Thornton Blackmore
It has been said that the wizards and sages of ancient times once cast spells at the behest of ambitious kings. And so it follows that the despots of our day have supplanted the sorcerers of old with the high priests of technology in pursuit of their own political advantages.
Indeed, the technological innovations of our era have bestowed an almost Godlike omniscience and omnipotence upon the powers that shouldn’t be – the likes of which even Merlin could not have conjured for his King.
And, as is becoming increasingly apparent, the digitisation of our society, the migration toward online services, the fashionability of wearable tech and an insatiable appetite for consumer convenience while throwing caution to the wind, may have yielded more benefits for the establishment than they have for the masses.
Today’s ‘Smart Generation’ have become almost inseparable from their devices and are ever-increasingly enthralled by having a world of entertainment at their fingertips. Few are aware of how their immersion in digital reality is facilitating the evolution toward initiatives such as biometric digital identification and integrated digital payment systems based on social credit.
As such, the world now stands at the brink of the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, where the biomedical application of nanotech, cybernetic augmentation and the modification and patenting of the human genome are not only possibilities but are now the tangible objectives boasted by the World Economic Forum and enabled by our generation’s naive participation.
Bound in this way by illusory chains, the majority are enslaved by their own consent and are unwilling to free themselves, despite having every opportunity to do so.
Interestingly, a growing awareness of our generation’s addiction to smart devices and screen time has acknowledged that it is not simply a matter of convenience or content which is fueling our digital immersion, but in many cases the technological medium itself.
In an experiment by Herbert Krugman as far back as 1969, it was discovered that even short periods of television consumption were found to alter a viewer’s brainwaves from a Beta state associated with active reasoning to an Alpha state – one of relaxation and suggestibility somewhat akin to meditation or hypnosis.
According to Dana Gioia, the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts who has commented on declining American literacy rates:
Reading a book requires a degree of active attention and engagement. Indeed, reading itself is a progressive skill that depends on years of education and practice. By contrast, most electronic media such as television, recordings, and radio make fewer demands on their audiences, and often require no more than passive participation.
Even interactive electronic media, such as video games and the Internet, foster shorter attention spans and accelerated gratification. To lose such intellectual capabilities – and the many sorts of human continuity it allows – would constitute a vast cultural impoverishment.
Interestingly, when interviewed by Nick Bilton of the New York Times in 2010, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs admitted that “We limit how much technology our kids use at home” and that his own children had not used an iPad.
In an article for the New York Times in 2014, Bilton commented that:
I never asked Mr. Jobs what his children did instead of using the gadgets he built, so I reached out to Walter Isaacson, the author of “Steve Jobs,” who spent a lot of time at their home.
“Every evening Steve made a point of having dinner at the big long table in their kitchen, discussing books and history and a variety of things.” he said. “No one ever pulled out an iPad or computer. The kids did not seem addicted at all to devices.”
Bilton also wrote, These tech C.E.O.s seem to know something that the rest of us don’t. Indeed, the average consumer certainly would not be familiar with US patent 6,506,148 B2, lodged by Hendricus G Loos of California, in which the abstract reads:
Physiological effects have been observed in a human subject in response to stimulation of the skin with weak electro- magnetic fields that are pulsed with certain frequencies near 1?2 Hz or 2.4 Hz, such as to excite a sensory resonance. Many computer monitors and TV tubes, when displaying pulsed images, emit pulsed electromagnetic fields of sufficient amplitudes to cause such excitation. It is therefore possible to manipulate the nervous system of a subject by pulsing images displayed on a nearby computer monitor or TV set.
For the latter, the image pulsing may be imbedded in the program material, or it may be overlaid by modulating a video stream, either as an RF signal or as a video signal. The image displayed on a computer monitor may be pulsed effectively by a simple computer program. For certain monitors, pulsed electromagnetic fields capable of exciting sensory resonances in nearby subjects may be generated even as the displayed images are pulsed with subliminal intensity.
After all, those who are accustomed to dealing in deceit are often the masters of illusion. Or, as Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud and the so-called ‘Father of Public Relations’ wrote in his 1928 book Propaganda:
No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and cliches and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders.
And as we have now become aware, the television has been the single most important invention in regards to what Bernays referred to as the ‘manipulation of public opinion’.
Indeed, it was during lockdowns when confined to their living rooms that the State’s propaganda machine broadcast the fear-mongering Covid narrative into the minds of the public and it has often been quipped that the unvaccinated are those that don’t own a television at home.
As Roald Dahl, the famous children’s author so wisely wrote in his 1964 classic Charlie & the Chocolate Factory:
So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, Go throw your TV set away,
And in its place you can install
A lovely bookshelf on the wall.
Then fill the shelves with lots of books, Ignoring all the dirty looks,
The screams and yells, the bites and kicks, And children hitting you with sticks – Fear not, because we promise you
That, in about a week or two
Of having nothing else to do,
They’ll now begin to feel the need
Of having something good to read. And once they start – oh boy, oh boy!
You watch the slowly growing joy
That fills their hearts. They’ll grow so keen They’ll wonder what they’d ever seen
In that ridiculous machine,
That nauseating, foul, unclean.
Repulsive television screen!
