Everyone’s Talking

At the gym or on the battle field, in the ghetto or on the street, in Cafe’s or restaurants or concerts, libraries or churches, its simply beyond belief how pervasive the use of the mobile phone is. You can use the phone to target a missile or make a date. Indeed it has become the indispensable accessory for business, personal use, entertainment, banking, killing, or information. Not only does one have a vast repertoire of social media on your phone, not to mention music, photographs, videos, books, movies, your smartphone can connect you with anyone anywhere on the planet, at least potentially. There is literally nothing this incredibly complex computer cannot do. Except in my opinion, one thing. It cannot connect you to another person. It gives the simulacra of intimacy. It can entertain, inform, distract, amuse, give deep feelings, enrage, calm, but in the end, once you are away from your phone, I think the true level of loneliness emerges in everyone. This is because we are being changed by our smartphones, being isolated, being told what we want to hear and see by incredibly sophisticated algorithms, radicalised, and rather confused. Its being shown by educational experts that since the advent of the pc and the phone in schools that we are less intellectually astute, simply because now the computers are thinking for us. Never before in history have people have been so truly siloed off from one another because of this one brilliantly clever piece of tech. Never before have we been so close to one another without being so far from one another. in gyms or on public transport it becomes apparent how physically proximate we are to one another without being personally present to one another. Actually as I write this, I am about to head in to an online meeting. We will discuss, strategize, laugh at each others jokes, be amused or intrigued by many original ideas that we will share with each other. We will see each other. Hear each other. But we can never be with each other. Not really. Contact is personal. Real connection can only happen with physical presence. I haven’t mentioned how everything you do say or connect to is recorded and stored forever, how we are the product, how it is simply delusional that we aren’t being used as fodder for big tech and then there’s the whole advent of AI…