Speaker: catchthewhistle
The High Priests of the Digital Age Are Working Behind Your Back to Make You Confess, and Repent.
Just as 18th century priests enforced total surveillance measures on masturbators, the new priests of the digital age are listening to your confessions and forcing you into puritanical repentance.
Who doesn’t have a relative, a friend, a colleague, who broke up because of an iMessage showing up on the wrong device, fooled by the iCloud, by a suspicious Facebook like, or a Pokemon caught in the wrong neighborhood?
I want to make the claim that a new system of surveillance, organized by the new priests of our digital age, are slyly acting behind our back to make us conform to a new form of puritan morality.
At the beginning of the 18th century, masturbation suddenly became a topic of intense reflection. In the Enlightenment Encyclopedia it is described as the new disease of a wounded conscience and a heinous sin. Surprisingly, the Christian Church was not responsible. It had, until then, never regarded masturbation as anything other than a marginal problem for adult men (and especially monks).
The people responsible for making masturbation a sin were economists, who worried about the consequences of masturbation for productivity in an economy that depended on the endless desire for more. The condemnation of masturbation spread, and in no time, doctors were making scientific claims to prove the dangers of masturbation, while priests made it their new obsession.
In the confessional, the sinners had to avow everything, not only their reprehensible actions, but their reprehensible dreams, the languorous images that crossed their consciousness, the birth of desire in their troubled mind. The priests demanded to know it all, the most inner thoughts of the masturbators. The sinner was meant to keep his own mind under surveillance.
Today, we believe that we have overcome this obscure period. Masturbation is widely accepted as a healthy sexu
