Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts
I remember when the telephone was a useful and appreciated device. The digital revolution, one of humanity’s most unfortunate developments, has turned the telephone into a nuisance and a threat.
The telephone is such a nuisance that most people no longer answer when it rings or even bother to set up the feature to record phone messages. The telephone is such a nuisance that many people do not even use it for calls. Instead, they text, and they only answer texts.
Ninety-five percent of the calls I get are scams, tele-marketing and robo-marketing calls. The telephone is a constant disruption. I don’t answer and rely on the answering machine.
No one I call answers either. Not even businesses. Recently I telephoned the diagnostic center, where tests are done as part of my annual checkup, to confirm the appointment. A long recording in two languages explained everything I had no need to know, but it was impossible to communicate with any live person at the diagnostic center. I could go online, get an apt, create a portal and establish a communication connection. In other words, what the telephone formerly dealt with in 30 seconds now took an hour or two just to set up a method of asking the question. The robot on the other end didn’t say how long I would wait for a reply.
Everyone must have noticed by now that whether you call your bank, credit card company or utility company, reaching a live person is the most difficult and most frustrating task of your day. Everyone has noticed that the recorded message tells you that “we are experiencing an unusual call volume at this time. Your wait time is one hour and 45 minutes. Stay on the line or leave a callback number and we will call you in approximately one hour 45 minutes.”
I can remember when if you called bank, utility, or credit card company, the call was answered by the third ring and the person you reached could resolve whatever problem or question you had.
The digital revolution made it possible for companies to impose costs of doing business on their customers. It is your time that is used up listening to recorded messages of no value to you and awaiting a callback. Often the callback person isn’t trained to handle your question, and you go through the process again.
The digital revolution has turned the telephone into a device that governments and corporations use to spy on you. Privacy is a thing of the past. It is unknown today, and the word itself will probably disappear from the vocabulary. Telephones today are used as computers to constantly surf the Internet. Your visits are recorded and your revealed interests are sold to marketers and, if suspicious, authorities are alerted. Whatever people are doing, walking on the beach, sitting in a bar, eating in a restaurant, driving a car, working on a job, or attending a meeting, the telephone is ubiquitous as the thumb scrolls the page. But its original use–to communicate with another human–is passé.
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My wife had some company arrive yesterday for a short vacation, she hadn’t seem these folks in quite sometime.
Since arrival they are on their phones constantly, before dinner drinks,dinner , after dinner desert and drinks….Oh there s some conversation but it is secondary, they are focused on their phones…
I find it interesting that phones monopolizing lives and society is rarely discussed..
I used to watch the teen grandkids sit in the living room with the rest of the family while passing texts to each other. I suspect they were making fun of the older folks.
A number of years back a little bar I used to frequent in Florida had a phone rule. Either turn your phone off, or if you wanted to leave it on you put on the bar, the first guy to pick the phone had to buy a round. That changed after the bar was sold and the new people wanted to attract a younger crowd. We used to be able to converse in the bars, most of them, not so much these days.
After the initial shock and die off a global EMP might be the greatest liberation mankind has ever known since humanity drew it’s first breath. Science and technology has become the enemy of all humanity.
Our technology will be what ends this cycle of civilization. We are not ‘evolved’ enough to handle the capabilities it provides. It makes me wonder whether some malevolent entity seeded us with the tech to start down this road.
You know it.
I quoted the Book of Enoch yesterday on another thread. May as well follow suit here:
Chapter 8
1 And Azazel taught men to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates, and made known to them the metals of the earth and the art of working them, … Semjaza taught enchantments, and root-cuttings, ‘Armaros the resolving of enchantments, Baraqijal (taught) astrology, Kokabel the constellations, …
and Steevjobsael taught mankind the use of the smartphone.
It certainly is a nuisance and a threat. I hardly ever use mine and keep it as far from my body as possible when I am not using it. The digital revolution has been a double edged sword. Much of its impact has been detrimental to mankind.
The UNABOMBER was right !
The Amish had that part figured out from the beginning.
Evil Putler must be stopped. President Poopy Pants should call his bluff and launch US Democracy of Love missile. Global democracy must not be threatened…reeeeee
Oh, hell! Russia launches (((diabolical))) new ‘Satan’ missile
“Most worryingly, the separate warheads in the Satan 2 missile are capable of detaching from the main 100-ton missile before traveling towards their target at hypersonic speeds,” the report said.
The Daily Mail said the test launch was of Russia’s “next-generation” missile that Putin already has called “invincible.”
https://www.wnd.com/2022/04/oh-putin-launches-diabolical-new-satan-missile/
Satan is the NATO designation of the missile, not Russia’s.
Tells you where NATO stands…
The RS-28 Sarmat (Russian: Сармат), named after the Sarmatians; ….sometimes colloquially known in the West as the “Satan II”
– Wikipedia
Sure thing. Let’s make an attempt to kill all Americans even faster than the clot shots are going to.
I haven’t had a cell phone for 20 years, since I first realized everyone wanted me to get one for their convenience. These days people are truly surprised to find I don’t have a cell phone, and just use VOIP at home.
I have an old flip phone that I turn on when I want to make a call. No data programs or apps. Just the ability to call someone. I am sure it may have more tech than I am aware of but nobody calls or texts me.
Same here. Old flip phone that I pay $5 a month for 20 minutes – and don’t even use that many minutes per month!
Join the Reactionary Retroculture.
Done, … and done.
I tend to leave mine at home. I get to sound like an old fart telling my kids about how I lived without one for years. I delivered freight nationwide for years just using a payphone and writing directions on a pad of paper.
No GPS or digital map. Just a paper map book.
I seem to remember an article here about how the Chinese tracked people through their phones, I imagine your conversations could be listened to by the microphone on your cell phone. All the freedom fighters/terrorists get tracked by their phones also.
I find it rude when I see people at a restaurant staring at their phones. I’ve actually looked at strangers’ kids and commented about how their folks take them out to eat and their kids ignore them and stare at their phones instead, or a game on their phone is more important than their family. The pussy parents agree with me but don’t say anything to their kids.
My kids have pointed out that teenagers ask people out by texting them or also break up with them with a text.
Some fukin world we live in.
The newest way to isolate is at the local grocery store, you can order your groceries online and get a discount. They pull the groceries for you and you pull your car up to a special parking spot and they wheel the groceries out to your car. I was told many people use this service now. To the point of it being annoying for the store and the store having employees set aside for this. I guess people pay with a credit card in advance. I personally enjoy picking my own food in person.
There’s nothing I miss more than phone booths when I didn’t have to listen to people all by themselves LOUDLY ranting, cackling, bellowing into our common space…. especially inside stores, not to mention middle of nowhere parks and hikes.
I just LOVE calling businesses who don’t answer the phone. Once I find one I add it my list — which now sits at 36 — and I call then every day. Oh, you want to know why? It’s because they all start out by saying “Your phone call is very important to us ..”. Imagine that! MY phone call is important to someone!! Not like anyone here ever gives a damn about what I have to say anymore. So, you can bet yer sweet ass I’m calling those good people to whom I matter. They like me and I like them.
The other thing to notice is how damned hard they work to get the message exactly right. 98 out of 100 times they will also say —> “Please listen carefully as our menu options have changed recently”. I’m picturing this poor scrawny Mexican busting her hoohoo day after day making damned sure she leaves the right message just for ME. You hardly find Customer Service like that anymore.
Text messages are going the same way, and much of what I get is Republicans asking for money.
Sorry folks, I got off the RINO train 20 years ago. R or D, 90% of the politicians are liars, cheats, and self-serving big government loving statists.
PCR bemoans the inability of speaking to a real person.
I love not having to deal with a meatsack idiot.
Machines require simple inputs to provide you with an output.
Figure the inputs required, and you can customize your output.
No social engineering required.
No fat cow bureaucrat giving you the suspicious side glance that something might be askew.
How do you think hundreds of millions of dollars were swindled out of state unemployment coffers at the beginning of the scamdemic?
Every sword has two edges.
Your government views you as a criminal.
Be the best criminal you can be.
“Your government views you as a criminal. Be the best criminal you can be.”
so … join them?
Saw Joe Rogan last night and they locked up our phones (per his request) …because it’s 2022 and all. Was without my phone for about 3 hours and was just fine!
Btw…hilarious show. He had 3 opening acts…all of them were great. Didn’t really want to go initially, but turned out better than I thought. Recommended if you get the opportunity.
Used to be no one had a phone at any event of any sort.
“Language, of course, is generally employed by human beings to distract or deceive. So there is much to be said for critical listening.” ~ David Mamet
To start at an arbitrary current in the tech stream, what did the telegraph telegraph? And was the informessage new?
I saw a Tesla car with the vanity plate “LUDDITE.”
And the first town to get city-wide telephone service was Deadwood, SD, in 1878, just one year after the whitehouse got it.
Mining, including now, & for longer than it’s been a thing, “data” is extractive. Miners rape the land, as David Milch put it.
Spooner put the whitehouse’s Post Office mining operation to shame, & was, of course, forced to shut down.
Mamet, again: “Employees are now referred to as human resources. The folks described are the same, but the difference is semantic, which is to say, in the way they are considered, and. So, treated. What does one do with employees? One pays them. What does one do with resources? One exploits them.”
But “language.” Don’t forget. Try not, at least.
Yesterday was the anniversary of the Ludlow Massacre. I doubt “human resources” had entered the lexicion in 1914. Semantics? All due respect, fuck off.
The semaphore has been as continuous as it has been clear. Whether this one times a few or that one times billions can “hear me now” is irrelevant to the informessaging, & to the informessengers.
PS The Wire is a fun binge-watch.
Garrote aspect is also just the language laying its hand face up on the table for the added pleasures/adistic gained from rubbing the sucker-masochists’ faces in their own impotence.
Like Michael Kenneth Williams, resting in the peace of his own impotence. Shot down by a little kid – telegraphy, & all is Benjamin Button•eness:
Thank you,for sending me deeper into the rabbit hole.
One of the best decisions I have made is getting a Answering Machine for the Home Phone. Now I never run upstairs to answer the Phone only to find its a Telemarketer on the other end.
Got to look at the good side, too. Have you noticed how EASY IT IS to BLOCK a number?
Oh, YEAH!!! And take that, Mr. Salesman.