When All You Have is a Hammer

I woke up to a Facebook post recounting the exorbitant healthcare bills that some of my Facebook friends have received, scrolled to a story about State Department officials who were banned from speaking about the threat posed by climate change, before then scrolling to a story about how surveillance software is being used to monitor millions of K-12 student's digital lives (including their private phones and computers), and which is being justified (rationalized) by the worry over school shootings.

The solutions to so many of these problems is simple - universal healthcare, eliminating fossil fuels in favor of renewables, and banning firearms - but our political system is so corrupt that what should be obvious isn't. Unfortunately, the obvious answer is an answer that serves the public good rather than private profit, and private profit rules. Consequently, the obvious answer has to be obfuscated, so that the citizenry doesn't unite behind it, and we instead argue amongst ourselves about the various profit-friendly "solutions" that are offered to us.

However, of all these stories, what most caught my attention was the article on the K-12 mass surveillance program. Outside of my obvious horror at this widescale program (about 5 million students are currently under surveillance by way of just one of these surveillance programs), what I was struck by is the way that this country is increasingly being run (and unabashedly so) like a prison. And what choice do we have? With real estate prices soaring, healthcare costs through the roof, higher education prohibitively expensive, a climate apocalypse pending, and wages stagnant, the American populace might not consciously understand how bad things are nor why they are so, but emotionally and psychologically it does. That is, we're a stressed out nation, a nation on the brink, and even if we don't know why, we don't need to know why in order to feel that we are.

Unfortunately, the more that these problems continue, the more we can expect unforeseen consequences. And many of these consequences will be violent and/or tragic, as people increasingly break under the pressure. However, because the policies that would actually solve these problems have been rendered “impossible,” the only “solution” that is left is to try and manage the consequences. And the United States only knows a couple of ways of managing such consequences—war and imprisonment. As the expression goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And so, while we’ve been transforming elementary and high schools into prisons for some time now, in no small part because imprisonment was also our solution to desegregation, the mass surveillance of students helps seal the deal.

If we lived in Norway, our prisons might be governed by the idea that treating prisoners humanely helps reintegrate them into normal social life. But, if we lived in Norway, we would also have adopted the policies that would have kept our society from degenerating into the kind of society that to some seems to require a carceral solution. Instead, we live in the United States, whose carceral policy is governed by the philosophy that prisoners are “rehabilitated” only when they have withstood the utmost of inhumane cruelty. In part this is obviously jest, but there is also some truth to it, given the Protestant origins of American carceral policy.

But perhaps what was most striking about the article on K-12 mass surveillance was the way that carceral policies are extending to groups that were previously free from them. For instance, as I mentioned, transforming schools into prisons was partially a response to desegregation. But now, the mass surveillance of students isn’t a policy reserved for those who belong to vulnerable populations, but that instead subject all students to its purview. And, in part, this is because, while vulnerable groups still disproportionately suffer in America, this suffering has left a scant few untouched. Consequently, we all need to be monitored, because you can never know where the next “problem” might emerge.

Which is all to say: Welcome to America, the rest of America.