{"id":152428,"date":"2020-01-27T12:00:21","date_gmt":"2020-01-27T12:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=152428"},"modified":"2020-01-26T06:48:12","modified_gmt":"2020-01-26T06:48:12","slug":"hovering-in-cyberspace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/01\/hovering-in-cyberspace\/","title":{"rendered":"Hovering in Cyberspace"},"content":{"rendered":"

24 Jan 2020 – <\/em>We live in a fabricated reality where the visible world became nearly meaningless once the screen world became people\u2019s \u201cwindow on the world.\u201d\u00a0 An electronic nothingness replaced reality as people gleefully embraced digital wraparound apparitions.\u00a0 These days people still move about in the physical world but live in the electronic one.\u00a0 The result is mass hallucination.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cadvances\u201d are accepted as human destiny.\u00a0 We now inhabit a technological nightmare (that seems like a paradise to so many) in which technology and technique \u2013 the standardized means for realizing a predetermined end most efficiently \u2013 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 \u201cefficient\u201d way possible.\u00a0 No questioning allowed!\u00a0 Unless you wish to ask your phone.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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, \u201ctransforms everything it touches into a machine,\u201d including humans.\u00a0 For every problem caused by technology, there is always a technological \u201csolution\u201d that creates further technological problems ad infinitum.\u00a0 The goal is always to find the most efficient (power) technique to apply as rapidly as possible to all human problems.<\/p>\n

Writing nearly fifty years ago in Medical Nemesis<\/em>, Ivan Illich, explained how in medical care the human touch was being replaced by this technical mindset.\u00a0 He said,<\/p>\n

In all countries, doctors work increasingly with two groups of addicts: those for whom they prescribe drugs, and those who suffer from their consequences.\u00a0 The richer the community, the larger the percentage of patients who belong to both\u2026In 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. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.\u00a0 The \u201caccidents\u201d and risks built into the technological fixes are never considered since the ideological grip of the religion of technology is all-encompassing and infallible.\u00a0 We are caught in its web.<\/p>\n

Marshall McLuhan, the media guru of the 1960s \u2013 whether he was applauding or bemoaning the fact \u2013 was right when he claimed that the medium is the message.<\/p>\n

Cell phones, being the current omnipresent form of the electronification of life, are today\u2019s message, a sign that one is always in touch with the void.\u00a0 To be without this small machine is to be rendered an idiot in the ancient Greek sense of the word \u2013 a private person.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

But to be out of it is the only way to understand it.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It means recognizing that the internet, despite its positive aspects and usage by dissenters intent on human liberation, is controlled by private corporation 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.<\/p>\n

But the price is very, very high.<\/p>\n

One price, perhaps the most important, is the fragmentation of consciousness, which prevents people from grasping the present from within \u2013 which, as Frederic Jameson has noted, is so crucial and yet one of the mind\u2019s most problematic tasks \u2013 because so many suffer from digital dementia as their attention hops from input to output in a never-ending flow of mediated, disembodied data.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Data is Dada by another name, and we are in Dada land, pissing, not into Marcel Duchamp\u2019s ridiculous work of Dada \u201cart,\u201d a urinal<\/a>, but into the wind.\u00a0 And data piled on data equals a heap of data without knowledge or understanding.\u00a0 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\u2019t.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 My eyes rest on the paper, not a blue-lit screen.<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0It does not allow anyone to spy on me as I type.\u00a0 I am alone and unplugged, disconnected, off-line and out of line, a sine qua non for thinking, and thinking about deep matters.\u00a0 The typewriter is mine, and mine alone, unlike the connected digital devices that have destroyed aloneness, for to be alone is to contemplate one\u2019s fate and that of all humanity.\u00a0 It is to confront essential things and not feel the loneliness induced and exacerbated by the illusion of always being in touch.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 There are little ways to step outside the closing circle, but even then, one is still in it.\u00a0 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. \u00a0There is no other way. The technocrats have decreed it so. We are all, as George Orwell once wrote in a different context and meaning, \u201cinside the whale,\u201d 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<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 And even in the woods one may look up to admire a tree only to find that it is a cell phone tower.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Today there are no limits, no rules to constrain it.\u00a0 The prohibition to prohibit is our motto.\u00a0 In our acceptance of technical efficiency, we have handed over our freedom and lost control of the means to ends we can\u2019t fathom but unconsciously fear.\u00a0 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 \u201cnews\u201d flash through their devices without pause, like wisps of fleeting dreams one vaguely remembers but cannot pin down or understand.\u00a0 Incoherence is the result.\u00a0 Speed is king.<\/p>\n

Of course, this kaleidoscopic flood of data confuses people who desire some coherence and explanation.\u00a0 This is provided by what Jacques Ellul calls \u201cthe explanatory myth.\u201d\u00a0 He writes,<\/p>\n

This brings us to the other pole of our bizarre intellectual situation today: the explanatory myth.\u00a0 In addition to its political and its mystical and spiritual function, the explanatory myth is the veritable spinal column of our whole intellectual system\u2026Given that appearances produce confusion and coherence is needed, a new appearance unifies them all in the viewer\u2019s mind and enables everything to be explained.\u00a0 This appearance has a spiritual root and is accepted only by completely blind credulity.\u00a0 It becomes the intellectual key for opening all secrets, interpreting every fact, and recognizing oneself in the whirl of phenomena\u2026this myth [is] their one stable point of thought and consciousness\u2026enables 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.\u00a0 What prodigious savings of time and means, which can be put usefully to work manufacturing some more missiles\u2026[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.\u00a0 This process places them within the most complete unreality possible.\u00a0 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 \u2018mass persons\u2019 who cannot detach themselves from the mass without dying.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Today that myth is the religion of technology.<\/p>\n

So if you have any questions you want answered, you can ask your phone.<\/p>\n

Ask your phone why we are living with endless wars on the edge of using our most astounding technological invention: nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n

Ask your computer why \u201cnice\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Ask your phone what really happened to the Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752 in Iran.\u00a0 See if your phone will say anything about cyber warfare, electronic jamming, or why the plane\u2019s transponder was turned off preventing a signal to be sent indicating it was a civilian aircraft.<\/p>\n

Ask who is behind the push to deploy 5 G wireless technology.<\/p>\n

Ask that smart phone who is providing the non-answers.<\/p>\n

Ask and it won\u2019t be given to you; seek and you will not find. The true answers to your questions will remain hidden.\u00a0 This is the technological society, set up and controlled by the rulers.\u00a0 It is a scam.<\/p>\n

Google it!<\/p>\n

God may respond.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>. Website: <\/em>Behind the Curtain<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 edwardcurtin.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

24 Jan 2020 – We live in a fabricated reality where the visible world became nearly meaningless once the screen world became people\u2019s \u201cwindow on the world.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":89352,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[910,1751,1282,234,734,1006,1109,911,461],"class_list":["post-152428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-big-brother","tag-cyberwar","tag-internet","tag-media","tag-mental-health","tag-social-media","tag-spying","tag-surveillance","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152428\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}