The trap was set at least twenty-five years ago and the mice jumped at the smell of the cheese. I am referring to the introduction of the computer as a mass necessity and the Internet that followed. I was slow to enter the trap, “forced” finally in 2007 by the college where I was teaching.

Up to that point, I was just a member of The Lead Pencil Club, whose motto was “a speed bump on the information superhighway” and whose membership list numbered twenty-three and a half people worldwide. When I slowly and reluctantly reached for the cheese the trap snapped, not on my neck to finish me, but on my head that was half in and half out. 

The out part kept thinking. 

What follows are that half-head’s musings on why I didn’t follow my intuition, the whole damn sorry situation we are all in, and what we might do to spring the trap and run free. I don’t like this trapped feeling. And, by the way, the cheese was American, which is not exactly real cheese.

In 1960 the sociologist C. Wright Mills said that there was far too much information for people to assimilate and make sense of and that lucid summations were needed. He was echoing Thoreau who in 1854 said: 

If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?”

Mills said people needed to develop what he called the sociological imagination that would allow them to condense and simplify news and to connect personal and social matters within historical and structural contexts.

That was the long-lost era of newspapers, long-form paper magazines, the reading of books, and minimal television stations. To think that there was far too much information then can only make one laugh, now that the digital revolution has buried us in data, information, and “breaking news” at warp speed, usually contradictory and lacking context.

The internet has literally made people crazy, created schizoid or split personalities who don’t know whether they are coming or going or what world they are in, physical or virtual. This is the era of social schizophrenia. It is also the era of Covid-19 lockdowns when a far greater online life is promoted as the necessary future.

If people once felt that all the information was too confusing and they were ending up thinking and doing things ass-backwards as a result, back then they might have understood it if you told them that the only way you can do anything is ass-backwards. Today, many would probably greet you with a look of bewilderment as they googled it to see if there was a way to swivel their asses to the front to get adjusted to the way they feel while waiting online for clear directions to emerge. Which way does an ass go?

They will be waiting for a long, long time. 

The Internet is a double-bind because we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. News, writing, and information of all sorts is now often not available any other way. The era of paper newspapers is coming to an end. This was meant to be. 

Other sources of fact and fiction have gradually been eliminated, while the content on the Internet has been dramatically increased and progressively censored. The dream of an open Internet is turning into a nightmare. 

If you look at the Internet’s creation and development by the US military-intelligence-Silicon Valley network as a tool for social control, propaganda, and total spying, if you grasp this nexus and their intentions, you will come away realizing that the Internet and the total integrated digital world is a dystopian tool designed to make you crazy. To sow confusion and endless contradictory information from minute to minute. To “flood the zone” (see Event 201) with propaganda and disinformation. To give you a headache, keep you agitated, destroy your genuine human experience in the physical world.

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2020/05/17/the-online-double-bind/

Social distancing regulations could breathe new life into a retro date-night hotspot: The drive-in cinema.

While indoor cinemas have pulled the plug on screenings for the foreseeable future, the COVID-19 pandemic could see the return of a family favourite.

In their prime in the 1960s, Australia had more than 300 drive-ins, a figure that has dwindled to just 16.

But with Netflix users (and bingers) eager to get up off the couch and into the car, it seems a momentary revival is on the horizon.

For now, most drive-ins across the country remain closed, but cinephiles could have something to look forward to as lockdown restrictions begin to lift.

One venue in Queensland has already opened its doors to customers.

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/entertainment/2020/05/18/drive-in-cinemas/

No more than 10 people per cars?...