Greetings my fellow Americans!
Having spent 30 years of my life immersed in the world of Information Technology innovation and development (IT), I witnessed firsthand the 20th-century evolution and revolution of the machines known as computers. The very first computer on which I worked, as I was earning a degree in Computer Engineering, contained what was commonly known at the time as core memory: you could walk by the picture window of the school’s computer room at the time and see the hundreds of wires arranged crosswise, with a small metal ring at each of the intersections (yes, this was that machine’s on-board memory, in all of its glory for all to see).
When we couldn’t get into the computer lab to use one of the terminals which was directly connected to said machine, we’d have to go over to the school library, where additional terminals were available via 300-baud, i.e, bit-per-second, dial-up modems (compared to the 100,000,000,000-baud available in most of our homes today); we could literally watch the cursor travel across our screens as the electronic ones and zeroes traveled along the telephone wires into the receiver placed in the rubber cups of the modem for translation into signals which our terminals could understand and properly display for human eyes.
From there I went on to a brief career in computer operations, where I joined a team of other professionals in managing factory-sized rooms full of six-foot-tall cabinets containing CPUs and disk drives, all communicating via miles of inch-round cable strung under raised floors, protected from errant steps by human feet as well as being chilled to a temperature befitting equipment consuming massive amounts of electricity that would otherwise require the humans to dress for winter indoors.
My first commercial use of a desktop computer came in the late 1980’s—an Apple Macintosh, as I moved into software engineering/programming. While I doubt that I could even read its nine-inch screen black-and-white screen today, it was quite revolutionary and visually stunning at the time. Eventually came the more colorful, and economical, Windows-based personal computers of the 1990s exploded on the scene, and my wife and I purchased our first home computer with a two-gigabyte hard drive (and a dial-up modem that could now handle 14,400 bits-per-second). I also began carrying my first pager around that time, as I was frequently on-call to handle failures/outages of the mission-critical systems which we were currently supporting. I procured my first email address for work in 1995, as “the Internet” became more mainstreamed. Following the bust of the Y2K “crisis,” we purchased our first flip-style phones around 2002, as mobile technologies burst onto the scene; within three years we upgraded to “smart” phones which we have been using ever since.
Why this trip down memory lane? To highlight that everything I’ve described here transpired in a span of about 30 years, how quickly and thoroughly IT has pervaded our daily lives and radically transformed how we communicate, find each other physically, and interact generally with the world around us, and how indispensable this genre of innovation has seemingly become in our ability to survive as humans.
Having been on the front lines of much of this revolution as an IT professional, I witnessed the early benefits of these innovations, as it became much easier to shop, drive, search, communicate with friends, family, and the rest of the world, etc. I also saw the potential pitfalls of such ready access to, and heavy reliance on, information, especially that of a personal or private nature, and began wondering what could or would happen if control of that information ever fell into nefarious hands? We’ve been handed a bevy of “free” applications, especially via our personal smartphones, to effectively live and experience the world vicariously through the news, social, gaming, health monitoring, and encyclopedic conduits to “the cloud” of information hovering over our global society, persistently inviting us to imbibe of its fruit while sharing as much information about ourselves as possible to enable us to get the help we appear to need at the touch of a screen, and without ever leaving the comfort of our bedrooms.
Now we’ve graduated to “metaverses,” where we can immerse ourselves experientially in man-made worlds of our choosing, all thanks to the radical innovations of IT. Gratification, escape, fantasizing, and the like are becoming ever more instantaneous, and fewer and fewer humans seem interested or willing to “deal with reality.”
But what of those real systems and technologies which exist beyond the reach of our sensory perception, and enable and facilitate these mental exits? Who controls and manages these? Why do we so easily trust them with our very consciousness, and to influence or control virtually every aspect of our lives? Why do we think they are incapable of misinforming or disinforming us to perpetrate worldviews to which they ascribe, or which will enable them to subjugate or “reset” us? Why are we letting a relatively small group of nameless and faceless people tell us what to think, where our priorities should lie, and what our ultimate purpose in life should be?
The utility of Information Technology made it very easy for us to adopt and adapt to living with the relative ease and comfort which they have afforded us. These have come at the price of sacrificing our ability to live without them, and at the mercy of those who provide them and with the power to revoke them. We’ve left ourselves open to the threat of this double-edged sword; how many of us are not yet fully immersed in its utopian illusion, and actually realize it?
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Seeing on how the quest for “consciousness” and “thought” is underway, understanding the psychotronic science that is enslaving us is paramount. Any good sources for the non-techie?
While we have left it up to others who have different attitudes about our uses and ability to make our lives difficult, my goal has been to go back to the written word, the manual non-computer transaction and the very limited use of online information gathering. Been using more cash lately, too. It was fun for the years I didn’t have to worry about the invasion of my computer. After that, just been getting to be a headache.
I remember the college Pascal class, and the time that the math teacher couldn’t let us use the DEC VAX because it was getting a memory upgrade, building my first PC, and the dozens more, and yep, that trusty old 300 baud modem.
Somehow, we have let someone else control our privacy, along with taking a little bit of what we used to think of as “ours” and take it and make money with it. And they have the audacity to take it for free while charging us for it, at the same time. Some brave new world.
I really pity the Facebook user, who hasn’t figured out that scam. I’d rather get scammed by a Kenyan trying to sell me an airport. At least I’d halfway know my enemy.
Even while at this time, we may not be able to live without that beast hanging around our neck, we will soon be forced to, once again, because the beast is consuming too many resources and has become so greedy that it wants total global control over man, and that will be the demise of all these “benefits” we have derived. Something as simple and biblical as vanity and greed taking it all down. As far as I know, the latest thing being 5G, I’m going to get off the train at that station, because I have nothing that utilizes. The last device/phone I bought was a an iPhone 6splus, when the 8 was being introduce. I though $200 for a phone was too much, then, and $1300 is just asinine.
I wonder if my old brick phone will still work?
Been a fun trip, until it became too much of a burden. I’m one you could say realized that double-edged sword, a while back. Great article!