Does the fence protect you or exclude you?

Cameron Summers (Broken Hands, May 15, 2024) attributes the following idea to the podcast Trashfuture, and paraphrases it:

"...there is a (metaphorical) fence. On one side of it is the people that the system protects and serves, on the other side of it are those that it simply binds. This isn’t only a matter of policing: this is a matter of any interaction with the bureaucratic systems that underpin society. On the outside you have people who say 'maybe we shouldn’t commit genocide' and on the inside you have the people threatened by calls to not commit genocide. On the outside, you have people who are looking at a future where all of the culture they will have access to are the product of LLMS, and those on the inside have human-made works. On the outside, you have people who want to be inside, and on the inside you have people who worry that the area encircled by the fence only ever seems to get smaller."

The idea, as I understand it, is that a fence may serve some people while hurting others. Thus (it occurs to me) a question we can ask ourselves is: Does this fence, whichever fence be in front of you right now, protect you or exclude you? Who is the fence for?

"In Deleuzoguattarian thought," Summers continues, there is "striated space" which is "law, order, and civilization, [and] within it you find the state apparatus," and then there is "smooth space" which is "chaos, transformation, and wilderness, [and] within it you find the nomad war-machine." Both want to co-opt each other: The former admires the powerful weapons of the latter, and the latter admires the wealth and stability of the former.

Today's equilibrium (post-1970s neoliberalism) is "just sort of run[ning] out of steam. Instead of a violent break, we’re seeing the paint that marks the striations begin to flake off."

Related

Elad Nehorai tells us: "In 1970 he [Philip Slater] had published his most famous book: The Pursuit of Loneliness, in which he warned that if the hippie and counter-cultural movements didn’t realize that the structure and culture of America, they would eventually succumb to the very values they were trying to subvert." In his 1991 book, A Dream Deferred, "he argues that anyone who is against authoritarianism must understand if they want to truly combat it and tear out its roots so that we can bring about the democratic and pluralistic society we dream of." (We've Always Lived Under Authoritarianism: On the vision of a little-known sociologist whose urgent warnings are a guidebook for truly understanding authoritarianism... and its antidote. May 13, 2024)