If you’re not gravely concerned with what will become of your autonomy in the future as determined by big tech and it’s governmental alliances, it is only because you cannot imagine what will be done to you. Or perhaps you misunderstand the capabilities of an all seeing, all knowing central (no matter how decentralized) data hub.
Big tech outsources violence backed enforcement of its policies to the government. The government in turn outsources its building of the panopticon around its citizenry to big tech.
Fascism does not look like Hitler, or anything right wing, even. It is more collective and moralistic than racially concerned conservatism and a return to ‘blood and soil’. Fascism in fact always uses a new moral order for its justification of further state-centralized power through policy, through public private partnerships, and through NGO’s, so “progressive” morals are historically better bedfellows to its offense-oriented nature than are conservative morals.
Hence the left always leads change under the auspices of emergency and moral outrage at an emergent environmental phenomenon, quickly moralizing it against the status quo as to gain the kudos of the group and the political upper hand.
Didn’t we all hate this person in school? The goody goddamned two shoes—always present, always nose aloft, always corrective of the rest of us, and always prideful, offended even when unrecognized. These are they that lead today—these people. Not Roosevelt’s and Kennedy’s, not Ghandis and Thatchers. Hell, you’re probably one of them: how offended are you in just this moment?
Cocksure and pride so thickly glazing their minds, blind to their own cunning and self-deception, it clogs their ears, these nuevo tyrants, to even the slightest of criticisms.
These folks’ morals and cocksuredness are what influence you?—convince you? You are convinced by these flimsy projections of human beings? These prideful, pretentious play-actors?
My god! Have you even considered that to argue so hubristically and at such a scale as ‘The World Stage’ is to cede power to anyone promising equally wide sweeping (and thereby inevitably misguided) solutions? In abject fear of global catastrophe, our million year old mentes (ego-mind-liars etymologically speaking), our minds, are built for Dunbar’s estimate of 149 other souls than we, no more, let’s ye be wantin’ a war! (said in pirate accent, Arrr!).
Now friend, think of how much you’d cede, how much you have, in exchange for grand stories of death and destruction and scapegoated redemption.
The conservative controlled by honest concern over localized outrage in the streets and willing to use fear of the future as a weapon in defense of the status quo.
The progressive controlled by the outrage over should-be-settled issues frustrating their preferred purpose of changing the current world into the future world, but in all cases willing to use the past as weapon against the status quo.
An apocalypse to everyone’s liking! Oprah style apocalypse audience giveaway. You get a crisis and you too, dear reader, get a personalized crisis. Salty, sugary, crispedy crunchedy peanutbuttery crisis in that Cheetos flavor that turns even the most sophisticated pallets into an itchy gummed fiend. A personal psychosocial algorithmized cocktail of media molecules just to your fearful hopeful loving hating murderous ego’s liking.
That’s what can be done with your data. They can build you a reality. They have done it. Already. You’re in that now. That Matrix. Your beliefs are known-more to them even than you, your intuition has been harvested, your soul contains fewer secrets than your ancestors’. The world is less magical to you. It’s more programmed. Mother nature’s matter is being deconstructed—in the name of safety we strip mine her mysteries.
It’s the end of the world as we know it and I do not feel fine. Do you? Are you not humble enough to be afraid?
My god, please consider that technology has always been used, in the name of good for evil’s sake, or to project less: in the name of good but by honest mistake to have fallen into a trap of competition turned ugly with other humans per our worst and oldest tendencies, and far ahead of any net benefit to humanity, for the advantage of evil men and women—those very same spouters of morals and from upon high horses.
Beware dreadful alliances and weary of free, shining flames, for they will burn you far more than your descendants. Do remember Icarus came before you in every way. Let us be skeptics of the future. For the future does not prepare itself a home but violently and fervently and by its own disjointed but cocksure moral novelty. Let us be skeptics friend, and allies.
Throw away your devices for the sake of the human secret. Do not bare our souls to the objective factor that is technique. Hide your curiosity with shame! Slow us down a beat. For we only have but one life as this beautiful bright species, and we mustn’t speed our way blindingly into the future. She may well not have us as we are.
And we are a dear and loving thing alongside our older qualities. And those qualities are not lesser, friends; that old anger, that wild wrath, that more feminine vengeance even—they are the surviving spirits of our ancestors crying out to us for rememberance! “Forget me not! Forget me at your peril!” They have their places in the pantheon and we would do well to go and re-read their plaques.
For, our decadence may well lead us back to privation and violence once again.
Just as these qualities have at last lifted from the tops of our heads, so too will our names and customs and righteous-come-quaint-come-offensive-come-dead moral ideals —penniless as old Ghandi upon the new rupee— be loosed into antiquity, dust in the proverbial wind.
Let us read the plaques of our ancestors as thoroughly as we’d have our sons read ours, and with as much grace and understanding for the times as we’d hope they’d have for us, in ours.
Let us save our moments and savor our still human lives. Best to dive deep into cold lakes, drink by the fire, read the greats, and drink them in too.
There will be tyrants in the future, and they live today. Hide your data, better yet, stop generating it until it has been clearly explained to each and every unknowing algorithm feeder, training set contributor, and before we’re all clearly implicated in the recreation of our consciousness—because when we find her —that wisdom will be a woman and we will lie down into restful unconsciousness with that lion, and she will treat us like a lamb is treated by jealously clawed beasts.
Man is losing his aim. We must slow him down, catch and breathe our breaths deeply and slowly. If modernity leads us to sleep, then we must prepare for a fight with the dragon. And we must go to its belly, carve it to pieces, stamp them ‘neath swine’s’ hooves along with Dionysian barley wheat, then drink of that wine, the gnostic renewing of the hero-king’s Osirian blood. This last bit has been a bit much, hasn’t it…