ARTICLE - The Luddites Were Right All Along

During Covid I stopped buying from Amazon.  I bought what I could from local bookshops, and transferred my music purchasing largely to Apple. Yeah, I know they're not really much better, but I'm not prepared to reacquaint myself with Vinyl. It brings back terrible teen nightmares. How many copies of Hawkwind's Doremi Fasol Latido  did I try? Never found one where Brainstorm played without skipping all the way through, as though someone had applied an avant-garde scratching technique on the master disc.

Anyway, I have prided myself on not making any sort of rapprochement with Amazon. Until the Husband informed me Amazon owns most of the world's business website providers, and we have one of those. So I can't completely wash my pre-soiled hands of the ubiquitous bell end that is Bezzer. And there was I thinking I could pour my saintly purity over you like a bucket of green slime. But that just goes to show how hard it can be to put distance between you and the Internet. In the space of twenty years it's become inescapable, for good or ill.

When Musk first started trumpeting about freeing free speech on Twitter, I stopped actively using X marks the spot. Driven into a complete frenzy of activity to discover how to delete it once his unholy alliance with The Tangerine Emperor became all too painfully apparent. I mean two more emotionally stunted individuals you could not find to play dictator with each other. The richest man in the world behaving like a teenage stoner, who surfs on Ketamine. Yeah, he's so impressive.

At The Tangerine Emperor's inauguration we saw Bezos, Musk and Zuckerberg all in a row, each eagerly tugging the forelock to this soon to be Ruler of All the Americas. Expanding soon into an autonomous territory near you. Fancy a bit of blatant colonialism anyone? We're not going to stop Putin or Netanyahu, so everyone just join in the land grab. You'd be foolish not too.

Facebook/Meta/Instagram. Yep, they are very much under consideration for the next chop. You know, the process of deleting a social media account is truly naff, a convoluted hard to memorise sequence of drop down options. Why isn't there just one delete your account here button? Well that's a stupid question once you start to really think about it. So far Google has kept its face out of publicly associating itself, but who knows what it's doing in private. No-one can afford to keep their brown noses clean, apparently.

This week's tech war intervention from China, sort of stuck two fingers up to the US Tech Bros over AI. With rumours abounding that an AI machine has already replicated its own AI machine. We are entering the territory normally occupied by the most apocalyptic of science fiction novels. Why are we being sold a future that no one wants? Because there's hills of money in them there hills, and who ever gets to the top of them first gets the really big Ka Ching. We are just the ones being sold an AI friend that hangs around your neck and can have conversations with you about how best to commit suicide.

A punk band from Yorkshire, apparently

At the moment I'm toying with the opinion, that after over 200 years of technological progress - 'maybe the Luddites were right all along'. They''re overdue a reappraisal. Look out for -  the return of Luddite riots, Luddite mass trashing of tech servers and infrastructure,Luddite street attacks on anyone remotely resembling a Tech Bro, or wearing unfeasibly even teeth and spray tan. People, as ever, just generally fighting back by indulging in breaking things without rhyme or reason. Its not a great tactic I know, doesn't really change anything, but its chaos or subservience. I can see folk trying to ease themselves off their tech habit by throwing their phones into guarded safes overnight.  Compulsory removal or trashing of all algorithms on all social media? Why not, when can we start? 

Tech-No-Puritanism is here. I am currently limiting being on my phone to a maximum of two hours a day. Most days it's under one hour. Taking this on as a personal discipline does free up time. If I want to do a serious amount of writing, then I power up my laptop. Once you start getting a grip on yourself, you realise its not that hard to put the clocks back.

Going completely 'Tech Naked' is pretty much impossible. But maybe there will be another way to be cleansed of our obsession with 'cat porn', like an electronic brain wipe. Everything is simply too available, too convenient, cheap and in your hand 24/7 to break our addiction altogether. But just imagine if you will,  a spiteful burst of solar wind or some genius hacker finding a way to pull the plug on it all, and there was suddenly no tech working, anywhere in the known universe. After two minutes of frustratedly throwing phones at a faux plastered wall, then twiddling with their stress balls, what the fuck might happen?