The Human Biohazard—Welcome to Machine World
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt and Mike Bloomberg are signed on to bring us a sanitized, dehumanized, no-touch, on-screen
dystopia. We are human biohazard.
Anuja Sonalker, CEO of Steer Tech, a Maryland-based company selling self-parking technology, has declared it so.
Sonalker enthuses that “There
has been a distinct warming up to human-less, contactless technology. Humans
are biohazards, machines are not.”
I’m not quite sure which social
bonfire Anuja found warming, but I detect a chill in the air about a dystopian
future a mere four months into a pandemic.
The source of this mind-bending information is an article
by Naomi Klein in The Intercept. Klein, you may remember, is the author
of The Shock Doctrine and a number of other books that long ago directed
our attention to various nefarious social trends.
The lady knows her territory.
And not to say that a self-parking technology CEO can’t
lead the way. There’s enough slop in this pig-trough for all the tech companies
to share.
Eric Schmidt, for example, since
leaving Google has reinvented himself as Schmidt Futures, “a venture
facility for public benefit, we help people do more for others by imagining
what’s possible, applying advanced science and computing thoughtfully, and
working together in networks across fields.”
Eric promises to “strengthen and
expand the American middle class in order to increase competitiveness and
improve quality of life.”
I’m not sure how he hopes to accomplish that by
throwing vast sums of public money at Silicon Valley—but hey—he’s got a plan
and that’s what his website promises.
What’s left of America’s middle class is already as competitive
as possible, with mom and dad working multiple jobs, credit-card, college
and car loan debt in the $trillions and 63% of Americans unable to raise $500
in an emergency. Schmidt is correct, in that there’s still work to be done in that improving
the quality of life part.
But I fail to see how that’s
accomplished by isolating us further with 5G online goodies.
Humans are tribal animals, at their
best by socializing, supporting one another by one-on-one eye contact, an
encouraging arm around the shoulder and a high degree of empathy. If we accept
that we are little more than biohazards to be isolated and controlled,
Eric has his work cut out for him in improving our quality of life.
The high-tech crowd will no doubt become
even more economically bloated and distant from society than is currently the
case. But you can damned well bet that Schmidt, Gates, Bloomberg and whoever
fills out the remaining twelve seats on Cuomo’s task force will successfully
avoid even sniffing-distance from the middle class they claim to champion.
It's Harvard, Yale and Stanford for their kids and a Tesla for their birthday (let's not forget, they're environmentally sensitive).
Dystopia is The Intercept’s word, not theirs. You
will find it nowhere in the advertising copy for their brave new world, nor on
their website.
Defined as a state in which the conditions of life are
extremely bad as from deprivation, oppression or terror, it describes your
and my portion of society and not theirs.
The scene is best described as
watching in slow-motion as the umpires argue, while high-tech steals third base
in the game we call American Society.
Ah yes, we’ve come a long way,
baby.