( A twelve minute read)
The world is in a crisis—Humanity has exhausted its ego and doesn’t know what to do.
I could write and I have written about why we are in such a mess but in this piece I want to highlight what Social Media is doing.
Social Media is driven by technology that are in themselves governed by un-vetted algorithms, is a competition organised to make you feel better at the expense of other people. It’s not about sharing the critical elements of your life, it’s about curating a fantasy world you can convince other people to believe.
It is producing an abundance of useless data which monopolies exploit to market our souls for advertising dollar’s: Google +, Amazon, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and their like are in the business of presenting the world by proxy for profit. In guessing the direction of technology it is wise to ask who is in the best position to profit.The knack of arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it, has already had serious consequences: The Arab Spring, The birth of ISIS and the most pathetic World leader ever to be elected in Donald Trump.
If we do not faced up to the reality of our own self-worth it will consume us.
Never has so much knowledge been so easily consumed by the whole of humanity but instead of exploiting this opportunity we are creating a technological divide that will cause wars.
Modern society is a product of the day’s available technology. An inordinate volume of early resources have been consumed by the most frivolous pursuit imaginable.
The worlds most talented engineers no longer work on crafts to explore the stars they work on algorithms to take advantage of our preferences in the hope of taking our money.
When investment is focused on the creation of monolithic tech giants whose only goal is to not be evil the hopes of society fade with each search or posting on Facebook.
Attention is money and if you can maintain it you can exploit eyeballs. That is all that life has become on social media.
Technology has enforced upon society the conditions whereby everybody requires instantaneous gratification. We want acknowledgement of everything we do all the time and we seek to maintain the attention of a large populous of strangers and acquaintances we couldn’t really care about but depend upon to feel good about ourselves. We outsource our self-esteem to the interweb and define our worth from the currency we are able to attain on social networks.
We no longer measure the quality of our lives by the kindness we gift to the world or the positive impact we have on other people’s lives but by the proliferation of our social media footprint.
Technology is detrimentally effecting a whole new generation.
It is infecting their lives and conquering our minds. We no longer experience the present we find ways to capture it to disseminate it to the world in order to gain credibility and approval.
We live in a world where money can make more money faster than virtually any other means. A spherically shaped speck of sand inhabited by 7 billion sentient beings who call a world the world.
Day by day new technologies and inventions are showing up while deforestation,global warming,water scarcity, and widening inequality etc are avoided completely not just by the common people, but also by unsustainable consumerism, cloaked in the economic mantra of growth at all costs.
The world is becoming a collection of a billion minds, trying to achieve a common objective, with selfish thoughts in them.
Are we at a precipice, environmentally, interpersonally, and industrially and the decisions made today will greatly affect the future generations and the future of the planet.
The common goal is to live life for a fruitful cause, to benefit the civilization as a whole is disappearing on the flat screens of smartphones, I pads, Smart TVs, and social media.
The problem is that people don’t know that their development advances in accordance with the program embedded in nature. No one sees the big picture, everyone’s busy satisfying their own needs.
We don’t know how to develop further because egoism exhausted itself and ceased to encourage us to develop. There is no competition that existed before.
The young generation doesn’t want to live the way their predecessors did. All the previous generations throughout the entire thousands-year-long history of humanity developed due to the fact that they wanted more and more.
Values are changing, but it’s hard to define them. The sense of purpose that people used to have is no longer there.
Trump is indicative of this personal entitlement. We see that everyone else is in it for themselves so we act accordingly. If you don’t you are an idiot. Nationalism is derided but personalism isn’t?
Today, it isn’t so; the young generation isn’t attracted to the values that their parents honored. They spend most of their time glued to their cell phones, absorbed in things like social media—all of this is a subconscious attempt to avoid asking questions about life, and the pain that comes from a lack of meaning.
Moreover, social media networks are making it impossible for them to find lasting fulfillment, and soon rather than later with Algorithms driven robots there will be no meaningful jobs for all of them.
In short, the world has reached an impasse.
Sooner than later some tipping point will arrive, and we all know where that leads us, we’ve been there. We were given a huge piece of land and all we could do was divide it into territories. This ‘division’ then crept into other things, and here we are. The low hanging fruits of life have been picked. The only people who care about what happens to each individual is themselves. You see a flat lining of the standard of living and a swelling of government debt married to a population which is aging and you understand why it has happened.
The only solution is unity because unity is the general law of nature. We can make a choice—either we fall in line with Nature’s plan and unite according to its laws, or nature will force us to through all kinds of external means.
We won’t have to suffer because of our lack of compatibility with nature; rather we can reach the next stage of evolution quickly and comfortably and in that, find eternal and lasting fulfilment.
The world is looking.
But it is useless to look for new things at the old level.
The problem with modern society is that it rewards those who can keep our attention. Irrespective of whether you are a force for good or tremendous damage society has become immune to the difference.
The advent of a world connected by networks will be marked by the transition away from geographic, religious, and cultural groupings into aggregations of people unified by self selected criteria; chaos and volatility will paradoxically increase while the world is homogenized to the new normal.
Humanity has always been one which has followed examples and precedent gratefully — we desperately need an alternative which is less depressing in order to thrive. Entitlement is hard but it is perhaps the only string which ties the people of the modern world to the path — it is the only thing that gives us purpose in our daily lives.
This feeling of entitlement is a major issue that will turn and bite us in the near future. Even in a fully mechanized world some one needs to fill the tank and turn the key.
The world is beginning to understand it is in a global problem and it would be naive to make technology the scapegoat of our shortcomings as man’s blindness, cruelty, greed, immaturity, and pride are contributing as always.
Modern democracy cannot value only the voice of majority, but it respects the voice of minority as well. But this can only be achieved if democracy re attaches its self to the capitalist world of economics. There can not be two strands of Democracy one political and the other Economic.
In the bakelite house of the future, the dishes might not break, but the heart can.
The problem of loneliness enveloping the modern world is related to the inner emptiness of man. And even when a person wants to rid himself of this state, he has no idea how to do it.
We are the past.
All comments appreciated. Al like clicks chucked in the bin.
Algos are increasingly in charge of a world that is precious to us all. Basically we’re entering the era of the machines controlling everything.
Blake saw the world in a grain of sand, and eternity in an hour.
The smart phone rules as to which party is the best in more way than one.
