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The title of the thread stinks.
I can never understand why people think they have to kill off God to kill off religion. Whereas religion always puffs itself up to be God-as-Fear, to anthropomorphize God, the actual God can't be killed off...
because as long as we are still human, we love, we suffer and we make art & music and while we do these things here on Earth, gravitation, electromagnetic energy & the strong & weak nuclear forces are ordering the entire Universe.
It's as absurd as trying to kill off any of those.
And it's precisely when we began to use primitive tools (technology) that we realized our own semi/quasi-divinity and our wills.
Someone bashed another's head with a rock long before anyone figured out they could use the rock as a flint to start a fire.
Freedom comes complete with the accoutrements of enslavement.
You don't have to pay extra, they are included in the price at first. The real bill, however, comes much later, when the accessories have become trappings, and it is too late to be able to pay.
Information Technology has become Big Brother.
People revere it with awe, mostly unquestioningly, and in many cases, are intimidated by it. People will pay five hundred percent markup or even more for IT work because there are only so many people in the population that have a skill set that understands some of the elements of the digital age beyond the rudimentary. Naturally, as a result, those who maintain IT systems, through their cognitive conceit, at the very least, overcharge their clients, and in the worst case, con them outright.
One can observe roughly the same mechanism at work in the case of a five year-old trading their three year-old sibling nickels for dimes whilst explaining to the young one that nickels are worth more because they are larger.
The internet has done much though for leveling the playing field and opening up free enterprise again in the marketplace, but of course, that too will soon be over. So-called Net Neutrality is just the first major spectre witnessed thus far.
What will grow is a world where advertising and marketing based on the gathering of your personal information is a mainstay of all aspects of life and we've already seen how the internet has naturally borne this bad to rotten fruit.
I didn't read anything from Tokolosh's link yet, but I can imagine that it presents some of these elements and then goes into a "what is to be done?" mode informing the reader that "information is power" and that we must utilize internetworking as a vehicle to empower ourselves.
Interesting strategy...good luck. Although the index for knowledge-gathering as been vastly expanded, the knowledge-processing ability of most people is akin to a bowl of Campbell's Alphabet Soup. Until people wake up from denial of death and discover Socratic self-knowledge, all is lost. On that note, I'll say three hail Dostoyevskys, embrace my suffering and go burn a Chernyshevsky book.
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