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Electric monk: Difference between revisions
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:—The late, greatly lamented {{author|Douglas Adams}}, {{br|Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency}}}} | :—The late, greatly lamented {{author|Douglas Adams}}, {{br|Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency}}}} | ||
So here is the thing I don’t understand: where are ''our'' | So here is the thing I don’t understand: where are ''our'' [[electric monks]]? | ||
Everything we know about the information revolution tells us they cannot be far away. Scrappy little [[Wikipedia]], crowd-sourced and free-for-all vanquished forever the grand, longevous ''Encyclopædia Britannica''. [[Reddit]] vanquished the [[master of the universe|masters of the universe]]. Yet, we insects, still crawling on the planet’s face — we seem on the end of a perpetual hiding from new-economy conglomerates with their [[artificial intelligence|artificially intelligent]] engines exploiting our innate horror of boredom; filling our heads with a clangorous noise that pleases us by obscuring the abysmal ''silence'' that otherwise would predominate. In this way we are aggregated, parsed, tracked, anticipated and nudged around like cups on some giant [[Ouija board]], and all this just to ''monetise'': to extract value from the magical well of human weakness into which it jams its stent, thereby consigning us by degrees to stale, mute, digital oblivion. | Everything we know about the information revolution tells us they cannot be far away. Scrappy little [[Wikipedia]], crowd-sourced and free-for-all vanquished forever the grand, longevous ''Encyclopædia Britannica''. [[Reddit]] vanquished the [[master of the universe|masters of the universe]]. Yet, we insects, still crawling on the planet’s face — we seem on the end of a perpetual hiding from new-economy conglomerates with their [[artificial intelligence|artificially intelligent]] engines exploiting our innate horror of boredom; filling our heads with a clangorous noise that pleases us by obscuring the abysmal ''silence'' that otherwise would predominate. In this way we are aggregated, parsed, tracked, anticipated and nudged around like cups on some giant [[Ouija board]], and all this just to ''monetise'': to extract value from the magical well of human weakness into which it jams its stent, thereby consigning us by degrees to stale, mute, digital oblivion. | ||