Natural Life Vs. Machine Life

 

photograph by Peep

Here is a recent reading to my UU.  These are supposed to be 3-5 minutes long. The theme was pro-life not in the abortion battle sense, but in what honors and promotes life. While I don't confront on Covid or vaxxes, I do believe the Covid stuff is tied to an insidious agenda with technology.  Obviously in this speech I made it known I am not happy with the events of the last two years.   This one was stepping out on a limb a bit.

“This is my beat. The heat drenched empty sidewalks and all the millions of lonely electronic hotel rooms and cybernetic apartments. No one goes out any more. They all stay in their rooms pressing their buttons, staring at their terminals. I call it The Gulch. Silicon Gulch.”

The Kid from Silicon Gulch—Robert Calvert

What has happened to life? Does a fire burn inside you or has it been stamped out? Many are allied with anti-life agendas today. Pro-life is freedom, spontaneity and social connection. Pro-life is love, joy and play.  Pro-life is the freedom to explore and be and do. Prolife isn’t conformity and being locked in a box. Prolife is discovery and imperfection.  This long drawn out crisis seems to be locking some new prison doors, upon the soul. 

  Prolife is not locked down societies where all freedom and free speech is erased forever. Where people are “othered” and corporations rule. Very few are asking “Should we?” Sadly crises can be used by those with nefarious agendas, like Naomi Klein warned of in her book, “The Shock Doctrine” which warned about “Disaster Capitalism”.  We seem to have a class of technocratic educated elites who want to impose their will on the rest of society disenfranchising the disabled, the poor and people of color.  Very few are questioning the goals or life they seem to want for the rest of us. 

We have entered the era of the battle between natural life vs machine life. One thing to ask is which is more prolife? I say the former. We can use technology as a tool but we must not go to the place where it owns us or is used for oppression by the more powerful.    Some are not waking up to the incredible damage that things like digital IDs or having everything computer mandated will do to our lives. Some are not realizing the negative things technology can bring. It goes far beyond the kids being on the smart phones too much.

Jesus said, “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.” Life is something that if you grab on too tight, and squeeze it down to nothing the essence will be lost  A human society run on fear and control, is one that is joining the forces of anti-life instead of prolife.

How many fascists have built cages in human history using human fear? George Orwell in his book 1984 warned of totalitarianism in all its forms. 

Society is going to a place, where it’s all about progress, but who is the progress for? The thinkers questioning the rapid march to technocratic dystopia have been sidelined. There is dehumanization in the march to commodify society. There is a loss to human soul where life becomes all about the measurements, the observation and not about living.  The severed connection from the spirit worsens. 

Who does it benefit? The “fourth industrial revolution”, is not conspiracy, it is discussed openly in Time magazine. Some may even see this as natural evolution or ‘good progress” but there’s dangers here, that work against the freedom of human life.

 Here there is too much power for a 1 percent that could be very abused. Look up things like block chains. Artificial intelligence works now via algorithms in many areas. Some focus on different forms of propaganda for whatever targeted demographic they are focused on.

There are too many who seem to want endless control of our lives.  Technology can be a servant, and has brought positive changes to our lives, I use a phone to transcribe speech due to my being hard of hearing, but what happens when there are desires to commodify human life itself? Human beings should not be turned into products too.  More of us should be asking, about some of the social engineering that has come to fruition in the last two years and how it is altering the use of technology. 

 The technocratic vision of life and their values are not my own. The desire to turn life into all polished metal surfaces “under surveillance and control” is stamping out the essence of life. Some take things so far, you’d think they want to pave over the whole earth. Human beings create tools but they also can be formed and changed by them. 

 I have an interest in the organic radical movement, there voices on the left though smaller in number like Allison McDowell and Charlene Spretnak who are questioning the view of mankind as simply another biological machine. There are naturalists, vegans, and others who are analyzing the natural vs. the machine life battle.

Artists have a different nature, we don’t want locked in a room with a computer ledger with life boiled down to nothing but rules and the numbers.

 I have no interest in joining the “Internet of bodies”. Where the human body becomes merchandise to track. They don't want any spontaneity, freedom, or natural life left. How do you feel about having human interactions mediated by corporations?  Some of us want lives beyond the computer screen. I am questioning my own life now in this regard.

Some may know about Singularity, and artificial intelligence. Do you want a digital boot stamping on your face forever? 

There were warnings at the dawn of the first industrial revolution, where people realize something was being lost.  These same themes ring true today but on a more advanced level. I’ve read the writings of John Ruskin, a Victorian social thinker. He raged against the machine back then and warned of the dehumanization that would come during the first industrial revolution. This warning would definitely apply today. 

Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent… And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.