Big Knobhead is Watching

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“First they came for the gooners. But I did not speak up, for I was not a gooner.” – People in the future, probably.

Having an honest wank isn’t so easy nowadays. It used to be a fairly simple affair – open an incognito tab, type ‘danbooru dot donmai dot us slash posts question mark tags equals sign fart’, and away you go. But now, thanks to Keir Starmer – that trailblazing trendsetter – there’s all this extra faff. Mr. Starmer has left you with two options: scan your face and send it to Persona, or give a VPN company access to all of your erotic fixations. When Westminster passed the Online Safety Act (OSA), search engine hits for ‘VPN’ in the UK went up 1,400%, suggesting that the British public would rather take their chances with Proton or Nord over Persona.

Shortly after the Online Safety Act came into force, overseas jurisdictions have rapidly moved to do the same – Australia, Canada, Germany, and states in the US are all making it impossible to view ‘explicit’ content without attaching your name, face, and address to your browsing data, and sending it all away to third-party tech companies. Naturally, the definition of ‘explicit’ is very loose; far more pedestrian content besides porn is now locked off for those who do not wish to hand their privacy over to unelected corporations.

Now several months into this New Online Order, lawmakers have begun floating the idea of a VPN ban, as well as requiring ID verification to log into operating systems – all in the name of children’s further safety, of course. So that leaves all web surfers – masturbatory or otherwise – with only one option: scan your face and send it to Persona. What, or who, is Persona?

Persona is the company which governments have endorsed for collecting their citizen’s facial data in the name of children’s safety. Persona’s biggest backer is Palantir, a ‘data’ company owned by Peter Thiel. Thiel, a German-American, grew up in apartheid South Africa, in the town of Swakopmund – a town which, in those days, was infamous for being a haven for neo-nazis. A fan of the Lord of the Rings (the most hitlerite of all fantasies), Thiel decided to name his company after the evil orb that Saruman uses to spy on people.

Persona’s customers include Discord, Reddit and Roblox – three companies with extensive access to children’s data, including their thoughts and feelings. Overseas, Palantir has contracts with various militaries, including those of the currently-at-war Israel and Ukraine. Back home, the British state seemingly cannot help but hand its data to Palantir, including patient data from the National Health Service, and intelligence data from the Financial Conduct Authority. Jeffrey Epstein was an investor in Palantir, and it has recently come to light that Thiel and Epstein were in extensive correspondence with one another.

What does this all mean? Is the world controlled by a small group of evil wealthy people (as opposed to ‘virtuous’ wealthy people), a group that once had a serial child molester at its centre? No. This is only a half-truth. In reality, what we are seeing is international class solidarity. Even when it competes with itself through imperialism, the big bourgeoisie moves as a single organism. We can find this to be true if we look at the recent actions of individual bourgeois.

Take the politician Nigel Farage, for example, a self-described friend of Peter Thiel who has made his opposition to the Online Safety Act well known. He's even made repealing the Online Safety Act a campaign promise for his ‘Reform’ party. How can all of this be true at once? Peter Thiel’s company financially benefits from the OSA; Nigel Farage wants to repeal the OSA; Nigel Farage and Peter Thiel are chums. One of these statements must be false, and it doesn’t take a genius to guess which.

Farage’s Cameo track record demonstrates his predilection for being paid to say anything; most notoriously, Farage in one Cameo appeared to express support for the IRA. In another instance, Farage recorded himself repeating esoteric neo-nazi slogans.

Farage can be heard here promising to commit genocide against Black people. The commissioner(s) used acronyms and euphemisms to obfuscate the meaning of their script, for humorous effect on their part (‘Haha we made him say it’). The editor of this TikTok has set Farage against a rotating Schwarze Sonne, a nazi symbol consisting of S-runes arranged in a circle.

Farage doesn’t really care about the Online Safety Act, because Farage doesn’t really care about anything other than becoming Prime Minister. He will repeal the OSA if he has to, and if so Thiel will still get to keep the data from all of the faces his company has scanned – data than can and will be used to develop targeting systems for weapons and state surveillance.

The Online Safety Act, then, does two things. First, it improves the sophistication of state surveillance. Second, it manufactures consent for a Farage government. It may seem strange that the policies of Starmer’s Labour Party are so beneficial to Farage, but keep this in mind: Starmer and Farage are of the same class. The bourgeois circus of electoral politics is just a bit of good sport to the likes of Farage and Starmer. Remember how Biden and Trump spoke of each other when the Democrats handed the keys of the American state to the Republicans two years ago? The same will happen when Starmer hands the keys of the British state to Farage in 2029.

 

Right now, the national bourgeoisies are dividing themselves into teams in preparation for a grand interimperial conflict. It may or may not be called ‘World War 3’, but that is what it will be, in terms of scale and scope. Starmer’s task is to juggle diplomatic relations between Europe and Washington in preparation for Farage, who seems to be the man for the job of imperialist war as chosen by the British bourgeoisie. Farage’s government will not be well-liked by many proletarians – especially the young – which is why the British surveillance state is rapidly expanding. The fact that other countries are following suit gives us a decent idea of what the international bourgeoisie is expecting in the coming decades.

Make no mistake. The bourgeoisie is not doing what it is doing because individual bourgeois necessarily enjoy brutalising proletarians on the streets and on the frontlines (though I’m sure many certainly do). Rather, the bourgeoisie does what it does because its hand is forced. Commodity production is a runaway train of manufacturing unnecessary bullshit. When too much stuff is made, profits fall while prices rise – this is exactly the situation we are in right now. In times like these, the only way for commodity production to continue to function in spite of itself is for the bourgeoisie to kill lots of people – an unfortunate fact which the bourgeoisie must justify through ableism, racism and nationalism (irrespective of how much sense these justifications may make). This process began in earnest with the Ukraine war and the deliberate mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the introduction of euthanasia programmes for the disabled in countries like Canada and the Netherlands. We see this process also in the genocide of Palestinians, and the total destruction of everything the Palestinians had built.

Contrary to what the idealists will tell you, war and genocide do not happen because bad ideas exist a priori, floating around in the aether, which then possess ordinary people and encourage them to do bad things. No. War and genocide happen because capitalism requires mass death to regulate itself in times of crisis; the bourgeoisie then creates bad ideas (consciously or otherwise) which justify these atrocities after they have been initiated. There is no atrocity in history or in present which is unique or separate from capitalism’s iron law of regulatory mass murder.

The lunacy of this policy is perhaps exemplified by the US’s recent military actions in the Middle East; a war with no clear goal, no sign of ending anytime soon, and a death toll already in the thousands. It is not a popular war, but it is a war that must happen if commodity production is to be preserved. That severe unpopularity may very well serve to be the eternal downfall of the bourgeoisie – we can only hope, at least.

Back home, Westminster is continuing its War on Fun, with a new Apple policy coming into force (at the behest of Ofcom) that will require iPhone users to provide their ID to the foreign tech company if they wish to browse the web freely. Doctor Who is on life support, Harry Potter is being re-adapted into a dimly-lit HBO thriller, and Pewdiepie is uploading again. You are not prepared for the ridiculousness of British fascism.