Worzels World - The price of experience

 

It was back in the days when I had just started playing senior rugby. I was young, fit and keen. I had a van for work and on occasion when travelling toward Auckland city I would pick up a group that were often hitch hiking in the same direction. They were heroin addicts who were heading to a clinic that ran what was called a methadone maintenance programme. They were a picture of sad, pimplyfaced, skinny-armed and hollow-eyed ill health. I used to feel sorry for them. Their very existence was an unspoken but eloquent testimony to the evils of addiction. This picture of unfitness and physical impotence kept me safe from ever wanting to experiment with narcotics.

When you see the junkie prostrate and insensible or the alcoholic down on his luck comatose on a park bench with newspaper blankets, it is obvious there is a problem. The destructive power of the demon of addiction is not so evident in the more socially acceptable vices. I am a recovered tobacco addict. I have met chronic alcoholics who can recite Shakespeare and Kipling with word perfect accuracy. Yet many people today who would balk at the suggestion that they are addicts have been so dumbed down by modern technology that they can no longer remember anyone’s phone number. Have you become so addicted to your devices that you suffer anxiety when you do not have your smart phone handy? Is the first thing you do upon waking check for messages or look at Facebook? During the government decreed lockdown did you become even more dependent on information technology? As Star Trek’s Scotty might say: “It’s OCD Jim, but not as we know it.” Tech addiction is a real but unacknowledged pandemic infecting the world.

Don’t worry, there is help on the way. Technology giveth and technology will giveth even more. The real solution to addiction to technology is, like the reformed narcotics addict, to stop feeding the addiction. The big tech industry though touts a cure that is akin to the failed methadone maintenance programme. Instead of giving up heroin, alcohol, tobacco, pornography, cream buns, or whatever the addictive familiar is, their remedy is to make the craving for that addiction easier to satisfy. This turns the borderline addict into the completely dependent user and Google, Facebook and Microsoft laugh all the way to the bank. No money laundering required.

Rather than having to access the pusher man, innovations in biometrics will bring the pusher man to you. And it will all be for free. At least it will be marketed that way. The problem with all addictions is they gradually remove from the addict the ability to choose. Yet the recent Government mandated directives show that most are only too ready to give up their freedom on the basis of unsubstantiated promises.

5G, along with Elon Musk’s emerging neurolink technology and the Bill Gates-touted digital ID implants, will allow people direct access to the world wide web. Tangled as that may be, it will also allow the web direct access to them, merging with the machine of the internet of everything will mean you will no longer need to use even the extremely limited intelligence you still possess.

Why think for yourself when a myriad of AI algorithms can do your thinking for you? It will all be so much easier. Join the hive mind, become a creature of popular culture and you won’t even have to remember to take your phone with you. Information without wisdom, convenience without work. Reward without responsibility. It can all be yours.

At the advent of the first Industrial Revolution, English poet William Blake penned these words: What is the price of experience? Can a man buy it for a song? Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is brought with all that a man has. His house, his wife, his children. Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none can come to buy, and in the withered field where the farmer ploughs for bread in vain.

Unlike myself, Mr Blake wrote this without an Americanised spell check and a cut and paste function. The utopian dream of something for nothing is, even now, being offered to you. It will eventually be forced upon you in the form of a cybernetic blend of man and machine. The operating system that empowers most smart phones is called ‘Android’, meaning, according to the Microsoft Works dictionary, ‘human-looking robot: in science fiction, a robot that looks and behaves like a human being’.

Those in the know are already telling you what their end game is. The vision for you is that you become an easily controlled ‘Android’. Sadly, their promised utopian dream is really a dystopian nightmare.

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