Friday, February 19, 2010

David Price at Counterpunch gives us more on the Human Terrain System Program Here.
HTS is a product of the  miscegenation of the private sector and the government  that corrupts science and generates delusion. Anthropologists are recruited to win the hearts and minds of the primitive peoples who are to be exploited. They are actually intelligence gatherers, or more succinctly, open spies. We explored this travesty earlier Here.
Having just seen Avatar, I am thinking it is probable, given the trend towards the privatization of space exploration,  that  Sigourney Weaver's character, Dr. Grace Augustine, will be replicated at some time in the future working for a company which will be the logical culmination of HTS under contract to an exploiting corporation. All pretense of the search for knowledge for its own sake will be shed; the corrupted anthropologists (or should we more accurately call them exologists by then?) will be gathering information for profit's sake.

2 comments:

Burt Hendry said...

It was as early as Alien, the first one, where it was made clear that that crew had been sent, unbeknownst to themselves, to assess and monitor the Alien's progress in a long-term corporate bid to devise a worthy outer-space expansionist fighting mercenary tool !

John said...

You are right Burt. The whole Alien Trilogy was about corporate exploitation of space and inferred a Fascist political system in that reality. Kubrick's 2001 prominently displayed corporate logos, many of which are now defunct. The voracious appetite for profit tends to shrink the number and increase the power of the surviving corporations who (and I say who in light of a century and a half of Supreme Court decisions) naturally subsume government throughout the process.