Our Growing Digital Dictatorship

The spying on and mind control of us is constantly growing. This brief article reveals latest developments and the dark future where we are headed (previewed in China), sharing two informative videos and enhancing them with commentary.

It is also related to the censorship which keeps the vast majority of passionate readers and video watchers of this blog from ever finding out about its existence — for example, yesterday my attempts to post a notice of the latest Video Weekend post on Facebook groups that I am a longtime member of where blocked by Facebook’s oh-so “anti-spam” algorithms (even though I had not posted in a week). — Dear readers, I can only recommend that you tell your friends about this blog and subscribe to it (for free, of course) if you haven’t yet.

Living to Live

The green-blooded moneycrats who rule us, think life is all about money. Well, it is not. That’s why they ruin our lives. Let’s take a look at people who have turned their back on the the corrupt system and hear what they have to tell:

Human connections and interactions count much more in human happiness than material things:

(Note: if the video linked above gets deleted, you may search the Internet for the title: “Route 66: Free living and liberty at a rural commune “)

Comment: In my imagination I would love to live in such a commune (except for my physical handicaps and the gross hunt for squirrels who I see neither as nasty tree rats nor tasty morsels). It would be so much better not having to fight over incomes and savings with my neighbors but rather support one another, be fellows and friends rather than desperate strugglers pitted against each other by a system that is set up to do so.  

We Need a Considerate Compassionate Culture

All day, every day, I meet people with virtual blinders on. Last week, in order to help out desperate family members against government reprisals (the details are private) I accepted a menial job in a sweatshop for which I am totally overqualified in terms of education and professional experience but physically underqualified due to bad health. The task is to de-staple, de-eyelet, de-booklet thousands of paper sheets each day to make them scannable. The papers are banking files. It’s unbelievable how many inches of papers are put together for a single person’s single credit by bank clerks many of whom also plaster them with countless staples, metal eyelets, and so forth only for other people to get paid a minimum wage to remove all those troublesome metal pieces again prior to digital scanning. The hand-breaking job reminds me of the movie scene of two guys digging and tossing the dirt into each other’s holes. This dumb job is quite symbolic of the socio-economic system of today in which we modern humans waste away our lifetimes.

One of my colleagues told a local bank branch director that his workers place way too many staples and such on their paperwork requiring a lot of work to remove them again. The director’s only response was laughter. Rather than musing about instructing his clerks not to waste so much time and metal that only raises the banks’ costs for scan preparation he just laughed.  

Sharing to Survive vs Robbing to Get Rich

When our ancestors had to make due with barely any technology and infrastructure, cooperation and sharing allowed our species to survive. A dangerous lion or cave bear or nutritious mammoth could only be killed by a cooperative group of men armed with mere spears. A day’s lucky hunter couldn’t eat all of his boar’s meet or put it in a freezer, so he shared it around. The next day when he came back empty-handed others would share their quarry with him. A sick member of the tribe was cared for rather than fired from his or her job and denied health coverage, in order to preserve the community marked by interdependence. Decrepit elder tribe members were fed and cared for with no demand for pay; and when a great drought threatened the tribe’s survival, the eldest member of the tribe could tell his younger fellows about a remote spring that had rescued the tribe from a similar drought in his childhood.  

Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses — to be Shot Dead!

You may have heard of the young woman who tried to cross the border and was shot in the head for it. It’s now death penalty for crossing a border without a visa. That’s the America of today. And she is not the first or the last.

What a contrast to the preceding centuries of America’s existence, when immigrants were invited by the millions to cheaply build our canals and rail roads, to work our mines and factories under deplorable conditions, to speed up the growth of our country and our industrial revolution, not to mention the wealth of the infamous robber barons and their growing rigged economy, built to make them rich and the rest of us poor — a system that lasts until today and is getting worse again.  

Disconnected America – A Mentally Unhealthy Place

Americans, today, live in a money-obsessed, profit-driven society which distorts and stifles our shared humanity, resulting in despair, rage, and loneliness that generate, among other things, mass shootings.

The article I wish to point you at contains something to mull over: Capitalism Breeds the Lonely, Alienated Men Who Become Mass Killers?

In short, the article proposes that mental health can be likened to four pillars: (1) an intimate relationship, (2) a circle of friends or family, (3) shared activity groups (like workplace, clubs, political organization, sports teams, and such), (4) connection to one’s nation and the world through political, economic, or similar participation. When people’s lives lack these pillars, they become mentally unstable.  

A Personal UBI Appeal: The Downside of Life-by-Jobs

I think that, in order to arrive at a better civilization, we must rid ourselves of the slave-mentality that is structurally built into our economic system of job-slaves and job-masters. We must do so because it makes us subservient to the ruling class which grossly abuses its power. We must also rid ourselves of this slave mentality because it ruins our individual lives by creating a desperate willingness to accept jobs that aren’t good matches. This willingness often has us even try very hard to convince employers that bad job matches are GOOD matches, simply because we don’t want to starve and go homeless. The threat of poverty has become what the chains and whips were during the days of plantation slavery. The modern form is wage slavery. And it comes with fears, coercions, and unhealthy conditions that ruin our individual lives and our entire societies. 

Why Are We Wasting our Lives in a Flood of Bullshit Jobs?

David Graeber exploded on the scene of investigating our rigged society by sharing his recurrent experience he had with people whose paycheck-earning jobs contribute nothing of value to human society. An amazing realization in a capitalist world, where we would think efficiency and the creation of wealth were the top goals:

(Note: if the video linked above gets deleted, you may search the Internet for the title: “5 Types of Bullsh*t Jobs with David Graeber”)

So, if so much valuable work has been taken over by machines, and so many jobs are nothing more than make-work, why are we still desperately hunting for jobs that often aren’t there? Why are we drowing in work and poverty at the same time? We should be swimming in prosperity and reducing our weekly work hours as machines are rapidly replacing us in the labor market and so much “work” being done is quite unnecessary. Why aren’t we? Why these bullshit jobs instead? 

Just Another Manic Monday

Welcome to another week of serfdom. Here is a little video to help you get over day #1:

(Note: if the video linked above gets deleted, you may search the Internet for the title: “‘Bullsh*t jobs’ posters on the Tube”)

The light at the end of the tunnel: once we realize, as a society, that our current economic system is bullsh*t, we’ll be a lot more ready to replace it with something better.

Have a nice Monday. 😉

~

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Our Meaningless Hell and the Heaven We Can Build

Summary: (1) The explosion of bullshit jobs and the need to uncouple our livelihoods from such bullshit jobs. (2) A jobless future from automation and the opportunity to create prosperity and leisure for all. (3) A cool video on these topics.

Here is some news: most of the productive manufacturing, agricultural, and useful service jobs of the past are gone. Meanwhile, useless or even harmful(!) administrative and clerical jobs have tripled. We have three times as many people pushing paper than we had in the 1930s, and that is so despite us having computers nowadays, computers which do many times a person’s work accounting, calculating balance sheets, documenting and measuring stuff, answering consumer questions, creating and disseminating communications, and, and, and… With the quickly improving artificial intelligence, we now even have industrial robots that that can learn their tasks, software that writes music and sports news, self-driving cars and patient care robots currently being tested, and so forth.

We must really get used to the idea that many of our jobs will never come back, and many more jobs will be taken over by machines. The trajectory is one of a world without jobs!