What’s Our Digital Destiny?
January 15, 2023 Leave a comment
A recent trip to a modern eatery has me wondering about our digital destiny.
Last Sunday I visited a “Test Kitchen” in my area. There, under a single roof, three separate kitchens offered three different low-priced menus. I had lots of choices, as shown on the order touch screen.
I poked out my choices and then “Checkout”. The screen told me to swipe or insert my credit card or use a mobile app to pay. I was taken aback. I came prepared to pay cash.
Not only was there no cash drawer, there was no human interface. Humans were scurrying around back in the kitchen filing orders. But I was forced to conduct business with a machine.
I understand the implications of hiring humans to deal with cash registers. There is the search for and interviewing of willing and able prospective employees. There is the decision to hire people who can add and subtract and think on their feet. There is the training of new hires to understand the system and to be customer friendly. There is the constant monitoring of the cash drawer for pilfering, and more. To those time-consuming aspects of hiring, add the cost of incentives, hourly salary, and benefits. Business sense would act to cut out the middle man – the counter person.
Outside forces also work to cut out human engagement. Idiotic COVID mandates created social distancing guidelines. Empathy was sold as hiding faces behind masks and staying away from people including your aged and dying parents.
Minimum wage laws increase the use of robots. (What’s next? Minimum employee laws with DEI hiring requirements? Governments can’t pilfer tax money from robots.)
My recent trip to a modern eatery was a trip to a vending machine. The machine took my order. The machine took my payment and the machine took my phone number so it could text me when my order was ready. How nice of the machine to do this!
The machine later texted me asking about my “recent experience”. The text contained radio button choices but no comment space for actual opinion. I deleted the text. I didn’t want to be part of the machine’s feedback loop.
For me, human interface is enriching, and even when the person behind the counter has purple hair, nose and mouth jewelry, tattoos and an attitude. My attitude comes from following Jesus and reading about his interactions with people that included Samaritans, self-righteous types, and sinners.
A man-man interface is what I look for in a “recent experience” and not a man-machine interface. That is why I prefer eating at diners. There, at least, I’m part of a community and not just a node in a network.
Another “recent experience” left me concerned about our digital destiny. Last fall I received an email from the church I had been attending. The email asked for my opinion. It contained an online poll with, as I recall, over a hundred questions with radio button choices and some comment spaces.
The poll questions ranged from quality of pastoral care to aspects of ministries involving children, youth and adults to questions of homosexual involvement and whether political topics should be addressed from the pulpit.
I didn’t take the poll. My first thought was “Why did the three priests and vestry need to send out a poll to know the status of things in the church?” Apparently, they didn’t know the status and didn’t know the people of the church or the mind of God for that matter.
And like the test kitchen text, I was asked to provide feedback about my “recent experience” into the system. Was this done to hone the church into an efficiently run operation and a satisfactory customer experience?
There was never any reason to keep me at data’s length. If anyone in that church wanted my opinion they could come up and ask me – face to face, just as Jesus did with his disciples: “Who do the crowds say that I am?” And then individually: “What about you? Who do you say that I am?” (Luke 9: 18-20)
And my understanding of the Christian church is a human-to-human engagement with the Living Lord and not a relationship with a business or corporation with bills to be paid and customers and stockholders to be mollified and handled.
Where am I going with all this? Honestly, I’m trying to be vigilant on my watch. I see the benefits of digital technology and I also see how digital technology can be used to condition, control and denigrate humanity. I see how digital technology polarizes just about everything including the user.
I am old enough to remember a time when digital devices were not around. There was no constant pinging and no bits and bytes clamoring for attention like carnival attractions. Vending machines were the man-machine interfaces. In 1964 I could put a dime into the machine for a bottle of pop. It was a simple hassle-free transaction. Buy anything today via digital means and one is constantly hounded to buy more and to provide feedback.
Back then, instead of a tracking device carried on my person that constantly wanted to sell me something there was a phone on the wall with a cord that limited its reach.
There was no need for a usernames and passwords. Friends used nick names.
Instead of logging onto web sites with two-pass authentication using purchased security software on a purchased laptop I walked to the library to check out books.
Instead of online banking I received paper statements that I used to reconcile my accounts.
Instead of social media I had neighborhood, school, and church friends. There was no façade of community that social media offers.
Instead of the internet of things I had books, games, LPs and 45s, a transistor radio, and lots for room for imagination. I can’t say that digital technology has improved my “recent experience” with regard to any of the above interests.
And, if the gov’t wanted to spy on me, they would send a couple of guys in overcoats and have them sit in a parked car across the street. And to monitor my phone calls, a wiretap order from a judge would be needed. In this digital age I’m not sure who is spying on me. Maybe the FBI and CIA are surveilling my every word and association.
Working as an engineer for most of my life, I understand how digital technology and the internet of things (IoT) supports engineering projects and a business’s bottom line. There are benefits galore. But the IoT doesn’t bolster my bottom line. Human connectivity, for me, is more desirable than being on a network with me as one of its nodes. Thankfully, that was my experience at work.
When I announced my retirement, managers and coworkers mentioned that they were grateful for my efforts and the time they spent working with me. Chirag, manager of the comms group I was part of, called me when he heard I was retiring. We had had many conversations on MS Teams regarding projects and some personal topics. We talked about my move to Indiana among other things.
During my call with Chirag, I said that he was the best manager I had worked with during my time with the company. I told him that he was personable and easy to talk to. He had listened to what I said and worked on solutions to issues I raised. I thanked him for my time working with him. I never felt managed. I felt engaged.
Chirag’s’ reply to my comments: “I treat people like humans.”
I’m not a sentimentalist. I don’t want to go back in time. But over time I have sensed a growing loss of the analog human-to-human interface for . . .. digital efficiency’s sake. Organic human connections are being disconnected. This loss is occurring not only in everyday transactions such as self-checkouts at stores but also in a politically determinative sense.
With increasing connectivity, I see digital communications acting to divide, isolate, and condition people “efficiently” for political ends. We saw this with the creation of digital vaccine credentials such as “VaxPass”. We see this with gaslighting bots on Twitter warping reality. We see this with the brainwashing, weaponization, hostilities, and persecutions that have come about as people share their thoughts on social media. More digital destruction is beaming our way.
5G towers are going up everywhere and with them, ways to monitor and manipulate the public. Janet Yellen, the worst Secretary of the Treasury ever, is working to do away with physical cash (and the corresponding human to human transactions). Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is coming and so is social credit scoring using smartphones and facial recognition software. Working on a digital chain gang will become a reality. Our digital destiny is the Inhumanity of Things.
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You must view this, especially as the 5GW information involves digital matters:
5th Generation Warfare: History, Modern Context, and (Some) Solutions
Steps to fight 5th generation warfare:
Take care of your weapon – your mind.
Take actions to make the tools of 5GW irrelevant
Raise your children to have good values and not the values the state wants them to have
Grow your community. Create networks of friends.
Create white space – terrain and obstacles that slows down enemy advances, including privacy.
Communications – decrease reliance on cellular and internet communication. Get away from using Smartphones – intelligence collection sensors. There is no more effective tool used against the American people than the smartphone.
The internet is nothing more than data going through servers. The “Cloud” is your data on someone else’s computer.
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Feedback loops – Here’s something you should be sensitive to. Your kids might be getting affirmation from all the wrong places:
Social Media May Alter Brains of Children — Study
Habitually checking social media as a young teenager is linked to hypersensitivity to peer feedback and may potentially lead to permanent changes in the brain’s reward and motivation centers, neuroscientists at the University of North Carolina suggested in a recent study published in JAMA Pediatrics.
The study looked at a group of 169 teens as their brains developed between the ages of 12 to 15 and their self-reported use of Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.
When those with usage the researchers classed as “habitual” – meaning they checked their accounts 15 or more times a day – played a game that modeled feedback in the form of peer approval, they became increasingly sensitive to that feedback.
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“ . . . a terrifying item buried within the Biden-McConnell “infrastructure” legislation, which passed in August 2021. According to [Congressman Bob] Barr, the government will now have the power to shut off your vehicle if they determine you are partaking in any “illegal” activity.
Does anyone really believe the Biden Regime will not abuse this newly obtained power?”
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Informed Dissent:
Kaufman Institute for Coincidence – YouTube
Learn aboutpropaganda and the pejorative “Conspiracy theorist” from Mark Crispin Miller, Ph.D.:
“COVID-19 is unquestionably the largest, most sophisticated propaganda operation in history. Psychological techniques were extensively used during 2020 to incite fear and panic in the population, while other persuasion strategies were used to get people to support and defend COVID measures such as masking, isolation, social distancing, lockdowns and jab mandates.”
Modeling Gone Bad. – by Robert W Malone MD, MS (substack.com)
“CDC’s VAERS safety signal analysis based on reports from Dec. 14, 2020 – July 29, 2022 for mRNA COVID-19 vaccines shows clear safety signals for death and a range of highly concerning thrombo-embolic, cardiac, neurological, hemorrhagic, hematological, immune-system and menstrual adverse events (AEs) among U.S. adults.”
CDC Finally Releases VAERS Safety Monitoring Analyses For COVID Vaccines | ZeroHedge
631 hospitals at risk of closure, state by state (beckershospitalreview.com)
Mainstream gatekeepers have been completely wrong about everything for three years yet they are incapable of learning from their mistakes
The Great Double Down – by Toby Rogers – uTobian (substack.com)
FINALLY!!: PENTAGON CANCELS VACCINE MANDATE… – CITIZEN FREE PRESS
The Censorious Scott Gottlieb Was a Major Influence on Lockdowns ⋆ Brownstone Institute
livestock and companion animals are getting the jab . . .
McCullough: Vaccinated Can Spread mRNA and Spike Protein to Other People (theflstandard.com)
The numerous mandates birthed by the onset of the Covid-19 scenario were all designed to deliberately break the global economy and crush small businesses as well as break people’s minds, will and the social fabric, in order to “build back a better society” that conforms to the dystopian visions of the psychopaths waging this class war. . ..
Put simply, Covid-19 was not a widespread medical emergency, it was a money laundering scheme, a massive psychological operation and a smoke screen for a complete overhaul and restructuring of the current social and economic world order.
COVID-19: A Global Financial Operation (2ndsmartestguyintheworld.com)
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Quantum Dot, digital currency
Dr Stella, Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), 5G technology,
Fundamental Transformation Taking Shape:
Cindy Wity 