define: squishy totalitarianism. alright. it's totalitarian in that the state permeates the lives of people to an ever-greater degree. so, for example, we need pre-k programs and assured retirement, cradle-to-grave healthcare, guaranteed employment and housing. sort of gently, it shapes consciousnesses: gently in comparison to a roomful of chinese children chanting maoist slogans or rallies of hitler youth (though of course our kids do inhabit rooms with patriotic symbols and chant slogans in unison). the state regulates media, and at the broad level helps keep it in the hands of large corporations. what is constantly emphasized is the dependence of people on the state. the bush administration jacked this up amazingly, and tried to make the only issue who could keep americans safe, as though the only human emotion was fear and we self-evidently live in a nation of cowards. the obama admin has taken this over seamlessly. so squishy totalitarianism has a militaristic edge and the domestic policing that goes with it.

the major feature, however, is the erasure of distinction between state and economy: the merger of the state and corporation in a way that makes corporations providers of basic public services and the state a for-profit enterprise. privitization and government purchases/bailouts of, say the financial system in a way amount to the same thing: blackwater merges with the pentagon; the fed with citigroup etc. this is theseemingly (at the moment) inevitable condition being approached in one direction or another by the u.s., china, venezuela, the eu, india, and russia: it's communism. or it's state capitalism. there is no distinction.

now why is it squishy? it doesn't usually involve straight-up crackdowns, where you have tanks in the streets of new york or beijing, or where we raid newspapers, round up dissidents into camps and so on, though of course such things still happen here and there. it has to deal, for example, with the constant proliferation of communication technologies, with the basic fact that the state/corporation cannot really control the flow of information, and actually depends on those same technologies in myriad ways. it respects some sort of zone of privacy around individuals and families and small affinity groups, because breaking into that zone is expensive and counter-productive. but it disables what goes on in that zone from constituting any serious subversion.

the political/economic/military systems are gargantuan: the largest human organizations ever known. revolution, like the straight crackdown, is obsolete, ridiculous. squishy totalitarianism absorbs dissent because it is a huge mound of goo: there's no real center: it's everywhere all the time: the only conceivable revolution would be to destroy...everything.

the era of revolution is over, just as is the era of the police state. in many ways, indeed, the concept of liberty is anachronistic, and means little except that we can still blog. concepts like "citizenship" are anachronistic: you still produce the signs of participation, but the systems are so gigantic and the consciousness so formed within them that your participation is meaningless.