The following is the unedited version of an exposé currently featured
in the 34th revised edition of Malleus
Maleficus, The Moonshine Memorandum. If you wish to report intrusiveness or inaccuracies, please email
MalleusMaleficus@aol.com To make a formal complaint under IPSO rules
please contact IPSO directly at ipso.co.uk .
Nor is it
generally realised that we now have two species
of men: Humans and Mutants. Of
all the exploited, broken, demoralized,
isolated creatures fashioned by the internet, I present you with an entirely new subclass of beings, reared right before your incredulous eyes - and I am not
thinking of dead-eyed feral packs of hoodies living on sink estates, but of
deeply 'institutionalised' reactive individuals, 'teen hermits' who have no real-life identity and no way of engaging with the world outside of Messenger, Instagram or WhatsApp, all owned by Facebook.
Never allowed to be themselves, inseparable from their mobile phones, these
are the mutants who sleepwalk through life with alarmingly vacant eyes.
It’s an easy syndrome to recognize. Proceeding with a kind of catatonic
mindlessness, numb and inarticulate, even crossing the street may seem a feat
of startling exertion. At a time of your life when you’re most cripplingly
insecure, the idea of being yourself scares the hell out of you. Some mutants live their lives online 24/7, managing a social media identity within the confines of a 4in screen on the iPhone.
A
“lost generation” of teenagers, it has been said, “who are so socially awkward
that they are unable to shake hands, make eye contact or even smile at a
stranger.” Indeed, in an era of the ever-increasing digitalisation of the human
mind, the advent of an impassive plasticised version of your own self is almost
a foregone conclusion. For even if you are not as yet an interactive addict,
just sitting in your bedroom hounded by trolls, curled up under the duvet, weeping quietly, looking at Snapchat in your pyjamas, pestered by low self-esteem, there are plenty of people around you who are.
“So
just remember”- as the Illuminatus said – “that
sort of business can be made more intense and kept up. I’ve killed men by
emotional control.”
The
demonization of an entire era is concentrated in that one sentence. Isaac
Asimov’s 1948 publication, Second
Foundation, contains the original statement of the principle of subliminal
infiltration and, in respect to its psychological and sociological aspects, his
first written formulation
of the futuristic notion of a psychohistorical world.
“So he created his Foundations according to the laws of psychohistory, but who
knew better than he that even those laws were relative. He never created a
finished product. Finished products are for decadent minds. His was an evolving
mechanism and the Second Foundation was the instrument of that evolution.”
Clearly, Facebook believes not in force, nor in
power, but in subtlety. Subtlety has blurred its malignant image. Subtlety
begets the object of its attention, power proceeds from it. It represents a
sort of potential energy. And potential disbursements can be extracted from a
system as long as there is room for it to increase, whereas in a thermal
equilibrium, entropy has attained its maximum
possible value and no further dividends may be obtained. And just to
remind you, while computers have infiltrated all kinds of industries, their
domination is not technological but psychological. This has been anticipated
plainly by Asimov and by A.C. Clarke. Both of them held the laws of
psychohistory to be absolute and unconditional.
And any two prophets proclaiming that the world is mad could not have
made a more timely arrival. Indeed, as practical men, originators and
calculators, not mystics or prophets, they would have been wary in the extreme
of any ‘psychohistorical objective’ that considers the collective suppression of all critical judgement one of the most brilliant sociological strokes of the
age.
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1 comment:
...frightening !!!
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