As we bear witness to a sci-fi techno-dystopia unfurling before our eyes, we have quickly discovered that most people welcome the total surveillance state into their homes willingly. Gladly. They’ll even shell out $1,500 for the privilege. That’s the price tag on Amazon’s latest tech horror, “Astro”, a robot that rolls around your house and records, catalogs, and make decisions about what it is capturing. And amid our ultra-hedonistic, present-oriented paradigm, bringing a pricey corporate surveillance gadget into one’s home is perfectly normal.
My only question, which is a broader, more fundamental question, is where does it stop? At what point will we have achieved peak connectivity? 20G phones with our own personal cell towers by the microwave? Sunglasses that automatically stream television 24 hours a day, vehicles that are indistinguishable from the phones in our pockets, nothing more than driveable computers?
Digital devices are draining us of our two most precious possessions, our attention and our time. It’s ugly to watch so many people staring at their phones while walking, while eating, while driving. The vibe I get is one of a soul being sucked through ones eyes into the screen. I’m no better. I stare at my devices mindlessly, always checking for meaningless updates, because I took have developed the addiction. But imagine what it will be like in 10 years. We know what it will look like if we continue down this path of rapacious, philistine technological progress, the cell towers encroaching on every once-sacred public space, the digital world pushing its way further into this realm, our lived experience becoming less real, while our simulated life fast becoming the only life we know. We have to pull the plug in our personal lives, if we are have a meaningful lived experience at all. Reject the robots, reject the phones, reject the “smart” vehicles, push back against this stealth corporate tech intrusion into your life. Pull out the opiate IV and fight your way out of the mental prison that has been slowly erected around your life. Unplug, wake up.
