>>> print (‘Current technology grants people an amount of free time that they have never had in human history, which will only increase with automation. What we do with this free time will dictate whether or not the technological revolution will ultimately benefit society. A concerning trend then, is that the internet is increasingly monetizing our youngest generation’s attention span, converting time spent consuming content to expected sales with the help of data far more sophisticated than Nielsen ratings. This would be palatable if the content they were consuming was educational, but instead they are focused on social media likes, memes, and listicles, precisely because it’s easier to feed people advertisements and have them buy something if you are engaging their short-term attention spans that seek serotonin bites. Conversely, educational material is price gouged astronomically and publishers release new editions of textbooks every year to undercut the used book market, but the worst examples are online educational journal databases such as LexisNexis, Reed-Elsevier, and JSTOR, which charge exorbitantly for papers published by academics who have mostly conducted their research at public universities with grant money from taxpayers via the government. You have access to these journals through your college if you are an active student (probably taking on debt), but once you graduate you will have to pay a large fee to each different publisher for access to their content. Therefore, if you’re enrolled in a college or university, you should download and save as many PDFs of articles in your field as you can before you graduate. This is a devastating development considering the internet was originally intended as an instrument for sharing scientific research.

If we had our priorities straight as a society, we should subsidize educational material to make it free while taxing people for wasting their time. We should encourage self-motivated autodidacts and free up professors who would rather be conducting research in their field than grading papers. However, when people educate themselves, they empower themselves, and when they inevitably see problems with how the world is run, they will want to make changes. If you limit the amount of people who can empower themselves, then you have a better chance of convincing the few who can that they have entered the private club of the elite who will take care of you and your family for the rest of time as long as you promise to play by the rules of the club, which needs to limit access to have any chance of sustaining itself as the human population on earth balloons, and the high-paying professions need government protections (for example, in most states you have to pay for a law degree to sign up for the bar exam). This is the strategy of the current oligarchy that is clinging to the wealth and power they accumulated from the end of the Industrial Age. They are trying to imprint their model of profit consolidation on to personal computing devices by manipulating them to distract, confuse, propagandize, and surveil instead of utilizing these extraordinary machines to propel the stated goals of Western society for the past few centuries, which are, roughly: scientific progress, individual freedom, and class mobility.

Their latest brash attempt to harness control, which they tried to pass without anyone noticing, is this piece of legislation called the Stop Online Piracy Act, in which they have claimed the right to censor the internet by citing the danger that copyright infringement poses to our economy as a reason to grant them the ability to shut down any website at any time for allegations of imitation without due process so that they can knock out competition and monopolize information. This is equivalent to the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which allowed those private academic publishers to put a paywall in front of state-funded research. The latent malignancies of the United States’ privatizing response to the economic recession of the late 1970s are well-documented: increased income inequality, decreased class mobility, scientific innovation, and share of global GDP. Fortunately, the internet is inherently a democratic technology and is therefore able to defend itself through crowdsourcing opposition to intensely undemocratic initiatives.

The ages of humankind are usually named in terms of the resource that is most valuable to humanity in a given age: Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age… etc. These ages end when a new resource that is more efficient than the last comes along. This in turn causes political and economic upheaval (The Trojan War marked the end of the Bronze Age) and confusion for a time, while the old kings are replaced by new ones who control the production of the new, most efficient resource. The industrial age’s resource of choice was undoubtedly fossil fuels, which we know we have to move away from, not because there is a new, more efficient resource, but because we have discovered that our current usage of fossil fuels is detrimental to the earth’s environment. However, the oligarchy that has amassed wealth through the industrial age will not give up fossil fuels and their planned economy in which they control the means of profit. In the past, this historical shift would have meant war, but in the age of nuclear deterrence, there can be no wars between dominant world powers. Therefore, this current process of change will look unlike any other in human history.

I see three possible ways for us to shift out of the Industrial Age: reprioritization, innovation, catastrophe. Reprioritization would shift our striving for constant growth capitalism, which teaches us that consumption of goods make a life well lived, into a more sustainable striving, probably in the form of knowledge acquisition in the Information Age. Innovation to decrease carbon, methane, and nitrous oxide emissions through green energy, the basket in which we have currently placed all of our eggs (some might call that a “concentrated portfolio”), is possible, however we are playing a dangerous game since we are essentially putting innovation and its full acceptance and investment by society in a race against melting ice caps. Both reprioritization and innovation rely on humans having open access to information and so both are compromised if the majority of academic research is gatekept. Catastrophe will come to pass if we cannot shift direction fast enough, and right now, it looks as if we are on course par with the Titanic. There are no control groups for this massive science experiment we are conducting on the earth, we are wading into unknown territory, but nature balancing our carbon footprint herself will almost certainly cause more death and suffering than us shifting ourselves and could potentially bring an end to humanity. As it stands right now, I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up turning our bloated aircraft carriers into arks to survive the pending flood on which we will pray that earth will return to an environment that supports our outdated biology from the Holocene.

The current argument against open access is that our 20^th-century conception of intellectual property rights incentivizes innovation. Who would want to innovate if they can’t make money? However, when profit is proof of value in and of itself, then actual innovation becomes a hopeful byproduct of speculation. “Return on investment” is a fiscal measurement that detaches ethics, utility, and sustainability from the value of speculation. Someone else’s house foreclosure does not register on a subprime mortgage trader’s ledger until the system collapses and turns into a full-blown crisis. In the same vein, high-frequency securities trading focuses on small statistical patterns and anomalies as opposed to a product and its fundamentals. They argue that they are “increasing the efficiency of the market” when they allocate funds to maximize short-term profit, basing their claim on the wild assumption that market algorithms, which traders are influencing themselves by purchasing securities (big spenders are called “market movers”), are a reliable mirror of real-time, real-world dynamics and consequences. Is it more likely that statistical models of supply and demand are perfect representations of reality, or an excuse for reckless profiteering? Market volatility in the absence of an anomalous natural disaster speaks to the latter conclusion. Utopian fantasies of honest, complete, unbiased data about everything are obviously impossible. So if we accept that market value is often separate from actual innovation, and Tesla died destitute, then we need to question what it is that we are actually incentivizing.

Since current investment models are based on short-term profit, we are recklessly mortgaging our future for private wealth accrual under the implied delusion that a few men who selfishly streamline revenue into their bank accounts are more innovative than the collective intelligence of humanity. It is as if they are sponsoring a contest to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar where they are active participants, but only they get to see the jar, and then they write off everyone else’s guess as uninformed and eat all the jelly beans themselves.’

GrrrgglllRrrrggG…aaANNNGGGgggnnnngggGGGGGG…

awoken by pains, worse than ever

dolorem ipsum

ANNGGGGgggNNNgaaAAAAHnngggggg…

‘I believe that computers are extraordinary machines that can be a force for positive change (which people in power see as a threat and lobby to push legislation through congress so they can maintain control (but the internet is an inherently democratic technology that spreads information and transparency which gives it the ability to defend itself (unless the amount of information becomes overwhelming, unnavigable, and contradictory (but, as someone who can program a functional web that intuitively organizes information, as well as understand and articulate the implications, I can help give the internet a coherent collective voice.’

aannnggggggnggGgguuuhh

‘(however, sometimes I feel so sad and tired I can only watch TV (however, other times I have plenty of energy and can be highly productive (however, in order to produce energy I need to eat, and food is always followed by pain (but I can’t spend any more time in the hospital hooked into test tubes and tethered to a top-heavy pole with bad wheels (but if I eat only white food and manage my stress levels I can keep my stomach from flaring without doctors (but the stress of the government actively trying to make an example out of me to deter anonymous anarchic hackers is overwhelmingly stressful as it drains my energy and bank account (even though my end goal is not money nor anarchy but freedom of information, which helps maintain structure by creating a more truly merit-based system, instead of one that is only disguised as such, and perhaps access to this information would allow some upstart biologist to discover a cure for my stomach (but the government doesn’t see it that way and denied my plea agreement (so why should I continue to try to have a positive impact on this world when it’s a closed-loop slipknot where liberal and conservative policies fail because both function as a means to maintain power, we’re headed for catastrophe anyway (but why so serious? (I’m just kidding (just kidding (just kidding (no I’m not)))))))))))))))))).’)<<<