From The Energy Of Slaves To The Latest Energy War

If in it's first phase, American wealth
was built on the energy of black African slaves,
which like industrial slavery across the world
had to be euphemised after it was ended,
to dignify a history that were it honestly told,
and accounted for fully, quoting the accountant's ledgers
it would be a self perpetuating cause for eternal shame.

The accounts of the discovery of coal, morse telegraphy,
and railways, though the American civil wars,
was the biggest demonstration of their uses
these three major new discoveries could be put to.

Where civil wars led, American corporations
led later where the imitation of life through peace,
but even more for indiviual profit, resided ever after.

Fracking for oil had barely been discovered
in America, so the civil war was the last war
where the control of oil was not
what the war fought over. That said....

The precedent of oil being the reason for the war,
the control of the energy the world  relied on,
had been set by arguments that justifying slavery
being at the core of why America went to civil war,
and the reason behind the Jim Crow laws after.

Fast forward umpteen wars over oil later,
and whilst oil is still the root cause
behind every global conflict in the world,
the world is now divided by digital conflicts.

There data is the new energy and and the more
data individuals put on line for the Tech Bros
to own, the more like the economic systems
of ownership that that once made slavery
the acme of Hellish levels of inequality 
the use of the internet is returning us to.

When we don't own what we write,
we are free to write what we want,
from '***k you' to 'I'm glad we agree',
but getting cotrol of the medium
you write it on has to be the aim.   

Anything else is being dishonest
about how little you/we all own
when we don't own our language.

Citizens of totalitarian countries
and empires already know this
and find it amost existentialist
to find how behind every fascade
and screen of their county's internet
it leads them back to their government,
from which they can never exit.  

Reasons For Disbelieving A.I. Pt 3

This advert on an electronic billboard in Bristol
Airport compounds everything about A.I. I distrust.
It is glossy and slick, it is for a service where the need
is less than the advertisers think, and the male minds
behind it have not thought further than female=cheaap
and practically infinite. When in the real world
 real women want men, want everyone to be real.
 Not fantasists mislead by the doom loops they create
       with technology they don't know they don't have control of.     

 

Money May Talk

And find an easy audience
for what it has to say, 
when it may well talk.

But it does not listen.

Is that why humans
so readily follow
where money goes:
to find the currency
of intentionally avoiding
listening to themselves?  

In These Days Of Post Modern Atheism

It is not the done thing to look too closely
at what Romans, Greeks, and Egytpians
might have believed, or the processes
by which those beliefs were made
to seem entirely natural and logical.

To modern minds those pagan gods,
with their complicated families lines
and love lives and erratic behaviour
have a lot to hide, seemed grotesque,
and lived lives as they were living out
some absurd revenge-driven soap opera.

But those old gods were not created out of nothing,
and were not created to merely amuse their followers.
The old gods were more than figures from history
where history was a hall of mirrors that was so ancient
and distorted we can't see from it what humans believed
about each other for how the gods were depicted as being.

There was an economic playbook that polytheism came with.

Statues and altars require skilled workmen to create them,
people who claim to prophesy the future require being paid.
Belief systems have to be integrated with economic systems,
and such integration required a playbook, to express in theatrical terms
the currency of belief. We ignore this playbook at our peril.

For when some modern demagogue rediscovers this playbook,
and reshapes how political power and modern finance works
according to it, the time for being reminded of the past will be gone:
we will be living it, barely recognising the we are the echo
of how it once worked. The near future of reliving the past
will be closer to us, and more part of how we live, than we thought it was.

Ars Longa Est, Vita Brevis Est

Cave art from caves in Spain.

Where we can't know when or how
the images became depicted on the cave walls

Or even the species that created them.

What we can guess is that the images they left were
what they might have dreamt about.

 If only our dreams could be made that simple
-then the future of the panet might be more assured.....

 

Dante's Guide To The Internet

Where the higher the number of the circle of Hell
in which you can locate your activities, the more you know
what you may be condemned for. Oddly enough
what I did not see listed there are the writers
of criminal viruses that affect many computers,
unawares. But maybe the whole thing is an infection
in itself and we cannot assume that there are saints
and good guys among the Billionaire tech giants,
that is credulity stretched too far.  

 

The Misleader Of The Free World

and his friends, the tech billionaires,
may own nearly everything a billionaire
could think to want. But what this new 
hyper-weathy generation do not have
is the what Roman Generals and Emperors
knew was very necessary: their persomal auriga,
the servant who was trusted to follow
the leaders as they were cheered on
by the crowds to whisper in their ears
phrases like 'Remember you are not a god', 
'Look behind you remember you are a man',
You are not Jupiter*', 'Fame is fleeting' 
and finally 'Momento mori', to remind
the great to limit how they were worshiped
by the masses from making them delusional.

*Jupiter was the Supreme Roman deity
for the sky, light, and for thunder.
He oversaw the laws, and social order.
He protected the Roman state.
and was depicted carrying a thunderbolt.
He was associated with the eagle.
As the Son of Saturn and Ops,
he was brother to Juno (his consort),
Vesta, Ceres, Neptune, and Pluto.
He overthrew his father, Saturn, to lead the Pantheon.