Month: April 2023

Lockdowns were an attack on the fundaments of our collective spirit

Posted on      by     

We, the human race, do not and cannot exist as isolated, atomized individuals. We need each other, man and woman, old and young. We exist as a collective whole and can hardly exist as anything but. But the lockdown orders of 2020 struck at the root of this togetherness in such a way that has never before been attempted. It struck at the root of what it means to be human, and so we withered as individuals because we were isolated and made to feel shame for yearning for the togetherness that our spirit commands us to pursue. Not just economic activity, but all interpersonal activity was in the crosshairs, and we suffered like we’ve never suffered before. The collective organism that we call humanity was maimed. As I return to all the news clippings of police raids on churches, brawls and murders over a piece of face cloth, screaming matches amid aisles lined with Chinese-made garbage, I see the evidence of a mortally wounded collective spirit. With the lockdown orders and taboos against congregation in the rear view mirror, can we as a species rebuild and revive this collective spirit, or is it too late?

Barbarism amid the birth of A.I.

Posted on      by     

I think a strange phenomenon that gets almost no attention is the barbarizing effect that technological advancement has had on the population as a whole. As more machines and gadgets do our thinking for us, we revert to even a sub-barbarism, less than, just barely able to keep ourselves alive at all, because we’ve never been forced to think. Our survival, for many of us, has never depended on our wit. When I say “we”, I mean the working professional class. The middle and upper classes. The ones whose lives have been so exposed as hollow amid the the chaos and upheaval of the past three years, and whose joy lies only in an animal hedonism. Technology is having a de-civilizing effect on us. We’re being made less human because of it. Yes this may be a Luddite argument, because I’ve become a Luddite, because I see the dulling, narcotic effect that technological advancement has on our spirit, our intellect, and our contact with the physical world around us. The situation is different for those in the lower classes, breaking their backs for 60 or more hours each week, and whose ends barely meet. They are submerged in a different barbarism entirely, one of the eternal hamster wheel, with not only no hope of getting off, but of only an increase in speed. The source of their pain, and their fate, lies in the steadily devalued dollar. The value of our money continuously eroded through incessant money creation, and they, who exist at the back of the economic line, bear the brunt of this inflation. They pay for it, and so despair inhabits their lives forever. Our service workers, unskilled laborers, who would benefit from a steady deflation, are forever submerged.

And so we exist as a vast submerged, barely-educated underclass, and a middle and upper class totally drug-addled on 5G pornographic pleasures. The freedom from thinking,this is the heroin addling the brains of the opinion-moulding classes. The machines think for them, and so these stunted minds, dull-gazed shaven apes that we’ve become, move ever closer to an animal state, even as we verge on a epoch-altering technological revolution.

As we regress culturally and intellectually, we simultaneously bear witness to the birth of AI, artificial intelligence. ChatGPT and others now do the thinking for us. In just a few years we will make us of AI lawyers, AI accountants, et cetera. Ironic, that these programs will replace the very white collars whose material comforts have atrophied the very qualities that make them human. Maybe this is for the best, maybe not. Once these programs are able to do all the thinking for us, they take away that which makes us human. But will AI ever think on its own, will Pinocchio ever be a real boy? I believe the answer lies in the negative, but that doesn’t mean that we won’t create an all-powerful AI program capable of wiping us out. And that would be the most ironic epitaph for us as a species, our creation of an omnipotent entity, in every respect a god, but one deaf, dumb, blind. God as a program, endlessly and mindlessly performing predetermined tasks, unleashed upon the universe.

Posted on      by     

Posted on      by