the months-long lockdown in the Spring of 2020. The market started to look shaky. The price of oil dropped to below zero for a few hours. Toilet paper and meat were scarce. But the US economy was saved, at least for a time, by the re-introduction of racial tension as the prime media narrative. With a reduced focus on the pandemic, the economy righted itself. Here we have a clear demonstration that as long as the invisibility of the disenfranchised remains in focus, economic systems can withstand anything. If the media focuses on immigrants, the poor, the mentally ill, minorities, the working poor, the disabled, then as long as the economy remains viable, society is capable of weathering anything. That the media can create a panic or make it disappear is to say that if the average citizen understood the Potemkin mechanisms that prop up national and international finance, a widespread loss of confidence would likely crash the whole system.
The US started to feel like it was heading for a complete breakdown of functionality during the months-long lockdown in the Spring of 2020. The market started to look shaky. The price of oil dropped to below zero for a few hours. Toilet paper and meat were scarce. But the US economy was saved, at least for a time, by the re-introduction of racial tension as the prime media narrative. With a reduced focus on the pandemic, the economy righted itself. Here we have a clear demonstration that as long as the invisibility of the disenfranchised remains in focus, economic systems can withstand anything. If the media focuses on immigrants, the poor, the mentally ill, minorities, the working poor, the disabled, then as long as the economy remains viable, society is capable of weathering anything. That the media can create a panic or make it disappear is to say that if the average citizen understood the Potemkin mechanisms that prop up national and international finance, a widespread loss of confidence would likely crash the whole system.
But is it only the media causing these disruptions? Certainly not—and much of the media is necessary. A free media keeps government malfeasance and corporate corruption in check, certainly. Some journalists even put their safety at risk to report the truth. But there is a level at which the media earns money by keeping people turned to their screens, tuned to a narrative that entertains as it creates a captive consumer base. Media consumers are conditioned to consume more media. But all this media consumption is a type of self-imposed surveillance, a self-imposed disciplinary measure ensuring our conformity. For those profiting from the system, no cost to society is too great.
To return to the dissimulation of Trump and company, whenever the invisible actions of corrupt political figures connected to his administration are made visible, they come to justice. Michael Flynn was the first convicted figure connected to Trump, and he’s been followed by a crowd of crooks, from Roger Stone to Rick Gates to Paul Manafort. Most recently, Steve Bannon was arrested for fraud. He received more than a million dollars from a fund created to build Donald Trump's wall on the Mexican border. America’s promised wall was always political theater. After nearly four years, Trump extended the wall by only five miles. Trump conceived the wall as a barrier to protect against a litany of fake figures, including drug dealers, criminals, rapists, and “bad hombres,” all lies to conceal the actions of a corrupt government administration. But walls don’t stand forever. Neither do the invisible remain invisible. Someday soon, all the invisible men in America will be seen.
And what of the invisible man, Wells’ psychopath pursuing science like a dying star? He wraps himself in the power of invisibility, and in doing so alienates himself from society and dies. A figure can only stamp his boot in the face of the people so long before they turn and smash him. But the death of an experimenting scientist does not imply that Wells’ message is anti-science; rather, Wells warns against the individual or entity that assesses the value of others as dispensable in contradistinction to an inflated sense of self-worth. The demise of the invisible man is an image parallel to a superpower protecting itself against its own people, a president descending to a bunker not from the threat of nuclear attack but from peaceful social rights protestors. What we thought was ultimate power was ultimate weakness. The power to make others invisible turns the wielder invisible. By surveilling, we surveil ourselves. By killing, we kill ourselves.
Works Cited:
Baudrillard, Jean. 1988. America. New York: Verso Books
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 1899. London: Blackwood.
Du Bois, W. E. B. 1897. The Conservation of Races. Washington D.C.: The Academy.
Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1835. Democracy in America. London: Saunders and Otley.
Virilio, Paul. 2002. Ground Zero. New York: Verso.
Virilio, Paul. Pure War. 2003. New York: Verso.
Wells, H.G. 1897. The Invisible Man. London: Collins.