FROM THE WILDERNESS
Newsreel
By James Strauss
Where did meritorious service, talent and expression go to die? It didn’t’ go anywhere. It stayed right where it was, a giant target for the steamroller of advancing communication technology. Instead of advancing civilization on the planet, this series of technological inventions has not increased the spread of real knowledge, encouraged inventive innovation nor brought tribally founded societies closer to one another, or internally closer together either. These things have fostered the death of merit rewards, however. Take a look at the chests of the male royal family in Great Britain. Those medals are fake, and everyone knows they are fake but celebrated the wearer’s as some sort of deserving heroes anyway. That takes away from the rewards of real heroes while, at the same time, elevating the worth and communicative ability of the phony medal-wearing family. Hollywood is a great place to take a look at this phenomena.
Notice anything about the quality of television shows and movies? Most of them lack any decent scripting at all anymore. The entertainment industry, typified by the Oscar awards this year, is filled with a ‘clam chowder’ assortment of trashy movies. The rewards of Oscars are going to uplift the downtrodden, as in giving the awards to more black people and Asians who’ve been so woefully overlooked, yet the intent of the Oscars is supposed to be the reward of the meritorious presentation of a great entertainment medium product. Not so anymore. The entire literary business (books) has died the same qualitative death. Books, those wonderous volumes of great literature and interesting stories and renditions, are basically gone. To be truly published today an author has to already be famous in some other area. That famous person/author then gets his or her name on a book as an author when, for the most part, that person didn’t write any of the material inside the book.
It’s become quite okay for a whole litany of dead authors to go on writing, with little bitty credit, or none at all, given to the lowly paid and barely recognized real writers, writing for and in the name of the dead.
Politics has fallen into the same bleak, dark snake pit. The only truth that Representative Santos has stated since being elected is this: “everyone knows my name.” He’s proving the truth of that statement, and its place on top of the scrap heap, of a looming meritorious disaster for all of civilization. Without rewarding merit, well, merit goes away, or into the waste basket of life. What then emerges? Mediocrity, scientific stagnation and social failure, although those things are disguised as being the result of Christian predictions called Revelations, or covered over with ‘entertainment’ that is so trivial that the celebrations about its greatness are much better attended and watched then the supposed results of the venues of entertainment themselves.
Just as this amalgamation of technological ‘advances’ is consuming what life used to be like, as well as inflicting enormous amounts of data on a public that is questionably true or not, the looming monster of artificial intelligence begins to descend over everything. This new artificial intelligence (A.I.) was never thought of, in its early days, to be built upon a fractured base of programming that is damaged in quality and reality. How can intelligence give an intelligent result if that result is built on foundations of mistruths, bad data and downright lies? But here it is and here it comes. Throw this new artificial decision-making series of near-life entities onto the rest and what does the culture, the world, really have.
These are, indeed, becoming the times that try men’s souls, and those of women and everyone else, as well. Recognition of this mix of communications problems, as they coalesce, is also missing. Not much is being written about it or discussed in almost any media genre. Artificial intelligence, combined with the rest of it, isn’t likely to take over the world using violence or dictatorial powers. It’s likely to take over the world because the real human talent of the world simply gives up in disgust and experiences a total lack of motivation. Life on the planet becomes some sort of rice pudding, without the rice. Almost everyone reading this can already feel that happening. Feel lonely, lost and without a real mission…and you begin to understand what is being written here.
