“And there are those who claim that Big Data will supplant Sapiens and drag him helplessly along like a straw in the mighty flow of information. We will then be close to knowing almost everything we don’t need to know.”
– Roberto Calasso, The Unnamable Present, 2017
Onerous it is and more onerous it will be when AI relieves us of the burden of knowing anything except how to ask AI the answers to everything. The weight of thinking for oneself, reading books, and living in natural reality will be lifted. Siri, Alexa, and the other AI assistants will usher us conveniently into virtual “reality” – an insubstantial world – where all anxieties will be tranquilized by trivia and the natural flow of time will be replaced by pointillist beeps of agitated inattention.
And most importantly: truth will disappear behind propaganda, for artificial intelligence and the digital world have been created and are controlled by the technology companies and government intelligence agencies that together with the corporate media are our controllers. Their mission is mind control, writ large for everyone.
Calasso wrote the words quoted above nine years ago, and I wrote the previous paragraphs in the future tense. But let us get up to date and realize that the future is now, even as we remember that the Internet grew out of the Pentagon’s Advance Research Project Agency (ARPANET) in the late 1960s when there were many warnings that the development of digital computer technology would lead to repression and surveillance, not emancipation.
“Hey, Siri, why am I asking you anything?” is not a question that many ask today.
There is a reason the smart phones are called smart: they are designed to make everyone stupid, but only stupid people would fail to grasp this. Everyone has a reason why they must have a smart phone. Cram people’s heads full of useless information and watch them spin. Henry Thoreau understood this in reverse long ago when he wrote in his essay, “Life Without Principle”: “It is so hard to forget what it is worse than useless to remember.” Today, no one can remember anything, so there is no need to forget. The useless washes minds night and day. It’s here and gone simultaneously, the ultimate evanescent mind bubbles popping incessantly.
So what is worth knowing? It is a good question.
But it is superseded by a prior question: What is important to ignore? Censorship today is primarily accomplished by flooding people with pointless information. Therefore, it behooves us to know how to avoid this inconsequential data.
Surely the first step is to ignore social media as much as possible and never to ask AI any questions. Then to avoid the corporate media’s reporting and nonsensical articles aimed at leading audiences down the primrose path where “relaxing” fiddle-faddle follows the fear-mongering headlines. And to dispense with “smart” phones, which are the current surveillance and distracting machines essential to the process of creating inattention and stupefaction in their users. Laptop computers are bad enough, but at least one can’t carry them in one’s pocket. Smart cell phones are self-imposed cells the keys to which are not carried by their owners. This is so obvious that it isn’t. Behind such tools lie the gullibility of those fooled by their jailers. Yet to suggest the abandonment of these phones seems so ridiculous and impossible that it proves their power over those who can’t imagine living without them.
As to the prior question, let me answer succinctly. Knowing the following will save one much time and psychic energy.
- The United States is an imperial warfare state built for endless war.
- It wishes to rule the world as the only empire.
- Its wars against Russia and Iran will not be ending since they are part of a strategic war plan to defeat China as well. There will be no “deals” that result in less than total victory.
- Israel is a U.S. forward operating base in the Middle East. Their coordinated wars of aggression and Israel’s expansion are aimed at controlling the region.
- All mainstream media reports to the contrary are lies meant to lead people on, to have them think peace is possible when only war is planned. Temporary ceasefires are part of the war planning.
- This strategy is endorsed by both the Republican and Democratic parties, who serve the interests of invisible financial forces who own the country and control its economy. Though the parties and their leaders may disagree on tactics, they agree on the strategic plan to continue the wars on Russia, Iran, and China to maintain U.S. world dominance.
- Essential to their control is the digital propaganda war waged against ordinary people whose minds must be captured and assuaged through lies and an overload of trivia.
- Central to this mind control is using the Internet and digital devices to control people’s thinking by creating confusion, distractions, fear, hope, and despair in alternating narratives. Elections are a key part of this “hopey” propaganda. Study the U.S. wars of just the 21st century for complete confirmation of this bipartisan consensus
- The only small hope that these endless wars – really one strategically connected war – can be stopped is for a genuinely radical and deeply informed anti-war movement to arise in the U.S. and for the multipolar countries to realize that the U.S. has no intention of stopping its wars and for those countries to bond together like steel in their opposition to the U.S.’s agenda.
Don’t be distracted and tranquilized by digital trivia and all the things you don’t need to know. Attention must be paid to the few essentials, as with the political ones above.
Beyond those, however, and far deeper in a place of epiphanies, are what the extraordinary Roberto Calasso, in Literature and the Gods, calls “absolute literature,” which is knowledge accessed only through literary composition “in search of an absolute, and that thus draws in no less than everything, and at the same time it is something absolutum, unbound, freed from any duty or common cause, from any social utility.” It is writing that one has to read, to enter, whose luminescence vibrates in the mind where a second reality opens up and sends shivers of recognition that ravishes one. It is what Nietzsche said was a place of truth, “a mobile army of metaphors” far beyond normal discourse or conceptual thinking. I mention it because it is essential to experience, a place where art opens the heart and mind to the sublime. Let this digression of mine seem jolting as we skip through what is not worth knowing and what is. Let it seem as enigmatic as it is meant to be. The wars are as much spiritual as physical, a truth certain artists have always known. We are always by the way on the way.
Daniel Berrigan, S.J., a friend and mentor and anti-war poet of the spirit, died ten years ago yesterday. He had a way of reminding us with his dissident life and blunt words of essential truths. Here are a few:
“The only message I have to the world is: We are not allowed to kill innocent people. We are not allowed to be complicit in murder. We are not allowed to be silent while preparations for mass murder proceed in our name, with our money, secretly … It’s terrible for me to live in a time where I have nothing to say to human beings except, “Stop killing.”…Our plight is very primitive from a Christian point of view. We are back where we started. Thou shalt not kill; we are not allowed to kill. Everything today comes down to that — everything.”