A short while ago, we put up this post – Wind up readings… 14.1.23 – featuring an eclectic range of readings aimed at prompting or even provoking people to re-think long held positions. One of the advantages of being semi-politically homeless is that we have the freedom to do this without having to worry about the consequences of being censured.

We continue in the vein with three posts questioning the role technology and worship of ‘science’ has been accorded in our lives without any serious thought as to what the adverse consequences will be. The first two posts are about the way technology is relentlessly degrading what it means to be truly human. The last is about blind worship of a version of ‘science’ that’s now starting to unravel. The start of this unravelling is discussed in this post: Something will have to give 17.1.23.

We’re merely scratching the surface with this selection of readings. There’s a lot more out there and, a lot that has to be said about our toxic relationship with technology. That’s something we hope to do during the course of this year, assuming we don’t get waylaid by ‘events’.

Both of us behind this blog are the wrong side of sixty. It could be argued that as ‘old gits’, we’ve had our time and need to step aside and shut up. It could also be argued that we’re suffering from ‘future shock’. The point we make in our defence is that having over six decades on the clock gives you a lot of perspective on how technology is adversely impacting our lives and actively changing what it means to be human.

This song from our childhood in the late 1960s – In the Year 2525 – was only meant to be a warning, it wasn’t supposed to be the f**king manual! The one thing we will say about the lyrics is that the relaxed timeline of their predictions is getting telescoped into a much shorter period. That in and of itself is frightening. However, it’s not too late as a growing number of people are waking up and fighting back against the increasingly dystopian world we find ourselves in…

TikTok is a New Type of Superweapon – Gurwinder | Substack | 21.1.23

As our understanding of psychology has developed, so it has become easier to evoke other emotions in complete strangers. Advances in the understanding of positive reinforcement, driven mostly by people trying to get us to click on links, have now made it possible to consistently give people on the other side of the world dopamine hits at scale.

As such, pleasure is now a weapon; a way to incapacitate an enemy as surely as does pain. And the first pleasure-weapon of mass destruction may just be a little app on your phone called TikTok.

Reality Has Become A Tourist Attraction – Jennifer Bilek | The 11th Hour | 7.12.22

The more we dissociate, the less we genuinely feel & empathize, and the more atrocities we stand down to and accept as normal. Nowhere is this more appallingly apparent than at the front of the gender industry, where children’s sex is being medically brutalized under the banner of human rights and medical care. We have become fodder for a tech mill intent on melding us with machines. We are not that far from the posthuman condition the corporate state intends to create. Many of us in the western world are centralized in cities and spend far more time close to machines than we do with our real-life friends and family members or with the natural world.

Science! Blessed be Thy Name: The Vanishing Value of Religious Freedom – Jordan Henderson | The Acorn | 15.1.23

Anti-Religious bigotry is prevalent in the ranks of The Followers of The Science; it’s worth pointing out to them that they themselves exemplify everything that they hate from religions. In terms of fanaticism, intolerance, and superstition, The Followers of The Science are currently the worst in the West.

I’m aware that Covid-19 was a means to an end (many ends) for ruling elites, but they couldn’t have pulled it off without science as a belief system. Organized Science is the handmaid of the powerful both by providing the powerful with real scientific developments and for providing temporal authorities with an aura of legitimacy through scientific “truths” fabricated to order.