PWP: Ponderings worth Pondering

Technology, Rhetoric, Capital Extremes

Excerpts with minor edits from Curtin, Rushkoff, Greenwald

E

dward Curtin is a writer, frequent contributor to Global Research-Ca; a professor of sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.

 Screened in Bubble of Noise

“Language has become debased beyond recognition” in the New York Times, Harvard, New Yorker, Martha’s Vineyard, Washington Post, Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, boardrooms of the ruling corporations, all corporate media, etc., world.

“In this [Orwellian] ‘Party’ world, the demonization, degradation, and killing of others is an abstraction; their lives are spectral” [shadowy, ghostlike]. 

Language its origin “the tongue,” “the tongue a bell tolling out its meaning”; springing from the body “is body language.”But “when language becomes abstract and devoid of blood, it becomes etiolated [bleached, altered in natural development, deprived of natural vigor] and unable to convey the truth that is the mystical body of the world. It becomes a viper’s tongue, dividing the ‘good’ people from the ‘bad’ so the good can eliminate the bad who have become abstractions.” 

“T

he United States is a pornographic society.… a commodified consciousness, where everyone and everything is part of a prostitution ring in the deepest sense of pornography’s meaning—for sale, bought”; and “consumed by getting, spending, and selling.  …

“People [have] become consumers of the unreal; direct experience is discouraged.  The natural world becomes an object to be conquered and used.  …Streaming life from Netflix or Facebook becomes life the movie.”

The mediated reality of screen society “distances people from fundamental reality. It promotes that reality through its screen fantasies.”

Almost dejectedly, Curtin asks,

Can we escape the forces of propaganda and mind control that run so very deep into American life? [Curtin]

D

ouglas Rushkoff  is a writer, documentarian, and lecturer whose work focuses on human autonomy in a digital age.

Extractors, Exploiters sans Ethics

The most devastating impact of “pedal-to-the-metal digital capitalism” falls “on the environment and global poor.

“The manufacture of some … computers and Smartphone[s] still uses networks of slave labor.…

[T]he mining of rare earth metals and disposal of … highly digital technologies destroys human habitats, replacing them with toxic waste dumps, which are then picked over by peasant children and their families, who sell usable materials back to the manufacturers.”

While the eyes may be covered “with VR goggles” and many may have immersed themselves “in an alternate reality,” the “‘out of sight, out of mind’ externalization of poverty and poison does not away.”

Check Extremes

“There’s nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology might benefit human society but the current drive for a post-human utopia”— “a quest to transcend all that is human: the body, interdependence, compassion, vulnerability, and complexity—is something else.” And “the longer we ignore the social, economic, and environmental repercussions, the more of a problem they become …,” resulting in

…even more withdrawal, more isolationism and apocalyptic fantasy — and more desperately concocted technologies and business plans. The cycle feeds itself.

“…We can become the individual consumers and profiles that our devices and platforms want us to be, or we can remember that the truly evolved human doesn’t go it alone.

Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It’s a team sport. Whatever future humans have, it will be together. [Rushkoff]

G

lenn Greenwald is an author, journalist, constitutional lawyer, and co-founding editor of “The Intercept” responding to hysteria and nay-saying surrounding the Russian-US Helsinki Summit

  

By all means Meet and Talk 

We deal with regimes all the time that are incredibly repressive. The United States government is often repressive.

We destroyed Iraq.

We set up a worldwide torture regime.

We still have a prison in Guantánamo where people have been imprisoned for 17 years on an island with no trial.

We have to deal with other countries that violate human rights.

Our own government engages in human rights abuses.

And the notion that “dialogue with other countries” legitimizes abuse of human rights “is the kind of rhetoric that the right used for seven decades to delegitimize attempts to reach peaceful negotiations with the Soviet Union.”

It goes without saying that the US must “fortify” its “computer systems” and institute “cyberdefenses.” But Americans must stop looking at the world through the prism of the US presidential election of 2016; and

look at it through The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock, now at two minutes before midnight, the worst rating since 1953 for the threat to humanity, largely because of the threat of nuclear weapons, along with climate change, that is in the hands of these two countries.

Let us “move away from the rhetoric that says it is treasonous or dangerous for us to meet and talk and have dialogue.” Let us “hope for more and more and more dialogue between Russia and the United States.”

Beyond hysterics

“We need to start asking questions” about whether institutions long held sacred (e.g., the WTO, EU, IMF, NATO) “are actually ones that are serving” the interests of countries, the US included.

“… Until we figure out how to solve the root causes that have given rise to ‘Trumpism’ and to [other] extremism …”; and confront the reality “that these institutions (e.g., the WTO, EU, IMF, NATO) are destroying the economic future of tens of millions and hundreds of millions of people in order to benefit the rich— we’re going to have more Trumps ….”

This is the “issue that is most being ignored” in all the hysterical post-Helsinki “rhetoric.” [Greenwald]

Ponderings worth Pondering!

Sources

Global Research. “The Prophecy of Orwell’s 1984. Totalitarian Control and the Entertainment Culture that Takes Over -The Sexual Passion of Orwell's Winston Smith” Edward Curtin July 20, 2018

https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prophecy-of-orwells-1984-totalitarian-control-and-the-entertainment-culture-that-takes-over/5647955

Medium. “Survival of the Richest: The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind” Douglas Rushkoff, July 5, 2018 https://medium.com/s/futurehuman/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0cc1

Democracy Now! “Debate: Is Trump-Putin Summit a ‘Danger to America’ or Crucial Diplomacy between Nuclear Powers?” Glenn Greenwald July 16, 2018, https://www.democracynow.org/2018/7/16/debate_is_trump_putin_summit_a_danger

Insight Beyond Today’s News, CLB