Contact Form * Contact Form Container */ .contact-form-widget { width: 500px; max-width: 100%; marg

Name

Email *

Message *

Is technology destabilising the United States?



Call me a Luddite if your like but One thinks of the forthcoming US Election and one wonders as the talk continue to swirl around
technology (Clinton Emails) one wonders (if she wins) whether technology will have destabilised the most powerful country in the world.  And one also is caused to wonder did technology ignite the disastrous wildfire that is the Middle East (Egypt, Libya, Syria)
Thinking of this I settle on the train yesterday morning on the way into London (an hour away).
I  to get a seat (UK trains are more and more packed I am not going to delve into that in case I get arrested by the thought police) As the train rattles towards London I am assaulted bythe babble of accents on mobiles; OK, call me a Luddite; Russians, Poles and other nationalities that are too politically incorrect to name for fear of the ‘thought police’. I get out my book, to rest my dystopian eye. It is a commentary on being ‘no one’; of your subjectivity not existing; thank you dear wife for this easy read.
 Still, this lack of subjectivity is soon verified by the passengers using their mobiles for there is no sense of self consciousness in this carriage. Silence is golden but not on this train where you grieve for its absence, for nothing seems sacred to these people as they self importantly vocalise their wares.
The mobile chatter increases in decibels as more people board. I have to get away from this communal washing in public. I am incandescent what I hear now from the mobile chatter to what I deem to be a violation of one’s space. Why am I so up in arms about it all, am I just a reactionary who would write one of those middle England howls of outrage letters to the Telegraph if I noticed someone was missing a rear light in their car? But the truth is more likely to be that I and perhaps you, have a deeply ingrained sense of order that is constantly being affronted

I think of mobiles as a vast technological money making confidence trick  (not unlike Hollywood) which has broken the bounds of privacy and I blame all those 12 year old boys from Silicon Valley; now billionaire male geeks. Yes ‘Silly Con’ Valley, the avant garde of our Orwellian future. ‘Twitter, twerp, tweep’ -  why is it that this 21st century form of slavery has to be so juvenile? We are being infantilised by 12 year olds and it is all emanating from the adolescent culture of the United States?

Let’s catalogue itmisogynistic abuse, trolling, the unstoppable flow of  hardcore sexual materials - half a million pornographic images posted on Twitter every day; a narcissistic selfie-centred culture disguised in the vacuous language of inclusion and transparency; a job killer not a job creator, the impact on jobs is huge, I could go on. Americans it is said don’t get irony, yet one thinks of the inventors of Google - idealistic science graduate students who so mistrusted advertisements that they banned them on their homepage; fast forward to now; Google is the most powerful advertising company in history, valued at nearly $300 billion. Hey guys, is there not irony here?

So too with the Internet the 'suits' have taken over from the idealists, The suits will use any means like unseen jackdaws ravaging and exploiting our thought patterns, yes, ‘they’ know where you are, where you have just been, and where you are going and is this for the common good, no, it is, as ever, for filthy lucre.
You see Google never forgets, it take your dabs on everything; computer user you have been fingerprinted forensically, the DNA of your thought patterns have been recorded sine die
and are housed in a giant computer in California.
‘Hey Dude, it’s good man, we are all connected.’ No, dude, we are drifting into a world where everything, our health; our appetites; our hobbies, our driving preference; our work patterns; what we eat and how long we sleep are recorded and stored in the data banks; we can redact nothing if we choose to use a computer

Oh come on, easy to see the bad, but there must be some good in all this? 
Of course there are a myriad of benefits but overall we may turn out to be the victims, rather than the beneficiaries.  THINK ON

No comments: