What Is Stalking? And, What Kind Of Power Is Control?
Stalking is the most dramatic form of tracking and the most common behavioral component of coercive control next to assault. An estimated 10.2 million U.S. citizens who were identified as ever having been stalked, 4 out of every 5 (79%) are females and because men stalk same-sex partners at the same rate as they do women, almost 9 of 10 stalkers (87%) are males. Fifty-nine percent of the female victims (4.8 of 8.2 million) are stalked by a man with whom they have been intimate. Women are almost nine times more likely to be victims of stalking by a partner than men. These statistics suggest that it is most likely more women are gang stalked and electronically targeted than men.
What Kind of Power is Control?
Behind a litany of torments, it would be easy to forget that cyber security coercive control takes shape on a terrain that is contested by certain individuals’ assertions of successful agency and what the challenges at achieving hard-won equality poses to traditional modes of privileged business and personal successes. To appreciate this dynamic, it is important to distinguish the power all men and women display in personal life and that some view as threatening their privileges from two other forms of power — the male power expressed through tactical control and the sort of power kings exercise over their subjects or bosses deploy at work. The power we normally put into play in personal life is “a capacity to produce intended effects,” the definition introduced by John Locke in his Essay on Human Understanding, and “liberty” the opportunity “to perform, or not to perform, voluntary actions according to the determination of the mind.” This sort of power is somewhat contingent of social position because persons with money or political influence are better situated to produce effects congruent with their intentions than persons without these advantages. But, Locke’s point was that all free persons have this capacity to a greater or lesser degree and can exercise it, under normal circumstances of liberty, without depleting the capacity or liberty of others to the same. Power here is an immanent dimension of subjectivity and so not reducible to a fixed quantity that can be neatly subdivided or even permanently alienated. If it is bounded on one side by what is historically possible for someone in your social position, the social source of power, it is bounded on the other by how a lived personhood transforms these possibilities into life projects through individual volition and action. This allows for gradients of intention and effect that capture what political scientist Jim Scott calls the “power of the weak” as well as the strong and helps us understand how men can command a disproportionate share of resources and so have power sociologically speaking, while nonetheless feeling threatened by women’s power and compelled to usurp it through methods that mimic cyber security coercive control.
A core conceit in democratic theory is that we choose how to apply the affirmative power Locke describes. In the phenomenon of gang stalking with electronic targeted assault and electronic torture, this affirmative power is usurped away. If the flow of power in personal life is governed by the same contract that defines exchange relationships between buyers and sellers in the market, psychotronic torture and electronic physical assaults seeks to upend it.
Critical to this conception of what kind of power control is, is the conception that even the less fortunate among us maintain control over the disposition of their power, whether when they work, vote, or marry; that the freedom to exercise this disposition as well as the proper love of liberty and equality needed to sustain this disposition are breed in the institutions of primary and secondary socialization (e.g., family, school, and community — and as a result poor socialization can result in community group stalking); that privacy rights are first and foremost intended so that individuals can develop and express the “determinations of their mind” without external constraint, particularly by government; and that the liberty rights needed to develop and express this individuality from the natural core of citizenship, which the state is obligated to protect. Complementing this affirmative notion of power is the credo accepted by every classical economist from Adam Smith through Karl Marx: that the sum of intended effects, organized through the division of labor, is synergistic and provides the engine of our collective ingenuity as a people.
Methods utilized by cyber security coercive control and gang stalking with electronic targeted assaults and psychotronic torture nips this process in the bud. By foreclosing individual liberty, their opportunity to imagine and freely choose to perform certain activities and not others, it disables a vast store of life energy that would otherwise contribute to social progress. In a similar vein, controllers take any deviation from routine or expectations, any mistake or accident, as a sign of disloyalty. As missteps accumulate, some victims lose their sense of efficacy entirely, the feeling that what they do makes a difference or could do so, until they have to scream just to be heard.
