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Paul Craig Roberts
Institute for Political Economy
The Digital Revolution Is Satan’s Master Weapon
Note to Readers: This is the 3rd day of my Internet service being down. It seems to be a large system failure. No information available about restoration of service. Postings might be irregular and limited as local library blocks foreign news sites.
The Digital Revolution Is Satan’s Master Weapon
Paul Craig Roberts
UPDATE: 2.9 billion records, including Social Security numbers, stolen in data hack: What to know
https://www.aol.com/2-9-billion-records-including-133227591.html?guccounter=1
Readers know that I am death on the digital revolution. I regard it as an equivalent disaster to the creation of nuclear weapons. Both can, and most likely will, destroy our lives, nuclear weapons by physically destroying us, and the digital revolution by destroying our freedom.
The digital revolution is the foundation, already in place, for the police state, and it will be a total police state far worse than the one in George Orwell’s 1984. The fact that the nerds who came up with the digital revolution were too stupid to see the consequences indicates that tech people are really not very smart. Whenever man plays God disaster results.
For the last three days I have been experiencing digital Hell. The Internet has been down for three days and there is no information. The company provides such minimum customer service that it has been difficult even to reach a robot. You have to leave a number for a call back as “all our representatives are busy helping other customers.” When the call comes you learn that there is an outage in a large area and given an estimated repair time. They put you on a message list for cell phone texts. The repair time estimates lengthened four times from August 13 into August 14 and have now ceased. The morning of the 14th a text informed me that my service was restored. It wasn’t. I called the service provider who, after a call back, eventually was able to confirm that the service was not restored.
What has happed, I believe, is that in order to boost the company’s profits and thus the “performance bonuses” of the executives and board, the company spends minimal money on maintenance and has replaced its own repair servicemen with outside contractors, reporting the cost savings as profits. In other words, the company is being sucked dry by its executives. Moreover, maintenance and improvements might have been deferred so long that parts for the existing equipment are no longer available or are hard to come by. This is America today.
I drove several miles to a county library to check emails and found one saying my service was restored. Of course, it wasn’t. I tried to check foreign news sources to see what was going on, as US media is useless. The library’s firewall wouldn’t let me connect to some sites. Researchers have told me that Trump’s few accomplishments during his first term can no longer be found online except for a few branded disinformation by “fact checkers.” To spell it out for you, a fictional world of false narratives is being created for us while we sit there, insouciant as always, scrolling our cell phones.
In the old analog world this was impossible. Every newspaper had a morgue. Every library had printed evidence as did everyone who had books, newspapers, magazines. Today the information is in a cloud subject to denial of access and erasure. Google is putting our actual history in the Memory Hole and creating a new fictional history consistent with the official narratives. This is the price we pay for the ability to scroll cell phones.
In the midst of my Internet frustration, BMW’s software engineers added another. My 6-year old BMW’s screen flashed “danger, tire inflation problem.” I am informed I can drive 80 mph, ten miles above Interstate speed limit, but must attend to the problem. I suppose there might be some danger on a German autobahn at 150 mph on under inflated tires, but on track weekends we always let air out of our tires for better grip. I never had any problem on under inflated tires at the 135-140 mph I could reach on the short straightaways.
To fix the problem, you have to attend to all four tires. But you are far from finished. The software can tell when inflation falls below the specified number, but it cannot tell when you inflate to the specified number. In other words, you can’t turn the warning off. The software doesn’t believe you. You have to prove it to the software by driving the car a distance so the system can recalibrate its tire inflation readings to confirm you are not taking an easy way out by turning off the warning.
It wasn’t possible for the wonderful analog cars I had to waste a person’s time like this any more than it was possible for a corporation’s “customer service” department to waste hours of a customer’s time with what was in analog days accomplished in a three-minute (answered by the third ring) landline telephone call that always connected. Moreover the person who answered the phone was not a robot and was capable of handling whatever your problem was, and you didn’t have to wait another 20 minutes to reach the person in the department that handled only the one problem. Try it yourself, call your bank, your Internet service. This is what you will get: do you want office hours, billing, to open an account, to close an account, to change an appointment, technical help or repair? You also have to indicate whether you speak English or Spanish, another indication of how far we are advanced in losing our country. Clearly, if there is any assimilation, it is white Americans assimilating to Immigrant-invaders.
I am not just ranting. I am pointing out important and critical facts. The digital revolution has permitted corporations to shift the cost of customer relations to the customer. The customer pays for it in hours of wasted time and the stress of frustration. Even when you finally get a live person, it is someone in Asia you can barely understand and whose responses are automated and often difficult to realign to your problem.
The digital revolution has totally destroyed our privacy and our security. I have a notice in front of me from a financial corporation that reads:
“The types of personal information we collect and share . . . can include: name, phone number, home and email addresses, marital status, family member information, Social Security number, driver’s license number, and driving records, healthcare information, credit information, and credit scores.”
In other words, they put your entire identification on the Internet where any hacker can steal your identity, open accounts and credit cards in your name, and hack into your bank and investment accounts. I am told that I can “limit some but not all sharing.”
Despite the privacy protection of the US Constitution, the digital revolution allows the NSA, the FBI, any foreign intelligence service, the State Department, Homeland Security, and just about anyone else to spy on us without a warrant and to compile a file on each of us containing our contacts, reading interests, purchases, travel, political orientation, affairs, and so forth.
Dumbshit nerds at Stanford University have actually created the ability to create a video of a person speaking in his own voice with lips matching the words speaking whatever offense authorities want to arrest him for. Imagine a defense attorney trying to convince a normal American jury that what they are seeing with their own eyes is a fabrication.
Among Americans there doesn’t appear to be any awareness of what is off limits if freedom is to survive. I am convinced that whatever its advocates intend, the consequence of Artificial Intelligence is to displace humans from human functions and to commit us all to rule by tyrants. The few, tiny benefits of AI are not worth the destruction of human independence and freedom.
Yet there is no way off this road to pure Hell and the destruction of mankind.