A rogues gallery, mugshots in line,
Induced memories make who we are
Who we were at the beginning.
Intellect fades, hidden in code.
Behind the page, on the face of it,
What appears is trite and banal,
Shallow or caustic, every word
Of wisdom is a whimper.
Reaching through nano-space,
Through its interconnected tissue of lies,
Truth decays to falsehood.
Reality is faked
In the fraction of a second it takes
To compress one harvested moment.
Only the image is left:
A pixelated projection of essence,
Digital residue, already simplified
Beyond belief, simplified:
Palpable to implacable,
Solid to smoke and mirror.
In the code-world, machine intelligences
Decipher us, deconstruct us; cold analytics
At their masters’ bidding, calculate
Our virtual selves: encoded prisoners,
Humanity made algebraic, free will Boolean,
Now on, now off, yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir,
As many terabytes as it takes to keep us in chains.
Monetised unto death, all flesh is weakened.
The soul’s immolation migrates to a dead heaven
Cooling in server farms beneath a distant sea.
And we are the drowned, drenched voyagers
Who thought cyberspace was our own domain
When we were only the taps and clicks in its wires:
Tomorrow’s microwaves on an ocean of information
Beneath which the writ of habeus corpus does not run.
No bodies are buried there,
Only memory survives,
Atrophied and fossilized
Like the coral our brains become.
© BH, 2018
Finally, Facebook. The love-hate goes on and I wonder at the complicity of the systems and the people behind them. The techies, the digital celebrities and, let's not forget, the marketing people, the corporations and all the money-mongers. I doubt if they see past the buck at what their income streaming obsession does to all us addicts. Sheesh! If it was smack or crack, there'd be laws…
This is the third in the series about enslavement by device, totalitarianism of telecoms, mesmerism by machine intelligence.
The image is myself disguised as a Zuckerberg. Yes, that's me under the mask but my specs are on top of it as is my very own beard. I was surprised to see just how big the Zuckerberg's lugs are. Interesting.
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