Into the Wind

A piece I wrote recently....

We're going in”...

Bill Harding – Twister.

It was a big thing in the seventies – the disaster movie.

People would pack cinemas to see films like The Towering Inferno and Jaws to be shocked and terrified by experiencing some man-made or natural disaster.

None of us, however, really enjoy living in a world of earthquakes or tsunamis... but we do.

It's also true to say we live in a world of enormous human evil.

The events of the 20^th century left a truly miserable trail of abominable carnage and extermination.

From the Gulag's of Stalin's 'glorious' Socialist state, through the gas chambers of Nazi Germany, to the Killing Fields of Mao and Pohl-Pot in the East, these awful decades of death grant us a horrifying insight into the seemingly inexhaustible misery and brutality we can impose upon others, particularly in the name of some form of political idealism.

As with the French revolution of the 1700's, this manner of evil is continually wrapped in the guise of something meaningful and 'progressive' for humanity. Hitler brought several years of genuine economic growth in Germany before his engagement in full scale war, but behind the scenes, work was already in hand to bring about the centre-piece of a national socialist regime – the 'final solution', which would begin with the extermination of the Jewish people, but would then continue within the new reich into the purging of all races to bring about the goal of a truly 'pure', eugenically guided master species.

The 'truth' we want to tell ourselves about our own times is that the great wars ended such troubles – that for our lifetimes we have moved away from such abominable aims and instruments of ideological control into an age of genuine enlightenment and calm, but this would fly in the face of reality, and recent events of global trial have shown us otherwise. Whilst the threat of a nightmare pandemic has left many realms gripped by fear into yielding their economic policies into wholesale damage control, the far deadlier take-over at work in our political and social structures has continued unabated, indeed aided by the present conditions. We are at greatest risk not from a virulent form of a seasonal strain of a particular grouping of a virus, but the very same ideological misery that has played out in prior times.

GAME OVER

Some of us will recall one of Disney's earliest ventures into digital technology in the early 1980s movie, Tron. It tells the story of how a mega corporation's attempts to corner the world of information technology is thwarted by a group of rebel programmers, but the 'real' story is the inter-action which takes place between a master game-creator named Flynn and the micro world within 'the machine', pictured as a malevolent Master Control Program. Flynn is taken into the system, where he is made to play gladiatorial-like games to remain alive, but escapes such through the help of a program his associate created called Tron. After a great deal of struggle, Flynn manages to defeat the MCP and its human counter-part, Dillinger and restore a form of freedom to the system.

The film says a great deal, as the 2019 documentary, The Great Hack, reveals.

In the modern world, “Users” (you and I) have indeed become 'stored' in the system as thousands of data points, which are constantly used in an analytical fashion to not only determine what we like and what we will purchase, but how we can be swayed to vote or think about various issues, and this has quite literally adjusted the entire course of the modern world.

The brave new world we have inherited, laid down by the likes of IBM and Microsoft, but then accessorised by Google, Facebook and Twitter, is a domain where you generate value for corporations and businesses by our continual use of their systems, the validity of which has increased ten fold over the last six months. These data spheres have become as invaluable to us as groceries and hospitals, even taking the place of worship and other social activity during our now commonplace times of confinement. It is only when we begin to fully comprehend the extraordinary power these 'faceless' corporations now control in every major sphere of human activity that we begin to comprehend some measure of how evil is shielded within the 'cloud' of what most of us view as benign, even benevolent, in our daily sharing of images or messages. Behind that popular notion is a very dark and manipulative world of global influence and monumental change that costs us so much, just so we can work beneath the pretence that everything is good.

LEAVING THE RESERVATION?

If you watched any of this year's other 'must see' documentary, The Social Dilemma, then one thing that should have really struck home was the number of prior pioneers for 'big tech' companies that now stay away entirely from social media, purely because they understand how their inventions have been deployed to manipulate the user as often as possible for as long as possible. As noted in The Great Hack, social media has been comprehensively weaponised by the best means available to gather profiling data on its users to addict them to what is on offer – 'safe' engagement with every social sphere you need, for as long as you need, in a fashion you perceive as 'free' and, most importantly, self affirming.

Gone is the paranoia of earlier days seen in movies like 'The Net', and worries about the very real existence of AI systems that are growing exponentially smarter all the time are viewed as conspiratorial at worse, so when Elon Musk announced a new 'implant' chip that plugs straight into your cerebral cortex on Facebook in the autumn, no one gave it much thought – just another 'app' that makes it simpler for everyone.

We have become entirely comfortable with such tech being within reach 24/7, and if the next phase is an 'upgrade' that makes it part of our own skin and thereby simpler to use, we won't be concerned. In reality, it will mean that far more about you is being streamed into the systems of private corporations who entirely own what you provide... and you cannot get it back.

THE CYCLE

When the World Wide Web first opened for business, the vast majority of domains and sites you could access were free use. Slowly but surely, companies moved into the space and offered various 'services' for a fee to keep your data 'safe', but the clauses we all signed when we joined such agreements gave our vital information to them, and for the last thirty years, pretty much everything we do has been feeding that system, not only by facilitating the way we chose to spend via mega corporations like Amazon, but through 'encouraging' us to see the world in particular ways, once again to facilitate the expansion of other power interests and continue to provide ever increasing amounts of valuable (tradable) data, which is why such information is now the most valuable commodity on the planet.

The question which should be on our minds is what happens next?

In the first episode of the 1978 series Connections, James Burke imagined what it would be like if the power were to be switched off – permanently. After the initial violence and looting, a mere handful of people just might make it by returning to the land and having enough savvy to know what to plant and how to survive, but what he showed then was just how entirely the world had come to depend upon technology. Over the last 40 years, we have reached a point where the pressures we have placed upon the planet and society have exploded, but along side those troubles, new forms of social reform and modifying behaviour have come into play, reaching a pinnacle in the use of social media.

It's highly unlikely that the 70s collapse scenario will happen, but how far are we from the manner of synchronised dystopia envisaged in a film like The Circle? As facial recognition cameras become commonplace in our supermarkets, as health requirements move us to a point where face to face engagements and the use of physical currencies become unhygienic, as AI becomes more and more responsible (intrusive) for determining what benefits or offers or virtual opportunities are available or not to you, how long will it be before what defines us is not ourselves?

THE TYRELL SCENARIO

On the cusp of technology adjusting us, Science Fiction writer Phillip K Dick penned a story of where the nightmare of growing dependence on the artificial would lead us. His 1968 book would become a cult classic in the 1980s when it appeared as one of the most defining films of the era, Blade Runner, exploring the heady question of what indeed makes us human, but equally, what allows us to keep what is genuine in that equation.

The 2019 documentary The Great Hack showed that this question has become absolutely imperative to this moment. Just like the men and women 'shielded' by using androids in the film, Surrogates, we find ourselves required to spend more and more of our lives on-line, vicariously living by what is provided there, having our identities defined and used by the parasitical systems that intrusively channel what makes us a viable extension of devised wants and needs that provide others with power.

BREAKING THROUGH

Evil does not parade its true nature and ramifications in a fashion that will leave us appalled and angered. It will work softly, methodically, appealing to our sense that it is best to tolerate and co-exist with what is not deemed or perceived as an immediate threat to us, drawing along side, and then, requesting what is clearly good or sensible for us, thereby gradually encroaching upon what it should not have until it erodes away our actual freedom by luring us with something it defines as better than what we had, until we are entirely snared by its pervasive systems and choked by the poison of its ideals, defined as being 'for the best'..

In his series of documentaries for the BBC at the turn of the century, Adam Curtis showed how our society has spent over a century succumbing to the power of the elites (The Mayfair Set), and discarding personal and social liberty for the sake of comfort and seculosity (The Trap). This has lead us to a point where 'freedom' is only found for most in what is fed to them (Hypernormalisation), leaving us suspended and eerily detached from the very need to find genuine humanity beyond the scope of immediate wants and needs. This is indeed the Soma predicted by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World.

The awful cruelty of the last century explicitly shows us what is now implicit in our times – where millions are now murdered annually because our ideology condones abortion and gradually accommodates euthanasia – Eugenics becomes accepted as reasonable.

The final chapter of such enclosure, the final annihilation of the community significance of being ourselves, is about to open, where most are imprisoned within themselves, constantly 'assisted' by their never – sleeping 'guide', which feeds upon them in a fashion which, they believe, makes them valuable.

Passivity leaves us dependent upon this IV, but “better eyes” (The Abyss) can penetrate the nightmare.

The purpose here is to provoke, to pierce, you, that eyes that were blind may see,

that the truth, indeed, might set us free.

Will we escape the machine?

Only when the Son sets us free!