Conditional Use and its Uses

The news about Ford seeking to patent its new technology to remotely control vehicle systems – and vehicles, themselves – isn’t new.

In the sense that this technology isn’t.

GM has had a similar system online – just the right word – since the ’90s. It is called OnStar. You have probably heard or remember the ads touting the system’s ability to remotely unlock or start (and so, implicitly, stop) the engine of a car so equipped and to automatically summon emergency help, in the event of an accident. It can also do more than all that, as this writer experienced when test driving an OnStar-equipped GM vehicle almost 20 years ago.

After driving the car at high speed through some tight corners, a woman’s voice manifested inside the car, even though I was the only man inside it. It was the OnStar operator, asking me whether I needed “assistance.” The car having alerted OnStar to my faster-than-PC driving.

It – the car – did not do anything. But the point is, it could have.

Every other car manufacturer embeds similar technology in their cars. They are all . . . connected.

Which means, so are you.

Perhaps you see where this is headed. On the other hand, maybe not. Many news stories about Ford’s supposedly “new” technology” not having mentioned it.

But one did illustrate it.

The New York Post published several diagrams, apparently from Ford’s patent application. One of them sketches out the network, to which the car and the borrower are tethered to the lender. The article goes on to describe how Ford could turn off various necessary vehicle functions, such as the AC – or cause the car to emit an obnoxious noise that could not be turned off – if the borrow fails to make payments to the lender. Possibly, the car could even repossess itself, if equipped with what is always inaccurately styled “autonomous” or “self-driving” capability. (It is is inaccurate because the car is the antitheses of autonomous, which nothing can be that isn’t under independent control.)

Fail to pay and the car drives itself away.

Considered in context, this isn’t objectionable – unless you object to things you didn’t pay for being taken away from you. But the patent sketch – and the tech – hint at something that goes beyond that.

Even if you did pay your bills. Even if you paid off the car. It will never be yours because it will always be under the control of the network.

Which could shut your car down for medical reasons.

As for not taking the drugs the government-corporate nexus ordered you to take. Why else would there be a box showing “medical facility” connected to the network, to which your car is connected?

Also note the connection to “police authority.”

Neither having anything to do with whether you made your payments. “Police authority” could shut down your car for driving it when you’ve been ordered not to – because Climate Change.

Or just because.

Or for driving it in ways they say you’re not allowed to.

Most new cars also have something called “Speed Limit Assistance Technology” embedded ever so helpfully. Drive faster and the car knows. And so could the insurance mafia, inevitably part of the same “network.”

Reading between the lines, what we have here is a picture of our feed lot future. One that has long been implicit about to be made explicit. Its motto is: You will own nothing – and be happy.

The latter part being debatable. Unless, of course, you are one of the few who intends to own everything by controlling everything. This makes sociopaths very happy.

Perhaps the picture is coming into focus now.

Ford’s technology – and remember, it is not new technology – proposes to make the use of what you like to think of as your car conditional upon your obedience. And that is how you – and I – are to be controlled. It is an elaboration of the concept in Communism of “communal” property; the individual is allowed conditional use of property but all property is owned by “the people” – which means the handful of people who control the apparatus of state. Stalin owned nothing. His many dachas – private homes – as well as his Packard limousine – all belonged, so it was said, to “the people.” Meaning Stalin.

And he was very happy.

The genius of this shuck-and-jive is that the people fall for it. They see Stalin in his limo, being chauffeured to his dacha while they walk home in the cold to their communal apartment – but they aren’t outraged because Stalin doesn’t own these things.

They belong to “the people.”

The same principle has been applied in America for at least the past 100 years and arguably far longer. You are allowed the conditional use of what you let yourself believe is your home but which isn’t because it can be taken at any time by the state, which in the meanwhile allows you to live there so long as you keep up with your payments – i..e, your rent. They call it “property taxes” but if this differs from rent in any meaningful way perhaps someone will explain how.

For awhile – and it was a pleasantly long while – we did have control over our cars in that they were not under the control of anyone else. If you didn’t make your payments, it might be repossessed. But it could not be turned off or shut down or drive itself away if you failed to obey.

Ford has pulled back the curtain on something that has been behind it for 20 years, at least. Something the ones behind it have been itching to do for at least that long and are, at last, on the cusp of actually doing, openly.

And they are very happy about it.

. . .

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