The boutique trending science fiction narrative twenty years ago was to install a color blind individual as a public official and change the font color in important documents to render controversial legislation invisible. While technology and innovation have ascended at the speed of light, as critical thinking skills have proportionally disappeared and strategically terminated logic, basic reading comprehension is the latest casualty of an aggressive societal engineering campaign, the addiction to the smartphone, and the unrelenting pedestal furnished for the masses by social media.
In a recent “click-bait” article from the daily dot promoted by MSN, this disturbing phenomenon is perfectly illustrated by a blatantly misleading headline, and the reactionary tendencies of online commentators. The fluff piece involves an alleged NASA engineer spending above her means utilizing Chinese state owned Tiktok to brazenly announce that she is getting a second job at a retailer to supplement her recreation budget. Of course the streaming video testimonial produced by “sexybabypartygirl” generated over 3 million hits, and the residual digital baggage of vapid responses by uninformed individuals incapable of original thought.
Curiously, the author deliberately included unattributed message board feedback in the title, making it appear that the space agency employee was bashing Capitalism. Disingenuously the headline “‘Capitalism has failed us’: NASA engineer gets second job at Tiffany’s in the mall, sparking debate” was allowed to go live prompting both backlash and praise from the peanut gallery, even though the article’s subject clearly explains that her desire is make some play money, and that NASA does indeed more than adequately compensate. With the prevalence of blind obedience to extremism and bots overwhelming the remaining shred of electronic integrity, the chasm between the common man and the enlightened has never been as vast in the history of mankind.
While instant gratification is spawned by a public education system afflicted by bureaucracy and an ulterior motive of pensions over pupils, the majority of entire generations lack a comprehensive skill-set, and a competitive spirit that aligns with the free market, as productivity and success are relentlessly maligned and lambasted by elitists. In this nightmarish environment of embracing the unproven, individuals have been conditioned with all the subtlety of salivating dogs to steal the hard earned dollars from the affluent, rather than engage in diligent work. Most disturbingly, NASA is allegedly employing engineers that use a despicable online handle that defies the foundational principles of professional engineering culture, but within the incredulous white lie tapestry of internet ambiance “if it’s too good to be true, it’s probably not.”.
As complex thought and reflection disappear with the deconstruction of language influenced by radicals under the influence of a sanctimonious cup of herbal tea, productive debate is becoming a rare commodity. The only hope may be to preserve the essence of tradition and literature within the impregnable NSA technology of the blockchain, and when 95% percent of fiction is burned and banned within the next century, at least the children of the near future will have access to truth that the world was once a diverse paradise of thought challenging beliefs and spurring imagination. Even snippets of healthy arguments can be stored or interfaced with AI to least maintain a semblance of free speech while radicalized think tanks continue to exist as the sole tyrannical wrecking ball of regressive and restrictive ideology.
Intertwined into the plot of “The Light of Other Days”, legendary science fiction author and technologist Arthur C. Clarke and cohort Stephen Baxter introduce a myriad of interesting ideas, including harvesting wormholes from the quantum fabric in facilitating instantaneous communication regardless of distance. The literary venture ballooned into a time machine mechanism, where humanity could delve into the deepest reaches of the past and reveal the darkest truths dulled by the continuous bombardment of history. With the nearly perfect memory of the internet barring a major solar storm, the complex and powerful array of current server farms ushering in the juvenile years of the information age, the capability already exists to travel back in time and access the content of disabled web pages, posts, and tweets and the related scrutiny as the only direct consequence in hiding behind a keyboard or a smartphone. As the junk fake news stories continue to accumulate in the archived search engine results, the problem is that things become so convoluted, that combing through thousands and thousands of results can lead to contradictions, not to mention the daunting amount of energy required to host the data.
The now infamous “sexybabypartygirl” of the 15-second news cycle claiming employment at NASA will forever be associated with taking on retail job to support her lifestyle, or to the revisionist “perusers” and the antithesis to linguists, a victim of the “exploitative free market”. Facing the laborious task of sifting through mountains of mistruths not even having a functional time machine at one’s disposal can put a dent in the copious incredulities of digital detritus.