Which device best fits your mind?
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, Sept. 16, 2024 – The intellect is all that divides us from beasts and birds, from fishes and reptiles, from chambers of commerce and clubs for growth. Because to achieve proficiency with computation and communication requires more effort and persistence than is fun for kids, those innate human tools have been mechanized and monetized by BigTek, at a grievous cost to society.
The less often people use their own heart, lungs, and limbs for locomotion, the less able they are to walk. The less often people use their brains to decipher the platform of the republican party, or the 1619 and 2025 Projects, the more felons and frauds wind up calling the shots, at city hall, the state house, and in Washington.
Go ahead, my sisters and brothers, outsource thinking, outsource it to machines and devices that are the darling spawn of chambers of commerce and clubs for growth.
BikTek makes junkies of us all
But please notice how like drug kingpins BigTek operates: the first dose always is free, followed by the new slavery – the subscription model. Nobody truly owns their device; everybody only owns a no-contract obligation to keep buying updated versions every couple years as well as monthly cell and data services just to call 911 and report a robbery in progress.
As it became the default household device during my 1950s childhood, TV was often referred to as the idiot box or the boob tube. In 1961, the head of the Federal Communications Commission described it as “a vast wasteland.”
Yet, we transformed it into an object of veneration, a new golden calf that led us into a virtual desert, where it became an idol-spouting fountain, an icon-making device.
Irony of ironies, at first the boob tube was utterly without boobs, much less dicks, but thanks to TV and its spawn, the internet, children today are bored by boobs and dicks before they even get to high school, since by then, pornography is old school to them.
to spy is to make war
During the first half of the 20th century, America interrupted two global suicide attempts. Since the ubiquity of TV, during the second half, we threw off the American way, and took up espionage, which is nothing more than criminal behavior for national benefit.
What American would not think it an act of war if the King of Spain had the Secretary of Defense on his payroll? (That was true for twenty years, during the presidencies of Washington, Adams, and Jefferson!) Suppose Putin had video of POTUS telling a hired companion state secrets, would we send the C.I.A. to reclaim our secret? Would we punish POTUS, or Putin, or both?
The post-war addition of espionage to the executive branch of the American government transformed us from a republic to something else. We, the people, in our personal lives, are free to pretend to keep things secret from one another.
But we, the people, cannot govern ourselves, unless we’re all on the same page. Knowledge is power. No self-governing people, unless bent on self-destruction, can afford to hire any person or group to collect and keep its secrets. Human nature simply doesn’t allow it, nor will machines and devices keep your secrets secret.