The Lifeless Virtual Road to Nowhere
Getty Images and Unsplash+.
Today, anything and everything either has a price or is categorized as worthless. This grander-then-grand fake binary now pervades every nook and cranny of every ecosystem on planet earth. But who decides what does and what does not have value?
Is the decider even human? Or, perhaps, a Russian “bot,” or an algorithm originating on Wall Street or the City of London.
Our world has become otherworldly as machines cancel all recollection of anything real, revealing only recycled hallucinations, delivering its images on a perpetual conveyor belt we call the “24-hour news cycle.”
Over a century ago humans were simply left alone with our consternation, wallowing neck-deep in neo-Puritan confusion and anxiety which began the “thingification” of masses of working people, which transformed people into being objects of working power. Labor was bought and sold, creating a dehumanized existence. Stripped bare of anything human, the working poor were forced to sell themselves to survive.
Technology has changed, but conditions for the working poor has remained inhumane.
In a June 24, 2024, interview, surrealist poet Annie le Brun (1942-2024) was asked: Are we seeing a return to Puritanism?
Le Brun replied:
Yes, and it goes hand in hand with a deregulation that is not just financial or climatic, but general, and that is spreading with the commodification of everything. Hence the worrying disorderly return of all the forms of conformism to which people seek to cling, through reactions stereotyped by the identity they have chosen for themselves.
We “Americans” are the clear winners in the contest for who is the most violent society in an increasingly violent world. There is nothing that has not been bombarded with the combination of American Empire’s arsenal of military and psychological weapons. Yes, we’re #1 in production of “bunker-buster” bombs.
There is concurrently widespread misperception in our society that the Internet and digital technology seems to expand our possibilities of communication. As the Internet increasingly reaches into our inner, once-private lives, without us being remotely aware of it, we are being herded (“nudged”) into a prison of meaningless images being used to control and manipulate humanity worldwide.
Global capital’s deadly grasp now extends far beyond extracting commodities, exploiting nature and enslaving man’s physical labor. Humanity is now facing new weapons designed to erase water-based and sunlight-based life and replace it with programmable matter, or “life” on a silicon chip.
The Davos billionaires’ demented ideas about enslaving, domesticating and harnessing Mother Earth’s life forces into a steel-cold, lifeless global bio-computer system are counting on the blockchain and AI as an ultimate settler-colonizer singularity.
The dominators, small men, want control over it all. They cannot see they’re planting the seeds of their own demise. Like Icarus flying too close to the sun, already their vulgar machinations are vaporizing, plunging into the sea.
Remember the ancestors who led this struggle for centuries, for millennia. Remember the history of Indigenous genocide and enslavement. Comprehend that where “smart-city” programming and Agenda 21 originated is in the inconceivable nightmare of an imaginary world where everything can be bought. And remember that it is often at the darkest moment that reversal can begin to manifest itself.
Seeds of passion and love are more powerful than anything they can throw at us. Have faith, resist, revolt, remain patient, loving and strong until the sun does its thing. Imagine and nurture the inner love which sees and feels in nature the power and ground of being, which is creatively active through nature.
Never consent to being a thing. Hold nothing back. And most important of all remember: Nature bats last!
The post The Lifeless Virtual Road to Nowhere appeared first on CounterPunch.org.