2026-01-07
A thoughtful piece in the Daily Sceptic today (about football, which is surely one of the most enduring artificialities of our age, in many ways leading all the others except radio and TV, which have acted as the enablers) points up the sad fact.
We are not the humanity we once were.
We once needed to interact with our neighbours in order to live. We were localised on a day to day basis and went to market once a week to trade our produce with the produce of others, so that our lives could be comfortable and our interests in our neighbours' and neighbourhood's well-being, prospects, and hopefully scandalous behaviour could be indulged. We could play tennis, compete with neighbouring settlements at football or cricket, and exchange gossip afterwards in the pub about what our neighbours had been up to.
Meanwhile our "leaders" in London would have to employ spies and await their despatches if the wanted to know what was really going on elsewhere. An expensive and difficult and therefore comparatively rarely used exercise.
Now we can sit at home and watch the telly, play strange games on our smartphones, order food deliveries from Tesco and await deliveries of everything else from Amazon without ever setting foot as far as the nearest postbox, which itself is fast approaching its forget-by date, becoming an increasingly rare element of forgotten infrastructure from a byegone age. You mean to say that people had to write letters on paper in those days? And wait days for a reply?!
The downside is that the secret services are doubtless monitoring our every keystroke, our every transmission, and categorising our every taste as revealed by our scrolling habits - they know more about us than we do ourselves. Or rather, their AI does ...
Truly we have been absorbed by the technology, sucked into the artificial world of the internet, fenced off from the real world of sun, sea, wind, rain, woods and lakes, rivers and canals, hills and dales, the very world that we used to inhabit. We are separated even from the need for human interaction. Is it any wonder the birth rate is falling through the floor? We no longer even have to talk to each other ...
But, but, but ... is living within the simulation of reality already reaching its limits?
