This essay introduces the concept of convergence as developed by Henry Jenkins and explores how the practice has expanded in the current global pandemic milieu wherein the interests of a technocratic elite converge to cultivate a general acceptance of the digital tools of a new socioeconomic order. Alongside this analysis stands the historical development of computing tools and the development of data as tools of social control.
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we suggest that emerging technologies not only “integrate [people] into the institutional structures of the larger society” (p. 1), but also into the so-called free market. We analyze the persuasive communications that serve this emerging order of the market working to integrate human beings into the forthcoming Internet of Things (IoT) where all organic and inorganic objects are prepared for sale and purchase.
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In the wake of 9/11, the power elites have steadily tightened control over press freedoms and free speech on digital platforms in accordance with the oppressive mandates of the USA PATRIOT ACT and, as presently witnessed, the COVID-19 pandemic. Corporate and state power converge, here, to control public perception. In the United States, for example, a study by Gilens and Page concludes that the wishes of the people have “a non-significant [or] near-zero level” (Gilens and Page, 2014) impact on the creation of laws that improve policies for the public good.
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If humans want to continue to add value to the economy, they must augment their capabilities through a merger of biological intelligence and machine intelligence. If we fail to do this, we'll risk becoming ‘house cats’ to artificial intelligence (Musk, 2017).
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Beyond battling everybody in a “war of all against all,” the body politic, observes Miller, has been effectively dismembered,
—society balkanized by race-and-gender, as well as ‘blue’ and ‘red’, so that the necessary solidarity of the have-nots has come to seem impossible. While this development was hastened, if not initiated, by the CIA from the late'60s, it's now been universalized by social media, which offers the illusory solace of a fierce sense of belonging, and enables each of us to vent ferociously against ‘Trump’, ‘Putin’, ‘Killary’, the ‘fascists’, ‘homophobes’, ‘anti-vaxxers’, ‘anti-semites’ or whatever other tribe we have to hate. Thus, Social Media transforms each one of us into prolific war-propagandists; and now that we're all ‘sheltering in place’, most of us have little else to do except flip out on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, 24/7 (Miller, personal communication).
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If imprisonment and slavery, therefore, began with the Auschwitz inmate tattooed with an analog Hollerith number (as Black's research reveals), the new slavery will end with a concentration camp prisoner microchipped in the global matrix with a digital number. The tools of the matrix are, at present, appearing everywhere, the smart cameras and sensors of the real world augmented by the goggles of virtual reality in the Internet of Things (IoT). They are pushed upon the people in clever marketing campaigns by the power elite. This inexorable march toward voluntary slavery in a new order of global economics should arrive as no surprise to those who have watched with unease the tools of big data applied to all products and commodities, both organic and inorganic.
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As of this writing, we see in the present COVID-19 Pandemic a clear path toward the “Brave New World” of “Big Digital”—the planned disappearance of hard currency and its replacement implanted in people mandated to be socially distant, the Microchip as big-tech savior resurrected by the “super-predators, [with] no conscience, no empathy [aiming to] bring [all] to heel” (Clinton, 1996).
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