My mother recently asked me how I feel about the NSA, the prospect of Big Brother via technology, the much-announced end-of-privacy and all that. She also mentioned the preponderance of "conspiracy theories" in the media universe that arise in relation to these issues.
I started to write a long, involved answer in email form, but decided to just give her a short answer and save the long answer for some kind of blog post. Here is that blog post.
One can't think about the state except in relation to what lies beyond it, the single world market, and in relation to what lies this side of it, the levels of minorities, becomings, and the "people." Beyond the state it's money that rules, money that communicates, and what we need these days isn't a critique of Marxism, but a modern theory of money as good as Marx's that goes on from where he left off. – Gilles Deleuze
I don't buy much into conspiracy theories, but concede the "scariness" of bigbrotherism via emerging technologies. My own marxian counterpoint is to observe that capital and the state are not natural allies. As antagonists, they tend to damper each others' totalizing tendencies. When google or facebook get out of hand with their accumulation of user data, the governments tend to step in. When the governments get out of hand with their spying on citizens, the corporations and the technoanarchists step in. This is a broad tendency, and of course there will be many exceptions and counterexamples in both directions, such as the apparent cooperation of US phone companies with the NSA or the recent failure of the government to back net neutrality.
As a reflection of this principle, I will note that a new internet browser was created recently by everyone's favorite Swedish anarchists at Pirate Bay, that "bypasses" the government sponsored DNS system through use of the same technology as the file torrenting systems, and therefore makes possible a sort of "stealth" internet that regulating governments can't "see."
The state-capital conflict is a long-standing interest of mine, and perhaps it is a source of my continued optimism for the lot of the little guy vis-a-vis big brother, even now. I think that Marx over-estimated the role of the "worker" (collectively) but that he also in some ways under-estimated the role of the state – hence his hoping that it would whither away under communism, for example. But this miscalculation in his theoretical work does not invalidate the perception that there is a sort of conflict at work, and my own tendency is to apply the more recent insights of cybernetics and ecological system to realize that it leads to a kind of "balance" that is, over the longest run, a steady state (different meaning for state, here).
The South Koreans know everything I do online. I have a very strong faith in their collective incompetence, and thus worry very little about it. My take on ALL conspiracy theories returns to the theorem: "Never attribute to malice that which is better explained by stupidity."