The Internet is Society’s Obituary
Over 50 years earlier, we were warned about the destruction of both reason and ethics with pervasive technology. Science fiction just missed the mark on how willingly we allowed it into our lives.
Imagine a world where technology allows you to view the inner most thoughts, feelings, and desires of those around you.
Or don’t.
Even if your imagination has long since atrophied, do not succumb to either FOMO (or FOFO): you’re using such technology now to read this screed, and you’re sharing it on a network backed by its kin—in a degenerate attempt to make mockery of it to soothe your self-denial.
You’re seething now, aren’t you? Good. Maybe that is the whale’s cry of hope you’re reacting to. One can only pray that you act on that.
Moving on to important matters: in the monochromatic hue of prehistoric 1963 C.E. The Outer Limits aired “O.B.I.T.,” a story about space invaders using a divisive technology that tunes in on people’s inner-most sanctum — their mind — and broadcasts it through a glorified television. Each person their own broadcast tower, the acronymous O.B.I.T. is designed to tune in on each person’s unique broadcast signal and its operator is then able to hear and see that person. No matter their location within a 500 mile radius, O.B.I.T. hones on the person and can hear and see everything around (and in) them…
Just like the cell phone that you cannot live with out, through which government agencies can exploit and use it as a tool of your own destruction. You pay for that dubious privilege, yet scorn whistleblowers — my, such big ethics you have.
Following the death of an O.B.I.T. operator, the competent U.S. Senator Orville (you know it’s science fiction for a reason, kids!) holds a hearing on a military research base to determine the nature of O.B.I.T. and its pervasively destructive, oddly humanizing nature. In the course of this inquest O.B.I.T.’s handler, the creepy four-eyed Mr. Lomax whose hands are festooned with copious tufts of hair—perhaps lending to the “hairy palm” myth perpetuated by the species religulous ignoramus—is found to be insidiously tied to this technology. Further, while the fractious effects upon O.B.I.T.’s victims are apparent, what’s more disconcerting is that no one in authority knows how such machines were made, how they came into widespread use, or how many exist.
Unlike life, we get the answer in the final act of the tale, as Mr. Lomax boisterously twirls his tufts of hand hairs, revealing the origin of such machines in damning eulogy: they are the alien tools of psychological warfare deployed to demoralize humanity, ensuring that humanity succumbs to its self-destructive urges and permitting invaders to repopulate Earth without firing a shot.
The machines are everywhere! Oh you’ll find them all, you’re a zealous people. And you’ll make a great show of smashing a few of them. But for every one you destroy, hundreds of others will be built. And they will demoralize you, break your spirits, create such rifts and tensions in your society that no one will be able to repair them!
Oh, you’re a savage, despairing planet, and when we come here to live, you friendless, demoralized flotsam will fall without even a single shot being fired. Senator, enjoy the few years left you; there is no answer. You’re all of the same dark persuasion! You demand — insist — on knowing every private thought and hunger of everyone: Your families, your neighbors, everyone — but yourselves.
Now, you know the Internet permits this, except we haven’t yet mastered reading people’s minds directly. Again, it is science fiction, after all. But we are a zealous people, and we can outsmart some hairy-handed aliens recorded on prehistoric celluloid, am I right?
We surely rose to that challenge, our technological proficiency outpacing our societal development. We created social networks, broadcasting apps, and their insidious ilk coax the information from our neighbors, and ourselves, with the insatiable lure of connecting with others “for the betterment of mankind.” Whatever that might mean to you, it doesn’t matter. It’s a motivational McGuffin.
For the mere price of your pictures, your thoughts, and your positively scintillating opinions, you voluntarily share these personal baubles through multiple variations of O.B.I.T.’s spiritual siblings both around and on your person! Eponymous “smart” phones, “smart” watches, and other computers are the altars through which you sacrifice personal baubles, in return for seeing into the lives of friends, neighbors, loves, and those persons of interest after who you lust and loathe. How unusually efficient of us zealously navel-gazing time-wasters.
You cast yourselves in minted digital currency of various denominations, with nary a thought at all as to who will accumulate them, and how they will be traded in the great information ether. We know some of where we cast ourselves off to, thanks to whistleblowers the likes of William Binney, Mark Klein, Edward Snowden; and to degenerates the likes of the manipulative Mark Zuckerberg and the litany of enablers who are more than happy to offer “free” access to their “communities” of addicted, ego-druggie sycophants looking for that next dopamine hit.
[O.B.I.T. is] the most hideous creation ever conceived. No one can laugh or joke. It watches. Saps the very spirit. The worst thing of all is, I watch it. I can’t not look. It’s like a drug, a horrible drug. You can’t resist it. It’s an addiction.
Do not despair as the fictional Colonel Grover had in “O.B.I.T,” for in the real world our participation is still voluntary, and you can disconnect from it. Prevent these behaviors from becoming tradition.
It begins with one small step. Abandon habitual use of the technology and reclaim your lives, curtail the masturbation of your egos, and be productive instead of destructive. You can do it. Be the best person you can be.
Whenever you feel the need to post something of your personal life, just say “No” more times than they say, “Yes, you will. We have damaged people who’ll pretend to like your posts. And Baby Yoda pictures.”
The price of doing otherwise is merely the destruction of privacy that — in its own paradoxical way — permits civilization to exist in a healthy, productive way.
Good day and good luck, fellow recovering hypocrites.