Science Fiction
The metastasis of the national security state has resulted in an everywhere invisible war.
For too long it was at the edges of everyday life. It defined enemies and moved to eliminate them in the name of preserving continuity.
But it confused itself with continuity. It confused itself with what it was established to defend.
In the beginning it monitored enemies that were outside. But the outside kept expanding to include everywhere the system was not; every place, every channel.
In this way, the system performed its confusion.
We knew it was happening. But it continued for so long that we forgot.
The crisis was a change in the weather of communication. The change in the weather of communication eroded consent for what had been.
The national security system sensed in this a threat. It reacted as a system as an almost thinking thing. This almost thinking replicated in the mind of every agent.
First the system declared a state of emergency. Then the system declared itself secret. What was secret kept expanding.
By assembling lists of the first to disappear we learned that political dissent and acts of war were equivalent.
By assembling lists of the next to disappear we learned that to tell what was happening around us was to reveal what was secret.
This is how we discovered that the system had declared war on us.
People continued disappearing. Then we remembered that we are monitored.
We were driven underground, reduced to calling each other phone booth to phone booth, each a relic of by-gone days of anonymity. But those lines were monitored too.
Now few of us are left.
This is the story of the metastasis of the national security state. It declared itself to be invisible only to replicate in every subsystem. Now it lives by continually expanding. What is inside is the history of its expansion. It is like any other cancer.
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Author's Note
The national security state was established in 1947 as a foundational element of the Cold War. It is a legal framework that is like the state of emergency doctrine.
It is also a shorthand for referring to the permanent military-industrial complex (Eisenhower, 1961).
Or you could think of it in terms of its mutation since 9/11/2001 into a kind of diffuse surveillance apparatus in the context of which criminal justice and military functions have entered into blurry relations.
Or you could think of it the way this little science fiction story does.
But it's just a science fiction story.
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Good writing. Right on. Except it isn't science fiction, it's fact, as you obviously know. The National Security Act of 1947 established the CIA as a front agency for the OSS, which went underground, where it remains to this day.
thanks for the read & comment.
the material is factual but the story is science fiction...like jg ballard defined it, writing the present in the subjunctive, making variations. if there's a response from this sector, it'll likely follow something like this logic and have something like these effects. its possible. it's also possible that, for a variety of reasons, this won't happen. the double-edged possibility scenario is that it's not in the collective interest of this sector to react as changing the current plutocratic regime is also in their interests. which sets up a scenario not that different from egypt as an outcome, in which it becomes quite clear that it's the national-security apparatus that runs the show, that we've become the sorts of regimes we propped up except with better commodities as befits an empire. it's still quite early in the unfolding of this process of opposition, of demanding basic changes, so we'll see. but the movement is acquiring momentum. it's multiplying across the country. we should do what we can to support it, to show our support, to be part of it.