You wake up on a normal early Autumn day. After hacking up your lungs in front of the sink and scraping the gunk out of your eyes, you sit down with a brew and LOG IN. In the 5, 10… maybe 20 minutes you spend mindlessly scrolling, your brain idly absorbing mostly useless information in return for a few small bursts of dopamine, you pass by funny videos of dancing animals, a sentimental status from an acquaintance, a bloody and horrific murder and the occasional call for the ending of one race or another. A small part of you thinks “oh, that was unpleasant”, so you keep scrolling. You finish your brew, LOG OUT, and continue your day. In the hours that follow, you don’t spare even a second to look back and remember what you saw.
WELCOME TO THE NEW ERA.
We live in the Golden Age. Never before in the history of mankind have starvation, disease and war been conquered as the biggest threats to humanity. In this new age, our power as a species has never been so great. In fact, it is so great that our lack of self-control is killing us. Starvation has been conquered by obesity, lifestyle choices are more deadly than natural diseases, and suicide kills more than war. In a few hundred years we have come to dominate this planet. But humanity is facing an identity crisis. Once upon a time, humanity was aware of it’s place in the natural world. Reality was a concoction of myths and stories that tried to explain our very existence. As a result, the majority of tribal beliefs saw animals as gods, and nature as the ultimate authority. Then agriculture came along, and with it came wealthy individuals that had power over others. We started worshipping gods, and increasingly often a singular God. Then one day, on the eve of the dawn of a new era, we came to a grand realisation. GOD IS DEAD. The stories and myths we used to define reality died with Him. It was at this point we started defining reality ourselves. As a species, the system we have created in this fantasy version of reality ensures us food, shelter and healthcare. But as individuals, the very meaning of our lives have been lost. In it’s place, we are being fed a distorted truth.
1. Capitalism, hierarchy, is the natural order and the “end of history”. All other attempts at organising society have failed. All we can do now is try to improve it.
2. The individual has more power than ever before. The power to choose. Wherever you make it in life, it is due to your own choices. The power to express oneself to the entire world.
3. The advances we make as a society are exponentially improving the world. Eventually there will be no poverty, no environmental destruction and no war.
These are the 3 pillars of the New Era.
They are lies.
1.Capitalism cannot be improved to benefit as many as possible. It works as it should, funnelling wealth from the bottom to the top. Last year, 64 people owned over half the world’s wealth. This year that number has been reduced to 8. However, this will likely be it’s downfall, unless it can adapt and change in a way that will keep the Units happy enough to keep mindlessly producing and consuming. By 2050, it is predicted that over 50% of jobs will be automated. We will have a class of useless people. Wether this is a good or a bad thing depends on if the masses of wealth produced by automation are used to benefit the whole of society, or used to benefit the few.
2. In a way this is true. We can now cast our thoughts, no matter how trivial, to millions of people at a time. What better way to express your individuality through pictures of your overpriced, unsatisfying meal or through witty remarks about the current state of the world that gather dozens of likes… but are forgotten within days. Why then do all these “individuals” do exactly the same thing? The truth is, we are not individuals. Everything we do, everything we think, every way we express ourselves is shaped and formed by the people and the environment around us. Without those people, our personalities would simply not exist. The owners of these social media platforms know this to some degree. Algorithms follow our interactions, monitor our behaviour and show us exactly what we want to see. More clicking = more likes = more money. Our very view of the world, the way we think other people behave, is controlled and manipulated. The choices we are allowed to make with our lives are still free, but our decisions are warped and our choices are limited. Facebook, for example, has been exposed for conducting psychological experiments on people’s behaviour through changing their newsfeed. No Psychological association could legally get away with this without prior informed consent from the participants. Not long after this, it was found that they were targeting political adverts, including ones for extremist groups, at people that showed such interests. Propaganda has never been so personal.
The system increasingly sees us as units, allowed to express our “individuality” within the small confines they allow us, as long as it doesn’t disrupt anything. It looks past politics, religion and race, seeing us simply as replaceable items that produce information and profit. Soon everything else will be obsolete.
3. The system depends on poverty, environment destruction and war. The coltan used in motherboard of the device you read this on was almost definitely mined from the ground by some poor African fellow, too scared about being killed by his masters or another rival gang to worry about the destruction he is causing to the Earth. It is very much possible with our current technology and wealth to create a society where these problems no longer exist. But what do the elite focus on? Power. Why be excessively wealthy if it does not give you power. They dream of becoming the gods mankind once worshipped. This comes in the form of technological advancement, and each step closer to the divine will be carefully justified. The effort for immortality (of those that can afford it) will be justified as medical care. The co-owner of Paypal is trying to achieve just that. The yearn for greater intelligence, created through genetic manipulation and eugenics, will be justified in a similar way. We may one day see a stratified society in which the poor are used as units of production, whilst the rich pay to be part of the upper echelons, with the benefits of greater intelligence, longer lives and perhaps even God-like abilities we cannot foresee. With every individual being constantly tracked and monitored, any resistance will be futile.
The internet has given us the divine ability to connect to anyone, anywhere at any time. And it’s only going to get bigger. Soon, everything with a battery (and maybe even some things without) will be connected. Constantly updating, constantly sensing, constantly monitoring. It’s as if we are heading towards a bizarre dystopian mix of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where every creature comfort and earthly desire is given to us for the price of our exact whereabouts at all times. Where the true intrinsic value of the human experience is reduced to an easily digestible, mass-produced package on sale for all to buy, missing only one or two small features available in the next upgrade. We don’t stop to wonder why we’re here, what humanity should do with all this power. For the first time, we have the opportunity to connect with the entire world, to form a society free of exploitation and destruction. We need to stop simply seeing ourselves as individuals, or as a collective, but as individuals within the collective. But such a view does not support the system. Our lives are reduced to four words. SLEEP, PRODUCE, CONSUME, REPEAT.
The Monkey and The Machine 