1971
SOMEBODY'S WATCHING YOU * LITTLE SISTER * ATLANTIC 2091-053 * UK
Little Sister, talking about Big Brother. Vet Stone, Mary McCreary, and Elva Mouton, were known collectively as Little Sister; Vet Stone, a.k.a. Vaetta Stewart, is actually Sly Stone's, younger sister, and the three girls all used to sing backing vocals for the outfit known as Sly And The Family Stone, although the girls actually started out singing Gospel as The Heavenly Tones. The song is a pertinent piece of agitprop recorded from a period when it is hard to imagine the level of covert, intrusive and criminal observation on its subjects by the state, could be anything like it is today. Though it was many years before the communications technology landscape that we have today the State was, as it has always has been, unrelenting in its pursuit of information on the finances, activities and thought's of the people, it is the pursuit of power and control. Orwell in his book 1984, written in 1948, was talking as much about his own time, than a warning of some mythical future to be avoided. Walter Cronkite, in his Preface to the paperback edition of 1984 published by The New American Library, said Orwell wrote his novel as an essay on "power, how it is acquired and maintained, how those who seek it or seek to keep it tend to sacrifice anything and everything in its name." The big difference between when Little Sister sang Somebody's Watching You and Orwell's take on mass surveillance, where the 'proll's' were, by-and-large, left to their own devices, is that now it is absolutely everybody who is monitored, consider this: a bill went into law yesterday (January 26 2009) enabling the state to hold a database on every child in Britain, the system which is cost over £250 million to build and a further £41 million a year to run, was, in typical fashion from New Labour, rushed through parliament without publicity last year. Does anybody have a valid reason why what is presented by government, their running dogs and stooges as such a good thing for children will not be taken up by those same government ministers who will exclude their children from the database? The reality is that this is just another step in the Orwellian nightmare of Big Brother England (for Big Brother now read Brown 'The Scottish Monster') where there are already 4.2million CCTV cameras, 1 for every 14 people in the country, a vast storage system storing and filing every email, and action you take on your computer, every phone call you make, every journey you take in your car, evry purchase you make with your credit card . . . with biometric identity cards just around the corner, and because these cards will contain a micro chip they will be able to be read remotely and at a distance without you even being aware of it, you can see just where voting for 'New Labour' the party with no real raison d'être anymore except the acquisition and accumulation of power, has got us.
On December 08, 1993, there was a discussion on cyborgs on The 700 Club, the fundamentalist Christian news show hosted by Pat Robinson. While finishing a generally favorable discussion of prototype implantable ID chips that would allow people to turn part of their anatomy into a credit card, Debbie Terry, the commentator on the “Newswatch” section, asked about the possibility that such chips, or more elaborate neural implants, might be the 666, Mark of the Beast foretold in the Bible. The news director, who was making the report, agreed that, yes, there was a danger, but the Bible, fortunately, prophesied that the Mark would be worldwide and, as of yet, implant chips were only planed for Europe, North America, and Japan. The assembled Christians looked relieved.
Chris Hables Gray, The proliferation of Cybernetic Organisms.