The Global Digital Compact appears to me to be a digital journey map for the long march to a digital Utopia. Marches towards distant Utopias have never worked in the past for two main reasons:
1) Not everybody wants to go there because they are marching to the beat of another drum (political, religious, philosophical)
2) People who see advantage in doing their own thing (criminals, the greedy, the selfish, those that would be the new Elite) will subvert the march
The advantage of a digital future is that it will be a lot cheaper to implement than a rollout of literacy, clean water, and sanitation. But in a comprehensive digital future people will *notice* that the 3 Oxen of the Enlightenment have passed them by...
This was another thought that I had during my reading of the zero draft, but which there wasn't really space to discuss here. It is profoundly ahistorical. How did the societies which we now think of as 'developed' develop? One thing is for sure: it was *not* through digital tech. So why are we expecting that the story will be different for the countries that are developing today?
I suspect it's already been re-written a gazillion times to suit the said nonsense of each time we've been through! I'm not really sure what's true about "history" and what's not, anymore.
Historians stick to primary sources as much as possible. Eye witness accounts, chronicles, personal letters, interrogation reports, and the like. Too often folks speak of history as a textbook thing. Of course, textbook history is skewed to serve the establishment. But historians are trained to look at the primary sources.
Maybe it's just me being ultra-suspicious, but I wonder how many primary sources have been faked, and also how much historians are nudged into interpreting them in particular ways? For example, I look around me at the British countryside and I see "Iron Age hillforts" everywhere. People back then, who were allegedly few in number, went to live up on the top of almost any significant hills they could find, far from water sources, and built massive fortifications with their bare hands to keep out all the other marauding tribes because all they could think of was to fight one another over resources? Something is missing...
But that's not history, that's prehistory. We don't have any written accounts of Britain before the Romans became interested in the island. Certainly the people who built those fortifications left no written records; so we are interpreting physical remnants which is the job of archeologists, not historians.
The cure for this is to read the primary sources yourself. Of course the way things are interpreted (the secondary sources) are tainted by the usual culprits, the interpretive matrices like colonial theory and such. But the notion of faked primary sources, some of which you indicate ("Iron Age hillforts") is going a bit too far. Surely the chronicles of Matthew Paris, the writings of Cicero, Aristotle, Herodotus, Thucydides and so on are not faked. The wonderful book on Montaillou based on inquisition records teach us a lot about what rural life was like in early 14th century France. When it comes to archaeology, things are more difficult and studies are indeed afflicted by the sorts of systemic biases now common to all institutionalised sciences. Graham Hancock's wonderful series Ancient Apocalypse is telling on this subject. Establishment archaeologists have fought him in some detestable ways. But the evidence--the primary sources--still stand for themselves. The stories we weave concerning them is another issue altogether.
Excellent observation. This kind of “Summit” is pure paranoid delirium. These people have completely lost their minds. But let's trust in "reality", soon it will catch up with all these little people. We are heading towards very... turbulent times (understatement).
I wonder how many of these "global leaders" have even the foggiest notion of what the Internet* is, or how it functions? I suspect that anything more technologically advanced than a hand axe operates through magical thinking, as far as most of them are concerned.
I've always capitalised Internet on the grounds that it is a proper noun, there being only one of them :)
The UN parasites have prattled on about the latest "big thing" for decades, with nobody taking any notice.
The difference now seems to be that our own governments are beginning to follow their vague and capricious lead.
In other words, the UN is not a new problem. The new problem lies closer to home, with the undermining and erosion of our own national democracy. At some point the people will wake up and realise they don't like their government working for the parasites. My fear is that the result when they do will not be pretty.
Thanks so much for trawling through documents like this, David, so we don't have to! I think I would have been physically sick and not got very far, even if it had been remotely interesting to read. The word "inclusion" already triggers a particular expression on my face. Thanks, evil overlords!
I'm currently delighting in buying CDs and DVDs in charity shops, and it is indeed a satisfying feeling knowing that my listening and watching is not being recorded somewhere. It could also be a bit of fun playing random stuff on Spotify with the sound off, and see which band you've never heard of sends you a thank you "short" at the end of the year... My 17 year old son suggested recently that we should regularly search a random word (he suggested "cucumbers") to build up a totally inaccurate digital picture of ourselves and fool the AI. There are of course better things to be doing - or are there?!
It's so annoying. Although I consumed a lot of Hollywood films when I was young, I never started saying "Gee, that's swell!" all the time, but YouTube has sorted that - my kids use so many Americanisms. "Gotten" - eye roll! :)
Everything in elite-speak has been lifted from Orwell's doublespeak dictionary. And so Inclusive, Open, Safe and Secure actually means Exclusive, Closed, Unsafe and Insecure.
It will exclude views that are unwelcome and closed to people who persist in infractions. It will be unsafe for those who do not follow the approved line, and "security" will be enforced through snooping through insecure apps and systems.
Another great read! Thanks again, David. I found the following compelling and in agreement with my thoughts on the matter:
"it will happen because the physical world will sooner or later be re-invigorated with a sense of ‘cool’, and being ‘extremely online’ will become seen as low status. This is in fact beginning to happen already."
This quotation has me wavering:
"In the second place, people in the long-term don’t like the feeling of being addicted to anything, and nor do they like the feeling of being manipulated and controlled."
I hope this is true. But I've been wondering for many years now why there hasn't been a class action here. My understanding is many lives have been impacted by this addiction problem, and apps are designed to be addictive. Folks have even been injured and killed owing to this addiction. I wonder if you could shed some light on why this issue hasn't been taken up by law firms wishing to make a name for themselves. Has it something to do with the money involved? I mean with the tech giants having enough dosh to turn legal challenges into a game of whoever has the most money wins?
The short answer is I’m not a tort lawyer, so I can’t really give a thorough answer, but I suspect it is because no identifiable tort has been committed. Or at least nobody has been able to convincingly make out a case that one has.
I think we have more power to say No than we are led to believe. So much of what is being presented is smoke and mirrors, as you insinuate. Covid displayed that very clearly, and was, for whatever reason, a massive overplaying of this hand. And the term "parasitical" is key: a parasite needs a host, and can often only survive as long as the host doesn't realise it's there. It's become a lot more difficult not to see it since 2020. We're still stumbling around trying to work out how to get rid of it, still stuck in the ideas and concepts that parasite has itself given us, but we're getting there!
It will be very interesting to see what the turn out is like come the election. It's so hard to imagine anyone believing any of the parties will do anything sensible. Though "reality" appears consistently to be beyond my imagination these days!
The Global Digital Compact appears to me to be a digital journey map for the long march to a digital Utopia. Marches towards distant Utopias have never worked in the past for two main reasons:
1) Not everybody wants to go there because they are marching to the beat of another drum (political, religious, philosophical)
2) People who see advantage in doing their own thing (criminals, the greedy, the selfish, those that would be the new Elite) will subvert the march
The advantage of a digital future is that it will be a lot cheaper to implement than a rollout of literacy, clean water, and sanitation. But in a comprehensive digital future people will *notice* that the 3 Oxen of the Enlightenment have passed them by...
This was another thought that I had during my reading of the zero draft, but which there wasn't really space to discuss here. It is profoundly ahistorical. How did the societies which we now think of as 'developed' develop? One thing is for sure: it was *not* through digital tech. So why are we expecting that the story will be different for the countries that are developing today?
I suspect it's already been re-written a gazillion times to suit the said nonsense of each time we've been through! I'm not really sure what's true about "history" and what's not, anymore.
Historians stick to primary sources as much as possible. Eye witness accounts, chronicles, personal letters, interrogation reports, and the like. Too often folks speak of history as a textbook thing. Of course, textbook history is skewed to serve the establishment. But historians are trained to look at the primary sources.
Maybe it's just me being ultra-suspicious, but I wonder how many primary sources have been faked, and also how much historians are nudged into interpreting them in particular ways? For example, I look around me at the British countryside and I see "Iron Age hillforts" everywhere. People back then, who were allegedly few in number, went to live up on the top of almost any significant hills they could find, far from water sources, and built massive fortifications with their bare hands to keep out all the other marauding tribes because all they could think of was to fight one another over resources? Something is missing...
But that's not history, that's prehistory. We don't have any written accounts of Britain before the Romans became interested in the island. Certainly the people who built those fortifications left no written records; so we are interpreting physical remnants which is the job of archeologists, not historians.
The cure for this is to read the primary sources yourself. Of course the way things are interpreted (the secondary sources) are tainted by the usual culprits, the interpretive matrices like colonial theory and such. But the notion of faked primary sources, some of which you indicate ("Iron Age hillforts") is going a bit too far. Surely the chronicles of Matthew Paris, the writings of Cicero, Aristotle, Herodotus, Thucydides and so on are not faked. The wonderful book on Montaillou based on inquisition records teach us a lot about what rural life was like in early 14th century France. When it comes to archaeology, things are more difficult and studies are indeed afflicted by the sorts of systemic biases now common to all institutionalised sciences. Graham Hancock's wonderful series Ancient Apocalypse is telling on this subject. Establishment archaeologists have fought him in some detestable ways. But the evidence--the primary sources--still stand for themselves. The stories we weave concerning them is another issue altogether.
Excellent observation. This kind of “Summit” is pure paranoid delirium. These people have completely lost their minds. But let's trust in "reality", soon it will catch up with all these little people. We are heading towards very... turbulent times (understatement).
Quite.
I wonder how many of these "global leaders" have even the foggiest notion of what the Internet* is, or how it functions? I suspect that anything more technologically advanced than a hand axe operates through magical thinking, as far as most of them are concerned.
I've always capitalised Internet on the grounds that it is a proper noun, there being only one of them :)
The UN parasites have prattled on about the latest "big thing" for decades, with nobody taking any notice.
The difference now seems to be that our own governments are beginning to follow their vague and capricious lead.
In other words, the UN is not a new problem. The new problem lies closer to home, with the undermining and erosion of our own national democracy. At some point the people will wake up and realise they don't like their government working for the parasites. My fear is that the result when they do will not be pretty.
Thanks so much for trawling through documents like this, David, so we don't have to! I think I would have been physically sick and not got very far, even if it had been remotely interesting to read. The word "inclusion" already triggers a particular expression on my face. Thanks, evil overlords!
I'm currently delighting in buying CDs and DVDs in charity shops, and it is indeed a satisfying feeling knowing that my listening and watching is not being recorded somewhere. It could also be a bit of fun playing random stuff on Spotify with the sound off, and see which band you've never heard of sends you a thank you "short" at the end of the year... My 17 year old son suggested recently that we should regularly search a random word (he suggested "cucumbers") to build up a totally inaccurate digital picture of ourselves and fool the AI. There are of course better things to be doing - or are there?!
It's so annoying. Although I consumed a lot of Hollywood films when I was young, I never started saying "Gee, that's swell!" all the time, but YouTube has sorted that - my kids use so many Americanisms. "Gotten" - eye roll! :)
Most of Canada it seems to me has abandoned the past participle.
Everything in elite-speak has been lifted from Orwell's doublespeak dictionary. And so Inclusive, Open, Safe and Secure actually means Exclusive, Closed, Unsafe and Insecure.
It will exclude views that are unwelcome and closed to people who persist in infractions. It will be unsafe for those who do not follow the approved line, and "security" will be enforced through snooping through insecure apps and systems.
Nicely put.
Another great read! Thanks again, David. I found the following compelling and in agreement with my thoughts on the matter:
"it will happen because the physical world will sooner or later be re-invigorated with a sense of ‘cool’, and being ‘extremely online’ will become seen as low status. This is in fact beginning to happen already."
This quotation has me wavering:
"In the second place, people in the long-term don’t like the feeling of being addicted to anything, and nor do they like the feeling of being manipulated and controlled."
I hope this is true. But I've been wondering for many years now why there hasn't been a class action here. My understanding is many lives have been impacted by this addiction problem, and apps are designed to be addictive. Folks have even been injured and killed owing to this addiction. I wonder if you could shed some light on why this issue hasn't been taken up by law firms wishing to make a name for themselves. Has it something to do with the money involved? I mean with the tech giants having enough dosh to turn legal challenges into a game of whoever has the most money wins?
The short answer is I’m not a tort lawyer, so I can’t really give a thorough answer, but I suspect it is because no identifiable tort has been committed. Or at least nobody has been able to convincingly make out a case that one has.
None of this will work, because it never works. Eventually this will play out.
I think we have more power to say No than we are led to believe. So much of what is being presented is smoke and mirrors, as you insinuate. Covid displayed that very clearly, and was, for whatever reason, a massive overplaying of this hand. And the term "parasitical" is key: a parasite needs a host, and can often only survive as long as the host doesn't realise it's there. It's become a lot more difficult not to see it since 2020. We're still stumbling around trying to work out how to get rid of it, still stuck in the ideas and concepts that parasite has itself given us, but we're getting there!
It will be very interesting to see what the turn out is like come the election. It's so hard to imagine anyone believing any of the parties will do anything sensible. Though "reality" appears consistently to be beyond my imagination these days!
I'm almost certainly going to do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pvlVE7-Rqs