Digital Everything Is The Fantasy of Elite Frankensteins
One of the openly stated goals of Klaus Schwab's WEF is to 'digitise everything'; an ambition as limp and hollow as Schwab himself. The list of natural things better than any conceivable digital version includes: food, water, sex, love, animals, the countryside, the mountains, the seas and all the smells of the world. Far from being 'progress', universal digitisation promises a retreat into unreality: a world of ignorance, superstition and fear. Not a moron myself, I have no wish to inhabit a moron's world. We need to put digital reality beck in the box where it belongs.
Behind the digital is best myth is the real -but dangerously addictive- kick that humans get from pushing a button to recieve an immediate, tiny reward. (A trick the average rat can master in a few hours). Hypnosis isn't new, and the only innovation here is the use of electronic screens. It's instant gratification; the short-cut to (short-lived) happiness.
The power of screens makes for serious business. In the peak-wank corridors of Wall Street, this is the cheap thrill elite profiteers generate, using IT-visuals to balloon their financial fantasies in flashing colours at the touch of a key. In boardrooms across the world, on wall-size screens, the jagged, tumescent cash-porn of 'growth' transfixes directors and shareholders alike. In the swell of murmurs and nods of delight that follows, the author of the oh-so-visible (but still hypothetical) 'success' preens like a cockatoo.
It works at gutter-level too, as a legion of self-obsessed 'influencers' will testify. In the end it's never the money - it's the AUDIENCE that matters. To re-phrase an old joke, social media is show-business for mediocrities. If success will be measured by your hourly total of hypnotised button-pushers, prodding idiots in the brain is not rocket-science and plenty of idiots are happy to respond.
TIME WARP
Those of us who lived through the digital revolution had first-hand experience of the shift in emphasis. For most of us the earliest gadgets were attractive as novelties. Although usually practical, they were -at first- treated more like amusing toys than serious devices. First out of the box were calculators and clocks. A great example of the very different experience a digital device delivered was the wristwatch.
On the left is a standard European military-issue watch from the 1960's. On the right is an early commercial digital watch from the 1970's. I remember wearing similar watches myself. So what were the differences? Perhaps the prime issue was shape. Pre-digital, almost all watches (and clocks) were circular. This was not some incidental feature; the disc is the origin image, echoing the sun and the planets of our solar sytem. It was by studying these bodies, and their regular movements across the heavens that humans learned to understand the concepts of space and time -and to measure them.
The 1960's wristwatch was not just telling us the time of day, but reminding us how we learned to tell the time, and where that knowledge originated. The internal machinery of every pre-digital clock and watch was called 'the movement'. The 'hands' were in perpetual motion -like the stars themselves- as they orbited the watch-face. Finally, we were required to physically participate in the activity of the watch, by regularly winding the mechanism that keeps it in motion. There is a depth and a warmth to such a device that -even subconsciously- links the circular passage of time to our own position in the universe itself.
On the stylised, robotic face of the 1970's timepiece all these symbols, echoes and images are gone: the hours, minutes and seconds are mere numbers -and the numbers themselves composed of straight digital lines. Not a single orb or circle is to be seen. Each day and each part of it is a mute number in a sequence, with no trace of the source or meaning of time on display. Battery-operated, the digital watch required no input, and would tick relentlessly forward for months or years until coming to a halt. Decide for yourself which of these devices supplies a better expression of 'time'.
Whatever your personal taste, we see the older watch is a physical demonstration of the time right now, plus a sophisticated illustration of the nature of time and its relationship with space. The digital watch tells the time, possibly a little more exactly, but that's it. For me, this sums up the problem with digital replacements. Digitisation guarantees change, but not all changes are progress and some downright mistaken. We have known this for 200 years. With her superb novel Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley unveiled the dark, sordid consequences that can follow blind leaps into scientistic 'progress'. {To read the book online free CLICK HERE}
There is no shortage of present-day examples to place digital innovation in an unflattering light. My childhood -and that of every boy I knew- featured several hours of vigorous physical exercise every single day. Twenty-first century boys spend much longer periods on their backsides, exercising their fingertips with on-screen digital 'games'. 'Social-media' (digital) has destroyed social (in-person) relationships. Smartphones have turned juveniles into zombies etc.
CRIME-U-LIKE
A major feature of digital processes has been an explosion of opportunities for 'perfect crimes' to be committed by those in charge of the financial systems. Not only is it much easier to steal, but the amounts that can be stolen are staggeringly large. The so-called 'financial crash' of 2008 was in reality the largest daylight robbery in world history. First of all, hundreds of billions simply disappeared -as the corporations, banks and dealerships erased the digital records of their activities - and then, in the aftermath, gathered at the doors of their governments demanding to be reimbursed for 'missing' money they had already hidden behind impenetrable digital walls. It is quite a feat to steal say, 500 million dollars, and then insist you must be given another 500 because you don't know where it went.
Money, unfortunately, has effectively been digital since the invention of 'fractional reserve banking' -the name given to the practise of lending money you don't actually have -which is how banks make money. In the era of online banking, this process is laughably easy, and the bankers really are laughing, believe me. [Real history of banking in a video HERE]
VIVA VIRTUAL
When the term virtual reality first appeared the hairs went up on the back of my admittedly primitive neck. They never went back down, as the accelerating rush towards digital everything is potentially the worst mistake our species has ever made. A few years ago we were made aware of the soon-coming internet of things. A month after I first heard that phrase, I found myself working in a thatched-roof cottage in which the fridge had a functioning touchscreen computer on the surface of the door. This didn't cheer me up. It's simple enough to compare the value of our life experiences -both virtual (digital) and actual (physical). Has the creeping presence of digital-tech really improved the human experience so much that in future the virtual should be deemed equal and/or an essential addition to the actual?
To suggest it should -and the transhumanists do- is to dismiss all human history as a fumbling, aimless journey towards our miraculous digital salvation -which sounds a lot like superstition/religion to me. Just carry the smartphone...just accept the cookies & digital tracking...just accept the compulsory GPS device in your vehicle...just read your official 'guidance' text from YouGov-com...just accept the implant...you'll be in heaven soon... {ARTICLE: DO WE WANT REAL LIFE?}
It's been half a century since the digital clock became commonplace but every day now we are witnessing the advance of robots into the workplace, machines into our pockets, computers into ever-shrinking nanotech devices that could be tucked into your ear or eye to 'augment' experience of life. The smartphone children will not hesitate. No alteration of the human body is a tweak too far they have been taught, and will be forever reminded. They have never read Frankenstein.
There is more to life than microchips and nanotech - and more to digitisation than meets the eye. The mere idea of a 'Digital Identity' is repulsive, with its bald implication of 'identity replacement'. In the process of digitisation, humanity itself is being reduced and depressed. Are we prepared to be stripped of our rightful place in the natural world, discard the commonalities we share with everything else that lives upon this planet? The virtues of digitisation are limited by the extent to which they improve life for the many. In the Reset/WEF/Net Zero Build back Better fantasy world, every last word of the digital dirge will be sung for the benefit of the few. I say resist and refuse.
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