Leaving time to Think
There was a news story that caught my attemtion. It claimed that electronic gadgets, especially using social networking were robbing the young people who use them time to think and learn. The claim is that the brain needs "downtime" to runimate over recent experience and learn from them, and that robbed of that alone time to think by the din of social media that young people don't process what has happened to them and learn from it. The story, based on some research, even claims that there are changes in the brain.
This sounds like the older tactic to turn off the TV and unplug the phone and pull away from the intrusive and destracting effects of media generally, like not opening a Newspaper, in order to make time to think, which means to hold still and contemplate the memory and emotions of past and current events.
I resist lapsing into truisms, looking for something deeper than to simply try to dispose of the tension in these ideas for in the case of this topic it was a media story that triggered it, and in fact I really dislike people who try to reduce everything said to them to innocuous statements, it shows that they are afarid, and they are afarid to think creatively. So, to simply say that one needs balance and moderation in how one works and uses technology is too pat and obvious.
I am sitting in my room, it is quiet. I am in front of my computer which I could use to get virtually any kind of stimulation or answer any question I could imagine. I could have the TV on or playing music, but it is quiet and the door is closed. Later, I will get sleepy and need a nap in the afternoon, which I have grown to really enjoy. The reason is that dreaming is refreshing in a way, and it is known that it is a stress reducer and that the midday nap, especially for older people, older men, in particular, is very beneficial. Maybe it is that one of the blessings of old-age wisdom is that taking time to think or to dream in the way that recharges the mind, is entirely good and necessary.
It may also be a gift of certian personalities that not burdened by keeping up an image frees one to use your energies more frugally just at the time when youthful vigors are waining. A living hell is that an image-driven person who cannot let go of the distraction of keeping up appearences suddenly crashes when he or she doesn't have to, and has free time and no practice at thinking.
Much of the Economy is based on Vainity
Much of the frenetic fever of life is driven by economics, whether it is exploitation or creation of demand. It is a seduction based on vanity and laziness. A great deal of it is based on "Conveience" which means make people pay extra because they didn't plan ahead and think out a less expensive alturnative. I used to say "Business on the Internet is about making people pay for something that others with more effort can get for free." That is certiantly true for on-line media of all sorts, such as music, but it is generally true. And to work on some schedule controlled by someone else, in which no thought is given to your intellectual health is no different than the kids being driven by texting and blogging, indeed judging by what I see of people "working" they have closen to be driven by their cell phones and the social media they contain, which is driven by their vain relationships to others. It is not useful to call this bad or a waste, but it is definately a choice, even if it seems natural or necessary.
Not using the airlines as a choice
The stories about the "groping" and invasive use of body scans by the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA), and the outrage at the privacy invasion it represents, is just such a case of a series of choices made by us and for us, and as such is something we need to become conscious of. There isn't "mind control" going on in the real sense, although some people who really aren't their own boss would say so, but there are a whole series of decisions and priorities that result in the absurdities of the situation. Yes, most people accept the necessity of tighter security, including the scanners and the pat downs, because of the threat to the transportation system as it exists, namely the international airline industry. A few are offended and some want to gum up the works, like opting out of the scans and submititng to the pat downs as a way to clog the whole system and bring it to a halt, especially tomorrow, because that is the busiest travel day of the year. I agree with this, and the airports claim in answer that they can cope with this tactic. Tomorrow will tell. I hope that the tactic might succeed because it would help to reveal that we are all paying for the economic self-interest of a few who are being aided, even unwittingly, by the government, but I suspect that not enough people will chose this and the airports, having been tipped off, will adjust, and pass whatever hidden cost on to the flying public eventually.
Factoring in the chalenges to one's safety and freedom by economic priorities set by business people who really place profit far above either the collective safety and freedom is the way to analyze these problems, whether it is the captivating effect of social media, and I mean that in the original liternal meaning, of the use of a technology as a tool of enslavement by unscrupulous entrapaneurs. Of course the user is making a tacit choice, and the more aware of the choice he becomes, the better, or of why security in the airline business has come to the absurdities of the TSA policies. The answer is to vote with your feet in both cases. The fastest path to an entrapaneur's fate is through his wallet, to vote with your money and not spend it with him. If the flying public wants to change the priorities for flying set by the airlines and the government, then don't fly.
The point of this is not that "there is no other choice", it is that there has always been other choices that were prempted by closed-door discussions between government security people and airline execs in which the model for operating under the security threat was set and the public had no imput other than to decide to submit to the reactive policies of the TSA. There was no discussion of other strategies of restricing service to certian parts of the world. I am sure that an embargo on flights to Yemen would have an affect on the threat as it stands, and there were opportunities to address the threat in other ways that were missed in the past all because the decision was made by the government and by the industry to make passengers pay in so many ways for a deteorating business model. I say, don't support those decisions, don't fly.
You Pay For Not Thinking
Tim Berners-Lee had recently come out and said that businesses, notably Facebook and the Cable Monopolies are a big threat to the freedoms on the World Wide Web. Lee is the true inventer of the WWW back in 1994 when he wanted a way to share online draft materials between scientists at CERN. His warning was about net neutrality and the fact that the cable companies have created a censoring bottle neck, which many countries, especaially in the EU, have also created, the "Great Firewall of ...", but it is also about the implications of Facebook's approach, lax security, and ability to degrade and manupulate content, and generally exploit people. My recent experiment with Facebook and the misgivings it has created were caused by a greedy smart-aleck kid, Mark Zukerburg, like a young Bill Gates, took a unrevolutionary idea and remarketed it in a way to make it seem new to gullible and un-creative masses. This is why people who were already familiar with computers, e-mail, BBSs, and blogs, missed the buzz, because these guys knew how to sell old stuff to people who were generally too stupid to see them when they were free, There is some connection with the fact that so many con men seem to come from Harvard even if they didn't complete a degree there. That includes these guys and quite a few U.S. Politicians whose net effect was dicy.
Not taking time to think and see the choices you have and the choices that rich and powerful politicians and business people are trying to make for you is the source for your enslavement: "There is no choice." But there is and one of the best tools you have is the choice you make every time you open your wallet, and only much more secondarilly when you vote. I am not talking about organized boycotts or other obstructions like opting out at the airport, although these work if they are well organzized and attended, but think of each purchase as a political decision, that each and every choice comes to someone else's loss, that the person who sells you the goods may have won simply by getting there first, but he may also have won through treachery and corruption as well, and that you or he could be heald to account at some point in the future. This is how whole populations get blindsided by historical events.
It is conventional reason to see terrorists as irrational religious or ethnic fanatics. Their delusion, though, may be that they think that they have more power in the present than they really have, even with the decision to destroy themselves and others in the process, but the dismissal of their fanaticism out of hand may miss a chance to see something deeper and more reasonable, though the solution they take may be stupid and even unecessary,
It has always impressed me that although Osama bin Laden appears to be a Moslem faniticaly opposed to the West and especially the US, that his family had major ties with both. This guy was no sheep herder from the desert or the mountians. He was well educated in western schools and he was destined to become another businessman in his family's construction business. Something radicalized him, is caused him to recoil against Western values, especially western business. It is no mistake that the September 11th 2001 attacks were against American military, government and business targets, and it may be, that even though he has been on the run ever since and the military may eventually catch up with him, that the terrorists are winning with a very effective strategy to cause their efforts to place a drain on the U.S. Economy and World Order far in excess of the tangible impact they have really had. By creating the climate of fear and reaction and causing the expensive response, they have achieved more than any real impact of killing 3000 stock brokers, soldirers, or politicians, and continue to reap the rewards. The War in the Middle East may not be winnable and the terrorists will still be able to threaten us even if their success rate is nill. The cost will have achieved the goal of negatively impacing the economy.
George W. Bush really has a problem, which his own recent comments and his memiors hint at. He really is dumb as a post, and his response to 9-11 played right into the hands of the terrorists who have really had considerable success against us, who, on the face of it have overwealming strength and control, but they have used that against us and cost us a lot. The biggest success is that they knew how to use the inflexibility of business plans against us. They knew that the solution the security response to their threat would be to destroy the conveinence and democracy of world airline travel driven by the greed of investors and the tendancy of the airline corporations to resist change, and to pass risks to passengers.
This is the usual response of business to change, to resist it and to pass the risks onto their customers. It drives the health care disaster and the mortgage disaster. It is the way our system can be defeated. The Government and Business are too intimate and dispite the lie that the Right Wing loves to tell that government is interferring with the natural rights of business it is corruption, the tendancy of people with money to buy the favor of politicians who are supposed to attend to the "general welfare", that is poisoning the well. It is natural for governments to promote economic development and businesses, and rich entrapaneurs wiill have access and influience, that is unavoidable and even necessary, but that needs to have scrutany, which the political processes in America don't provide enough of, as compared with the ideals of openess in our institutions. That is why we can't depend on these institutions to provide a political solution, especially since the economic balance of power is now so skewed that it threatens the very viability of the Constitutional system.
The response to this is going to have to be economic, and individual. People are going to have to realize that first their economic future and then their political future is in their hands individually, that they can choose not to buy from the company store. So, don't fly and don't use things that drain your self-expression and time.
People in the rest of the world who want the US and the New World Order to stop robbing them don't need to blow themselves up, they just need to be patient. If they are right, the economic system will self-destruct especially as its consumers choose to opt-out. Far more than helping terrorists blow things up, if people just made choices as if they were political, they can have far more effect. Be conscious of when someone is trying to exploit you, and say "No". So, view the marketing barrage the same way you would political propaganda, it is the same, and view purchasing decisions as political, they are.
