script or sword

Medieval Europe saw the invention of technology ( agrarian) as means for man to finally be divorced from and rise above nature: tilting, harnessing, plowing, cultivating and having “dominion over the land and seas”.

God-man-nature.

Then man got all the wiser (having listened to the serpent): why not tilting, extracting and prospering without bound i.e. Columbus and the new Indian (Native American).

And so it went. With two nuclear bombs and a bunch of financial crises. Same script, same sword. Big 5 (AWS, Apple etc..) are now Columbuses. We the new Indian, to be extracted of our “posts”, “uploads” and “likes” to be aggregated, scaled and monetised. Other people’s connections and content.

Why not using someone else’s quota to import garment when/if there were a trade war or restrictions. Other’s People Money (OPM) & the sharing economy (other people’s credit history – to buy new cars). Why not “blue ocean” and exploit the natives (thanks to Samuel Colt and his 6 shots ; which by the way, good odds for “Russian roulette” in addition to be instrument for Native American genocide).

And so it went. Sub-Sahara Africa during the advent of the Internet (which Bill Gates himself had not seen coming) had zero usage.

Approaching 2020, we see kids, housewives, street vendors etc… using smart phones and spreads their own version of “fake news”, not just in NYC but any city.

Filter buble at atomic scale.

As transmission gets unrestricted, our content gets constricted: we only honor and accept our own P.O.V. (friending homogeneous people). Technology expands; our worldview tribalized.

Voila. A menace, just as Marconi had feared.

Ship-to-shore and not shore-to-ship. Script becomes the sword, only to turn against ourselves, and not the enemies e.g. ignorance and prejudice.

I tried out Twitter, but only skim through the top tweets; turns out, they were mostly from the same people who grump and gripe about same ole (AI thought I enjoy being validated and affirmed, hence, always top-lining similar content based on my own previous clicks).

All that wasted energy to create useful arts, to return to Eden, only to find ourselves back home, whose posted sign says “No Exit”.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. And as we made technology – data accesss – widely available, so we end up with wider exploitation and extraction, by facebook or Google, both try to “help” us finish our un-articulate and uncertain thoughts.

I fear as Morse and Marconi once expressed “what has God brought”. He who has a hammer in hand, everything looks like a nail.

Keep posting until you are exhausted. Then wait for the other shoe to drop. 6G? robotic massage? perpetual living and permanent unemployment? Our wealth-distribution graphs have never been more skewed, especially over the last few decades. Wonder why! the collapse of the Soviet Union and the civilian release of Vincent Cerf’s co-invention?.

They have abandoned the sword for the script and exploited the opportunities to the nth time. The plus side is, once in a while, a script is read by someone far away, and maybe a kinship is sparked; and Sub-Sahara Africans feel no longer alone and nor forgotten.

Those chances are rare, but the opportunities for scale and exploitation have not changed since Columbus found America. Call them whatever you want, take whatever you want in the great name of God who made them all after his original liking. Yet the Benedictine monks once naively thought technology was to serve mankind in his quest for transcendence, for returning to prelapsarian state. Monk or money? Script or sword?