“More than any other previous coterie of corporations, the tech monopolies aspire to mold humanity into their desired image of it. they believe that they have the opportunity to complete the long merger between man and machine – to redirect the trajectory of human evolution.”
This has been coming for some time. Me & the crew have been on to this shit for years whilst so many seem to be happy to gorge on the poisoned milk-shake of instant ersatz efficiency without considering the not too distant long-term, or consulting the small print/terms & conditions & their grave repercussions. Hopefully it joins a growing swell of books, media & opinions decrying the ongoing dissatisfaction, immense deleterious fall-out, subliminal prescription & severe stunting of both sentience & volition/independent-choice/thought/creative capacity, one of such is is Foer’s urgently required World Without Mind.
Pervasive replacement technology (smart tech – dumb user) has wrought a silent catastrophe on the sentient being, a massive reduction in character, cognitive ability & everyday artistics. A new banality, cowardice, falsehood & exaggerated artifice that pits the victim against their own emotions, instincts, ethics, & I would say existence even (we can throw “reality” in as well), has very literally down-graded the human being (the technology advances- the human withers) with art & music, by on large, degrading significantly under this mass down-scaling & socio/intellectual neutralization & commercialization of the most private, off-limits & sacred tenets of the human being (just think that socializing, dating & “sex” has literally been outsourced to the machine/cyber space for massive factions of the world’s population)
Luckily this seems to be getting much’ much more attention (at last) as record levels of self-harm, psychosis, anxiety & depression (particularly prevalent in the young) continue to dilapidate & disempower (I would also include stupidity as well). Beyond useful tools under the control of a human user, machines & humans do not mix. It is a folly & a dangerous & deeply deluded misalliance that will result in doom, dystopia or dictatorship. We are not machines/computers, & we never have been! all because a few hyper-privileged mad-scientist billionaire fuck-wads in Silicon Valley with an ultra-unhealthy Big Data fetish vie to reap trillions in profit & stroke their little “major scientific contribution/pioneering evolutionary course changing” ego’s to orgasm at our expense (as a whole species as well as individually). Turning the world into a bunch of depressed, panic attacked, anxi-oholic life-ophobes divorced from the core qualities of human existence is a strategy – for total compliance/exploitation. Neutralize the mind – control the body.
Oh’ & there’s much more (everything to do with this effort ends badly), with GAFA’s (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) systematic off-shoring of profits & extra-epic tax evasion, their obsession & insistence on mass Automation/robots (whenever a group of billionaires & a mega-market is united on the compulsory direction our civilization/the world (in this case species even) has to embark, you know there’s trouble right beneath the veneer), surreptitious surveillance, major political interference, dirty lobbying & anti-democratic chicanery, un-consensual scrutiny & algorithmization, on & on. Art, journalism, book publishing, market variety/competition & even truth itself have all been mangled, blotted & thinned-out (the quality & diversity at least, as there are now hordes of flunks populating the free platforms spewing endless e-excreta, permanently staining the on-line sewer with evermore technological tinnitus & mis/mal-information) (thanks Zuck you fucking bug eyed prick!).
Foer runs through a large selection of such ills & peril, concentrating centrally on GAFA (Gates, Thiele & Musk are largely excluded & very little is spoken about the Far East (South Korea, Japan, China) who are one of the heaviest investors in both robotics/automation, AI & communication technology etc). it’s an appalling, unsettling & at times terrifying read. He also devotes a great deal of time denouncing the mega-monopolies that are the modus-operandi of these companies, most notably (& insanely) the awful & insatiably rapacious Amazon/Jeff Bezos.
He also opines the deterioration of journalism, scribe, publishing, books, off-screen reading, quality media, veracity/accountability in reporting & news & commercial imposition/advertisement intervention & the ‘new commercial necessity’ that many media platforms feel they have to force swallow in able to exist & reach a sustainable audience. This is a collapse he knows well from decades in the field/industry & one he has witnessed at close range.
There’s a lot more to say/debate about this great piece of journalism & the pressing topic it confronts, one that is getting more & more out of hand with every passing week (no one’s really regulating these fucks & they are metastassing so fast that all drafts are taking place in the aftermath of embedding trends). For those of us that are interested, intellectually defensive & not comatose to the temporary, short-term/share-ware hollow convenience of the empty trash these predatory, sick & detrimental brain-rapists, contra-human extremists & jumped-up megalomaniac, god-complex freaks are peddling/gently (for now) forcing on the globe as a standardized “unavoidable” short-cut to ruin or worse (I would far rather we all die off as a species than ‘live’ under the unspeakable artifice these existentially-challenged fucking maniacs intend of inflicting if this madness is not thwarted). humanity is being robbed/defaced of it’s essence, leaving a bunch of, intellectually inert, meek, rag-doll, fake-as dullards conditioned for slavery & technological subservience, a disposition/disaster/nadir that these tech-fiends & the nightmare scenario they are ushering in – are more than happy to see realized.
Letting an extremely insalubrious micro-bunch of billionaire technological extremists play out their insane god fantasies with the rest of us is not going to happen. Zuckerberg, Bezos, Gates, Schmidt, Page, Thiele, Ishiguro & the ilk can just get to fuck & take their homogenizing hulk companies the fuck with them!
Author-Franklin Foer
Publisher-Jonathan Cape