The Guerrilla Economics Manifesto is quite clear on what it thinks is up. It says

People, we are at war. The Machines have taken over and Kyle Reese ain’t coming to babyfather no-one. You aren’t in their game, you’re just the collateral damage. Your choice is not over who gets to play. Your choice is over whether you get to smash the fucking board.

In less pungent terms, the course of recent developed world history, since its definitive end in 1989, is a story of how we built Skynet and how we’ve let its operations corrupt us all and how we’ve turned from a world that promised so much to one that has closed its imagination to all the possibility and only sees fear and conformity, and one that instills little hope in the future. The people responsible have come from all sides of the political spectrum and are united simply by their contempt for anyone who is not them and does not hold their ‘superior’ values. We are the external cost of this.

The evidence piles up around you. Why would it be that after five years of coalition torment – oh come on, that’s what everyone’s telling us we felt isn’t it? – that Labour could not get in. Answer – because Labour was a coalition, and the Skynet classes within Labour broke the coalition by focussing on their pet policies rather than simply leaving people alone. As a result, principally working class supporters drifted away, and well, five more years an’ all, yo!. What about Europe? Arch case of technocrats versus the people. What about that whole Diesel Engine brouhaha? Came from Government – We handed out the incentives to switch to the smelly sods because they emit less CO2, but didn’t even think about particulate matter or NOX, and when standards were brought in, no-one could simultaneously hit the two conflicting objectives so they cheated. How’s our services delivered? Well by Theory X management that sees people as essentially incentives and tools. How you feeling? Like a person? Or like a thing? Guess what, if it’s the latter it’s because you are a thing to Skynet, and if not then it’s because you profit from it, and fewer and fewer of us feel that we do. (I’m in the system and I don’t, so Chthulu knows how someone who isn’t in it feels.).

And it doesn’t have to be this way. It’s an equilibrium that’s ripe for disruption, and can be simply just by demanding that your essential humanity, whether you’re a sinner like all of us or a saint like none of us, is respected. But you won’t do that, probably because you’ve got Stockholm Syndrome from living under Skynet. What’s the end product? A tent that’s getting smaller and smaller and more impervious to people on the outside pissing in, evitable conflicts, blame duckings, rituals crucifixions by social media, avoidance of real issues, security theatre over real security. These are all connected, and all come from society, Western, Eastern, Middle North by North Western, being governed by the most hubristic, the most bombastic, the angriest and worst citizens and those best able to play the inside game while those outside are kept in zero sum conflict, and you, I all of us are participating, even if we think we’re not.

John Connor will once write “No fate but what we make.”. Right now, it’s not a great fate we’re making. Maybe we want to change the programme and shift the paradigm and disrupt the shit out of our thinking, because we won’t get the chance come Judgement Day.