<nettime> Ubik 2017

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

... During 1974 we who opposed the Nixon tyranny here exhausted 
ourselves in forcing that tyranny out of office, only to discover, the 
next year, that underneath it lay an even greater abuse of power and 
threat to freedom: a secret police apparatus that had worked since the 
forties, completely invisible in terms of its lawless acts against 
Americans. In fact, something much like the police state that I depicted 
in Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said has come to light, and really to 
the astonishment of us all. I recall that back in the fifties, about 
1953, two FBI agents came to visit me and asked me to spy on my wife, 
who at that time was attending the University of California at Berkeley 
and knew people -- students -- who were politically active. From then 
on, the secret political police apparatus grew.

And yet it was a thrilling year in 1974 when we began to dislodge what 
we thought was the tyranny... but then found the greater one, the 
intelligence community one, which really we cannot dislodge. The 
American people have lost the will to combat this tyranny; it has lasted 
too long, and we are tired. I am tired. As the disclosures came about 
the CIA and FBI, I could not believe them. What could I do? What could 
anyone do? It was not a question of one particular evil president, but 
all the presidents starting with Franklin Roosevelt: even our heroic 
ones, such as Kennedy. Freedom won only a limited victory in August 1974 
when Nixon was forced out of office; the political police apparatus 
remains and will remain, and we cannot vote on this issue. I myself have 
given up, as our newspapers say most Americans have, with a sense that 
we are helpless. ...

Philip K Dick, "The Short, Happy Life of a Science Fiction Writer" (1976)

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