Ahhh, it seems impossible to escape detection, the ever present devices gleaning what they can, all of it in my case mundane, of no importance to anyone, not even to me most of the time, but that doesn't mean it's not bad. I cover the cameras on my computer and iPad. God, I hate these devices more and more everyday but cannot find the will to do without them. How else would I know about Mark Bisone? I refuse to have a Ring or an Alexa or any other extraneous spy beyond the 3 I allow in my space. Good God! My devices have my digital fingerprint, but honestly, I can't summon the energy or interest to protect myself. One could never rest. Is this how it will end?
I don't think it will end that way. We just need to figure out better ways to use (and not use) it. I think we're actually doing that now, simply by finding each other and talking about it. They are collecting a trillion-trillion bits of data about us, true. How much of it is actionable against us? We may find out someday. But until then, we can be secure in the knowledge that evil has a nasty habit of devouring itself. The competence level of this crowd is plummeting, too. They're not as limber either, and they lack the trust to use their powers as fully as they otherwise might.
Stay strong, keep your eyes peeled and be joyful. Their time is coming, and so is ours.
We need critically placed emp’s. I vote for the first one at dc,then all the big telecom cities. Imagine a quiet, peaceful world, and no interruptions!
Indeed Humdeedee, it's virtually impossible to escape surveillance completely. Especially once you consider if you actually do avoid it completely, when you once hadn't, it will attract more purposeful surveillance. I find it funny though. I bet you if you have told a spook from the 1950's that in the future people would willingly pay to have bugs planted on them at all times they'd have you committed to an asylum.
Yes. The Eye of Sauron sees long and wide, and those who wear the One Ring of invisibility mark themselves even more clearly. And yet... the Fellowship prevails, "hiding" in plain sight. Food for thought, from the banquet feast that is Tolkien.
I hadn't thought about your observation that were I to successfully go dark, assuming that were possible, the focus on my mundane existence might really intensify, but that makes sense. We need a full body Faraday aura, eh?
Sometimes I have the good fortune to select a link in an essay, and stumble upon another essay so descriptive of the encroaching future that it leaves me a little stunned and brimming with resonance of my own previously unremarked experiences. I remember I had a Chatty Cathy doll as a child, and so I found myself getting my young daughter a Teddy Ruxton toy in the 1980s that survived until the late 90s when a flying squirrel invasion in our attic crawl space left a layer of dreck so deep I had to call in a white suited clean up company looking a great deal like the virus hunters we are now familiar with, to clean up the mess.
And your reminder of the talking crosswalk signs! There is one, downtown, right next to the hotel we stayed in the first weekend we visited Ithaca in 2002. All night it would be triggered...wait...wait...wait...and we could hear it on the 6th floor of the hotel....
Reading this beautiful essay, I am aware of our good fortune that we don't live in a thoroughly modern city....and how I instinctively avoid all the droning mechanical voices coming at me from self-checkout lines in restaurants and grocery stores. And I am grateful that I have avoided getting "Alexa" or any other digital "helpers". But I cannot avoid the smart phone in my left hip pocket all day, and our computer....
How do we start to re-humanize ourselves? As you said so poignantly, Mark "reminding us that we’re not just countrymen and neighbors, but children of God and potential friends."
Your essay gives me a great foreboding: that we have lost our cities, our technologically ensnared hubs and that we must resist all the attempts at technology being introduced into our smaller living communities. Yes, resist "15 minute cities" but further than that--resist any technologies that dehumanize the daily experience. If we fail to do so, our Ubers, our taxi, our own cars, will be mechanizes and "self driven" by technology. And our daily outings that used to be a quick way to encounter other humans will only encounter machines and the great, unknowable technocrats running our lives.
I think the answer for how we rehumanize ourselves amidst all this gadgetry and noise is both complicated and simple. The simple version is that we need to cultivate a quiet space within ourselves, where we can better speak to God and hear Him. The complexity is how to do that without completely cutting ourselves off from the genuine benefits of our technological environment, which includes meetings of minds like the one you and I are having.
I'm not a Luddite. I have worked in highly technical fields (and I still sometimes do, though I'm getting a little long in the tooth for it). The reason I included Chesterton's quote about "things" near the beginning of "Spook Central" is because I think he (unlike so many of his atheistic contemporaries) could envision our current network of "goods" and its attendant spiritual dilemmas. He knew that people would not stop making new goods, and that many of those could be turned to bads by people who misused them. But no technology is innately bad, because its ultimately composed of the substance of God's creation.
Even so-called "A.I." isn't *innately* bad. There are some good uses buried inside the core techniques, which could be used to help people lead healthier and more joyful lives. The problem, of course, is that they aren't being used that way at all., but rather to fuel new engines of deception and distraction. The Things That Speak are multiplying as a result, and dehumanizing their users at a rapid clip. It's because there is a cancer of malign ideas and bad intent spread all throughout that industry.
That's why I think the first step is to learn to recognize the bad intentions behind certain products, and to change the way we use them (or refuse to use them at all, in some cases; boycotts can still work, at this stage of the game). The next step is to cultivate that quiet room, and inhabit it on a regular basis. In that regard, I found beautiful essay by Oaf to be inspiring:
I suppose one could allow ones face and voice to become ubiquitous, so that any manipulation would be obviously incongruent, but then that does not seem very desirable either.
When you wake up to the world, you begin to see it through a different lens, not unlike They Live, you see the machinations.
Possibly the worst digital voice I've heard is at Sky Harbor airport. The enunciation is creepy, and elongates vowels. Just enough uncanny valley to make you uncomfortable as it chimes in every ten minutes to remind you not to leave your bags unattended.
I got a very similar dystopic feeling when travelling through JFK. I was waiting in a long ass line at Dunkin Donuts to get some coffee when I realized that the customers weren't ordering with a person, but at a kiosk. So... Detached. Firstly it's inefficient as hell. I wanted black coffee with one sugar. Normally this would be "medium hot dark roast, one sugar please", but instead I had to navigate like six menus of options.
For one coffee. Then I had to do it again for my wife's coffee.
But the worst part was just the cold detachment of it all. I had just returned from Spain and had become accustomed to walking to the bakery in the morning to get fresh bread and a cup of coffee, greeted by the warm (and cute) Spanish girl who managed the bakery. The limited conversation we'd have with my terrible Spanish was imbued with more humanity than any interaction I had in JFK; where every single employee working there was "diverse" and looked and acted like they were better suited to slinging rock on the street.
So this is our future. We will interface with machines and have our orders made by thuggish wage slaves who will serve your food and drink with a sneer. It's only going to get worse.
Remember what they said. We will own nothing and be happy, but there are some of us who will prefer to live outside this society (that danish woman's word, not mine).
Ahhh, it seems impossible to escape detection, the ever present devices gleaning what they can, all of it in my case mundane, of no importance to anyone, not even to me most of the time, but that doesn't mean it's not bad. I cover the cameras on my computer and iPad. God, I hate these devices more and more everyday but cannot find the will to do without them. How else would I know about Mark Bisone? I refuse to have a Ring or an Alexa or any other extraneous spy beyond the 3 I allow in my space. Good God! My devices have my digital fingerprint, but honestly, I can't summon the energy or interest to protect myself. One could never rest. Is this how it will end?
I don't think it will end that way. We just need to figure out better ways to use (and not use) it. I think we're actually doing that now, simply by finding each other and talking about it. They are collecting a trillion-trillion bits of data about us, true. How much of it is actionable against us? We may find out someday. But until then, we can be secure in the knowledge that evil has a nasty habit of devouring itself. The competence level of this crowd is plummeting, too. They're not as limber either, and they lack the trust to use their powers as fully as they otherwise might.
Stay strong, keep your eyes peeled and be joyful. Their time is coming, and so is ours.
We need critically placed emp’s. I vote for the first one at dc,then all the big telecom cities. Imagine a quiet, peaceful world, and no interruptions!
Indeed Humdeedee, it's virtually impossible to escape surveillance completely. Especially once you consider if you actually do avoid it completely, when you once hadn't, it will attract more purposeful surveillance. I find it funny though. I bet you if you have told a spook from the 1950's that in the future people would willingly pay to have bugs planted on them at all times they'd have you committed to an asylum.
Yes. The Eye of Sauron sees long and wide, and those who wear the One Ring of invisibility mark themselves even more clearly. And yet... the Fellowship prevails, "hiding" in plain sight. Food for thought, from the banquet feast that is Tolkien.
I hadn't thought about your observation that were I to successfully go dark, assuming that were possible, the focus on my mundane existence might really intensify, but that makes sense. We need a full body Faraday aura, eh?
Sometimes I have the good fortune to select a link in an essay, and stumble upon another essay so descriptive of the encroaching future that it leaves me a little stunned and brimming with resonance of my own previously unremarked experiences. I remember I had a Chatty Cathy doll as a child, and so I found myself getting my young daughter a Teddy Ruxton toy in the 1980s that survived until the late 90s when a flying squirrel invasion in our attic crawl space left a layer of dreck so deep I had to call in a white suited clean up company looking a great deal like the virus hunters we are now familiar with, to clean up the mess.
And your reminder of the talking crosswalk signs! There is one, downtown, right next to the hotel we stayed in the first weekend we visited Ithaca in 2002. All night it would be triggered...wait...wait...wait...and we could hear it on the 6th floor of the hotel....
Reading this beautiful essay, I am aware of our good fortune that we don't live in a thoroughly modern city....and how I instinctively avoid all the droning mechanical voices coming at me from self-checkout lines in restaurants and grocery stores. And I am grateful that I have avoided getting "Alexa" or any other digital "helpers". But I cannot avoid the smart phone in my left hip pocket all day, and our computer....
How do we start to re-humanize ourselves? As you said so poignantly, Mark "reminding us that we’re not just countrymen and neighbors, but children of God and potential friends."
Your essay gives me a great foreboding: that we have lost our cities, our technologically ensnared hubs and that we must resist all the attempts at technology being introduced into our smaller living communities. Yes, resist "15 minute cities" but further than that--resist any technologies that dehumanize the daily experience. If we fail to do so, our Ubers, our taxi, our own cars, will be mechanizes and "self driven" by technology. And our daily outings that used to be a quick way to encounter other humans will only encounter machines and the great, unknowable technocrats running our lives.
Ginger Breggin
Thank you for the wonderful comment, Ginger.
I think the answer for how we rehumanize ourselves amidst all this gadgetry and noise is both complicated and simple. The simple version is that we need to cultivate a quiet space within ourselves, where we can better speak to God and hear Him. The complexity is how to do that without completely cutting ourselves off from the genuine benefits of our technological environment, which includes meetings of minds like the one you and I are having.
I'm not a Luddite. I have worked in highly technical fields (and I still sometimes do, though I'm getting a little long in the tooth for it). The reason I included Chesterton's quote about "things" near the beginning of "Spook Central" is because I think he (unlike so many of his atheistic contemporaries) could envision our current network of "goods" and its attendant spiritual dilemmas. He knew that people would not stop making new goods, and that many of those could be turned to bads by people who misused them. But no technology is innately bad, because its ultimately composed of the substance of God's creation.
Even so-called "A.I." isn't *innately* bad. There are some good uses buried inside the core techniques, which could be used to help people lead healthier and more joyful lives. The problem, of course, is that they aren't being used that way at all., but rather to fuel new engines of deception and distraction. The Things That Speak are multiplying as a result, and dehumanizing their users at a rapid clip. It's because there is a cancer of malign ideas and bad intent spread all throughout that industry.
That's why I think the first step is to learn to recognize the bad intentions behind certain products, and to change the way we use them (or refuse to use them at all, in some cases; boycotts can still work, at this stage of the game). The next step is to cultivate that quiet room, and inhabit it on a regular basis. In that regard, I found beautiful essay by Oaf to be inspiring:
https://jawbone99.substack.com/p/p-r-a-y-i-n-s-e-c-r-e-t
God bless you,
Mark
I suppose one could allow ones face and voice to become ubiquitous, so that any manipulation would be obviously incongruent, but then that does not seem very desirable either.
When you wake up to the world, you begin to see it through a different lens, not unlike They Live, you see the machinations.
Possibly the worst digital voice I've heard is at Sky Harbor airport. The enunciation is creepy, and elongates vowels. Just enough uncanny valley to make you uncomfortable as it chimes in every ten minutes to remind you not to leave your bags unattended.
I got a very similar dystopic feeling when travelling through JFK. I was waiting in a long ass line at Dunkin Donuts to get some coffee when I realized that the customers weren't ordering with a person, but at a kiosk. So... Detached. Firstly it's inefficient as hell. I wanted black coffee with one sugar. Normally this would be "medium hot dark roast, one sugar please", but instead I had to navigate like six menus of options.
For one coffee. Then I had to do it again for my wife's coffee.
But the worst part was just the cold detachment of it all. I had just returned from Spain and had become accustomed to walking to the bakery in the morning to get fresh bread and a cup of coffee, greeted by the warm (and cute) Spanish girl who managed the bakery. The limited conversation we'd have with my terrible Spanish was imbued with more humanity than any interaction I had in JFK; where every single employee working there was "diverse" and looked and acted like they were better suited to slinging rock on the street.
So this is our future. We will interface with machines and have our orders made by thuggish wage slaves who will serve your food and drink with a sneer. It's only going to get worse.
Remember what they said. We will own nothing and be happy, but there are some of us who will prefer to live outside this society (that danish woman's word, not mine).
Well done, friend!