Hovering in Cyberspace
Edward Curtin
Photo by Ales Nesetril on Unsplash
We live in a fabricated reality where the visible world became nearly meaningless once the screen world became people’s “window on the world.” An electronic nothingness replaced reality as people gleefully embraced digital wraparound apparitions. These days people still move about in the physical world but live in the electronic one. The result is mass hallucination.
This is the fundamental seismic shift of our era. There is a lot of bitching and joking about it, but when all is said and done, it is accepted as inevitable. Digital devices are embraced as phantom lovers. Technological “advances” are accepted as human destiny. We now inhabit a technological nightmare (that seems like a paradise to so many) in which technology and technique – the standardized means for realizing a predetermined end most efficiently – dominate the world.
In such a world, not only does the end justify the means, but to consider such a moral issue is beside the point. We are speeding ahead to nowhere in the most “efficient” way possible. No questioning allowed! Unless you wish to ask your phone.
These days there is much political talk and commentary about fascism, tyranny, a police state, etc., while the totalitarianism of technocracy and technology continues apace. It is not just the ecological (in the human/natural sense) impact of digital technology where one change generates many others in an endless spiral, but the fact that technical efficiency dominates all aspects of life and, as Jacques Ellul wrote long ago, “transforms everything it touches into a machine,” including humans.
For every problem caused by technology, there is always a technological “solution” that creates further technological problems ad infinitum. The goal is always to find the most efficient (power) technique to apply as rapidly as possible to all human problems.
Writing nearly fifty years ago in Medical Nemesis, Ivan Illich, explained how in medical care the human touch was being replaced by this technical mindset. He said,
In all countries, doctors work increasingly with two groups of addicts: those for whom they prescribe drugs, and those who suffer from their consequences. The richer the community, the larger the percentage of patients who belong to both…In such a society, people come to believe that in health care, as in all fields of endeavor, technology can be used to change the human condition according to almost any design.
We are of course living with the ongoing results of such medical technical efficiency. The U.S.A. is a country where the majority of people are drugged in one way or another, legally or illegally, since the human problems of living are considered to have only technological solutions, whether those remedies are effective or anodyne.
The “accidents” and risks built into the technological fixes are never considered since the ideological grip of the religion of technology is all-encompassing and infallible. We are caught in its web.
Marshall McLuhan, the media guru of the 1960s – whether he was applauding or bemoaning the fact – was right when he claimed that the medium is the message.
Cell phones, being the current omnipresent form of the electronification of life, are today’s message, a sign that one is always in touch with the void. To be without this small machine is to be rendered an idiot in the ancient Greek sense of the word – a private person.
Translation: one who is out of it, detached, at least temporarily, from the screens that separate us from reality, from the incessant noise and pinging messages that destroy reflection and create reflex reactions.
But to be out of it is the only way to understand it. And to understand it is terrifying, for it means one knows that the religion of technology has replaced nature as the source of what for eons has been considered sacred. It means one grasps how reality is now defined by technology.
It means realizing that people are merging with the machines they are attached to by invisible manacles as they replace the human body with abstractions and interact with machines.
It means recognizing that the internet, despite its positive aspects and usage by dissenters intent on human liberation, is controlled by private corporations and government forces intent on using it as a weapon to control people.
It means seeing the truth that most people have never considered the price to be paid for the speed and efficiency of a high-tech world.
But the price is very, very high.
One price, perhaps the most important, is the fragmentation of consciousness, which prevents people from grasping the present from within – which, as Frederic Jameson has noted, is so crucial and yet one of the mind’s most problematic tasks – because so many suffer from digital dementia as their attention hops from input to output in a never-ending flow of mediated, disembodied data.
As a result, a vicious circle has been created that prevents people from the crucial epistemological task of grasping the double-bind that is the ultimate propaganda.
Data is Dada by another name, and we are in Dada land, pissing, not into Marcel Duchamp’s ridiculous work of Dada “art,” a urinal, but into the wind. And data piled on data equals a heap of data without knowledge or understanding.
There is no time or space for grasping context or to connect the dots. It is a pointillist painting in the form of inert facts that few can understand or even realize that they don’t.
I am typing these words on a Hermes 3000 manual typewriter, a beautiful piece of technology whose sound and movement creates a rhythmic sanctuary where my hands, head, and heart work in unison.
It allows me to think slowly, to make mistakes that will necessitate retyping, to do second and third rereadings and revisions, to roll the paper out of the machine and sit quietly as I review it. My eyes rest on the paper, not a blue-lit screen.
Technology as such is not the problem, for my typewriter is a very useful and endurable machine, a useful technology that has enhanced life. It does not break or need to be replaced every few years, as computers do. It does not contain coltan, tantalum, or other minerals mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and other places by poor people working under oppressive conditions created by international consumer greed that is devouring the world. It does not allow anyone to spy on me as I type.
I am alone and unplugged, disconnected, off-line and out of line, a sine qua non for thinking, and thinking about deep matters. The typewriter is mine, and mine alone, unlike the connected digital devices that have destroyed aloneness, for to be alone is to contemplate one’s fate and that of all humanity. It is to confront essential things and not feel the loneliness induced and exacerbated by the illusion of always being in touch.
But while this typing machine allows me to write in peace, I am in no way suggesting that I have escaped the technological condition that we all find ourselves in. There are little ways to step outside the closing circle, but even then, one is still in it. I will eventually have to take my paper and type it into a computer document if I wish to publish it in the form you will be reading it.
There is no other way. The technocrats have decreed it so. We are all, as George Orwell once wrote in a different context and meaning, “inside the whale,” the whale, in this case, being a high-tech digital world controlled by technocrats, and we have only small ways to shield ourselves from it.
Sitting in a quiet room, working on a typewriter, taking a walk in the woods without a cell phone, or not owning a cell phone, are but small individual acts that have no effect on the structural realty of what Neil Postman calls technopoly in his masterful book, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.
And even in the woods one may look up to admire a tree only to find that it is a cell phone tower.
Humans have always created and used technology, but for a very long time that technology was subject to cultural and religious rules that circumscribed limits to its use. Today there are no limits, no rules to constrain it. The prohibition to prohibit is our motto.
In our acceptance of technical efficiency, we have handed over our freedom and lost control of the means to ends we can’t fathom but unconsciously fear. Where are we heading? many probably wonder, as they check the latest news ping, no doubt about something to fear, as a thousand pieces of “news” flash through their devices without pause, like wisps of fleeting dreams one vaguely remembers but cannot pin down or understand. Incoherence is the result. Speed is king.
Of course, this kaleidoscopic flood of data confuses people who desire some coherence and explanation. This is provided by what Jacques Ellul calls “the explanatory myth.” He writes,
This brings us to the other pole of our bizarre intellectual situation today: the explanatory myth. In addition to its political and its mystical and spiritual function, the explanatory myth is the veritable spinal column of our whole intellectual system…Given that appearances produce confusion and coherence is needed, a new appearance unifies them all in the viewer’s mind and enables everything to be explained.
This appearance has a spiritual root and is accepted only by completely blind credulity.
It becomes the intellectual key for opening all secrets, interpreting every fact, and recognizing oneself in the whirl of phenomena…this myth [is] their one stable point of thought and consciousness…enables everyone to avoid the trouble of thinking for themselves, the worry of doubt, the questioning, the uncertainty of understanding, and the torture of a bad conscience.
What prodigious savings of time and means, which can be put usefully to work manufacturing some more missiles…[they] have a good conscience because they have an answer for everything; and whatever happens and whatever they do, they can rely on the explanation that myth provides. This process places them within the most complete unreality possible.
They live in a permanent dream, but a realistic dream, constructed from the countless facts and theories that they believe in with all the power of ‘mass persons’ who cannot detach themselves from the mass without dying.
Today that myth is the religion of technology.
So if you have any questions you want answered, you can ask your phone.
Ask your phone why we are living with endless wars on the edge of using our most astounding technological invention: nuclear weapons.
Ask your computer why “nice” Americans will sit behind computer screens and send missiles to kill people half-way around the world whom they are told they are at war with.
Ask your smart device why so many have become little Eichmanns, carrying out their dutiful little tasks at Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and all the other war manufacturers, or not caring what stocks they own.
Ask your phone what really happened to the Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752 in Iran. See if your phone will say anything about cyber warfare, electronic jamming, or why the plane’s transponder was turned off preventing a signal to be sent indicating it was a civilian aircraft.
Ask who is behind the push to deploy 5G wireless technology.
Ask that smartphone who is providing the non-answers.
Ask and it won’t be given to you; seek and you will not find. The true answers to your questions will remain hidden. This is the technological society, set up and controlled by the rulers. It is a scam.
Google it!
God may respond.
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There has been a mass migration to a low-friction, low-barrier, low-loyalty world.
The flimsiest of experiences conform some sort of reality.
I cannot imagine how this will be affecting the people whose significance and context is ‘owned’ and ‘mediated’ on these digital plantations, having grown up on them.
You remember when Musk or somebody said that reality was a hologram or some such?
And my first thought was “Casualty!…” in the old sense “…of the drugs”!
That it is looking to be a distinct possibility- even desired by some- is perhaps the inevitable downside of the human brain, so at home with fiction, games and probability. And so afraid of endings.
So-digital natives will never get homesick?
Either because they subcontracted memory to servers to the point that their capacity for actual biologically-useful memory withered or because they have no real feelings or experiences to loop back into.
(Coincidentally and recursively I was thinking about sensory poverty and modernity earlier this evening- https://medium.com/@jangas/doing-something-analogous-here-going-through-people-i-followed-and-randomly-reading-the-past-do-447ec86b1617)
First there was the word…
Was our first big mistake! Confusing, as ever, the map with the land.
Carts before horses, the use of technology, not the technology as such, reflects social relations it does not make them. Really simple idea.
Does technology have an effect of its own —- obviously it does, but the effect is two sided, the general features of the technology are good the digital revolution is a massive, in the end —- good.
In the end, potentially, but within these social relations, misapplied, distorted and and anti-human, because our social relations are misaligned, contorted and anti-human. The effect of use has some aspects of the future good, and a compounding aspect of further alienation. Every modern technological advance has had the same Janus face; its not new and the Luddite view is past its use-by date.
This particular technology also offers opportunity, still virtually untapped, for people to self-educate, become informed and self-organise on a massive scale. This technology could help the world dissolve the professional managerial class —- the Eichmanns.
It was not Heydrich who made Eichmann, but Eichmann who made a Heydrich possible. What I am saying is that 1% who are killing our world have no actual power within their civil army the professional managerial class. The immediate enemy is not the 1%, nor the banks, nor finance, or the state —- it is the anti-productive and tyrannical overseers, the amoral mechanism of oppression unleashed and certified —- Corporatism the corrupt and walking dead of our times.
Technology properly applied dispenses with them, as a medium of communications it identifies them as the zombie menace, it can shame them personally in rectifying their ways, to disconnect the mechanism as the rest of push from the outside.
Instead of wailing about technology, take the tool where you find it, sharpen it, and be able to distinguish human beings from zombies, and then cut cut cut.
The actual problem is that the left harbours managerial ideology and interests —- those should be first attacked, just as in the last days of Apartheid the agents of the rulers were identified and necklaced —- brutual and effective, the electronic versions could begin now.
‘Carts before horses, the use of technology, not the technology as such, reflects social relations it does not make them.’
The sad thing is what this says about human social relations: that we would like them to be easier, perhaps even throwaway.
In terms of human development, to the degree we affect each other we can have feeling for each other and I’m not sure that the 2D non-presence of verbal/visual contact is enough of a substrate for the chemistry of affection and understanding that ‘humanity’ or ‘natural justice’ (concepts of what it takes to get along) evolved from. Your response seems to come from just such a deep well of solidarity and trust in humanity- one that I’m not so sure will exist to tap in to in the future.
You see, we haven’t really had time to see the effects play out yet- as the majority is still made up of people whose formative period wasn’t digital.
The babies who scroll smart-phone screens before they can properly sustain the weight of their own heads however… we’ll see.
Thanks for your reply Jangas,
Social relations, in the Western world are reaching a state of near complete fragmentation, only economic ties seem to be keeping social coherence, our lives are increasingly a barrack-like existence. And as economic relations are themselves are being eroded by this Neo-liberal hell, ironically the electronic symptom of it is developing at an accelerating rate.
The notorious millennial, their endless posturing and vapid existence, they speak in repeated idioms and ape human relations in a sort of shadow play. They flock to virtue signalling, tattooed from head to toe as a desperate act of appearing individual —- I could go on.
Yet they are the real hope.
There dumbness is real, carefully fostered by a purposefully corrupted ‘education system’ the ‘standardized’, test instead of teaching, US system mandated across its allies has been introduced since the 1980s and then pushed to completion over the last two decades, its products are the vapid millennials — minds immature, ignorant.
In their hand where they waste all their time is a window unto the wold, and knowledge. More books that a University library, more lectures, more ideas, and all of this swamped by distracting garbage.
Why is there hope amongst these hopeless?
They lives are hell, an internalized hell, expressed by overcompensation.
When they find a way out of this hell, remembering the means already sit in their hands, what we don’t known is what will turn the already existing leaks into a torrent.
The stupid millennials have everything to win, this hell is all they know, it is when enough of them see the possibility of a better future, then they will be unstoppable.
My hope is with humanity that suffers much and gets few wins, but historically time and time again gets off the mat and starts punching a away.
The frustration is that there is so much information, the vast majority of which can be plain incorrect, depending on subject. For example, the information over global warming. There is clear evidence that the climate is changing – melting glaciers etc – and we can see the north pole marching into Russia at a pace not seen in recoded history, but what is very difficult to determine is the cause or the consequence: so much misinformation that the truth is buried and cannot be found by us mere mortals.
In the past we had an editor picking the version of the “truth” that would be exposed to us: was that “truth” also just fabrication or was it closer to the truth that what we are exposed to today? Was it more healthy to be secure in the knowledge that the BBC always told the truth, even if that truth was a lie? At least we didn’t have the stress of trying to find the real truth, it was printed there on our daily.
Our pattern of consciousness development persists until there is a new decision in place of the old.
Normalised insanity can be managed at a cost. While we are willing to pay the cost we ‘live in a fabricated reality’ of lies and deceits.
A work that inspires me states; ‘There is no life outside Heaven’ – and another way of saying this is that Thoughts never actually leave the mind of their thinker and so we who are Thoughts – are still living in our Creator no matter how our minds are set in giving life instead to images, idols and ideas as identities conformed to ‘thinking’ in a frame of opposition in fear of loss.
There are ‘upstream’ perspectives to our virtual reality experience of a displaced and dissociated ‘physical’ consciousness – which like a Russian doll continues to further displacement and dissociation as the belief in Separation as survival.
The pattern of modelling Reality as image and concept and now as ‘systems’ of learned, acquired and manipulated meanings, from behavioural response patterns of conditioning is an ancient archetype of psychic separation or ‘splitting off’ from Source, from Other and from World.
This is the ‘death’ spiral that works through our defences, to constrict, paralyse and checkmate us in what we took to be an autonomous free will. As if a Thought could cast itself from the mind of its Living Inheritance and suffer the belief it not only has such power – but is now trapped in subjection to a loveless experience in which every move to escape or overcome is weaponised against it.
The idea of Space in a object-modelled reality is ‘nothing’ and ‘distance’ or separation.
All Space is a Field of Knowing for there is nothing between us but the objection modelling of a psyche in denial. Yet in some moment, everyone has had experience of transcendence – upstream to a thinking-script that resumes ‘service’ after the temporary disappearance of the conditions of a driven struggle of a split sense of isolation to somehow regain or restore Life in the forms of a world of treachery and deceit.
There IS another way of looking at what we have made of ourselves, our world and a Creator in our own image.But not while everything is seeking to hide, mask over and dump this onto others, world and Life itself.
The nature of our entanglement in hate has ancient roots that tare at our attempts to reach the fruits of fulfilment. A mind at war with itself. Many minds set in war as the very basis of their survival in a world that plasters over the cracks of a managed chaos that only grows the more it is ‘controlled’.
Embrace the seeming chaos with the desire to see with new eyes – or persist in diving down rabbit holes of the lure of the power of deceit.
Wherever you go – there you are. Not just the fragments that remain – but All of You is right here while a tiny part is aggrandised in victim or victory to fill the space of awareness that remains.
And yet if All of You is here – then there is a potential or indeed opportunity for Communication or indeed Communion of an intimate recognition. All that blocks such a simple fact reaching awareness is invested belief in narrative identity. Opening the narrative and its supporting beliefs to the space of awareness is the opposite of trying to invest light in darkness – as if to change it.
The more you give it the more it feeds and the more it needs.
The darkness eating our world is not in any of the false trails set in the world to sustain it as a suction upon a captured light. It is in our heart’s desecration.
Order set over a chaos assigned to a personally responsible and irrevocable guilt – is the usurping of an Order arising from wholeness that guilt can no longer see or believe in EXCEPT as the victim made sacred to power over Life. Because once you have hate in your heart you are convicted by your own judgement to protect and persist it as the ‘only world there is’.
The Script unfolds logically and inexorably from its predicates. And insane world is reliable feedback to insane premises. One of which is the attempt to kill or eradicate an evil – that thus becomes us – as we righteously become the thing we hate beneath the bubble of a ‘righteousness’ that completely blinds us until our ‘world’ cracks open to a helpless recognition of our own undoing.
If there is a way to See and know truly, instead of shifting perceptions that repackage ancient hate in complex instruments of incentivisation, it is a matter of the heart’s desire and not technological ingenuity purposed to self-specialness. For desire vibrates the ‘space’ – and what we accept and hold in our heart is given power in our name – regardless it be true or worthy of you to share in.
We ‘object’ amidst a Universe that is 99.9% Space – and yet filled with energetic order of a kind we are only just beginning to – somewhat reluctantly – recognise. The only ‘nothing’ is the false given acceptance as true. Acting as if something fearful is true MAKES it true in the mind of that experience.
Do we really have choice?
If so – are we even now using it to deny or rule out the only real choice available for an ancient mis-identification struggling to make itself real?
Thank god for the Long Descent. This will all be a fading nightmare (though some will dream it as a lost golden age…!) in a century or so; when the Limits To Growth have finally insisted that we stop expanding the Technosphere (aka ‘Koyaanisqatsi’) – and then go into reverse. Roll effin’ on!
We cannot possibly, on the current trajectory, make another century. A few decades at most, months or years if thermo-nuclear or biological warfare is unleashed.
I have been living in southern California for the last two years, yet I’m still trying to adjust to what I observe daily in terms of “screen addiction.” It is a daily occurrence here to stop at red light, wait all of 30 to 40 seconds for the light to change, only to have one or more cars in line fail to move when light turns green. Why? Because they are completely glued to their cell phones either reading messages, texting, or god knows what? Inevitably one has to honk one’s car-horn to get them moving. I’ve never observed this anywhere else I’ve lived, but then again the screen addiction thing is growing daily in real-time so who knows if this is just standard operating procedure around the world in all urban areas at this time?
The most frightening example of the screen addiction here is that in stop and go, bumper to bumper freeway traffic, moving from 60 miles and hour one moment to a dead stop the next, I’ve glanced over many times to see drivers next to me literally looking down at their cell phones instead of at the road in front of them, while driving 60 miles and hour, and when knowing that at any second they may have to slam their brakes on to avoid a collision. Two years ago I was living in rural France and I NEVER witnessed behavior like this anywhere, even when driving in Paris. Maybe things have changed there – I just don’t know.
What does it say about us here in the U.S. (at least southern California) that we can’t drive our car, or sit for 30 seconds at a traffic light, without pressing a screen into our face? How frightened and alienated and uncomfortable must so many of us be that we are unable to be alone with ourselves and with our own thoughts for even a few moments? I’m not sure I want to know the answer to that, though I dare say it is a rather important question. Thank you Mr. Curtain.
This article made me realise how visionary the SF writer Philip K Dick was – with his spaced out psychotic “heroes”, sinister shady corporations and breakdown in the whole criteria for determining what’s real.
Recommended reads:
“A Scanner Darkly” where a schizophrenic main character seems to represent a schizophrenic world in which the ones fighting against drugs and the ones supplying then are two arms of the same organisation.
“Lies Inc.” – A total mindfuck of a book in which psychotropic weapons have spiralled so far out of control that the whole narrative seems to break down.
The Machine Stops, E.M. Forster (A Room with a View, Howards End, A Passage to India, …), Short Story, published in The Oxford and Cambridge Review (November 1909).
There are other free versions of the same text as well as several free audiobook versions available online.
This app shows in real time which app on your Android phone is talking/connecting to the outside world. App name: ‘Network Connections’ or ‘Network Connections for Android’. Not sure if there are other flavours.
You can get it from Google Play, and if you don’t like Google, the APK (Android Package) can be found quite easily online. Full version is paid but to check it out it is free. Sometimes it says you need to pay, but then the message disappears and you can keep using it (from my experience).
Interesting to see apps, that were forced to stop, coming back to life all by themselves and talking to whatever server they are supposed to talk to. However, you cannot tell, using this app, what data is being sent to the server. It would be good fun to find out.
You can click on a connection to see the IP owner and location information which take a few seconds to show. But it is an eye-opener to see the geolocations of various servers around the world that the mobile phone connects to simultaneously. It shows clearly, there are no boundaries (and no limits perhaps) on how high-tech companies operate. For example, an app (which I don’t need and could not be disabled) can activate more than one connection and each connection is made to a server in a different country.
Answers to the author’s questions are contained herein:
Wow! I don’t praise many articles nowadays but what an excellent article; one of the very few I’ve read in media (MSM and alternative) over the last couple of years. Thanks Mr Curtin – bravo!
Incidentally, on a more mundane level – I haven’t had a mobile for quite some time now and have never had a smart-phone; corded landlines are so much better for phone calls (and freedom from stress when you are away from home/office!). Also, if you want to email, watch films, or play games PCs are infinitely better than mobile phones! Never got the thing about all-in-one devices, myself.
The filth in power will use electronic warfare (5G, wifi, blue/white light LED ie cars, homes and streetlights, health harming devices like CCTV camersa which all emit microwaves at 2.4GHz same as your microwave oven, note: anyone noticed the massive uptick in radiation you are now exposed to in supermarkets with the ultra powerful new LED lights and wifi routers lining the ceilings? etc), false flag terrorism, mass poisoning of the food and water, synthetic man-made viuses, geo-engineered climate change and other methods straight out of the “how to genocide” handbook to conduct WW, reduce the population and destrot the world as we know it. Oh wait a minute, they’re already doing all of those things. Do the maths people, it’s pretty simple to figure it out. This is a silent war being waged against YOU and YOUR FAMILY. Who would have thought streetlights would be turned into a weapon of war? Well, they have been and with 5G, it won’t just be the light they emit that is harmful. They know what all these things do, that’s why they are installing them. WAKE UP!
When the space outside of jail is much smaller than the space inside the jail, those outside become prisoners by default as their freedom is curtailed by the lack of space and dearth of options.
This is the exact situation with our present Digital Prison that has been built by exploiting science and technology for nefarious and psychopathic and tyrannical aims.
Another thought provoking peice Edward, thanks.
And yeah, I read this while staring at my Huawei smartphone, which also contains my Email and things like Google Earth.
And, yes, I was wincing.
As someone who boycotts the mainstream presstitutes, and who hasn’t bought a newspaper for over 15 years, how then do I find out what is happening in the world?
How do I find out when a protest is happening, or if a major war breaks out?
I regularly comment here (when it actually posts – major gremlins last 4-5 days) and at a few other independent sites.
It’s about connecting with others who also see what is happening – the havoc and rank injustice created by the Neoliberal economic system and the Empire – epitomised by thugs like Pompeo and Esper.
Connecting with other like minded people is important.
The word to use here is… balance. I check the news at a few sites, make comments, but also limit the time I spend on my phone. Balance.
I read a fair bit as well as listen to quite a lot of music, watch thought provoking films, and also connect with nature in a spiritual sense. That’s an important one.
Just research the radiation you are exposing your body to by using a smart phone, carrying it in your pocket is plain crazy! They have tricked you into harming your self with it. That’s how they do it, it’s all trickery…..illusion…..lies.
Listen to this guy, Kevin Mottus, he is ultra qulaified to impart info about this. This presentation is not just about 5G it is about wireless.
Thanks Mucho for the clip, just heading off to work, will watch it tonight. Hmmm, 40 years ago, we didn’t even have Dvds or Cds.
And now we can watch movies on our phone and Skype people on the other side of the world.
And everyone staring at their phones…
I just cannot believe what is unfolding before our eyes with this technology.
Meet your new streetlights:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2018/04/26/new-led-streetlights-may-double-cancer-risk-new-research-warns/
All of the answers to all of the problems that face us are already within us. All we need to do is to switch off from the stuff that they want us to consume.
“switch off”? And miss on Providential Guidance? Here is the White House Spiritual Advisor sharing their flash of enlightenment:
https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1220740601781608448
This is the providential guidance the masters of the universe receive in Washington ….. Thank me for the giggle, and don’t miss the comments below the (1minute 34seconds) video
not found your on/off switch yet, then?
Oooops ..
I think technology reaches an apex then it’s downhill from there. The only advantage the internet has over the Gutenberg Press is that it’s faster and easier to use. Both snail mail and email deliver mostly junk. Hey but it’s faster and easier to get rid of and you don’t have to recycle it which reminds me of the paragon of political correctness when he isn’t planning mass genocide Bill Gates changing the name of what us Mac users still call trash and called it the “recycle bin”. Yet his OS is still a dumpster fire with an architecture that was designed by a chimpanzee. Too funny 😂
Anyway seriously somewhat. Google is now a joke with its stupid “AI” that only hits on mainstream news and approved sites lest the holi poli find out what’s really going on. Same with YouTube which has gotten as bad as watching cable TV. Like that ol Springsteen tune 55 channels and still nothing’s on. Only there’s a lot more of nothing thanks to the holy censors. Unless you’re into soft core porn and cat vids.
Ain’t technology great?
Now there’s 5G that aside from being an overhyped hoax is dangerous. Hey but if you want to get irradiated in your own home or walking down the street than go fer it dude! Hope ya’ll got a supply of Potassium Iodide because it’ll come in handy when that goes on line but your last words will be sent faster with more ghz. What more can you ask for?
Funny you should mention the bomb Ed because with 5G coming on line we may not have to wait for that mushroom cloud.
It’s probably not that bad at least that’s what the experts who haven’t bothered testing it say 😎👍
Hope ya’ll got a supply of Potassium Iodide because it’ll come in handy when that goes on line
why, does 5G technology somehow produce radioactive iodine? how is that supposed to work?
It’s possible that high concentrations of EMR can convert natural iodine in the thyroid gland to iodine 131. Just a theory but better safe than sorry. Also Vitamin K and Niacin have been shown to be somewhat effective as well.
It’s possible
no, it isn’t.
otherwise, anybody who uses a microwave oven would have died of cancer, long ago.
take your anti-scientific disinfo someplace where it will be appreciated, like Alex Jones’ psyop websites.
Why don’t you stick your head in a microwave and turn it on? Report back when you’ve finished that experiment.
are you a disinfo troll, or just an common moron? inquiring minds want to know.
No I’m just someone making a comment. If you’re looking for a “disinfo troll” I suggest you look in the mirror. Now GTFO of my face moron.
common moron it is, then. at least until further evidence becomes available.
Are you referring to yourself again? Personally I’d say that you’re not just common but exceptionally moronic.
I was going to link to the CIA released document which is a translation of USSR studies into the effects of non-ionizing radiation. It has an eye-watering summary of the effect of milimeter waves on biological structure, a fundamental aspect of 5G. It has been pulled and I cannot find it on their website. Very interesting. Luckily the FUllerton INformer has it on his 5G Dangers website.
https://thefullertoninformer.com/5g-dangers/
Go to page 57 of this document:
https://thefullertoninformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/cia-millimeter-waves-1.pdf
Thanx Mucho. There is also another factor to consider as well and that there is a very fine line spectrally that is almost nonexistent between Ionizing and Non-ionizing Radiation.
Also as I was trying to point out. There is nothing wrong with taking supplements that may counteract the effects of either.
Just like there is nothing wrong with taking vitamin C to counteract a cold.
Anyone who would should suggest that there is is not only a “disinfo troll” or agent but also a homicidal maniac.
ionizing radiation produces ionization, which is not at all the same thing as nuclear transmutation.
evidently, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Wasn’t it Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul who said that an obsession with information technology is one of the hallmarks of a corporate state?
I think it was the editor of a US record magazine who wrote that one of the sicknesses of our society is that perfectly good, tried and trusted technology is junked the minute something else is invented.
Thoughts worth considering, at least.
And Jacques Ellul and Marshall McLuhan made the similar observation: “First, we take control of our tools, then they take control of us”.
Technology – or technique as Ellul preferred – gains an almost real time velocity, compressing time and space, making ends and means virtually synchronic …but why? Does a 10 millisecond arbitrage trade vastly improve the quality of life compared to a 100 millisecond arbitrage trade …or are we in the service of the machine?
We upset the biology but cling to the technology.
More bogged than ‘hovering’ methinks.
“nice” Americans: .. Here is a sample of nice Americans who want to control our breath:
Pompeo, Fri 24 Jan 2020: “You Think Americans Really Give A F**k About Ukraine?”
Nuland, earlier than Feb 2014: “Fuck the EU.”
“…my typewriter is a very useful and endurable machine, a useful technology that has enhanced life. It does not break or need to be replaced every few years, as computers do. It does not contain coltan, tantalum, or other minerals mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and other places by poor people working under oppressive conditions created by international consumer greed that is devouring the world. It does not allow anyone to spy on me as I type.”
Edward, you’ve slipped into pseudo-Ludditism (and grammar errors). Your noisy, ribbon chewing, paper consuming (think of the trees!), typing machine is surely “durable” unless you suffer to endure it (Lying to another lover?). It may not contain “conflict coltan” and other imperial minerals but I’ll bet it was produced by low wage serfs somewhere less than ritzy.
Anyone in your room can spy on your work, while my computer can be adjusted to a “narrow pixel view”, blocking any spies, and if I want noise I can simulate the clack of keys hitting the carriage (I don’t, can’t stand the noise). I can also isolate all screen distractions in “private” mode, can choose my “paper color”, usually a burnt cream mimicking early 19th C manuscripts (Ha, joke coming, my word processor is called Manuskript). Enough…
I’ll read the rest after coffee, proofing this electronic creation, and posting. It’s all real, not totalitarian electronic post-modern fascism. Oh, my smartphone? It sits obediently silent, taking messages, reminding me of appointments, like a dutiful secretary, as I’ve programmed it. Ain’t technology great?
PS. I write for a living and the invention of the computer saved my sanity, since I’m a “backwards” writer – end first, middle, then start. Years of real “cut & paste” drove me mad.
So, all praise the god Laptop and his children, Word Processors. Anon.
Personally I don’t see anything “therapeutic” about staring at a blank screen and a blinking cursor. I write for a living too at times and still I end up going old school and actually writing notes or doing a handwritten outline before I hit the big empty.
Writing is a personal thing. Actually I admire Ed’s method. Anyone who takes the time to type out their piece on a manual typewriter is a craftsman. Makes me want to haul out my old Smith Corona and give ‘er a spin.
That’s the difference between an amateur (lover) and a pro (expert). I don’t caress the keyboard or kiss the screen, but my words sell or I don’t eat. Typewritten words pay the same as electronic words. Nothing’s therapeutic about about a blank screen; my job is to fill it.
I envy amateurs, who enjoy inserting the sheets, adjusting the light, polishing the keys and neatly stacking that final draft, even if it’s never published. I used to do that when I worked as an engineer, when writing was a hobby.
Who is behind 5G?
I though it was China (Huawei), the nation that has its citizens even more hooked on mobile phones than the US: even opium was a less popular escape from a top down society.
Not only do the Chinese, Americans and many others suffer from cyber addiction but also from gross materialism. Same symptoms, same cause: lack of spirituality. “Money” is just another deficient religion.
Dear me, Ant-did you forget your own tribe, hooked on materialism for 3500 years.
All cared for by loving machines – or so it says.
They want to de-nature us.
They want to de-nature the planet. To prepare the way for the machines, perhaps.
What is very clear: they want to suppress our reliance on nature by pushing their drugs and poisons at every turn and every opportunity.
It’s not so much the reliance on Nature that the robopaths despise, but the fact that we are of and in Nature. Nature, above all else, means dynamism, change, evolving and, inevitably, Death, to make way for new creatures. The psychopaths hate that, just as they hate future generations who would live when they are no more, hence their desire to destroy the living world and human posterity in a fit of prospective vengeance.
I can remember when there were very few computers, which were only owned by large organisations, only 2 television channels, no video recorders or dvds, no internet, computer games, cash machines, cctv cameras, and mobile phones, amongst other things.
And life wasn’t too bad.
You could repair a car when it broke down with a part you got from a breaker’s yard for £5. Now you scrap a perfectly good car because a £600 electronic chip has failed.
You didn’t have to listen to someone spewing out every gory detail of their love life into a mobile phone on a train or bus.
Businesses and large organisations didn’t come to a grinding halt for a week at a time because of a computer failure.
You could go for a walk without your every move being followed by 100 CCTV cameras.
Or your every telephone conversation and e mail message being monitored, recorded and stored for all eternity.
You watched the rubbish broadcast on 2 channels, instead of 102 channels.
Children played games or did something active instead of bullying one another on line.
Brilliant essay.