Our Exciting Journey to Annihilation: Confronting the Uncomfortable Truth About Ourselves

An explanation of the steps taken to interface with the digital age and how to take control of your online activities.

The 21st century brought a digital age, which has accelerated us into ultimate data availability and freedom of connectivity in less than two decades. Everyone now exists in this mix of physical and virtual spaces, which improves our daily lives, listens to us, helps us, and, if not checked, hurts us in ways many have yet to realize.

Digital freedom and accessibility have brought civilization to a point of no return. Without this freedom of access, we feel closed off and disconnected, a mental prison from ourselves and our thoughts at times. We are becoming locked out of our thoughts and ideas and, in many ways, lazy and even simple-minded. This mental prison is our new way of life, all thanks to technology.

While we are locked into our interconnected and semi-virtual lives, those serving us these often-free services are listening, gathering, scavenging, selling, and building. These service providers are growing, and while making our lives even more manageable, they are quickly gaining control at a rate that exponentially increases the gap between their ability to gain power and our ability to hold on to that little bit that we have left.

If we are willing, we all have the power to and can break free. Read on to learn how.

Don’t Deny It; Accept It

If you are reading this, you, like nearly 5 billion other people today, regardless of social class or technological know-how, have a smartphone. That magical device allows you to access voice and data from the palm of your hand. Marvelous technologies are these, developed and released by technology company geniuses, and they are not inexpensive. However, our society has evolved so that credit availability extends to the service providers we purchase our mobile network access. Therefore, we can pay off these devices over a multi-year period. Whether you pay for your device outright or not, billions of other people cannot afford to that can finance their devices directly from their mobile carriers. Now, there is mobile market saturation.

That’s right. The technologies needed to allow personal connectivity directly to the Internet have completely saturated the market. It’s nearly not competitive as a technology market. Taking a page out of our Economics 101 course, remember that supply and demand strive for balance. This means that technologies and the demand for technologies, in the mobile sense, are unbalanced. That is, there are more technologies than there is demand for the technologies. This imbalance should naturally drive the prices down, but it does not. Therefore, to charge more, suppliers add features. Cameras, battery life, storage, and applications that make their products more desirable. Face it, those are the criteria for making our smartphone purchases today. It’s not the network access; if it were, there would be a limited supply. But you will soon learn that smartphones and tablets are easy to attain because of the connections built into our personal lives, many of which are to those we don’t even realize exist.

Why do you want that phone with a 1000-megapixel camera, AI editing features, and 10 lenses for four viewing dimensions? Ok, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but have you looked at your printed picture albums lately? An everyday activity that once drove families to come together and reminisce about the memories made is now a thing of the past. Anyone can become a “professional” photographer; many have become videographers without print, editing, or broadcasting experience. This has completely saturated the creativity market. And it has taught many that these activities and how they are performed using our mobile technologies are acceptable behavior. From there, those hosting the picture and video services pay us if we get 100s of 1000s views. Therefore, these activities are validated, and the yearning to be heard is fulfilled. All others who watch are now “fans,” waving their hands in excitement, disbelief, interest, or simply and mindlessly observing. The observation is, somehow, just enough for many of us. Those short bursts of images and sounds, perhaps music, satisfy the boredom and settle the will to do something about it. Those who know no different, born into this new anti-social norm, believe and learn that this is life. Many are our very own children if you can believe that. They are our future… and they know no past.

Step 1: Build a Bridge

In the not-so-distant past, many of us strove for a technological future where we could easily access digital television shows and use the Internet from home. A world filled with high-definition sound and audio. Connectivity that spanned the globe. Communications that could be reached from the farthest points offshore or even space. These dreams, these goals, and these advancements brought excitement and hope. Electricity in every home was a norm in the developed world, but a connection to the Internet in every home was unheard of in 2000. Information, games, entertainment, and even communications with our far-away family and friends for affordable rates didn’t’ exist—emphasis on cheap rates, but not on costs. We’d yet to realize that the costs might be far higher than we can fathom. At this point, advancement was compulsory.

In this first step, a step idealized from a good, innocent place, we decided we wanted a digital connection. But how were these connections to be made? There were limited options to support high-speed data transmission, but services were available to corporations and private citizens for voice. These included our telephone lines (landlines) and cellular networks, all built around voice transmission. It was up to us to determine how to make these connections better and more affordable. Therefore, in step one, we saw the introduction of affordable high-speed connectivity.

These connections have become the foundation for all digital communications; voice is now another digital service. As technologies have evolved, so has the availability of high-speed digital access to connect to our online services. What once was a 64KBps digital connection over a 2-wire voice line to our homes is now commonly over 500Mbps over fiber optics. What was once a first-generation voice and analog cellular system is now a 5th generation mesh wireless access system that allows up to 20 Gbps transmission speeds! Indeed, there may be no limit to expanding digital access systems!

Step 2: Cross the Bridge

If we built the bridge in the first step, then in step 2, we crossed it. Let us retort and ask, why did we want to connect in the first place? Was it strictly to improve communications and meet the love of our lives in faraway places? Did we want to replace all of our printed copies of books and encyclopedias with online access to references? Or, perhaps we wanted to purchase goods we could not procure locally and sell to a broader market? One could say it was all of the above.

Had anyone stopped to think that the connection was much more than one person’s idea?

As a human race, this global interconnectivity is an evolutionary marvel that allows us to not only find what we are looking for but also allow our human colony to flourish. We are now, literally connected, through visual and audio stimulation, to a network with more than 6 billion others of our human peers. Our connectivity allows us to interact and communicate in a way that is much more similar to ants or bees, termites if you will, than individuals in a society. However, our drive for individuality, for strength, as a person, perhaps hinders our eusociality. Or does it?

How often do we cross that bridge? Remember, for many of us, we did not build the bridge. Nor did we make what was on the other side. But what is on the other side of that bridge, that valuable information, those valuable products and goods, all that fantastic and high-definition entertainment, and above all else, that satisfaction one only gets from the biochemical response and stimulation that validates the activity, is there?

Step 3: Settle In and Make Yourself at Home

So, we laid the bridge, crossed it, and are now on the other side. Is that it? Are we all doomed? Is annihilation a “go on three” situation, or is it a “1,2, 3, and then go?” What if I were to say that it is all of the above, and for many, this change is here, and there is nothing they can do about it?

Let us step back for a minute to something from an earlier comment I made in step. If you will, base this theory on hive mentality. This is a bit abstract, so bear with me.

In many cultures, it is believed that we are all connected and influence each other, perhaps even on a miniature scale, but not all. As we have populated this planet, there has been mass traveling and distancing of the species, and very far apart in places, there has evolved this separation of practices and thoughts, the group thought, if you will. These are now considered to be cultures. Technology bridges these thoughts, ideas, and actions of others, from near and far, which can be shared and observed worldwide, tightening our collective mental heard. This is our new virtual civilization, so to speak. We are missing that control, that order in the system by design to make us function as successfully as the eusocial ants I mentioned above. But it is there; if you blink, you will miss it!

Step three is a loss of self. This is an unhealthy trend in one’s life brought on by crossing the bridge too much. When we cross our digital bridge, we give ourselves to others. Across that bridge is a period of using services and purchasing goods, watching and listening to other people’s ideas and beliefs, being introduced to advertisements, and learning how to live in that virtual world. Every journey has a point when one should return home, virtual or otherwise. However, in the virtual world, your body might be home, but your mind has crossed the bridge, and your attention is elsewhere. So, what’s on the other side of that bridge?

In cyberspace, a vast, global store exists designed to prioritize the broadest possible target market. In that global store, vendors with the best supply, lowest prices, and most effortless accessibility sell to the most people. This global store has a global storefront designed to capture your attention and lure you in. That storefront typically comes in the form of a search engine but may also be found on nearly every webpage with advertising enabled. It is also in the form of personal videos and shorts. Behind the scenes is the marketing engine, the data pump, if you will. That data pump pulls in all the information about your browsing and cyberspace activities and modifies the storefront to meet your needs.

That is, it’s a shopping mall! Instead of walking around with friends, grabbing a cinnamon roll or coffee, you're only doing activities that are available online. But do we think of a shopping mall as a place to conduct our most important business or private affairs?

In step 3, we enjoy cyberspace and give our lives to it. Once that happens, an individual is doomed.

A Brief Interlude

This is not as far-fetched as some of you might be thinking. In the introduction, I mentioned that many of us, or our children, do not know a world without a connection to the Internet at our fingertips. These younger folks have not been taught or exposed to marketing or business concepts. If not taught by their families, they might be unable to distinguish between a video pushing a product or an individual showing off their new shoes. Individuals who would have been drawn to reading books or even watching television shows now believe that watching clip after clip of other people commenting on bloopers is satisfying. And those commenting and making some money from the hits, views, and subscriptions, further destroying our physical market space. A shift to online shopping is a very real situation we are dealing with today. The whole while, the smaller businesses that exist in shopping malls cannot compete with online mega stores.  It is not too farfetched to see a future where a place of work is a thing of the past. Warehouses, factories, and data centers will be the only brick-and-mortar business facilities, not offices.

What Does Our Part in Annihilation Look Like?

The virtual, online mega-stores are the employers. Most people employed by these mega stores purchase their goods from their employers. As other businesses and competitors go under, the mega stores no longer need to work as hard at competition. Then, they raise their prices and lower their selections and quality. During this evolution, the vast majority are mentally stimulated by short bursts of audio and images that convince them that the mega-store and its products are what is needed to be happy, healthy, and wise. This stimulation shortens attention spans and breaks down one’s ability to communicate with others or contribute to society. For many, that is the current state, unfortunately.

Although this is oversimplified a bit, in proper form, there will now and forever be those who perform different roles in society. To simplify, there will be various ratios of vendors, drones, and consumers. However, without competition, there will likely be an imbalance between vendor and consumer wealth, favoring the mega store vendor (i.e., the trillionaires). While accumulating capital, they also invest in infrastructure such as electricity, water, gas, fuel, etc. Through those investments, they work to increase their bottom lines and integrate the control systems’ technologies that spin, push, pull, heat, and pump directly into their storefronts to allow for direct consumer payments. When payments are processed, motors spin; when payments are missed, motors are turned off. This integration exposes many of the most critical devices to the Internet. At this point, a heavy reliance on technology and connectivity could lead to a lack of human intervention if something were to be compromised.

What Can We Do to Prevent It?

First, acknowledge that the digital world is changing and that overindulgence in consumable media is unhealthy. By accepting this fact, you will make a mental commitment not to ignore it.

Second, to quote Ice Cube, you better “check yourself before you wreck yourself.” Meter your online activities. Decide which activities to pursue from your phone, tablet, TV, or computer. Remember these tips,

1. If what you are doing online prevents you from completing something you need to do in the real world, stop doing it.

   
   

2. Be intentional when watching shorts. Pick a theme like comedy, life hacks, low carb, etc., then pick a time frame and tell yourself, “I’m only going to watch for 10 minutes.” Then, stick to it.

   
   

3. Install an ad blocker on your phone, computer, router, firewall, and everything possible. Ad blockers stop websites from loading that are only designed to make money from advertisements.

   
   

4. Watch out for family and friends. Share this advice with your kids, brothers, sisters, friends, etc. Please pay it forward and make them intentional and conscious about their web activities.

   
   

If you do not do these things, you will slowly but surely give your consciousness to people trying to profit from you.

Third, block the block heads. Those of you who are of the digital age may be disillusioned to believe that it is OK for someone to rant in their video, using four-letter expletives, line after line, in a heightened emotional state. It is not. People who video themselves doing this have no regard for their audiences and only post their media to grab attention and get views and, ultimately, some advertisement funds. If they were more interested in their audience’s well-being, they would put more effort into figuring out ways to grab attention and still articulate their thoughts more intelligently. Again, these are just advertisements feeding into a more significant marketing engine. Block them.

Conclusion

Finally, stay tuned for more about protecting our critical infrastructure. While your online activities are essential to ensuring peace and order in everyone’s virtual lives, another, more allusive activity occurs. This activity is a global rush to connect more and more of our critical infrastructure to the Internet, the same web that I’m attempting to caution all of you to be mindful and safe while using. And that story is just beginning to unfold.