In recent years, “hoarders” — people who collect lots and lots of stuff, until it overpowers them — have become a hot topic in the news and on “reality television.” The mainstream consensus seems to be that “hoarders” are mentally ill, or at least socially abnormal, and need to be “helped,” or at least stopped from amassing huge piles of stuff. I personally disagree with the idea of using force to combat “hoarding,” but I think there’s something useful as allegory in the phenomenon.
I knew a guy once who answered to the general description of “hoarder.” He collected … well, everything. Over the years I knew him, his house filled up with “antiques” (read: Any piece of furniture more than a few years old), “classic computers” (read: Obsolete electronics) and stacks and stacks of old newspapers and magazines.
My friend didn’t suffer from any lack of will to organize his life. He also collected organizing stuff — storage totes, shelves with little cubby holes for categorizing small objects, books on “taking control” of disorganized households. Unfortunately, all he did with that stuff was … well, collect it. It stacked up on top of those old newspapers, which stacked up on top of those obsolete electronics, which stacked up on top of that old furniture. Oh, and he collected cats, too. Lots and lots of cats. Which meant that all those stacks of stuff were covered with cat hair, cat hairballs, and other cat leavings. He had a lot of stuff. Most of it was probably worthless, ruined by his collecting habit if it had ever been worth anything at all.
He never did get organized, and when he died I’m sure his adult children (they had grown up and moved out before he developed his disorder, if indeed it was a disorder) had a heck of a time cleaning out his house and saving anything of value.
I was reminded of my old friend when I ran across a news story on the The NSA’s problems in doing anything useful with all the data it collects through its unconstitutional surveillance operations (“NSA Can’t Make Sense of Masses of Culled Data,” Antiwar.com, December 26, 2013).
I think a lot of us — yes, me included — may have been looking at all this illegal NSA spy stuff, revealed over the last several months by whistleblower Edward Snowden, from the wrong perspective. We’ve seen it in Orwellian terms: An omniscient state tightening its grip on the populace by tracking our every move, our every purchase, our every electronic statement.
Now I’m beginning to think that what we’re seeing may actually be the equivalent of my hoarder friend’s obsession.
To the extent that hoarding may be symptomatic of mental problems, I suspect that its genesis lies in a perception of loss of control of one’s life. The acquisition of lots and lots of stuff is an attempt to re-assert that control — to act, to take charge.
It seems to me that NSA data hoarding reveals the same set of fears. It’s not an all-powerful state asserting its power and control. Rather it is a failing, quaking, fearful state attempting desperately to re-assume its lost powers.
Like the hoarder who doesn’t understand that his stuff is controlling him rather than him controlling it, NSA can’t come to grips with the fact that the emerging anarchic world order — decentralized, voluntary networks of equally empowered peers — will determine the future of centralized, hierarchical governments, not vice versa.
That’s not to say that government and its spies aren’t still dangerous, but they’re getting more and more dangerous to themselves and less and less dangerous to the rest of us. Their stacks of newspapers are just dripping dust and cat urine through their obsolete electronics and rotting the substructure of old furniture underneath. The whole thing will eventually come down on top of them.
Translations for this article:
- Spanish, La Privacidad en 2014: La Fábula del Acaparador.
- Italian, Privacy 2014: La Favola dell’Accaparratore.
Citations to this article:
- Thomas L. Knapp, The fable of the hoarder, Gulf Daily News [Bahrain], 01/09/14
- Thomas L. Knapp, Privacy 2014: The Parable of the Hoarder, Gulf Breeze, Florida News, 01/09/14
- Thomas L. Knapp, Privacy 2014: The Parable of the Hoarder, Junea, Alaska Empire, 01/07/14
- Thomas L. Knapp, Privacy 2014: The Parable of the Hoarder, Dhaka, Bangladesh New Age, 01/07/14
- Thomas L. Knapp, Privacy 2014: The Parable of the Hoarder, Eastern Nagaland Mirror [India], 01/06/14
- Thomas L. Knapp, The NSA and the Parable of the Hoarder, Islamic Invitation Turkey, 01/04/14
- Thomas L. Knapp, Privacy 2014: The Parable of the Hoarder, Before It’s News, 01/03/14
- Thomas L. Knapp, The NSA and the Parable of the Hoarder, Press TV [Iranian State Media], 01/04/14
- Thomas L. Knapp, The NSA and the Parable of the Hoarder, Counterpunch, 01/03/14
For, the problem of mass surveillance that was uncovered is not that is made en masse, but that they can pick a specific person.
Imagine that during Martin Luther King and Malcon X years? How could any black leadership exist if *everything* was taped?
Now, back to our times. In one hand, we have the government, a non-profit entity, trying to spy in us for profit reasons. On the other hand, we have private, for profit, companies being allowed to spy on us.
If they can profit from that, the will do that, right? So Wallmart want to bust an union and pays Microsoft or Apple for information about specific people. NSA may be a mess, but information *is* there.
Ye know what? Thomas Knapp: Capitalists are not seen as psychopathic, domineering, avaricious kyriarchs but "entrepreneurs, champions of the free market, captains of industry, role-models,etc." who relied on government's intervention, who readily violate the Lockean proviso by not leaving "at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others" & hoarding the means of production into their own hands to prevent others' homesteading & self-employment & for the latter group to work for them,
Meanwhile, hoarders only collect so many unscarce goods & still leave plenty & as good stuffs for others to collect, hoarders are seen as ill-minded & need "help" (read: control by outsiders, for hoarders' own good, of course).
Alexandre,
True enough (although I don't make the distinction you make — government is not a non-profit entity, it is an agent of for-profit entities).
I've addressed part of what you're talking about here:
http://knappster.blogspot.com/2013/06/how-i-learn…
Iconoclast,
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here, or where you think we disagree.
This is a very perceptive piece associating pathological collecting with the surveillance state.
Incompleteness of knowledge as a creator of anxiety is something which has profound social effects. Is it any wonder that the term "total information awareness" is the phrase of western intelligence agencies? Like the collector who will not rest until he has whatever fetish objects he desires, complete and catalogued the state strives for the conquest of totality. It is ultimately an impossible task and so the lunacy continues onwards until it becomes utterly unmanageable and self-destructive.
My recent post Bob Black: Debunking Human Rights
I mean many hoarders, like your old friend are not dangerous at all. They hoard non-scarce stuffs. So labeling such a hoarder to be "mentally ill" to justify outside controls over their life (euphemistically termed "help") is just coercive.
Nevertheless, not the same for the NSA, as you've pointed out. & certainly not for capitalists who relied on government intervention to hoard wealth for themselves & impoverish other peoples, who must work for those capitalists as wage-labourers.
I mention the Lockean Proviso because hoarders like your old friend don't violate it, why capitalists & who rely on government interventions clearly do.
Our future dystopia will be a lot closer to Terry Gilliam's Brazil than something like 1984. Still brutal, but instead of ruthless 'efficiency', it will be a sprawling corporate nightmare of planned chaos where nothing works for the powerless.
That’s not to say that government and its spies aren’t still dangerous, but they’re getting more and more dangerous to themselves and less and less dangerous to the rest of us.
Can't say as I agree with you. It's true, as you say, that they're buried under a mountain of data, which reduces to near zero their ability to perform their ostensible duty of detecting genuine terrorist threats before they materialize, but at the same time they're becoming more and more dangerous to ordinary citizens. Anyone who comes under their focus can be screwed (three felonies a day and all that), and I'm quite sure that those of us who agitate against the criminal government will come into sharper focus as things start to fall apart and they become more desperate.
Their very ineffectiveness increases their frustration and therefore increases their motivation to find villains – any villains – somewhere, anywhere.
I wish I could accept your hypothesis that the vast array of data will be unusable. I have, however, some passing familiarity with machine learning techniques which efficiently extract patterns from large datasets. These data mining techniques are in many cases surprisingly powerful at uncovering robust correlations among the data points, without the user having to know in advance what s/he is even looking for.