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the Internet, or (b) a user profile for every visible website on the Internet."1”77 We'd not honestly thought the end of this would be a need to so deeply question or defend freedom or liberty. The whole idea of connectivity had begun with liberty, after all. The Fall of the Wall. We'd not known or expected to lose it through the very systems we’d constructed in the open space a 20-year peace had presented. So: We'd been naive after all. We’d been united in a tacit claim that there was nothing bad about connectivity. We believed it for the most part and convinced others. We didn’t mean it that way, | felt the New Caste readers of the Snowden Papers were saying to each other, paging through the sick, ineffably banal logic of those NSA Power Point presentations. They were brochures for totalitarianism. If you have not read them, it is worth looking them over. They have, you'll see, all the anodyne banality of insurance company pitches, even if the dull language was expressing something vivid, nothing less than the potential murder of some very basic rights. We were reading and discussing and debating the documents so avidly because, it seems to me, each of us had a kind of horror of what we might have done. Here was a massive technological and insidious web, a totalizing virtual machine of collection and analysis and instant observation and reaction. It relied, for its safe operation, on the humans in the loop of that sensing and seeing and machine thinking. And what was it, exactly, that the humans had appeared to do in the face of such urgent responsibility? Almost like that silly secretary chatting with the ELIZA machine, they had suspended their sense of warm humanity in the face of the magical charm of electrical promise. They had let the machine run. The whole system had been built and operated by members of the New Caste who were, in turn, beguiled and charmed out of a sense of certain essential limits as they stared at the beautiful face of machine power. Looking back on his formative years, before Europe was ground up in the First World War, the powerfully brilliant and sensitive economist John Maynard Keynes bitterly recalled the iron certainty of his set of friends and their confident, diffident arrogance: “We were not aware that civilization was a thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and the will of a very few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skillfully put across and guilefuly preserved. We had no respect for traditional wisdom or the restaints of custom.”!78 It was the war, then the depression, then a war which taught them this expensive lesson. What is fracturing around us now, with our own willful and diffident support, is that very thin and precarious crust, cracked and assembled as Keynes said by “the will of a very few”. What if those very few are the New Caste? 177 The aim: GHCQ “Pullthrough Steering Group Meeting #16” available from theintercept.com 178 “We were not aware”: John Maynard Keynes, “My Early Beliefs” in Two Memoirs: Dr. Melchior, a Defeated Enemy, and My Early Beliefs (New York: A.M. Kelley, 1949) 99 125 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018357