overview
dark forces
end times
precursors
fizzles
day after
flicks
related
Guides:
Digital
environment
Governance
related
Profiles:
Surveillance
Echelon
RFIDs
ICANN
auDA
Messaging
Assassination
|
end times
Prophets bring to their forecasts the preoccupations of
parts of their society and projections about the likely
consequences of what is assumed to be fact.
In the past that has resulted in racist fantasies about
the inevitable decline of "the white race" or
the Anglo-Saxon elites of fin de siecle England
and Germany, superseded - indeed in some visions actually
eaten - by "colored people" or the working classes.
It has also embodied assumptions that the future will
be past crises, but replayed in technicolour and with
more loud noises.
Canadian academic Henry Warwick in fretting about "PostCarbon
ICT" associated 'peak oil' with the imminent end
of asphalt roads and information & communication technology,
forecasting four futures -
1.
worst case: we do nothing. ICT ends in the 2050s, as
machines cease operating, energy disappears, resource
wars become global, and the political situation destablises
into warring localised territories fighting for the
last of it. The world enters a permanent dark age.
2. medium bad case: we make feeble attempts at a late
date. The last devices are built to last, but the declining
global situation removes a number of critical resources,
and it all falls apart in the early 22nd century, resulting
in a dark age for a century or so, and then the development
of localised systems, some democratic, others tyrannical,
based along technology of the late 18th century.
3. medium case: We make significant inroads on repeatable
energy production, peaceful and honourable population
reduction, and implement a number of technologies to
keep some portions of industrialism going. ICT as we
understand it fails in the early 22nd century, but is
replaced by other systems that may not have glowing
screens, but allow for significant long distance data
transmission. Eventually, that society will also fail,
due to materials failures and ecological problems, but
not collapse like scenario 1. ICT disappears completely
in the 23rd or perhaps 24th century.
4. best case: we enter an ecotechnic age. Population
is peacefully and honourably reduced to sustainable
levels (500 million - 1 billion) and the invisible hand
of Thermodynamics and resource depletion removes ICT
at
some unspecified date.
... Vigilance and resistance are the necessary practice,
but given the past few decades of a very successful
Bread and Circuses campaign that has resulted in a stultified
public discourse, as the resources make bread and circuses
more expensive and spotty, the reaction may not be a
positive one.
The
chiliastic Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government
Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID (New York:
Thomas Nelson 2006) by Katherine Albrecht & Liz McIntyre
mixes passages from the Bible with questions about how
a Hitler would use RFID.
Their The Spychips Threat: Why Christians Should Resist
RFID & Computer Tracking (New York: Thomas Nelson
2006) reportedly "ties in these ominous new devices
to current Christian thought about the coming New World
Order", presumably a refreshing change from alien
implants.
Albrecht explained in 2006 that "My goal as a Christian
[is] to sound the alarm", with RFIDs as the mark
of the Beast presaging the End Times and consumers being
compelled "to receive a mark on their right hand
or on their foreheads".
next page (precursors)
|
|
