There's a sense here in the States our "machine is out of control." This is an expression of the powerlessness people feel in their everyday lives, their belief individual actions have minimal to no impact on the gears which spin the world.

Friday night was an hour of the witch conversation between myself, ioerror, buckminster and mattbot. Roaming between endless geekery, one of the many topics was the New Fascism.

This is not your forebears' fascism. We're dealing with something different here. It's not jackbooted thugs bringing down the fist and it's not simply about men in control manipulating laws and society to their advantage. There's some of this, certainly, but the system itself seems to be rigged to support action that's not in the interest of human beings.

Yesterday I reviewed Jeff Hawkins' excellent On Intelligence, speculating we're entering an Age of Pattern, an ultimate mechanist wave which will reconfigure our understanding of everything. I think what we're seeing in the New Fascism is an expression of this. Welding capitalism to democracy, we've evolved a system which has given life to corporate entities much larger and more powerful than humanity. One human being is simply a signaling mechanism. Our behaviors, like those of the individual ants in a colony, are small sparks traveling the structures which create a larger pattern. We feel like cogs because, viewed in this context, we are.

The New Fascism is the system itself.

Is it self-aware? I don't know. The same way we cannot directly communicate with the individual neural structures of which we're made, it's unlikely to be able to communicate with us.

Try not paying your taxes, even though you don't support what they buy. Try not obeying a law you find unjust. Try not towing the line in any of our deeply entrenched social conventions. Try to find logic on your scale and compare it to what seems to make the system run.

When we individually move to change in a fashion against its interests it attempts to move us back to plan or cut us as a loss. When we operate as a group, as parts of the brain must to identify and learn a new pattern, we can make the change stick.