One of the main reasons I started writing this blog, lo, these many years ago, was so I could go back and read it once in a while to remember some of the times I'd forgotten, good and bad, and some of the things that were on my mind. I just started randomly picking out posts and giving them a read. I read about a dream and a nightmare I had when I was living in China. A LOT of stuff came back to me about life there. I was surprised to read that I was STUDYING Chinese! I don't remember a word now.
I read a couple of very well written, if I do say so myself, posts that could have been written yesterday, but were written 3 or 4 years ago. One was about the David Letterman interview of Barack Obama on his new, bearded, show. It might have been his first. And the thing that Obama said that stuck with me was how different people can do an online search for the same thing, I think he used "pyramids" or "Egypt" or something like that as an example, and we ALL get completely different stuff. He said that information about us is so well known that we only get fed by social media, the information we already believe and this is going to divide us and ruin our world. We don't share a common baseline of facts. I said in the post that he's exactly right and we are divided over a million secondary issues and it distracts us from the two or three main issues that we all need to be united and fighting against, namely, nuclear war, environmental destruction and the greed that fuels both.
I've gotten away from posting on things that I think will be interesting to read about years down the road and spent almost all my time posting about Donald fucking Trump. Even if I DO decide to read this 10 years down the road, if my blog and I both survive, those will most certainly be the posts I DON'T read. And that's exactly what his purpose was! He was a big distraction. A divisive, polarizing freak show who diverted me from more important topics I should have been posting about.
I watched a documentary a couple days ago called "The Social Dilemma," and it hit me pretty hard. There wasn't much to it really, I just couldn't get it out of my head. It's only been a couple days, but it's been constantly there. Nagging me. What were all these former workers for Google, Facebook, Twitter, NVIDEA, Instagram, YouTube, Firefox, and some other well known web giants saying that was basically the same? What was their common purpose that they didn't really want to admit to themselves while they were doing their jobs? One after another they don't quite exactly come right out and say, but sort of intimated that they were data miners whose job it was to create device addiction to opiate the masses.
This is one of the best memes I've seen in a while. Not just because it's accurate, (Facebook HAS that much information about you!!!), but because this all seems trivial enough to be humourous to us. And it's like that because, what can we do? Without our computers? Without our internet? Our PHONES? Good LORD, we'd never survive! Even those of us who have survived, in fact THRIVED, for YEARS without all our electronic crap, say, think and actually believe this!
I had a bit of an epiphany today while teaching a class. It hasn't happened since my youth that I can remember and that's most likely because of the technology I'm decrying. It's also an epiphany killer, it turns out. I was talking about "soft skills" teaching job interview English to a class today. I had to describe soft skills and what they were so I got into this explanation about how we all do things like problem solving, critical thinking, showing leadership, thinking outside the box, working as a team, conflict resolution, building relationships and such every day. Some of us are better than others at some of this stuff, but we all have these skills and we use them all the time. It's what separates us from the machines, computers and robots. These soft skills are becoming more valuable with increased automation because these are the only skills machines don't, as yet, have. And we improve all of them by just being around other people.
What occurred to me was not how close robots and A.I. have come to approximating things like thinking, creativity and even sensitivity to the feelings of other people, but how the opposite is taking place. I realized that I might be preaching my sermon to the inconvincible. It occurred to me that with "social" media increasing the number of the antisocial, "smart" phones making people stupider, social distancing creating an ever socially distant population, and this ever increasing tribalism decreasing the enjoyment, desire and necessity of human interaction, people just might be becoming more and more like machines at a comparable rate to machines becoming more like people.
Is this intentional and can it be taken advantage of by forces of evil? Obama suggested the Russians could and HAD taken advantage of it already. I wouldn't have narrowed it down that far although Putin is most certainly among those evil few I'm thinking of. Those few entities that make up the last on my list of three pivotal concerns we are being distracted from, namely the greedy.
I woke up this morning and, as I have for about half a year now, wiped two eyes full of caked eye boogers and a few fingerfulls of not yet caked eye boogers out of them. I'll do the same tomorrow. It comes and goes in direct proportion to how much I use my smartphone, but it's never completely gone. It may be permanent for all I know. It is without a doubt caused by my smartphone. I stopped playing the game I play most for a while because I couldn't update it. My eye boogers almost went away. I told an optometrist and two doctors that it's pinkeye and that it gets worse when I use my phone more. Both agreed with the pinkeye diagnosis but pshawed the smartphone theory. This is a country whose largest industry is semiconductors, smartphones, electronics, 5G and things of that sort. Hell, my phone is a Samsung. No doctor is gonna diagnose Samsung Conjunctivitis! (Or should it be called "semiconductivitis?") Not in these here parts! It makes one wonder the extent to which health problems and risks caused by 5G have and will be ignored and/or covered up. I hate like shit to bring him up cuz it'd be so nice to have a post without his name, but since it's already been included in this post already, like Trump reckons, there won't be any 5G health problems or eye problems caused by smartphones IF you don't test for them.
If you knew the Korean collective consciousness like I knew the Korean collective consciousness, you might be as terrified as I am that this is the future of all countries. I have listed many examples of what Orwell might call something like Samethink in Koreans before. It's scary to behold. Fan death. Four season. Dokdo. Scientific alphabet. Dan Geun. No gay people in Korea. Wivestales and myths believed as fact. Christianity! But like aggressively dogmatic Christianity and beliefs that are accepted on faith alone. Even in microcosm they are just so user friendly and programmable! I'll give you a good example. I have 10 classes. We have the same curriculum in every class. And every week I teach the same lesson to all of them. That lesson usually ends with something fun. I do a unit a week and I make a quiz on Kahoot, a game site, for every unit. The students go to the site and put a code in and their names and we all play. In one class every single student puts his/her student number AND name. I never told them to do this. In fact, I don't want them to because I don't know their numbers and sometimes I can only read their numbers. But every single one of them does it. Only a few students did it the first time we played, but within a few Kahoots, all of them were doing it. Nobody told anybody, they just followed the crowd obediently and unquestioningly. I am 100% positive this comes from the antisocial tendencies that are also being obediently and unquestioningly adopted by the entire country. They are becoming more robotic all the time!
And these skills that make us most human are the ones that are being removed. Is it a plan to hasten automation masterminded by the rich and greedy billionaires of the world? I've blogged before about the purposeful dumbing down of many countries, like Canada, that were starting to produce logical, well informed, critical thinking citizens who aren't so easy to robotize. Could it be so that we don't have ANY skills that make us competitive in the job market against mechanization? There could come a point at which robots are so like humans and humans are so like robots that humanity becomes all but obsolete. Is this our future? Is this what the money sickened lunatics who run this planet actually WANT? And can we please take our minds off skin colour, patriotism, religion, political party, or whatever clubs or tribes we subscribe to and demand proper education and employment? Because human obsolescence is NOT what we want?!?!
You don't have to run for office, just visit a friend. I will not say that Covid 19 is a virus created for the purposes of weakening our social skills, but it certainly isn't strengthening them! It's Christmas time. Set up a Zoom meeting with a friend or family member you can't visit in person. Play a game, have a beer, smoke a cigar with someone you CAN visit. Catch up with people, meet new ones. It's just too easy to fall for the defeatism of "people are so ugly to each other!" I believe there ARE a lot of people being awful to their brothers and sisters, but I still don't believe they are the majority. Though it may sound trite, particularly at this time of year, it isn't cool to give up on the concept of peace on earth. Helping one another. Co-operating and getting along is not only the right thing to do, it's the only way we are going to save our species. It's easier and a lot more fun to love the good guys than hate the bad guys, and maybe more than ever, it's also more vital to our survival.
I am setting a goal for myself this Christmas season. Be the change you want to see and so forth. I am going to hug at least one Trump supporter. I don't hate Trump supporters, I just don't agree with them. But I still value their humanity and compassion. At least they're not robots! If it weren't for mail cancellation from Korea to Canada, I'd send out Christmas cards. I still might find a way to do so. But I plan to call some people. Maybe Zoom some others. I've been as guilty as anyone of burrowing down into my protective hole at this time when we need to be doing the opposite. I hope I can encourage others to do the same. Not by this blogpost, but by my actions. I'll keep you... er... posted.
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