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.Once theIndustrial Age gives way to the Information Age, with its entirelydifferent requirements, the Industrial Age totalitarian ideology reveals179 Matthew Malyitself as absolutely outdated and collapses.But there could easily be atotalitarian state created on the basis of an Information Age ideology.People must stay in touch with themselves, consume information that isrelevant to them, control their own behavior on the basis of moralprinciples born out of respect for the rights and freedoms of others.Ifpeople are subjected to a barrage of information that is irrelevant tothem, if they can no longer tell the virtual from the real, if theinformation noise prevents them from hearing the voice of their ownconscience, they become ripe for ideological exploitation.When you watch TV, the TV makes you switch your attention fromone object shown on the TV screen to the next.You sit on the couch,motionless.You re not really living: all your emotions are inside the TVbox, completely controlled by it.You do not discover relevantknowledge in response to your needs, but get what is given to you by thebox.Thus, we again see the same Social Machine: millions of peoplesuddenly acquire inanimate characteristics: they gave up their emotionsand personality, forgetting their individual needs as they sit motionless infront of the TV.We also see that the TV network assumes the role of amodern-day Stalin: it suddenly is the only entity that knows everything,that tells everyone what to think, and can control the thoughts andactions of everyone.There was a whole slew of recent Hollywoodmovies about one theme: a human being somehow loses his personality:gets a new face, gets cloned and replicated, forgets all he knew, etc.Thisis a sign of the times.Fifteen years ago, young Russians could not express their politicalviews because of censorship; now, since they spend every wakingmoment listening to music, they have no views to express.Human beings should not permanently attach themselves to theSocial Machine: they should not lose self-control and freedom of choiceby permanently lending their senses, their eyes and ears, and very soon,their brains, to outside influences.These outside influences areincreasingly more sophisticated, manipulative, self-perpetuating,addictive, and evil.Their natural tendency is to degrade and controlhuman personality.When we rent our eyes out to the TV and our ears tothe CD player, we give ourselves up to outside management.180 Russia As It Is: Transformation of a Lose/Lose SocietyThe means of delivering information to an individual are improvingvery fast, but the quality of information itself is declining, and our abilityto select and evaluate information properly is declining as well.Ourcalculators are now extremely sophisticated, and we use them a lot,because we are no longer able to do even the simplest addition.We riskbecoming zombies that are so overloaded with useless information thatwe completely lose touch with ourselves.Yet the whole point of thebook is that people need to be alive, and not all of those who walk andtalk are.If we were to turn into parts of the Information Age SocialMachine, we could be easily manipulated and even directed to self-destruct.Like astronauts in outer space, we are becoming 100% gadget-dependent.In the Industrial Age, the Social Machine could not get inside aperson, and if a person behaved in a certain way, it was assumed that heactually was what he pretended to be.Now we have increasinglysophisticated lie detectors, surveillance cameras on every street, traceablecredit cards instead of untraceable cash, and even unmanned remote-controlled killing robots that have already been used in Afghanistan andIraq.Since a totalitarian society of the Information Age is very possible,we must make sure that each individual gets the information he needs,that he is able to evaluate, access, and use information correctly, and thathe is protected from the barrage of information that interferes with hispersonal judgment.THE SOCIAL MACHINE TURNS FROM AN ABSTRACTION INTOTHE ONLY REALITYHere is a real-life example of how virtual our life has become.There aremillions of men in Latin America.On one fine Sunday, they could haveplayed with their kids, read a book, hiked in the forest, helped their wivesdo the laundry.But they spent the day differently: they watched a soccergame.Soccer is a part of virtual reality: twenty two men running after aball as if it were important or relevant to anything in real life.But ofcourse the great majority of men did not even attend the actual game:they were watching it on TV.This is a virtual reality of the second order.A TV cameraman showed a particular episode of the game at such anangle that it appeared that a goal was scored incorrectly.This is a virtual181 Matthew Malyreality of the third order.But the result was a real war between two LatinAmerican countries, and many people lost their lives.Let us trace the development of the Social Machine
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