Who gets the payback from YouTube?

[pantodragon 121]

When I was thinking about how to describe YouTube and how it works, what it is doing, I had a dream that displayed it perfectly:

In the dream I wanted to do some nature study. I had a well in which there were some fishes, so I attached a long pipe with a u-bend in it (a youtube!) to the well. That made a pipe that the fishes could swim into which would lead them out from the well and then return them to it. I painted foliage onto the transparent walls of the pipe so that I could watch the fishes, but the fishes would feel safe thinking they were swimming unseen through weeds.

The image of that small, round, stone-walled well is an image of our world. It is a small, poor and very restricted world and people ‘swim’ around in it not knowing that there is anything better, not knowing that the walls are artificial and that beyond them is an unimaginably vast and rich world that should be theirs.

I am reminded of a comic strip called The Perishers which featured a bunch of children and a dog who all went to the sea-side each summer for a holiday. The dog visited a certain rock-pool each year and peered down into the water. The perspective was then changed to that of the inhabitants of the rock-pool, now known as the Pooliverse --- for obvious reasons ie the crabs and shrimps etc thought that their pool was the whole universe and every year when the dog looked down they celebrated the annual arrival of the eyeballs-in-the-sky.

So we, too, live in such a ‘pooliverse’ and have come to believe it to be all there is, all that is possible. And not only does it induce people to be so content with poverty that they call it wealth, but it stops them from dreaming anything other than the most trivial of dreams –-- what are the dreams of a crab in a rock-pool going to be compared to those of a creature that has the freedom of all the oceans of the world?

YouTube offers a way out of the little world of the internet, an apparent freedom, but it is just a trick to induce you to go where you can be more easily observed.

Another memory: The War of the Worlds. It starts with words something like this:

No-one would have believed, in the latter part of the 19^th century, that human affairs were being scrutinised, as a man with a microscope studies the creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water; that across the gulf of space minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly, and surely, they drew their plans against us……………

That about sums it up: on the internet you are being scrutinised by minds that, though not immeasurably superior to your own, are every bit as ‘well-intentioned’ as the Martians were to humans in the above-mentioned book --- ie, for those unfamiliar with it or the film, the Martians were out to destroy humanity. I am not saying that the powers-that-be are out to physically kill the rest of humanity, but you can destroy, even kill, a person psychologically while leaving the physical body intact --- and that is what they are about. I am not even saying that the powers-that-be are even aware of what they are doing. Maybe some are, in the way that some slave owners of old consciously oppressed their slaves and treated them with extraordinary cruelty, seeing them as less than human, seeing them as creatures that needed to be tightly controlled, while to others, slave ownership was merely an excuse to exercise their own sadistic pleasures.

But some of those in power actually believe, I think, that they are doing good --- they acquire power believing that with it they can do good, while all the time power works through them to achieve the destruction of all that is good in the world.

YouTube, forums, blogs and the like are all very restricted channels which you swim into thinking it a new freedom, when all the time you are ‘being channelled’ into places where you can be spied upon.

Power is about controlling, manipulating and spying, and that is what is behind the internet. You should know this. If you did, you would not accept these ‘wooden horses’ into your lives --- beware Greeks bearing gifts!!!

How long will it be before you have no well to swim in at all, when all you have are a network of transparent pipes in which you feel safe, but which control and manipulate you and put you under the kind of unrelenting scrutiny as are the Citizens of the society presided over by Big Brother in 1984? In essence, Orwell saw the world of the future (actually an exaggeration of his own world and time) very clearly --- only he did not know the half of it!

[StarMountainKid 7,715]

I've always known that as soon as I turn on my computer I'm being watched by someone. Whatever page I go to, whatever I write can be scrutinized by some 'authority' that is beyond my control. On the other side of the coin is the information I can acquire that may be unavailable to me if I didn't own a computer.

As far as this information goes, who controls the information we receive? I think there is honest information out there, but we have to be careful and awake so as not to be deceived.

Of course, no one should be tracking my every movement on the internet, no one should be listening to my phone calls, no one should be using GPS to monitor my movements, etc. We have become like animals in a cage. We have a certain freedom within the cage, but we are still in the cage.

We must be alert to realize who are our guards and our wardens, and not allow them to monitor and control us. Modern technology can empower us or enslave us. It is our choice.

[pantodragon 121]

We must be alert to realize who are our guards and our wardens, and not allow them to monitor and control us. Modern technology can empower us or enslave us. It is our choice.

The choice is an illusion. It's thoughts like that that keep you chained to your Doom.