A deathless war

Submitted by Lindsay
Melbourne Australia!

"…my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free." - Lincoln, August 1862

(8/2021) Have you noticed how different the past few decades have been in one particular thing?, (No, not the weather). Want to guess?

Over the past fifty years armed conflicts have declined. Skirmishes, disputes yes, but apart from the Crimea, no one has gone to war. The cause of death has shifted from armaments to climate and pandemics. These two scourges will continue for the foreseeable future, and will lead to revolution, mass death and hardship – but not by armies doing the bidding of their national masters.

On the contrary, mother nature has taken things into her own hands. You can hear her groan, ‘Too many, too many,’ and she is doing her best to undo some of the ravages we have made to her beloved planet. Viruses and weather, two of her big guns, are full on.

No one knows how many of us will survive, but there will certainly be enough to continue in the most ancient of workforces, the slave. That was how the pyramids were built, and this kind of production still has lots going for it: It’s cheap, there’s always more labour available, and it has been embedded in the system of government. You say it’s been outlawed? Discredited and wrong?

Think again. It has never really gone away, just called by different names. So, here’s this month’s question: which country has the greatest number of adult slaves per head of population?

Sorry folks, it’s you.

To make that claim, we must look at the definition: A slave is anyone who cannot leave their work or their home. Two point three million, slightly less than one percent of the American population, are in that category – those in prison. This is far greater than anywhere else, and way above the per capita incarceration of anywhere else.

So, why are they slaves? Because they work for virtually nothing and cannot leave.

The other part of the definition is that they must enrich their owners. The contribution made to American wealth by this group is staggering: According to the Economist, some $1 billion in 2019.

China, by comparison, has half the number, and with about three times the population.

One of the great scourges of civilisation is the number of children in slavery, and their plight is far worse than anything we can imagine, but there are newer forms of slavery that are more pernicious: free to go home, free to walk around, to buy their own goods, but are unable to leave their employment because there is nothing better.

That is the Amazon model, one that mines desperation for profit, and is replicated across the country.

There is also another form of slavery, that of addiction. In the past, this was available only to a select rich few, but now, where willingly or unwillingly, it is available to everyone - so we can get hooked on getting that tiny dose of dopamine. Its growth has come from both technology and social conditions, as family, friend and community closeness has declined, leaving a void in the hearts of many people, and the availability of social media and entertainment has proliferated.

TikTok is the addiction of millions, Twitter other platforms are still growing, and governments can not only do nothing about it, they don’t want to, as they have enormous power in what they post. The real horror of it all is that it is used by kids as young as two. Hooked for life, which will become less meaningful, less useful except as escape from the bleakness.

Not so strangely, governments have also become hooked on its use, often in the use of algorithms which take the role of the person, and give it to a program that can only do what it is programmed to do. Governments are not clever. They are often made up of lawyers and professional politicians who have little awareness of the real world, and need such programs to do the work. Why not? They do work – provided the programming is based on reality by unprejudiced and non-partisan people.

Then there is the ultimate ruler: The super-computer, soon to be the Q bit version. This is so powerful that whole populations can be monitored, the economy tracked, intelligence gathered, all in real time.

There are two protagonists in this game, China and America. America has been, for decades, preeminent in this field. Silicon Valley has been the powerhouse with contracts in every area of government, commerce and entertainment. Billions have gone into its success, trillions have come out of it, whole industries have formed around it, and American power has rested on its pre-eminence. Is developments have not slackened, but China has caught up.

Talk about the law of unintended consequences, this is a zinger. Trump, when he was president, slapped restrictions on the export of hardware, notably chips to China, in retaliation for China increasing its tariffs on American imports – which they did because he put huge increases on tariffs on a range of imports from there.

Far from bringing them to heel, they did the obvious: They said, ‘OK, we’ll make this stuff ourselves,’ and that is what they have done. They had an enormous base of technology and thousands of highly skilled and clever people, put them to work, and now appear to be overtaking you.

Enter the new 5G (6G is on the way) networks and the picture becomes that of two enormous arcs of data gathering and processing glaring at each other.

What is at stake is the control of data, their populations, and any others they can infiltrate. An ultimate power that is far more frightening than climate change or pandemics. It will put to an end, once and for all, the need of war to achieve an end. This is big Brother, the Demolished Man, Brave New World rolled into one.

And we will be slaves to this monster; it will be benign except when it senses something against the latest dictum. America, where freedom has been the basis of the nation, will have become the same as China.

You think I’m crazy? How much actual freedom do the majority of you have today? And, more importantly, what can anyone do about it?

Shifting to New Zealand might be a good bet.