How is your evolution? Take the TAC Bulletin ‘glued in’ test
Blind faith in all the new technological gadgets and in the rich men who design and market them seems to be lessening
The Observer newspaper on 27th May 2018 ran two big features, one by James Williams and the other by Jaron Lanier.
Both assert that these gadgets (sometimes tools, sometimes toys, sometimes both) are shaping a new sort of human and a new sort of society.
Williams tells us:
“I soon came to understand that the technology industry wasn’t designing products; it was designing users.”
and,
“The constant stream of new products this unleashes… can result in a situation in which users are in a constant state of learning and adaptation to new interaction dynamics, familiar enough with their technologies to operate them, but never so fully in control that they can prevent the technologies from operating on them in unexpected or undesirable ways…’’
Lanier says:
“The above elements are connected to create a measurement and feedback machine that deliberately modifies behaviour. The process runs thus: customised feeds become optimised to ‘engage’ each user, often with emotionally potent cues, leading to addiction. People don’t realise how they are being manipulated. The default purpose of manipulation is to get people more and more glued in, and to get them to spend more and more time in the system…”
The results, getting stronger by the hour, is that we are manipulated to be unthinking consumers and spied on by all the people who can profit from knowing more about us – including governments. And forced to live in electrosmog.
Take the TAC Bulletin ‘glued-in’ test:
Q: When you go to work or club, can you leave your phone at home? Can you?
Q: Do you ignore the cancer warnings about the radiation just as smokers do about tobacco?
Q: Do you believe the despairing government line that we are all going to get cancer whatever we do?
Q: Do you succumb to pressures to let your children get ‘glued in’ and addicted alongside you?
Q: Would you save your phone before your children when your pleasure boat overturns?
Of course, you would grab the children first so there is hope for you. But have you ever crossed a busy road attending more to your phone than to your children?
We have a love affair with the gadgets. But love affairs fade. As we start falling out of love, we can stop buying new gadgets, unsubscribe from social media, throw away our smartphones (did you just break into a sweat?) and take the gadgets off our kids.
The latter suggestion is on the basis that parents are supposed to protect their children – unless, that is, you have been re-designed as a mother or father.
Peter Limbrick. 3/6/18
Cartoon from TAC Bulletin Issue 222
