Nothing is harder to see than what we believe so deeply we don't know we believe it. That's why a frontal assault on our core beliefs is always doomed. Our minds think they themselves are under assault, rather than the beliefs they have adopted, and defenses go into gear to rationalize, minimize, or deny what they're hearing. Or else the anomalous data creates so much cognitive dissonance that our minds just plain shut down.

The degree to which technologies of communication, surveillance and control have insinuated themselves into our everyday lives is striking. Here in Wisconsin, a bill just sailed through the legislature that expanded the state's authority to collect health care information. The bill allows the Office of Health Care Information to collect and publish financial and other data from doctors and health care providers in addition to data gathered from hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers.

Remarkable to those concerned about "function creep" was the lack of concern on the part of the public. Everyone pretty much lined up on behalf of "efficiency and safety," the two horsemen of the apocalypse of privacy rights. The legislative committee was "stacked" on behalf of the measure and the public was informed after the fact, the bill having been called suddenly the night before the vote was scheduled.

This is a holographic slice of a bigger picture. The technologies of linkage and the power of those who profit from using them are the true weapons of information warfare. That war is fought not with lasers and satellites patrolling the "high ground" of earth orbit, but in the trenches of our daily lives. Because the consequences of ubiquitous linkage are often invisible, the average person - with limited time and mental resources - is unaware that the hidden infrastructure of a global political economy is being built out of the mundane data of their lives.

When I recently pressed a career officer in the intelligence community about practices that alarmed me, he maintained that those practices were illegal, hence nonexistent. After a few drinks, however, he acknowledged that many intelligence agents find it easier to ask forgiveness than permission and act accordingly. That all-too-human reality is why we will pay in the future for every time we refuse to speak or act in the present on behalf of the privacy that secures our freedoms. Without secure boundaries, there are no individuals … and no individual rights. The primacy of the collective, a by-product of the transforming power of information technology, is paradoxically entering mainstream thinking as a priority through the political action of those who believe they are supporting a conservative, business-friendly agenda.

It's as if the entire world is joining NATO, justifying Cold War behaviors by invoking the Evil Enemy. But unlike the Cold War, when there was at least another camp, the "other side" now means people anywhere who oppose the converging self-interested policies of the military-industrial-information complex.

And now for something completely different.

Children's toys are often an early warning system in which the future first becomes visible.

"Sound Bites" is the name of a new technology recently introduced at the annual Toy Fair in New York. A person inserts a lollipop in a Sound Bites holder, and when they bite into it, sound vibrations travel through their teeth to the inner ear where they are heard as normal sounds. This magical effect lets snackers hear music (guitars, drums, or sax), special effects, or voices.

The notion of slipping advertisements, propaganda, or suggestions into our meals is so outrageous I expect it to be adopted without a murmur. One imagines voices coming into our heads from every artifact. Deserts in the company cafeteria, basketballs as we dribble down the court, even sex toys will all have something to say. Everything will be a means for communication … as indeed, everything already is, but today those messages are still mostly implicit, while these songs and jingles will be as explicit and close to our noses as bumper stickers.

And now for something even more different.

A hobby in which I have indulged myself for years is the investigation of UFO phenomena. It's an interesting puzzle, requiring cross-referencing texts in the public record with the confidences of mostly plain people, as well as intelligence agents, air force officers, and airline pilots. Like most amateur investigators, I find that ninety per cent plus of what I read or hear can be explained or discarded, but - again, like most - the remaining accounts are pretty compelling.

Yet what interests me as much as the data is the widespread ridicule that greets even the most reasonable statements about the phenomena, e.g. it is worthy of investigation, if only as a psychological or sociological phenomena. One hesitates even to mention this interest because of that predictable response.

Such ridicule apparently became official policy around 1953. Before that, for five years (1947-1952), UFO phenomena was taken seriously by governments in public and private. An early head of Project Blue Book stated that behind the Pentagon's closed doors, the argument was not about the reality of the phenomenon, but whether its origins were Russian or extraterrestrial. A widespread wave of sightings in 1952 became the point of departure for a policy of debunking. Air force fighter pilots and commercial airline pilots alike have told me how they and their colleagues learned quickly not to risk their careers or reputations by making a report or going public with details of an encounter.

Indifference to the erosion of privacy rights … candy that sings to our brains … a policy of public ridicule that discredits innocent people.

It is easier than ever to engage in sleight-of-hand, manufacture a consensus, and manipulate dissent. Yet the truth too is boosted by technology. Truth too sings to our brains, and the linkage technologies that magnify the fictions we seem to need to sleep easily in our beds will disseminate as well the truths that fuel our hunger for knowledge and our passion to be free.

March 21 1998