Aaron Dykes and Melissa MeltonActivist PostThey Live, We Sleep: How the Control of Data Allows an Invisible Government to Rule in Secret.In the prescient and unsettling-but-realistically-surreal alter-reality 1988 cult classic They Live directed by John Carpenter, there are many clues about the real-life police state scientific dictatorship we’re all living under today.Before the pivotal, iconic turning point when Rowdy Roddy Piper first puts on the Hoffman sunglasses and sees the very first subliminal billboard to “Obey,” there is another subtle message for the police state technocracy to come….The regular billboard – before revealing the hidden message “Obey” – carries an advertisement for a company called “Control Data” and reads, “We’re creating the transparent computing environment.”Via Wikipedia: “Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a supercomputer firm. CDC was one of the nine major United States computer companies through most of the 1960s; the others were IBM, Burroughs Corporation, DEC, NCR, General Electric, Honeywell, RCA, and UNIVAC. CDC was well-known and highly regarded throughout the industry at the time.”During the sixties, CDC created what were considered the fastest computers in the world at the time.“We’re creating the transparent computing environment…”What sad irony when considered in the context of a movie where an alien race is using that same “transparent” system to control everyone’s minds through frequency manipulation and subliminal messages.Control [of] Data, yes?The relationship between implicit control through a data-driven society where “They” know everything of any importance that happens on a “transparent” computer platform and a world where “we” obey is clear enough.In other words — even aboveboard in a society ultimately controlled by hidden commands to obey, consume, never question authority, and hold no independent thought — there is already a data-driven “controlled” society where “transparent computing” holds promise.This is basically the society that we have been bathed in since the age of Big Data has dawned.Total surveillance. Everything tracked, traced and cataloged in metadata libraries that make the Library of Congress look like a magazine rack.In fact, there’s a new term for this beyond the surveillance world of big data we’re all living in: Überveillance.Überveillance is defined as, “an above and beyond, an exaggerated, an omnipresent 24/7 electronic surveillance.
Read more about That Very First Billboard Decoded in ''They Live'' Wasn’t Put There by Accident
Read more about That Very First Billboard Decoded in ''They Live'' Wasn’t Put There by Accident
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