A further look at the way our digital prison is trying to encircle us. Covered already in previous articles, but as it continues, so does the observation of it.
This is an updated look, seen as things are still moving along at quite a pace. New staffless shops being revealed, robots in place of people in factories, robotic dogs shown marching in formation, some with weapons loaded on them. You know, all totally normal for a harmonious ordinary functioning society. But today I have read through a few comments of the reality for some starting to hit home, women in particular after a certain move by a certain social media company a few weeks ago in the states. Showing people what the consequences are of sharing very personal information online, and giving rise to finally understanding that ‘private messages’ are only so to a point. Imagine someone being able to eavesdrop on every conversation you have ever had, and were ever going to have, omnipotence of a godly nature hanging over you. Many are close to it, as they share most of their lives online, publicly and privately, but when it’s all online, maybe there is no difference in the two.
With microphones in telephones and TV’s, they don’t even need to bug people’s homes anymore. We invited the devil in ourselves, paid for it, gave our time to it, and still do. The saying ‘you have nothing to fear, if you have nothing to hide’ is apt here, or would have been if the game was fair. Alas, it isn’t. Or they would have cracked down and stopped all the nefarious online activities that flourished as they were given free reign. Now being used as a weapon against normality to monitor everyone, while still not curbing anything.
The latest move bringing charges in a home abortion case, using messages between a mother and daughter to prove something. Women have rightly pricked up their ears on this and have started to think it through. Whether the girl was right or wrong isn’t the issue, it’s about privacy. Why people had apps to monitor their cycle is beyond me, I didn’t even like having a calorie app for a day for the idea that it was then recorded somewhere. By who? For what? No need. Population, pregnancy and the future of humanity have featured in many a storyline and I wonder sometimes if it’s a head up, speculated upon in They Tell Us.
But it really does seem as though they want to know what you think, what you eat, what you feel, where you go, when you travel, where you travel, who you talk to, what you say. They have access to most of that with lots of people, freely given to them on a daily basis, and that wouldn’t be an issue ordinarily. Like people said, ‘I’m very boring, why would they want to monitor me?’. And that is right, and monitoring all by itself wasn’t important, yet the overall point of what it leads to was for me. Why do they want all that info? In my mind, it would lead to being able to control those things. And here we are. Because while it wasn’t so much an issue before, now it is. Because they want to decide things about you and for you (and those around you), based on that monitoring.
There is also a big push and lots of restructuring going on around medicine. They want that all online too. Monitored appointments, checked and reviewed, doctors and patients alike will feel the scrutiny. This is where the idea that they are implanting digital tracers in people would come into play. They could monitor your heartbeat, circulation, location, intake of calories etc all from an internal sensor. They keep saying they want to integrate people with their phones, and they are already a beacon on us. Once fully integrated, we will be the data. They make no secret of that being a goal. To augment humans and machine to create something weird and seemingly not necessary. But as history and the present shows us, just because we can, does not mean we should…
It’s a funny thing time. It can stretch on forever or be over in the blink of an eye. We are beholden to it in the modern age, and it’s not by accident. But is it natural? Were we always slaves to the order of it rather than just taking part in the process of it. Was there always an order to it? Has it always run on a cycle, a countdown with a reset date? Like each night at midnight when we ‘reset’ the day to start over. To run the simulation again and again until it eventually reduces the cycle back to zero. But on a bigger scale.
We have our time divided up and dictated, whether we like to admit it or not. The system of our whole day being split into three eights to command a separation and categorising of our time. Work time, down time, sleep time. All very ordered. For industry of course, and the working part of those hours used to be much higher and has changed over time depending on the needs of the corporations, not because of the needs of the people, although it’s painted as such.
And to facilitate the above, we have clocks everywhere. Alarm clocks to frighten, sorry, startle you out of sleep to start your work day. If you are lucky enough to not have to start with an alarm, it can only be a good thing. Your body gets to decide on what terms to start the day. But so much of our daily routine involves and revolves around time and breaking it all down by way of numbers. Clocks being integrated into most parts of your day, to wake you, get you to school, or work, clocking in and clocking out as they say. In your house, on your wrist, now on your phone. TV Programmes arranged by time slots, everything organised by time. Yet it passes us by quite unnoticed sometimes. Hasn’t the time flown by one might say. As can it drag on and seem an eternity, depending on the activity at hand.
The church also plays their part I have noticed. Bells ringing, every quarter hour, and numerous times to signify the hour change (after 1 o’clock obviously). It’s around 96 times a day I think they chime, for timekeeping purposes of course. Nothing to do with the hypnotic rhythmic tolling periodically.
As a society, we are set on a calendar (which has been changed and altered I might add, but for this we’ll go along with what we are told, with some places running on a different one). With years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds. And from day dot, having this instilled in us through our childhoods and for the rest of our lives. Along with our age, which is marked by an annual ritual acknowledgement of it, and having multiple tasks, laws and expectations placed upon it.
It can also really tamper with a person’s stability and sensibility if you mess with or rearrange someone’s timeline or knowledge of it. But is that only because people are given a timeline to work within, so without that, you have no grounding or starting point. Imagine if every clock you passed was keeping a different time. And each day things didn’t have a specific reference point for anything, it seems like it would be hectic and chaotic. And perhaps it would without a different system in place. People like to have a starting point, to know where you came from, what you are doing and ideally where you are going. Time can reveal all of these things, if there isn’t a truck load of obstacles in the way and human interference. Time will tell as they say.
We know, or appear to know that time is fixed in our daily lives, past, present and future. Yet we dream and fantasise about travelling backwards or forwards through it. Capturing the secrets of the past, or to reveal the wonders and worries of the future. But the conundrum of either only being able to view said events, or of being perpetually doomed to keep trying to fix something you never can isn’t a happy one. Maybe it’s a good thing we can’t, as far as we know anyway.
Time waits for no-man they say, and it marches forth whether you are taking part or not. But that makes it sound as if time is an entity, rather than a mathematical system of numbers to calculate us into conditioning. As if we have a choice and that time is not our enemy, who is following and stalking us to our fate as we are led to believe. But more a friend, who we can walk with and will be with us to the very end. Depends on your perspective I guess. Your time is up, is another saying we have, to make us think we are a personally on the clock, that we have a set time to go. Like we are programmed to expire and do so because we believe it to be true. Who can say for sure.
It could have been as simple as night and day, afternoon and morning, I’ll never know.
I guess I have given this subject thought many times over the years, being born at the beginning of the 1980’s meant I grew up before the internet, before mobile phones, before the ‘world wide web’ donned it’s net over us all. Bringing us together, they said, in fact, I don’t think we’ve ever felt so far apart. It was something I could see would change the face of society and have speculated about it much. This piece is about the impact of it all and how I theorise it may have possibly affected others.
I’m from the time of there being no computer, and one phone in the house, the landline. I hated it. It was an awful sound that cut through what was previously quiet in comparison. I always saw it as an intrusion. So moving to mobile phones was a whole new level of intrusion, and one I undertook for work purposes, but have had to have rules around that, maybe that will be another post. This one is meant to cover general changes.
Back then as kids, we also had to physically go and knock on a friends door to see if they were available to go out, possibly having to then talk to their parent first! Or you could use the dreaded landline, but then it was a definite you would talk to an adult, that was even worse. And you had to ask permission. As an adult, friends were rarely at home, so you just had vague designated meeting places. On Saturday’s you bumped into people at the market, or in the pub, the cafe or in the park. Because otherwise there was no way to know where they were. And that was ok, we didn’t need to.
As it all changed though, I paid attention, possibly having a unique position to view it from. My mother was a technophobe, she did not like the changing technology moving in and struggled with anything up from a typewriter. She bought a word processor with built in printer, and then proceeded to get me to always type her letters on it. On the other hand, my grandpa (on my fathers side), was very tech savvy. He wrote basic computer programs, taught me how to access the games through MS Dos, and he had a video phone to my great grandparents in Bournemouth. This was in 1989. The house I grew up in was very different to the house I visited once a month or so.
I have taken to technology well, incorporated it into my life like everyone else. I very quickly saw the advantage to moving onto online systems and made the speed and efficiency of my work improve. I was able to do a home learning course, set up and run my business from home and barely interact with people at all on a physical level within a few years.
And that’s where I saw a potential problem. But on the whole it was minimal, people chose to work from home. And most of those still had a social life, external activities and things to engage with. All of that keeps the brain social, functioning and gives you an outside perspective to your own thoughts. Because if we all just stayed in ‘our own little bubble’ then we wouldn’t have much to go on would we? If I had never asked many of the questions I had, I wouldn’t know, I would only be able to assume. And you know what they say about people who assume!
I sometimes give thought to if children of today had grown up in my time, they would understand where we were coming from. That’s why I can relate to people of my age group well, despite not growing up around many or having closely aged friends. But I also give thought to what I think it would be like to grow up in the ‘after time’, without the things above that had such a large impact on my development, how I gained confidence in things, learnt about social boundaries. All face to face, having to be there, feeling the fear and doing it anyway. Character building stuff they say, and afterwards I agree. But at the time it felt like a trial, and I realised that’s because it was and is meant to be. But no-one knew what I thought all the time, it was easy to hide things and yourself without really trying and I realise now what the purpose of that was. It was self-preservation. It bought me time to try and work out who I was going to be without allowing others to try and mold me into what they wanted me to be. I had a parent trying to influence me, grandparents, school, friends, society, media. It was too much to be fair. I had to work out how you filter all that crap while still taking part in society, and manage to find out who you really are. It wasn’t easy. But factor into that social media (and this is where I theorise). If I had been able to ‘create’ an online identity of my alter ego, the persona you present to others would possibly confuse or override your true identity, thus creating two personalities (at a minimum), and splitting the sense of self. Helping to create an internal discord which wouldn’t be easily reconciled and would make it harder to function in the ‘normal’ physical world. This is why I thought maybe people get ‘addicted’ to the internet and various things under that banner. Internal conflict occurs when the online self has to function in the real world which inevitably at some point, has to, but doesn’t want to. Feeler safer and more like ‘themselves’ when engaging online.
I have had my privacy invaded a few times in the before time as a young person, so I was careful as soon as online began. Knowing already that things you say and think, and certainly things you write down can be used against you, knowing people can turn on you in a second and loyalty means very little to many. They were valuable lessons and ones which I understood well before the internet came round. I was also not reminded of them constantly (other than family reminding you and people you might chose to tell), and was able to leave them behind as is normal. To move on, let go. That isn’t as easy these days. Social media appears to be geared up to keep reminding you of yesterday, last week, last year. Living in the past means you are not living in the present, and now more than ever people can dwell on things meant to be left behind.
Although I don’t do it much outside of my household now, I believe that interacting with other people is incredibly important. For many reasons, but firstly reading people and their intentions or motives. Facial expressions, tone of voice and body language had always been big ones for me, it’s taken me years to understand the subtleties and glaringly obvious of what information is being presented to me by the other person. But only through personally interacting with that person or situation. Online is a different thing altogether and am quite good at that too now, but only because I had so much experience of people in real life and learning to ‘read between the lines’ as they say. Inside that, there have been difficulties, because I didn’t know how to socialize properly for years. I was neglected as a child, kept off school at a crucial stage of development, had a dysfunctional and unpredictable home environment and was moved around a lot, without the chance to have a consistent friendship base. All of that can make for a rather strange outcome, and took years to sort out and make up for.
This is why I particularly feel for children at the moment in this continuing situation. Not being able to have friends, socialise, have anything to look forward to, and to have the rug pulled out from under you constantly, as well as have fear pumped into your life at every turn, must be quite shocking. And I know they won’t be able to assimilate it properly for quite some time. But it also forces them to engage online for an extended period during their development. Also meaning it can all be monitored, and reviewed, and recorded. Information is power as the saying goes.
Also happening at a time when they are meant to be finding themselves and discovering what it is to have your own identity, not one you superficially developed or quickly threw together and changed repeatedly because of all the messages you were given. Those types of identities don’t usually hold up to the test of time. Leading then to general identity disorders, personality disorders and anxiety and depression. But no-one really talks about that anymore because it would mean addressing the incredibly strange and strict parameters of society we now find ourselves in. Living in a parallel world of real life and online, the line of which they are always trying to blur.
But still there was this fear I couldn’t shake, I had determination, ambition, motivation, frustration but ultimately a strange fear that followed me through. Through all the changes, all the decisions, all the experiences, a dulling, numbing fear that controlled everything. A fear of dying that stops you living.
Were we meant to understand mortality? Is that what drives us to be more? Or is it why we live in denial of it, scared to face what is coming to us all, to live not despite it, but because of it. Because we are given the chance to know that it will end, to make of it what we can while we can.
Time is a strange thing, chasing us all yet stretching on forever before us, and oddly as I get older, there is less fear. It is what it is, I cannot change the defined parameters of time or death, so am at the mercy of them whether I like it or not. Instead of being haunted or followed by them, I have decided they can accompany me on this journey of strangeness, which is now a little less lonely.
MKW Publishing 