It was roughly 04-00 AM after the pressure on my bowels forced me to enter our WC where I sat and pondered about what I was thinking whilst hoping not to venture into our dark corridor without attempting to contact Google, Bing, Facebook, X-Twitter, Linkedin. After plonking myself on the WC-seat did I commence to analyse what I and the rest of the world have become; I-Slaves, and that was without any thoughts flashing through my mind pertaining to the brain-deadly, AI (for those who still are Neanderthals, Artificial Intelligence).
In those moments of utter confusion I realised I had actually succumbed to the fact that my persona (sometimes non, sometimes grata) altered over the last fifteen to twenty years, and my mindset of independent, free-thinking, rather rebellious, anarchist morals had been swept away in a tsunami of 'Google it', 'Bing it', 'Facebook it', 'X-Twitter it', 'Linkedin it', etc, Moreover, my precious Encyclopedia Britannica was now buried alongside a mummified version of an Egyptian Pharaoh gradually metamorphosing into a timeless grain of sand, thank you Google.
Hours later I descended our wooden stairway, took Lunar, our dog, for a walk, knocked up a smoothie for the missus, and myself (really healthy stuff), and with my fingers beginning to shake, I leapt onto my laptop to find out what is happening in the world, review my bank account, check up on my minor ailments (non-cancerous, luckily), send a few Emails, pitch my latest manuscript to global publishers, hoping for redemption in the shark-infested publishing world, finish off my latest effort, which without Google could never have been completed (Medical Terminology is like Cantonese to my thick head); thank you Larry Page and Sergey Brin, or even Steve Ballmer's, Bing for making my I-Slavery so transparent that it even haunts me while sitting on the bog!
It is now the time in Homo-Sapien anthropological history to admit humans are all I-Slaves! There is no escape! We are incarcerated in the 'intellectual freedom' given to us by the inventors of I-Technology, social-media, Tik-Tok (sad for the younger ones), FB, Twitter, Instagram, millions of apps, and downloads! No we are not being whiplashed like our brethren from the African continent once were. We are not locked in chains in the stinking bowels of wooden ships sailing from Africa to the 'New World'. No, we are not Ben Hur's rowing profusely chained to our oars and being whipped by Roman Slave Drivers, or being fed to the lions in Rome's Colosseum. No, none of that barbaric treatment is being dished out by our hi-tec slave drivers. However, fact remains, we are all their slaves, and if you do not believe me, GOOGLE IT!
Resume: Transparency is a 'god-send', living in foggy notions of hi-tec, and even worse, AI (which is about to make our brains even more dead than they are) and believing we are all FREE, is surreal fantasy; no! We are all I-Slaves, and I dare anybody who reads this divulgence of utter surrender to THEM, to book their 5* hotel without Googling it first!
Greetings from Kunta Kinte.
Our fingers and minds are chained to our keyboards, there is no ESCAPE!
This is a horribly depressing testimony to our lives with the internet. It was suppose to make it possible to extend our horizons but, instead it has caused laziness, illiteracy and addiction. What a sad state of affairs.