Digital Screen Slave Zombie Syndrome. It's a thing.
No plugged in person is safe, which is why I limit my exposure to it all.
Because of this, I have never owned a smart phone (pocket surveillance and data mining tool), and never will.
Beware the zombified:
They would be conscious and aware — yet not fully awake; they would sit motionless and speechless all day in their chairs, totally lacking energy, impetus, initiative, motive, appetite, affect or desire; they registered what went on about them without active attention, and with profound indifference. They neither conveyed nor felt the feeling of life; they were as insubstantial as ghosts, and as passive as zombies.
While the passage is apt, it does not describe the effects of excessive screen exposure.
The quote is from Dr. Oliver Sacks. In it, he describes patients with a sleeping sickness that was diagnosed in about 5 million people between 1916-1927, way before television, computers, video games, social media, and smart phones.
But the comparison is a good one.
The digital age is changing us and not necessarily for the better. I'm not seeing the consumer utopia we were promised, as long as we bought all the right internet connected things.
Some believe what we are witnessing is nothing short of a new form of slavery.
Now we can add digital slavery to the economic, wage, and debt slavery, as well as the slavery slavery that we have always had.
Now that's progress!
An electronic fast (efast), screencation, digital detox, digital Sabbath, or media fast mean the same thing - escaping, unplugging, and de-digitizing.
Here are my personal top three most effective ways to break free from digital slavery:
1. Nature
2. Nature
3. Nature
Nature is the analog experience we need to connect us with reality, with real living stuff.
In the unnatural digital world we are nothing but highly surveilled zeros and ones, but in nature we become the very essence of what it means to be alive on a living planet.
Through gardening, hiking, bird watching, and cycling, I break my digital chains, and reconnect with that free and unbound experience in the great outdoors.
In nature there are infinite possibilities, while in the digital world the authorities are cracking down and limiting more of our options all the time.
"In fact what is going on here is really about control of behaviour, especially purchasing behaviour. Whether through behavioural marketing or outright threat, the online world is shaping our beliefs, dictating how and what we consume and enforcing the rules."
- Mick Chisnall
For immediate and long lasting effects, think about escaping the technological data mining dystopia by going off-screen, off-grid, and paying a visit to a natural area near you.
Easy. Get off the screens. Go outside. Repeat.
Safe and effective. Really.
Time on device is a big thing. The habit summit offers an insider glimpse: https://www.youtube.com/@habitsummit/featured. The longer you are on a device the more money is made. The problem with content is generally the same as big pharma research garbage in garbage out. I have done a bit of reading around AI, unless I'm missing something it appears true AI is another big tech pipe dream with the so called AI just being search on steroids. The linguistic stochastic holy grail is a long way off. As a species we don't truly understand the workings of language, let alone map it in code.
ReplyDeleteThe Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff is a good introduction to the online data exhaust extraction industrial complex.
BW,
Alex
AI - why? What is wrong with ordinary intelligence? And yes, if flawed humans are constructing it, how can they make sure the product isn't flawed as well? It will be no matter what they do. But it might make money, and that is all that matters.
DeleteAs a species it sometimes feels like we don't know anything at all. If we are the most intelligent beings in the universe, well, that would be sad.
Thanks for the recommendation on the Zuboff book. I don't know much about data extraction, except that dealing in our data has created a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars, of which we see exactly none of those profits even though it is our information they are trading.
I found an interesting review of the book.
"We tend to think of this as an invasion of personal privacy, but to Zuboff this is a stealth usurpation of our freedoms. By insinuating themselves into our lives and keeping their operations and goals secret, these capitalists use interventions to “nudge, tune, herd, manipulate, and modify behavior in specific directions by executing actions as subtle as inserting a specific phrase into your Facebook news feed, timing the appearance of a BUY button on your phone, or shutting down your car engine when an insurance payment is late” (202). As they roll out wearable devices, “smart” homes, and “smart” cities all designed around capturing and using data, we will have no places of refuge. We’ll be nudged relentlessly in the kind of value-free behavior modification people were disturbed by when B. F. Skinner originally touted it."
- Gregg
So wise never to get a smartphone - if TV is cocaine, then smartphones/screens/internet in general are crack! My wellbeing increases the less time I spend on my phone. I'm still addicted to it but maybe one day I'll be able to let it go altogether. As for now, I try to use it just for communication and satnav as I find that it's the random scrolling that really eats up my time and energy. I know e-readers are anathema to many but they have actually opened up reading much more for me. I think it's because I'm not neurotypical and there's something that my brain likes about the large print. I've been able to tackle some lengthier and more difficult books since I got mine.
ReplyDeleteThanks for maintaining this wonderful blog Gregg. I come back here time and again as I gradually negotiate my way out of the rat race. The last 3 years have been so difficult. I nearly lost my job because of my belief that we MUST have choice regarding what we put into our own bodies. I was (and still am) prepared to walk homeless on the street if that's what it meant to keep my bodily integrity. I lost a very dear family member directly as a consequence of the coerced medical intervention that has proved neither safe nor effective. Here in the UK, the vaccine injured and bereaved are marginalised by the mainstream but we deserve a voice as much as those who lost loved ones to covid.
I have never tried an e-reader, but I think I would also like enlarged print. On the computer I always make it bigger. Cell phones are like crack, except more dangerous.
DeleteHappy to hear you are still on track for leaving the rat race.
The last 3 years have been difficult for a lot of people, Linda and I included. Something very, very bad has happened since 2020, and it continues to happen today. The lies and the manipulation are unprecedented in their boldness and destructive power, and they have changed everything.
Things went sideways very fast, and a large percentage of the population completely lost it. It didn't take long for those of us who said NO to become the brunt of some very hateful ideas and suggestions.
We are with you, because if we don't have bodily autonomy, we don't have anything. Sorry to hear about your family member. Too bad they aren't giving as much attention to vax injuries and deaths as they did to deaths from covid, or with covid, each of which was meticulously reported. Now the silence is deafening, and I have heard no apologies now that The Science is showing everything they tried failed.
- Gregg
I do not have a cellphone. I am seriously considering getting off Twitter. It's all a con. A time-wasting con game.
ReplyDeleteGreed and corruption are the rule of the day. Everything is a money making scam. Time wasting to be sure. Best to ignore it all.
DeleteI was on Twitter, then off Twitter. Now I am back on, but rarely spend any time there. I will probably get off again, for good this time.
- Gregg
Slavery indeed. It's an agenda. A con game.
ReplyDelete5000 years of lies keeping us in our chains. It is time to break out of them for good.
Delete- Gregg