Take charge of your lives

[BurnedOut]

This is largely a contemporary-cyberpunk rant.

So, are we all turning into Forrest Gump together?

I remember an article recommended by Google (What an irony!) which said that our Femoral Heads (the head of the thigh which connects it to the pelvis) have thinned out over time because we sit on our asses much more than expected. Such an evolution took place extremely quickly (In just 10,000 years), given how much time it generally takes for species to have significant changes in their DNA.

So don't you think if rapists like Google, Facebook, Microsoft cannot change your 'humanness', you may be wrong. I call them rapists because they forcefully take your identity away from you without consent and force themselves on you. You can always resist it but in most cases you cannot. You have to accept what they give you. You are almost powerless in front of them when you confront them. The only way out is running away from them or standing tall and defying them with counter-measures. But the latter takes a lot of effort. We can all deduce that if women are taught-defence and body language training and resilience training, they can fend themselves from potential rapists in a lot of cases but can you really compel a woman to learn even self-defence in the first place, normally? Similarly, can good things be noticed even if they are noticeable? I don't think so. It takes persistence and effort to notice the good and the correct and the virtuous in a world that is in a destructive state of competition at all times.

Technology is good when it helps you gain momentum - material and mental. When it enables to increase your productivity without causing significant organic and psychological problems, it is definitely a good thing. For example, if I am a high-stakes programmer, I would like my editor to have certain features - autocompletion, tag tree, auto-indentation, skeleton framework putters, etc to massively boost my productivity. However, if I am a beginner and I try to avail all these benefits, I would be wasting my time trying to understand why they are there or simply wanting them in the first place. Trust me, this is a real situation that many many modern programmers face, including me - feature bloat. I learned the hard way that my editor is best optimized when I understand fully what I want and what I need. Optimizing it requires tinkering, effort and time. You have to take out the time to assimilate the information you are trying to take in before thinking of its application. Usually it takes experience to understand this or some kind of disillusionment but sometimes it is kind of a permanent drive to get better things without understanding what is exactly better in possessing them. If you want to see examples of this, they are plenty - constant competition among consumers to get better phones, better computers, better cars, better clothes every fucking year. This problem is the most visible in the case of mobile phones. The companies have figured out how to fuck with the mind and release a better phone right after 2 months of another 'better' phone. Then the consumer is caught in a dilemma and suddenly he finds plenty of reasons to get a new one.

What we need to understand is technology does no good when you don't understand why you need it. For eg. I don't know why Truecaller exists in all of our phones when they have 0 utility for a layman. Why the fuck would my grandma need Truecaller when she has trouble navigating in the phone? To further corroborate this, read this nice precis.

It all boils down to this, what is wrong in not ceding control of your lives? Why can you not resist doing things that do nothing? These questions yield nothing when asked. Therefore, one should ask, "How much do you know and understand about the world?" It looks like the only way to gauge whether a person's a zombie or not is by examining his General Knowledge and his personal ethics and values. When you start leering at this, you will suddenly start feeling disgusted about the society as a whole. Then it is another battle of fake integration and full psychological acceptance of its fakeness.

Cheers to pragmatism! Cheers to self-fulfilling prophecies! Let us make this world a worse place because you gotta be pragmatic babe. It is the tide of time. Right motherfucker?

 

[Black Rose]

I think that the internet is the literal manifestation of the law of attraction. Just now on PBS, they said data is being stolen from us. A trillion calculations a day on a million data points per citizen. That creates a profile you can see into the soul.

I stopped using Facebook in 2016. It was bringing me negative social situations. But if they are predicting what I am doing might as well take what may come. Might as well be transparent because if I am invisible the machines can't see me. yet I can still ride the wave.

Eventually, we will all need a private A.I. just for security layers.

 

[Cognisant]

I don't actually mind that Google tracks me, I appreciate free services like Gmail and Google Search and Google Maps that just work really well and the tailored advertising is honestly less annoying than ads designed for the average person.

Indeed I wish I could swear allegiance to Google and be a Google citizen rather than an Australian citizen because the people in charge of my country are frighteningly incompetent, that's basically what it comes down to, I want align myself with whichever power can credibly offer me the stability and security within which I can thrive.

 

[ZenRaiden]

I am definitely going off facebook, I tried it twice in life and its a horrible site.
Even when you look past the horrible layout, the terrible design of the site and unbelievable bad configuration, there is literally zero benefit to the site.
IF there is something positive on the site you can probably find better solutions in real life or elsewhere on internet.

What still puzzles me is intelligent people who are on the website and those you work in IT.
People posting personal photos on the net are also very crazy in my book.

Microsoft is just necessary evil for me. Google sucks in many ways, but you go do somethings you aren't always agreeing with too and google seems to try at least to be helpful in some capacity. They also seem to try to improve in many ways so I guess its just something one has to accept.

 

[Rook]

You are one among billions. This is the new human age. Autarchs and monarchs of old became the republics and nations of today, and the corporations are now stronger than ever, stronger than during the industrial revolution and the world wars. Ever has there been small groups dictating the movement of the herd.

We're talking about companies with greater fiscal resources than entire countries, so the old boycott is redundant, they can field a mercenary army if they want to.


Personally, I used to care, but not anymore. I don't use a VPN, maybe when I can afford one I'll do so for torrents, but meh.

In the end, how do I scratch my own pot? Does boycotting Microsoft and Google get me anything? I've used DuckDuckGo for years now, but use Google Drive and gmail for my job. Continuing to exist is more important than worrying about privacy. A well-fed monkey in a zoo at least has food.

These companies are here to stay for a good while longer, and it would be interesting to see at what point they begin to really push back against governments. You see cencorship on many platforms, data dealing etc, so they for sure already know how to control the populace, but so far only influence governments, not directly controlling them. In the end, they want profit and power, and this is how they get it.

My smartphone was robbed a few months back, still running with my Nokia 105. I'll buy another computer phone, and if it gets lost and craps out, won't immediately replace it. It's not a vital tool for continued existence.

This Corona Virus and Lockdown is ideal for these companies, it gives them greater power. As you say, they like it when humans looks at screens and use their products, being passive. It is what it is. Personally, be aware of the detrimental effect tech can play, but societally, people are pretty much fucked, shackled to their ligthboxes.

 

[Old Things]

I hear what you guys are saying, I think.

It seems that we are lambs lead to the slaughter, pulling our noses lead by sweet scents.

 

[Yubbie]

What I learned not having any phone for 3 months and my regular devices in another state for much longer was that life is full of distractions if you want it to be however the truth is life is only moved by the Most High and people, yes put down everything and you only see people, and a further truth is everyone is trying to eat and drink because we are a hungry, thirsty creation always in need of nourishment. In my desperation for fulfillment I prayed and the Most High filled me with good things, I am weak however with thorns in my flesh for when I was first hungry I took on anyone and now I say I'm hungry but I won't eat. Though I would rather use technology than let my faith be without works because of how lost I felt after an experience I had.