It has been getting harder and harder to produce essays every week these days. Sure, it was easy back in Lock-Down, as it is always easy to write during an apocalypse, but now is a different story. Yes, we may be heading towards civil war, or at least rioting in the streets that will make the past riots look like Memorial Day parades in small Midwestern towns, but that has become so normal, like nose rings and ear gages. Of which, could you imagine those things even in the 1970’s? Yet, we see these and other ‘body modifications’ just about every time we come to a fast-food window. I’ll have an order of full-body tattoo with my fries, please.
I digress. There are reasons for everything, whether they be good reasons or not, and of course I have my own. There is the thinking about editing my book Hurricane River for publication. With that I will probably go bi-monthly, but I have not started that yet. But there have been many camping trips, to make up for the few large ones we planned, and Fall chores, which, without planning, included splitting and stacking five chords of wood. That’s a lot. I still have bark scratches and pine sap stains on my arms to prove it. And so much more, but nothing as annoying as that boon to national security, Captcha.
As everyone in the world outside of the deepest jungles of the Amazon is more attuned to the cyber world than I, the reader probably knows what Captcha is. For those few who don’t, it is a test of identity that is given to one before one can enter their site of choice. It consists of a rectangle with nine sub-rectangles within it, each with a picture, the whole topped by a caption that reads something such as “Taxis.” Then one is supposed to check each rectangle that has a taxi in it. Supposedly, only humans can do this, so this eliminates bots and worms and all those other disgusting things that I know nothing about, those things that are set out on the world through the will of Satan to make a tough life that much tougher. Why can’t we all just “git along?”
But we can’t, and that is why they invented such inscrutable devices as Captcha. Or so they say. Personally I think there is something more, well, diabolical about this thing that is going on.
Programming. Everyone who took a psych class in high school or college knows about BF Skinner, who started the Behaviorist School of Psych, which insists that ALL of our behavior can be explained by programming though stimulus/response and reward/punishment. The greater world found problems with this position, and so it has been dethroned for some other reductionist atrocity, but there are a lot of people in the cyber world – our self-proclaimed geniuses of the day – who still cling to this theory like Midas to his gold. I recall some guy who had been one of the whizz kids on one of the big computer companies coming out a few years ago warning us of such programming through the likes of Facebook. Said he, to paraphrase, “We knew that allowing people to give others the ‘thumbs up’ would give the receiver an endorphin rush that would be addictive. We knew it, but we did it anyway, and I am here to warn you to keep Facebook and the like from your kids!” This guy was supposedly instrumental in the development of this scheme, and one could tell that he thought he was really, really smart and proud of it, but hey, you’ve got to help the idiots who fall for such genius schemes every now and then just to make it a little bit fairer. Oh, to have more such saints among us!
But anyway, these cyber guys are into programming us, and it has occurred to me recently that Captcha is just another of these genius ways to get us to move in their direction.
Here’s how it works: the pictures you are supposed to click on are sometimes obscure – is that a taxi or just a car? You sweat it out, wondering if you are supposed to click on all possibilities or just those that are clear. You go for the obscure one. Then you see that one taxi has the tiniest smidgen – ‘scintilla’ is the word our last president often used – of its bumper in another rectangle. It is so small that you really have to concentrate, but there it is, so you go for it. Then you click “enter” and hold your breath. Sometimes the rest of the document – in this case, my website – appears, but sometimes you get the “not available at this time” line. This lasts for at least an hour before you can try again. Then you finally get back to the testing point and see up top, “Previous Captcha verification failed.” Ah ha. Now you think you know that you should NOT click on the obscure. So you act on that next time. And then find that you fail just as often as before.
I include this as part of my excuse for not publishing every week on time, but the reasoning behind Captcha is more important than being excused for its idiosyncrasies. Way more, because it is obvious that you, me, and everyone who is saddled against his will to have to endure this trial simply to get into his own paid-for site, are being handled, manipulated, and trained. You come to sweat each encounter out; will I be able to publish in my site this time?, you ask. You question: are they doing this because they don’t like what you write? Are your political or cultural or social views being judged, and are you being punished for them? Or is it more like China’s way, to punish and not punish indiscriminately, so that you never know the rules? This puts you in a constant state of self-reflection. Is this right? Will I be judged positively or not? If you can’t figure out the reasoning behind the judgment, it is easier to control you, for you are forever questioning your motives and your actions, always a penitent before the inscrutable will of Big Tech. And they are so much smarter and powerful than you are.
So; where are they going with us once they have us groveling, trying to work out the unworkable tests being given us?, you ask. Well, if you had that power, where would you take the rest of the world? Why, you would take it anywhere you so desired. That could be to make others want to buy more of your product, or to vote liberal or conservative, or to favor a one-world government which would be run by the smartest people in the world, which would include you. After that, with the common idiot out of the way, what could possibly go wrong?
Or maybe it is simpler than that. Maybe the test is just a test to weed out bots and worms, and you are writing too much into it. But aren’t we all reading so much into our new cyber world? And could that not be the point to it all? That we believe we are being sucked down a hole that we cannot control, and so we long for someone to control it? Could it be, then, that the cyber world is creating its own demise through its own cleverness, or simple non-clever hubris?
I don’t know, but I do know that the seeds of destruction are built into any scheme that wishes to dominate in any way. Sooner or later, whether the dominant class is an aristocracy or simply our parents, the pedestal of power they use to dominate makes the rest of us look for cracks and weaknesses in it, and sooner or later we find it or them and tear the statue or company or state down. It is the way of the world. As is said, blessed be the meek. The cyber world will have its day of reckoning, even if the manipulation we suffer under is sometimes unintentional, and we will raise our fists in the air as Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are tarred and feathered and driven out of town, or at least (alas) are simply taxed properly for their mass accumulation of wealth, and the companies are regulated out of power. But then I will lose my excuse for being late, or skipping weeks of writing altogether, as new seeds of destruction are planted simply be shifting the balance of power back to me or to you or to that other guy.
We can only win in a universe beyond change and time, where all things and non-things are present forever. In many ways we have tried to define that realm, either in Zen or in God, but we know it is there and that is why we seek power. But power can never last in this world. Here, we are forever looking for the right floor but are forever pushing the wrong buttons – just as I continue to do with Captcha, hoping to find the reasoning, the key, that apparently does not exist. That is at the heart of conditioning, and the only way to win is to either not push the buttons, or not care for the results. If you can do that, you have outsmarted the smartest of them all without even trying. But first let me try again to get this published, just one more time.
It has been getting harder and harder to produce essays every week these days. Sure, it was easy back in Lock-Down, as it is always easy to write during an apocalypse, but now is a different story. Yes, we may be heading towards civil war, or at least rioting in the streets that will make the past riots look like Memorial Day parades in small Midwestern towns, but that has become so normal, like nose rings and ear gages. Of which, could you imagine those things even in the 1970’s? Yet, we see these and other ‘body modifications’ just about every time we come to a fast-food window. I’ll have an order of full-body tattoo with my fries, please.
I digress. There are reasons for everything, whether they be good reasons or not, and of course I have my own. There is the thinking about editing my book Hurricane River for publication. With that I will probably go bi-monthly, but I have not started that yet. But there have been many camping trips, to make up for the few large ones we planned, and Fall chores, which, without planning, included splitting and stacking five chords of wood. That’s a lot. I still have bark scratches and pine sap stains on my arms to prove it. And so much more, but nothing as annoying as that boon to national security, Captcha.
As everyone in the world outside of the deepest jungles of the Amazon is more attuned to the cyber world than I, the reader probably knows what Captcha is. For those few who don’t, it is a test of identity that is given to one before one can enter their site of choice. It consists of a rectangle with nine sub-rectangles within it, each with a picture, the whole topped by a caption that reads something such as “Taxis.” Then one is supposed to check each rectangle that has a taxi in it. Supposedly, only humans can do this, so this eliminates bots and worms and all those other disgusting things that I know nothing about, those things that are set out on the world through the will of Satan to make a tough life that much tougher. Why can’t we all just “git along?”
But we can’t, and that is why they invented such inscrutable devices as Captcha. Or so they say. Personally I think there is something more, well, diabolical about this thing that is going on.
Programming. Everyone who took a psych class in high school or college knows about BF Skinner, who started the Behaviorist School of Psych, which insists that ALL of our behavior can be explained by programming though stimulus/response and reward/punishment. The greater world found problems with this position, and so it has been dethroned for some other reductionist atrocity, but there are a lot of people in the cyber world – our self-proclaimed geniuses of the day – who still cling to this theory like Midas to his gold. I recall some guy who had been one of the whizz kids on one of the big computer companies coming out a few years ago warning us of such programming through the likes of Facebook. Said he, to paraphrase, “We knew that allowing people to give others the ‘thumbs up’ would give the receiver an endorphin rush that would be addictive. We knew it, but we did it anyway, and I am here to warn you to keep Facebook and the like from your kids!” This guy was supposedly instrumental in the development of this scheme, and one could tell that he thought he was really, really smart and proud of it, but hey, you’ve got to help the idiots who fall for such genius schemes every now and then just to make it a little bit fairer. Oh, to have more such saints among us!
But anyway, these cyber guys are into programming us, and it has occurred to me recently that Captcha is just another of these genius ways to get us to move in their direction.
Here’s how it works: the pictures you are supposed to click on are sometimes obscure – is that a taxi or just a car? You sweat it out, wondering if you are supposed to click on all possibilities or just those that are clear. You go for the obscure one. Then you see that one taxi has the tiniest smidgen – ‘scintilla’ is the word our last president often used – of its bumper in another rectangle. It is so small that you really have to concentrate, but there it is, so you go for it. Then you click “enter” and hold your breath. Sometimes the rest of the document – in this case, my website – appears, but sometimes you get the “not available at this time” line. This lasts for at least an hour before you can try again. Then you finally get back to the testing point and see up top, “Previous Captcha verification failed.” Ah ha. Now you think you know that you should NOT click on the obscure. So you act on that next time. And then find that you fail just as often as before.
I include this as part of my excuse for not publishing every week on time, but the reasoning behind Captcha is more important than being excused for its idiosyncrasies. Way more, because it is obvious that you, me, and everyone who is saddled against his will to have to endure this trial simply to get into his own paid-for site, are being handled, manipulated, and trained. You come to sweat each encounter out; will I be able to publish in my site this time?, you ask. You question: are they doing this because they don’t like what you write? Are your political or cultural or social views being judged, and are you being punished for them? Or is it more like China’s way, to punish and not punish indiscriminately, so that you never know the rules? This puts you in a constant state of self-reflection. Is this right? Will I be judged positively or not? If you can’t figure out the reasoning behind the judgment, it is easier to control you, for you are forever questioning your motives and your actions, always a penitent before the inscrutable will of Big Tech. And they are so much smarter and powerful than you are.
So; where are they going with us once they have us groveling, trying to work out the unworkable tests being given us?, you ask. Well, if you had that power, where would you take the rest of the world? Why, you would take it anywhere you so desired. That could be to make others want to buy more of your product, or to vote liberal or conservative, or to favor a one-world government which would be run by the smartest people in the world, which would include you. After that, with the common idiot out of the way, what could possibly go wrong?
Or maybe it is simpler than that. Maybe the test is just a test to weed out bots and worms, and you are writing too much into it. But aren’t we all reading so much into our new cyber world? And could that not be the point to it all? That we believe we are being sucked down a hole that we cannot control, and so we long for someone to control it? Could it be, then, that the cyber world is creating its own demise through its own cleverness, or simple non-clever hubris?
I don’t know, but I do know that the seeds of destruction are built into any scheme that wishes to dominate in any way. Sooner or later, whether the dominant class is an aristocracy or simply our parents, the pedestal of power they use to dominate makes the rest of us look for cracks and weaknesses in it, and sooner or later we find it or them and tear the statue or company or state down. It is the way of the world. As is said, blessed be the meek. The cyber world will have its day of reckoning, even if the manipulation we suffer under is sometimes unintentional, and we will raise our fists in the air as Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are tarred and feathered and driven out of town, or at least (alas) are simply taxed properly for their mass accumulation of wealth, and the companies are regulated out of power. But then I will lose my excuse for being late, or skipping weeks of writing altogether, as new seeds of destruction are planted simply be shifting the balance of power back to me or to you or to that other guy.
We can only win in a universe beyond change and time, where all things and non-things are present forever. In many ways we have tried to define that realm, either in Zen or in God, but we know it is there and that is why we seek power. But power can never last in this world. Here, we are forever looking for the right floor but are forever pushing the wrong buttons – just as I continue to do with Captcha, hoping to find the reasoning, the key, that apparently does not exist. That is at the heart of conditioning, and the only way to win is to either not push the buttons, or not care for the results. If you can do that, you have outsmarted the smartest of them all without even trying. But first let me try again to get this published, just one more time.
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