In these days, attempting to live a stable life is like being an empty trashcan in a tornado. All the headlines focus on what “Wanna be a dictator” is doing to the fabric of government; there are large situations like global warming, rational health care, personal civil rights, what schoolchildren will not be taught, the emerging isolationism of each state in the Union, and the precarious ripping apart of economic relationships between democratic nations.
That’s just one whirlwind in the storm. Another whirlwind swirls around the corporate freedom to dissemble independent human behavior and replace it with computerized corporate manipulations of behavior and intervene the interface between humans and genuine reality.
Having one’s own private perspective on how to engage in the community has been diminished and largely replaced by the new town square, Facebook – which is a behavior similar to smartphones, which requires no social intervention at all.
Corporations have automated out of existence places and activities where ‘community’ could be felt and engaged in – places like small storefront businesses, shopping malls, and computerized food services that have a negative effect on restaurants.
Slowly, humanity (in the wealthy nations only, there is no life to be had in poor ones) is being corralled into the world of one of mariner’s benchmark icons, the movie Matrix. The model is identical but Matrix says humans were put into wired coffins, their brains filled with artificial life experience and their bodies were used as batteries for the great “system”
In this reality it is the same model but for different reasons. Smartphones replace the coffins, social control replaces batteries. Remember Zuckerberg’s fantasy about everyone having their own online town? Sort of like the false life of humans in Matrix.
But the Armageddon swirl is closing in. Everyone must now store their personal computer backups on the ‘cloud’. Metaphorically, your smartphone provides verbs, your computer provides nouns. Your computer is no more than a data entry keyboard – sort of like a typewriter but wired to the corporate database.
Mother Nature will step in big time in a few years. Not that it will necessarily make things better; Mother owns the largest corporation – the planet.
Mariner is inclined to go looking for his two ponies and a cart. He has no smartphone, will not store his data in the ‘system’ database and continually searches for ways to shop face-to-face with other humans and to spend cash for purchases. He is a Homo sappien approaching extinction.
Ancient Mariner