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
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