Your second life has in many ways become more interesting than your first. In any moment you can have any girl you want naked, you can pretend to be whoever you want, in whatever community you aspire to be a part of. In a moment you can buy whatever you desire without leaving the home or combing through market shelves. You can work from home, sell from home, find transportation, create art, all from the comfort of a desktop.
Computers have brought a technological revolution, there is now doubt, but for infrastructures, secret documents and private information to be so freely passed around and stored, make no mistake, this revolution could be crippled by Contras. In less than a generation we have plugged ourselves in, put everything at stake, for an alternate reality. A smokescreen.
I remember all too well how devastated I was when my first laptop melted down. All of my music, writings, pictures, everything I worked so hard on, gone without warning. Not only did I lose my documents forever, but I lost an expensive machine, one hard to replace. I felt cut off from society in so many ways until I bought a new computer, for the price of a low-end used car. A fragile piece of plastic, filled with manipulated sands and tiny slivers of weak materials, all carefully fused together to project a false reality and sense of comfort or power.
Last night at the pub I discussed how "I could not imagine college without the internet", and today I woke up understanding how most people in first world countries, could not imagine life without the internet. The notion is somewhat terrifying.
As a society we are in a cyber war. The powers that be understand how empowering the internet can be from an informational perspective, and it seems they do anything in their power to give credit to horrible articles posted by borderline illiterate writers. In other countries, the internet is sparking revolutions and sparking free thought, but not in America, at least not on as large of a scale. Half of the material on major network sites like CNN are just quick disinformation blurbs with poor editing and worse reasoning, and unfortunately FOX and the likes have managed through their age to establish credibility. The middle aged are using the internet as a fast way to ruin their marriages, and young adults for the most part are finding themselves at the pinnacle of entertainment via the wondrous net. Countless, pointless hours on Candy Crush or Farmville, Facebook or other fruitless software. But it is the youth that is truly at risk. I worked for a while at a local YMCA after-school program, and currently work in a restaurant, and see what large parts of this next generation is becoming...mush.
The kids I tried to mentor didn't want to go on the bike path, they didn't want to play basketball or ping-pong, they didn't want to do anything physical. We had X-box's, Playstations, Wii, Nintendo 64, and about any other console you could think of...but they didn't want to enjoy the laziness of social gaming with others. The kids sat by themselves, ignoring any attempt I made to speak with them about life, their future, school, their teachers, anything attached to reality. I'll never forget the strange feeling of seeing young kids so plugged in to personal devices, bright screens never further than a foot from their faces.
Apologists can say "kids will be kids" or "they will grow out of it", and to them I say, you are just as ignorant of reality as these mindless children. This tech is new in the scope of things, I'm still considered young at twenty-eight, and the internet wasn't widely accessible until I was in my early teens. I experienced a real childhood, I met kids from the neighborhood, played games, rode bikes, broke things, caused trouble, played in the woods, partook in all the typical American adolescent endeavors. These kids aren't going to grow out of this phase, they have grown into it.
I judge my peers who play video games for countless hours, it's a waste of time in this short-lived life, and while you may have a "top-100 kill count" on your favorite device, you have actually produced nothing real in the physical, just bragging rights to who is best at diverting attention from real problems. This gaming culture is so wide, that isn't considered nerdy anymore, grown men who do nothing but game are getting laid, in fact, they are a majority of males in their mid-twenties to thirties at this point.
There is a war taking place for the human mind, an assault on all fronts, sensory overload for most us. We are unable to produce thoughts, find words or obtain information, because we rely so heavily on videos to instruct us, Google to guide us, and Wikipedia to tell us. Imagine if our "laptop" shut down for the first time. An EMP, perhaps a real attack from one of the international enemies our Government has created since we've been sleeping, out in reality, with real guns, plans, economic strife, and political philosophy. We have been warned over and over by top ranking officials about how weak our infrastructure is, how fragile our power grid.
There is a large, worthless population in the United States, they don't formulate their own opinions, they are oblivious to what is going on around them, they are empathetic, they are pathetic. We have an obesity outbreak unseen in human History. It isn't genetic, it hasn't been a part of our DNA for thousands of years of existence. There are people who can't even wipe their own asses, let alone survive without the grid. Building a fire, hunting, building shelter, any of the skills needed to survive out in the real world of nature, are known by few. A lot of Americans would rather die than try to survive, out of shear laziness.
Some of us are on the front-lines of existence, learning Historical truths we were lied to about in school, staying up to date instantaneously on world events, being aware of our surroundings like never before. We are learning how to fix engines, build fires in multiple variations, create food, decipher what we can and can't eat. We are learning how to fight, how to assemble weapons, how make things, how to share. We are paying attention to which legislators are passing which bills, what these bills mean, how they affect us. We are using the internet to empower us, as it should, and how to survive without it if we must.
In your second life you are constantly spied on, you voluntarily give up all of your privacy without any cares. Your credit, bank accounts, social security numbers are all floating somewhere; waiting to be plucked by any criminal with knowledge of computers. You willingly profile yourself on social media, you tell everyone where you are and who with, your phone and random applications ask if they can access your location and you agree. Youtube wants to link to Facebook and Twitter, with your email and Netflix. The NSA knows who you are, where you are, who you speak to, what you texted, what music you listen to, what your political ideologies are, what videos you watch, what you've learned, what you believe, and who you aspire to be. This kind of intel gathering makes tyrants and generals alike salivate.
A few years ago, talking about domestic spying made you a "conspiracy theorist", doesn't matter how deep you dug into the facts, how well you understood the laws, how the government spelled out exactly what it was going to do. It didn't matter that protesters were constantly photographed and filmed for facial recognition databases by the police, didn't matter that more and more cameras appeared above traffic lights and on street corners without public consent. It's been the elephant in the room for some of us since The Patriot Act arrived during Bush's reign. We knew exactly what would happen. Wartime surveillance, wartime restrictions on personal freedom. They told us then, these things would be implemented, because we were at war. Our President told us the war could be one-hundred years long, or for their rest of our lives. But still, just speaking about these laws meant you were steeped in conspiracy, or potentially had a mental illness, or potentially were going off the deep end, or potentially a domestic terrorist...just for listening and remembering what you were told.
Enter Edward Snowden. Suddenly the claims of many become legitimate, years after programs were already implemented, and the ignorant continued to play ignorant. "We didn't know". Snowden didn't tell "We The People" anything dangerous, he told us we have no privacy, that we are constantly monitored by the NSA and CIA, he only told us what The Patriot Act already told those who read it, the difference now is media outlets decided to report on Snowden. Oddly enough it was print journalism (a business that is dying) which broke the story. Not our worthless 24 hour news stations, or their illiterate bloggers, that make livings from disinformation or no information. But it makes sense doesn't it? That the historically most honest form of media is dying during the War on Terror, during a war that has held the notion of peace on Earth hostage.
Our Government didn't come forward and have a discussion with America after the media finally did it's job and reported news, they hunted Snowden, called him a traitor and told any country that harbored him it would strain relations with the U.S. The government once again did the wrong thing, like an abusive boyfriend who beats you then says he loves you, right before a stiff right-cross. Our government constantly reminds us they are here to protect us, and then they smack us in the mouth. Occupy Wall Street got disciplined pretty well, the backhand of suppressed speech.
Bradley Manning released documents about the War in Iraq, and is still imprisoned indefinitely, one can assume, he's been beaten and tortured by some of his captors. Manning, like Snowden, believed he was doing the right thing, informing the American public about the wrongs of it's government. In order for a Democracy to operate properly, should it not be informed?
Manning, has been, like Snowden, seen as a traitor. A young life IS over because he released a video entitled "Collateral Murder". The video shows the true face of our War in Iraq, or war in general. Innocents being killed by air-fire, bodies desecrated by tanks. This isn't new. Once upon a time when television news mattered, reporters were on the ground in Vietnam, and viewers got to witness what war looked like, they didn't like it, and mass protests ensued. Since then, the government has never made the mistake of letting the true face of war be televised.
To the average American, they only believe what they see, once again, they are fucking lazy, and rely heavily on video, possibly the easiest medium to contort truth through. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis haven't died out of the blue since 2004, it's been brutal. Bush and company sold us the war, told us we had to defeat terrorists, that we had to stop them from getting weapons of mass destruction, that Hussein was direct threat, but then they hid the truth, and managed to even hide a war. The private contractors, the Halliburton profits, the civilians death toll, the lack of a real military strategy, goal, or plan after the invasion. Just like the massive surveillance of American citizens, it was all hidden. Maybe on Facebook or Twitter these actions were reprimanded, in our second life, but in reality...there has been no accountability these traitorous deceptions.
Snowden and Manning didn't give up locations or war strategy, they didn't release highly classified materials, they tried to tell us what is really happening in these wars and surveillance programs we are paying for, we are part of them, we are executioners and participants in the death of freedom we once had, freedom of privacy. Manning, once again was a Private, he didn't have access to much in regards to ground-breaking information, he's as low as you can get on the wire. Our government and President told us these were serious breaches of National Security, and vilified men moved by their moral code, men who only showed loyalty to their countrymen. They sacrificed themselves just to whisper truth in the ear of a Nation where truth is being stamped out. Get back to your second life America, we have reality under control. Plug back in, It's for your own good.
It's hard to believe anything we are told anymore, in the real or second life. That's the nature of war. Soldiers don't know if they are good or bad, or what side of History they will fall on. Anonymous was championed by many for uncovering truths and battling corporate entities around the world in their second lives, and the thirteen members who have been arrested will be punished no doubt to the full extent of the law in their first lives. Our Global War on Terror has turned inside out, or maybe it's just finally exposed what it really is, a war with ourselves, a war with our own identity. A war between our first and second lives.
