The ease that technology provides is illusory. It has trapped you, made you a slave to things you don't even need but suddenly can't live without. So you rot in a cubicle trying to get the money to get the stuff, when you should be out walking in a meadow or writing a song.
Utopian claptrap, you sneer. So you put nose to grindstone, your life ebbing as you accumulate ... what?
Look around. Our collective humanity is dying a little more every day. Technology is killing life on the street -- the public commons, if you please. Chat rooms, text messaging, IM are all, technically, forms of communication. But when they replace yakking over the back fence or simply walking with a friend -- as they have for an increasing number of people in "advanced" societies -- then meaningful human contact is lost. Ease of use is small compensation.
The street suffers in other ways, too. Where you used to buy books from your local bookseller, you now give your money (by credit card, with usurious interest rates) to Amazon.com. Where you used to have a garage sale, you now flog your detritus on craigslist. Almost anything you used to buy from a butcher or druggist or florist you can now get online. Handy as hell, to be sure, and nothing touched by human hands. But little shops lose business and close, to be replaced, if at all, by cookie-cutter chain stores selling One Size Fits All. The corporations have got you right where they want you.
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4 comments:
Why not let technology run everything? Just let human to be entirely lost in their own desires through visual realities or recreational mind control........
If you can build technology capable of running such an all-encompassing totalitarian system, I doubt that anyone still needs to work...
I know this waste kote ..a lecturer who had previously shown all the classic signs of high intelligence (baldness, socks with sandals, glasses)...now he is left with just a blue n pink waist coat..
Arthur C. Clarke wrote of a society that used a computer to periodically choose a new president. The first criteria for selection was that the candidate must never have shown any desire to be in politics before. Sir Arthur is probably the smartest man alive.
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