Review of a Book Review
There is much to commend about Gaz’s review of the Technocracy Rising book, but I could not help feeling that its message was mostly a one-sided, fear-mongering take on our changing world.
One man’s Life Lens seen through the Life Lens of another.
Gaz’s essay provides an excellent synopsis of how many of the “Freedom Group” members who I have met see humanity’s current circumstances.
They fear the control of powerful elites, the meddling of domestic and global institutions, the digital technologies that make both increasingly pernicious, and their feelings of helplessness to stop any and all of it. I, too, share most of the expressed concerns, and found this paragraph worth sharing:
“Through these unfolding developments, Patrick Wood’s Technocracy Rising serves as a sobering reminder of the stakes involved. The world he envisioned is no longer a distant possibility but a burgeoning reality, challenging the freedoms, rights, and values that define human existence. The book’s insights demand urgent reflection and action to safeguard against the encroachment of a technocratic future.”
My take is slightly different.
With four-decade career in Information Technology behind me, primarily as an IT Recruiter who interviewed thousands of IT professionals and studied how enterprises applied technology advances, I am excited about the emerging prospects arising from the current Digital Era for its many potential and realized benefits for humanity.
The tech itself is never evil.
Evil comes from the keyboards of those who use it for malevolent purposes, and from those who coerce or pay those keyboard warriors to do so.
Bias is systemic.
It is easy to label people like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Klaus Schwab, George Soros, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and any mega-billionaire that you don’t like as “evil incarnate”. Let’s play devil’s advocate for a moment.
What if those men look in the mirror daily to ask themselves if they are doing their best to save and protect humanity from itself? Many may, in good conscience, believe that they are.
The world is in a mess in many ways. The richest and most powerful people of the world may believe that they are the only ones who possess the wherewithal to do something about it.
The life lens of those elites are likely so aliens to that of we “lesser mortals” as to be like making comparisons between a Martian and Little Orphan Annie.
Positive uses of technology exist.
When I wrote Digital Direct Democracy - An Antidote to Digital Communism in 2023, it was intended to be a response to Dr. Klaus Schwab’s 2017 book called The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Klaus revealed his vision regarding the uses of technological advances. Schwab believed it possible and desirable to engineer geo-political and economic outcomes for the betterment of mankind.
That book left me wondering what his realized vision might look like.
My subsequent following of the World Economic Forum has provided the answers.
Consider that Klaus, born in 1938, was a young boy in Germany while Hitler, a zealot of German nationalism and the superiority of the aryan race, was its supreme ruler. Young Klaus would have been unaware that Adolf was becoming increasingly deranged by the progression of a syphilis infection.
What nationalistic, totalitarian influences may have flooded that young boy’s mind as such an impressionable age?
One can only imagine.
In 2022, I watched an historic YouTube video in which Schwab introduced Xi Jinping in growing terms as the featured guest speaker to launch the WEF’s annual Davos Agenda. A weeklong conference, it was attended by some of the world’s wealthiest, most influential and politically powerful people.
What could go wrong at an exclusive “frat party” for the world’s most famous “cool kids”?
The best frat parties I heard about when I was growing up in the 1960 and ‘70s always featured attractive, stylish women, confident “type A” men, and all the trappings that go with “privilege” which only the “coolest kids” could enjoy. Davos week is just that kind of shindig.
Who knows what kind of clandestine meetings take place during and long after each annual “cool kids” summit at one of the world’s most exclusive resorts located in Davos, Switzerland?
What do they know that I don’t?
A while ago, I asked myself: why does Xi Jinping describe his nation as “Communism with Chinese characteristics”.
Likewise, why has Vladimir Putin continued to preside over Russia as a Communist state after being its leader for well over two decades? Putin must surely understanding the “sins” of Russian communism over the past 125 years, right?
My conclusion is that my life lens will never be able to understand and appreciate theirs. This holds true for everyone on the planet - we can never “walk a mile in their shoes”.
I certainly don’t want to live in what I perceive to be the life circumstances of a typical citizen of Russia or China. I have no idea of how I might experience my life there if I suddenly found myself in those circumstances. My current views arising out of my personal life lens are likely the product of decades of Western propaganda. I currently live in skepticism about how much to trust what “knowledge” I hold on life in those countries.
It’s all determined by our life lens differences.
Gaz’s essay reminds me that his essay reflects the contents of his personal life lens. Each of us will necessarily view the subject of global, domestic and local socioeconomic changes through all of our past experiences which inform and shape our own unique life lens.
From my life lens, I am confident that the proposal outlined in Digital Direct Democracy, if implemented, could restore the balance between individual sovereignty and the ever-expanding spread of “digital lava” that creeps across the psychic and economic topographies of our lives.
If only I could convince more people to read it🥺
