There are needs and there are requirements. We are all required to consume conventional nutrition along with the basics like water. But surely without the needs fulfilled, ‘man’ would be a lesser creature. And man would not want to associate with such a ‘label’, now would he?
‘Lesser’ to some may be demeaning, for others it may be derogatory, and still for some it could be a failure and surely for a few it could be an indicator for betterment.
Take the present day world. Requirements remain the same. Needs undergoing a paradigm shift. A tectonic shift. Conventional socializing is defunct. Vanished. No one merely drops by your home in the evening, or calls just to catch up. But surely family life has not, nor have people, and neither has socializing vanished.
So what’s going on? A leap frogging on the evolution ladder. A gateway to a new life system. Let me explain. Firstly, if one wants to discuss Facebook, we need to keep in mind that the other regularly used platforms too are owned by Facebook. So when one messages via WhatsApp, or indulges in some voyeurism aided by Instagram, we are in their realm, a one single repository.
The new human socializes via the Internet. Be mindful though, this interaction has no regard for the biological, electric, chemical, psychological exchanges that take place when person-to-person socializing takes place. We no longer are in the pure human realm. The shifts we are facing, we can’t begin to fathom, let alone comprehend. We have keenly let it fulfill our primal needs such as our daily dose of numerous psycho social and other such needs. Do not be fooled for a second that this is some ordinary “path-dependence” in play. QWERTY lock-in of the late 1800’s, despite its inefficiency, was a blessing in comparison to this one.
Do you think all this is chance? Twitter prompted you to adjust your lexicon. Sometime back, Zuckerberg informed us that Facebook has reached a mark of 1.1 billion daily users in a world of seven billion. Zuckerberg also informed us that under the “internet.org” project he is going to include the remaining world. Just type the URL in your browser and you will uncover the magic. Free internet via phones as a starter kit. A humble capitalist gesture that I term as an “Inclusive Evil”. It almost seems like distributing free tobacco cigarettes in the thirties. If only the capitalist mind was that ‘thoughtful’ a century ago!
It doesn’t help to wonder: is there any social or spiritual platform on earth where over a billion people gather on a daily basis? I don’t think even any faith system has a billion followers praying to their god on a daily basis.
Whilst time and space have remained consistent for over 4.5 billion years, something strange maybe afloat at this juncture of human history. The new ‘online’ realm peeks hyper-efficiently into our present life (style) and may make it pubic record all the while archiving every bit of our thought patterns, to be accessed anytime, anywhere by ‘someone’-even twelve years down the line. Eerily, something like the Islamic scripture foretold about angels on each shoulder recording our every step.
You may, can and will be questioned about your comment on lets say “Charlie Hebdo” you once typed a few decades ago. It is possible. Therefore it will happen. It suggests that life is not what you have known it to be. The more ‘online’ it gets, the more you give up your freedom. The perfect illusion of privacy.
Did I mention that Facebook also bought the market leader in virtual reality (VR) for a couple of billion dollars? The company in question is Oculus VR, which just launched their first consumer product, Oculus Rift. Another milestone, another step away from our original soul and old school body. The avenues available via VR may be a topic of discussion for another day.
How can one kid get strategic control over all these platforms and more? How can this be allowed by all and sundry? The powers that be, the ones that spend all their lives, for generations, to acquire global power, accumulate nukes in order to control the world have missed out on such an efficient tool (remember tools are weapons too, just like freedom fighters are terrorists too). No one lets someone walk in and use their territory for their own trade and benefit. No mobs, no governments, no businesses. It is not easy to walk in and claim the world at age 25 and also have enormous wealth.
In conventional industry, the barriers to entry were understandable. Suffice it to say the creation of an online social platform is not in the same league. And with over 4 billion children, the primary source for producing such products, it is funny that we see not many successful competitors around. Why create barriers to entry with monopolizing, cartelizing, and extortion of the kind where an online company with hardly any assets sells for 10 or 20 billion dollars? Lunacy or pure genius?
A step deeper into the free world technology and we would see ‘logging in’ into the system of daily life taking place without the requirement of hardware. People in the near future will ‘engage with information’ using all of their senses: touch and feel, sight, sound, smell, and taste—using them in combination, more often than not. Wearable, connected devices will become embedded more and more in our bodies, more like implants, as in (Google) Glass, becoming more like contact lenses. As that happens, our ability to use nerve impulses to engage with information will expand dramatically. We will see today’s connected devices become smaller and smaller and slowly merge into the part of the body from where the particular sense related to that device operates.
Upon reaching such a point we humans will truly be one, uniform in our language, social patterns, voyeurism, emotions and at par with each other on a level playing field. Homogeneous humans at our core. This is where we are headed. Now if only we should label this given life (style) as a religion, we are all followers. A new religion born, larger than any Abrahamic religion.
Once logged in, we are under supreme control. Catalogued, tagged, located, recorded, profiled, and free to be who we are. Then, and only then may we truly understand the salvation that may be brought on by supplication, for which there most likely will be a fatwa to ‘sign out’ to offer our prayers, in effect saving our souls by this in and out operation, hopefully.
Do not fall for the fashionable illusion of the ‘conspiracy theory’ theory. After all, many during their lifetimes believe the revelations and even the re-resurrection as being the same: a conspiracy theory.
In a world where two global powers cannot co-exist, two faith systems cannot come to terms on their authenticity/superiority, the two genders remain in disagreement, how can one expect anything different from the capitalist market economy?
Let the ‘Mark Zuckerberg Industry’ be the one true free market, the one global doctrine; let government be the ‘invisible hand’.
The writer is a development economist. He can be reached at ibuild.eh@gmail.com