I often feel lost
in an accelerating world,
staggering through streets
filled with O2 touch screens.
Youtube fame and insane love.
Tinder to burn to a cinder
those lonely nights,
which I don't really mind.
A face-off fight on Facebook,
with pointless opinion junkies
spunking their ideals like
masturbating monkeys.
Skype gets me psyched up -
talking to friends in China
Bulgaria, Guatemala, North Carolina.
We feed a schism growing a
prism of the techno-biological.
As algorithms guide you to what your
keywords indicate.
As algorithms decide your interests,
and infest your feed
with a subconscious singularity.
Feeding us disinformation about all of the Isms.
Communism, apathetic-ism, anarchism, capitalism.
Judaism, Christian-ism, Muslim-ism,
the self-made church of Aquarianism.
What about the Isms?
Arguably religion is a dying bird,
wings clipped, grounded by science
and this may not be a bad thing,
as long as we don't replace it
with a technological enhanced
religion to feed us ignorance.
What do you expect when you check-in
to this insanity every day?
We’ve lost the way, of thinking for ourselves.
Now we have daddy Google.
<h2>AMEN</h2>
This poem was written in response to an argument I had with a completely insane flat-earther on Facebook one evening, where every single argument, every science-based fact I pointed out to them, they declaimed as 'fake news' and accused me of being part of some type of liberal elite conspiracy of some sort.
Nothing could be further from the truth, if I have any political affiliation it would be that of the word I made up in this poem... I would prescribe to the ideology of apathetic-ism, or possibly at a push some type of communal anarchism which is decentralized to a point where no one person can ever remain in a position of power in any community for more than a year or two. Lol, which would take some doing in the modern world, or perhaps we should let the AI's run things because fck knows we're creating a shitpile of our own planet rapidly through our own governance models.
Anyway, I argued with this flat-earth maniac not because I really wanted to change their mind, it was simply an exercise in intellectual trolling. And when I really thought about that, about what I was doing wasting my time on Facebook, a platform that is set up to create greater division between groups and therefore creates more argument/engagement on their insidious platform, it suddenly struck me.
I need to wipe myself off the face of Facebook. And so with a whistle and a smile, I deleted Whatsapp and deactivated my Facebook account and I've not felt so focused on the important things in life in years.
My Google feed is no longer filled with targeted articles fed to it through Meta's (Facebook rebrand) monopoly of invasive tracking to Google AdSense, to make sure we all focus on our problems and divisions.
Do you know what I have found?
A measure of freedom I haven't felt since before the 2000's.
I am old enough to have been born, and grown up until my teenage years, without the internet or smartphones. So I feel like I can see the issues of insidious tracking that has crept into our technocracy quite clearly.
We used to use technology exclusively as tools under our control, which is shifting now due to powerful monopolies like Google and the major social media giants into a case where for the most part the line between who is the tool is becoming increasingly blurred.
It is this withdrawal from social media and the benefits that I've felt which led to writing this poem and Prayer for the Modern World. I'm sure some people can ignore their Google feed tracking, and Facebook timeline targeted advertising easily, and good for them. But I'm just not built that way, as soon as I realized by reading through Whatsapp's Ts+Cs fully after Facebook acquired the company, I realized that the next level of tracking was underway. If you don't believe me try talking about a certain subject consistently through voice messages on WhatsApp for a week, and then check what has happened to both your Google feed and Facebook timeline advertising.
Thanks for reading 🙂
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