Questions We Should Have Asked About Technology

People are taught – or rather programmed – to look with awe to corporate baubles that may actually be leading to their own destruction. It never occurs to them to ask the crucial questions about a technology before it is unleashed on humanity. Barely anyone throughout history has asked, “but won’t this also bring on such and such?” They buy the slogans and accuse questioners of paranoia. They turn on the unbelievers, accusing the “Luddites” of being heretics, cavemen and even murderers. It doesn’t occur to ask “why do things get worse” if things are so “advanced”?

Afterward, the people who are the most affected by the cozy relationship between government and the corporatocracy are told “it was oversight, but now there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.”

Jerry Mander, the former ad executive who brought you the Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television disagrees. The genie can be captured by public discourse and empowerment. Last October, when he spoke among other scholars at “Techno-Utopianism and the Fate of the Earth,” he wanted to bring you these questions we should have asked about technology – we can start now.

For the record, this writer does not align with every stance Mander takes personally and absolutely wants greater advancements that create high speed travel, safe water collection and treatment, healing, help with disabilities, oceanic cleanup, agricultural developments and anything that removes human suffering. I don’t believe in going backward or that slower or more difficult means better. Skeptics of the elitist technocracy want people to know that real, stunning advancements are doable but are purposely suppressed. We’re getting the raw deal. “Hearing” between the lines, one could see Mander hinting at “why this technology”?

His statements and questions about technology are cleverly woven into this under-the-radar speech. Much like his writing, it gains momentum until the final crescendo. He argues why corporations like Monsanto did not need a seat at the workshop in order to “hear the other side.” He points to the dark side of practices such as geoengineering and genetic engineering of humans. One of the most important questions should always be, “Who benefits”?

In Four Arguments, Jerry recounts his initial fascination with the power of television imagery during his 15 years in public relations and advertising – until it turned into a gnawing concern and then horror. “During that time, I learned it is possible to speak directly into people’s heads, and then like some otherworldly magician, leave images inside that can cause people to do what they might otherwise have not thought to do,” he said. When he tried to use it as a benevolent force for good, he realized whose technology it really was and its resulting global unification.

In the video above, he reminds us that what we are led to believe is dumb, stupid or harmless is actually a powerful controlling force. It is naive to think intelligence protects us because, “advertising has nothing to do with intelligence.” Although it is impossible to get rid of the media imagery and messages we’ve been stitched with growing up, the dark side of globalist technology is something with which he talks about contending.

What he leaves out is just as powerful – what would the world be like if true innovation weren’t stifled?

Heather Callaghan is a natural health blogger and food freedom activist. You can see her work at NaturalBlaze.com and ActivistPost.com. Like at Facebook.

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