Jack, <...we see traffic jams with literally millions of our most productive people wasting precious hours getting to and from the cities...>
Okay, this might seem pedantic, but you do not belong to me. I don't own you. You are not one of my people. If you are in a traffic jam, it is YOUR loss of time, not mine. It is YOU who wishes to be free of the jam and waste of your life.
They are not our people.
This is a vital distinction. While we are all citizens of some country, because there is nowhere to escape to and anyway, we quite like hanging out with a lot of other people, we remain individual beings - just one of a petatrillion of DNA-based beings, each with their own unique DNA, every single one of which has been as evolutionarily as successful as the others. The winners being those alive at any given instant, be they a mosquito feeding on your blood, a flea on a dog's back, a cheetah eating a gazelle or a teenager playing Quake or an amoeba hanging out in the ooze [the teenager and amoeba look similar].
We are NOT owned by the USA, or New Zealand, or a King, or a slave-driving Founding Father or Mother, or the current alpha-male monkey, be he Saddam or Stalin, though they [the current rulers of any monkey clan] invariably try to exert control over us and subvert us to their purposes.
With the internet arriving, we are creating another world. An abstract world as real to our minds as the 3D world which is a noisy, smelly, hot/cold, tactile, physical place rather than the verbal, reasoning, knowledge-based zone of our thoughts and cyberspace. What 3G is going to do is break the bounds of that physical world which ties us to a wire, fibre or microwave dish pointing in a set direction. With 3D visual input we will really cut loose because a big chunk of our brains is visual [unless we are blind - hmmm, what do blind people do with the part of their brain which would otherwise handle images; I suppose it just sits there doing nothing, same as the optic nerve, while they keep their minds on other inputs?]. We will be able to be in cyberspace while we feel sand on our feet, sun on our skin and the wind in our face.
Our physical position will be freed as our minds and lives are increasingly bound up with the Internet and our computers. Where our minds go, our bodies have to tag along, so we have been stuck at the end of wires, on rickety chairs, usually in the same room, with sore bums, clicking on $ill Gates' 'computer on every desk and in every home'. Go Brain Go!
There is a literal war underway right now. The USA and other governments are seeking to take control of all process in the Internet. Don't worry, it's just to stop criminals, drug dealers, teroists, extreme left-wing socialists, what the heck, throw in Democrats and any bastard trying to not pay tax to the rightful owners of that money who are the chad-pushing cargo-cultists in Florida and around the world who are voting to redistribute your wealth to them. Jeb, George and George, Katherine and a horde of hangers-on need your money to keep themselves in the manner to which they have become accustomed. Bill C and cronies had their turn at the trough and now it's George's turn.
Here is the literal war; we have had McDermott most recently. But we have had Kaczynski, David Koresh and acolytes, Timothy McVeigh taking revenge. Do you not feel a faint note of empathy with their ideas as you look around your own circumscribed life which resembles a honey bee or ant or maybe mouse in a running wheel or rat in a rat race. Life as The Truman Show! The Matrix. There is something going on! It is NOT all nice. 1984 and Animal Farm. War of the Worlds; those aliens came from Outer Space - the real ones might be from Cyber Space. There are plenty of cultural icons warning us of what might lie ahead and real-life 'madmen' taking real-life action, who are really NOT insane in the conventional sense though I think their attachment to rationality is tenuous and mostly provides an excuse for violent impulse like any common wannabe alpha-male.
The Quake players of the world and Submariners turned cyberspace software testers [McDermott] turned 'freedom fighters' are not necessarily going to turn the world into a pretty place full of light and love.
Our dilemma is that we want and need society and the vast capitalist-collectivist achievements of the modern democratic world, but the continuing conversion of people to 'our' people is causing some disturbance amongst the slaves of The New Paradigm. 'Our' people are NOT behaving as 'we' want them to.
Bring on the Prozac and some Clockwork Orange conditioning.
We will all love 3G and Big Brother. Anyway, I'm prepared to take the risk.
Who are 'we' if 'they' are 'our' people?
Yes, I know it's pedantic, but the bigger context is serious and real and coming to a neighbourhood near you.
Mqurice
PS: Maybe our people are hiding in the traffic jams, safe from the cloistering world of their workplace and their cell in the suburbs. For an hour, their mind is their own. Maybe they LIKE the traffic - people fly around the world to get in a huge traffic jam as they circle the big rock in Mecca during the Haj.
We don't have to go back far [USSR, China today, Albania, North Korea] to find places where 'our' people are told in no uncertain terms what's what and who is in charge. History is a litany of 'our' people cutting loose. From slaves cutting free from the founding fathers to children cutting loose from domineering parents. From the French Revolution to the Berlin Wall coming down. Hitler disposed of a lot of 'our' people, who he no longer needed. It's a very ugly scene when we talk of 'our' people. |
