Tomorrow!!

      More and more our world is seen through a screen, now with virtual meetings and virtual reality the natural world is becoming a forgotten and alien world. Even the barbarity of war can be carried out from an office somewhere thousands of miles from the horror, destruction and death. The hands-on world is slowly becoming a distant memory. Is this the direction we wish to go, to a world that suits big business and the controlling state, where you become a studied, profiled predictable entity, devoid of the right to your own social structures and interactions, without being monitored? Where communities are in a monitored virtual world?

The following from Montreal Counter Information:

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

PDF to print (11 x 17)

Poster text:

Fire to the Cybernetic Prison

It’s never too late to resist

Artificial Intelligence
     AI labs, recipients of several $100M in government funding, are working to put “machine learning” algorithms in the service of a long list of industries. Under an “ethical” facade, some applications will simply allow well-placed capitalists to further enrich themselves. Others aim to reinforce repression, whether detecting shoplifters at the supermarket with automated video surveillance, developing facial recognition tools that work even on partly covered faces, or “predicting” crime or the probability of a prisoner re-offending.

5g Wireless Networking
     The unprecedented bandwidth of 5G technology enables the deployment of AI on the scale of a city in real time. Every movement becomes trackable thanks to thousands of cameras integrated into a centralized surveillance apparatus. This vision is already in practice in more than one European “smart city”. Countless sensors dotting public spaces, in businesses, cars and public transit, and worn on our bodies aim to make every action the object of calculation, prediction and control, all under an eco-friendly label. By its pervasiveness, a web of algorithms is made invisible and therefore impossible to resist.

Robotics and Automation
     Self-driving cars. Robotized warehouses. Cashierless stores. Delivery robots that call the cops when they are attacked. An infrastructure is being deployed that will change the world of work and our living environment permanently. We don’t mourn the disappearance of back-breaking and boring jobs. A dehumanizing pace is imposed on the remaining workers, who must keep up with the machines and productivity software or be shown the door. Meanwhile, what measures of social control and what exploitative schemes await the new excluded masses of an age of technological unemployment?

Life in Front of a Screen
     Possibilities for authentic relations between humans and with our surroundings are increasingly erased in service of a virtual hyper- connectivity. Understanding, discovery, and the search for meaning are reduced to production of data. Attention deficit, memory problems, loss of emotional skills and imagination, disrupted sleep, musculo-skeletal pain, anxiety, loneliness, depression: the symptoms of addiction to online technologies are worsening as the proportion of the population that has spent their entire lives immersed in touch screens grows.

For free and full lives, open to the unknown

Be the outage in their network!

And just a thought: 

Tomorrow’s World!

See the fat cat’s grinning smile
as Corporate Capitalism runs amok,
Chasing profit as it goes
firing millions of ordinary folk.
Raping and polluting land after land,
starting bloody wars.
Toxic waste, sweat shop wages
and oil covered sea shores.
Where have all the flowers gone
beneath this ozone free sky?
To join the birds, to join the fox
on yonder plutonium field to die.
Mercury fish, strontium lamb
trees that never show a leaf,
radio active beaches, toxic streams
good lean BSE-antibiotic beef.
In a world of epidemic, plague and famine
it’s bottled water and chemical food.
Of course, it’s all tested on rats and mice
so you know its got to be good.
Beneath a sky that’s always black,
hurricane winds and endless drought,
its oxygen masks for the toxic air,
corporate profit’s what its all about.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk  

Where Has The Real World Gone?

      As always, thoughtful, insightful words from Not Buying Anything.

Where has the real world gone, are we now afraid to be alone with our thoughts, after all thoughts are a good way of finding direction in our life. Face to face communication can be a wonderful enriching experience. Yes, there way be a place for "social media" but as part of our life, it shouldn't become our life, and that, unfortunately seems to be the trend. 

This from Not Buying Anything:

 

      Oliver Sacks, British neurologist, naturalist, historian of science, and author, feared for the future before he died. He wasn't so much alarmed at what had come into being. Rather, he was shocked by how much was missing.

     “Everything is public now, potentially: one’s thoughts, one’s photos, one’s movements, one’s purchases.
     There is no privacy and apparently little desire for it in a world devoted to non-stop use of social media.
      Every minute, every second, has to be spent with one’s device clutched in one’s hand. Those trapped in this virtual world are never alone, never able to concentrate and appreciate in their own way, silently.
      They have given up, to a great extent, the amenities and achievements of civilization: solitude and leisure, the sanction to be oneself, truly absorbed, whether in contemplating a work of art, a scientific theory, a sunset, or the face of one’s beloved.”

Oliver Sacks died in 2015. Before he passed he wrote, 

      "I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life — achieving a sense of peace within oneself.

       Sacks wouldn't have advised looking for such answers, such peace, in a mobile screen.

      We are trapped in a virtual world. I have doubts about it providing us with a "good and worthwhile life".

Visit ann arky's home at radicalglasgow.me.uk