The Coming Techno Apocalypse
August 31, 2017
Imagine, if you will, a war in the near future. A war not fought between East and West. Not fought between nations, nor creeds nor races. A war fought brother to brother and sister to sister, father to son and mother to daughter.
Tesh (technologists) against
NonTesh (non-technologists).
The
Tesh, a tribe or caste intoxicated and socially validated through their umbilical connection to technology and the Meta/Hive Mind. Glued to
Google Glass, status permanently
updated: the
Tesh always offer the
right opinion at the
right time. Incapable of
nonGroupThink, the
Tesh occupy all positions of import in the professional, media, academic and information classes. Opinions counter to
Tesh GroupThink are not only by definition incorrect, they are also invisible – filtered, de-platformed and deleted into a silent nonexistence.
The
NonTesh are homeless, stateless non-people. Unable to participate in comfortable society’s rituals and prefabricated dialogues, without access to currency and the staid social discourse that lubricates function in the mainstream. They attack from the margins: wild wastelands, hardware graveyards and mountain ranges of landfill – zones abandoned by the
Tesh as beyond rehabilitation. The unknowing progeny of the much-maligned (but historically vindicated) Luddites, the
NonTesh build primitive Drone traps, savagely attack convoys of technicians and inflict random violence at the edges of
Tesh civilisation. They slaughter and destroy with no plan, no blueprint – a simple, intuitive anger and violence that
Tesh mainframe-algorithms cannot comprehend and struggle to strategise against.
This will be the Final War – man against machine and man against machine-man.
Trapped by Techno-Blindness?
The omniscient progress of technology brings with it many benefits – this is beyond serious doubt. But seldom if ever discussed is technology’s insidious and largely invisible detriments. They remain near-invisible for many reasons: commercial imperatives, an infantile inability to see past
convenience and short-term rewards and a surfeit of attractive and
entertaining distractions. Perhaps the most difficult to discern are those problems that might occur in the moral, predictive, philosophical or ideological realms: spheres apparently far less concrete than instant, addictive neurochemical rewards and the superficial and textural allure of consumer electronics.
Modern-era human society also appears rusted to the concept of progress – the idea that all technological advances are intrinsically positive whether immediate gains outweigh severe long-term deficits… or not.
The black silicon squid of hyper-technology sends its powerful tentacles into every domain of human activity, its vice-like grip stultifying thought and any hint of animalistic defensive counter-measures. Our species suffocates in the death-grasp, yet lacks even the primal survival instinct to respond effectively. Is humankind fatally trapped by techno-blindness?
Big Data & Psychographic Profiling
While essentially unknown to the general public, the astounding technologies of the London based firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) are credited by some as having a fundamental role in the 2016 election of US President Donald Trump and the ‘Leave’ campaign that led to the UK Brexit. CA trumpets proudly on its website and in its strategic communications that they “use data modelling and psychographic profiling to grow audiences, identify key influencers, and connect with people in ways that move them to action.”
Birthed at the nexus of leading Cambridge University Psychometric scientists and the SCL Group (self-described as a ‘global election management agency’), Cambridge Analytica works big data to identify and manipulate the intentions of mass voter populations.
According to CA Chief Executive, Alexander Nix,
“Today in the United States we have somewhere close to four or five thousand data points on every individual. So we model the personality of every adult across the United States, some 230 million people.” Harvesting Facebook ‘likes’, smartphone data, purchase histories, subscriptions, church visits, online and other available aggregate information, CA builds profiles of every individual in the target audience (i.e. every potential voter in the US during election season 2016) and generates a ‘psychographic analysis’ in combination with the OCEAN (‘openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism’) personality trait or ‘lexical hypothesis’ model to predict and influence the electoral actions of individuals.
As reported in the Swiss Das Magazin, with just ten Facebook ‘likes’ as input, CA could “appraise a person’s character better than an average coworker. With seventy, it could ‘know’ a subject better than a friend; with 150 likes, better than their parents. With 300 likes… (the) machine could predict a subject’s behaviour better than their partner. With even more likes it could exceed what a person thinks they know about themselves.”
Deployed in a number of developing nations, the SCL Group has worked extensively with military and political contacts in activities that
Slate magazine described as akin to a ‘coup’ scenario.
According to their website, “Cambridge Analytica is building a future where every individual can have a truly personal relationship with their favourite brands and causes by showing organisations not just where people are, but what they really care about and what drives their behaviour.”
(continues)
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Originally Posted by Brian4Liberty
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