SOCIAL MEDIA?
Although I have always been a technology afficionado, I am appalled as to what direction the development of technology has come to take. Technically the possibilities are limitless indeed, but factually there are two all dominating purposes to which modern computer technology is put: totalitarian control and "economic growth". Every aspect of the internet, which has it's root in the secrecy of the cold war military and "intelligence" craze, is optimized to further these ends. Money and alleged "Security". In fact the latter is only another aspect to serve the first. Money. Control to make more money where it serves the money making. The best way to achieve this is by means of programming people, by directly linking up to their brains, controlling their behaviour, keep the tied in front of the scree, where they are told what to do - and to stay. Online addiction is a massive growing concern, especially among our young, and targeted political online campaigning is likely to already have swung a number of major democratic vote castings and elections.
I remember that as a child I read a German Science fiction series where an alien spaceship had crashlanded on the moon. The robotic autopilot broke, and the first man on the moon (written years before Armstrong actually made his historical big step) found a spaceship full of helpless members of an alien species addicted to computer games and unable to do anything productive - except for consuming. I found the idea ludicrous at the time, but now I virtually - actually literally - see it happening. My daughters get lost in online games with all signs of addiction, and the idea of transhumanism, of merging with machines, does not seem to be very unsettling to this mass consuming generation of little naked apes.
Walden comes to mind, and a particular statement Henry David Thoreau made about houses, warning, that not we possess them, but they possess us. Paraphrasing this concept I'd say that we are not possessing things anymore but having become possessed by them. In that process we are in the danger of completely losing ourselves, of becoming dissolved in our own creations, structures, processes, systems, mechanisms - of the machine that replaced what once was a society.
I remember that as a child I read a German Science fiction series where an alien spaceship had crashlanded on the moon. The robotic autopilot broke, and the first man on the moon (written years before Armstrong actually made his historical big step) found a spaceship full of helpless members of an alien species addicted to computer games and unable to do anything productive - except for consuming. I found the idea ludicrous at the time, but now I virtually - actually literally - see it happening. My daughters get lost in online games with all signs of addiction, and the idea of transhumanism, of merging with machines, does not seem to be very unsettling to this mass consuming generation of little naked apes.
Walden comes to mind, and a particular statement Henry David Thoreau made about houses, warning, that not we possess them, but they possess us. Paraphrasing this concept I'd say that we are not possessing things anymore but having become possessed by them. In that process we are in the danger of completely losing ourselves, of becoming dissolved in our own creations, structures, processes, systems, mechanisms - of the machine that replaced what once was a society.
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