In 2020, masks, tests, people, arms, needles, hospital beds, lives and deaths themselves became “standing-reserve” – on standby and ready to be put on order, available on demand. Even health came to mean supply. All this could not have happened if it weren’t for technology.
Technology in the modern sense is not neutral at all. Our technology is a great challenging of nature and man is the ultimate “standing-reserve” in the battle of ideology. What emerges from this technology is humanity made inhuman by the cult of technology.
“Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.” – Martin Heidegger
Would schools and businesses have ever closed were it not for the decision-makers knowing full well that their own working lives could carry on unimpeded?
Without the digital magic of “quantitative easing” and helicopter money, would the idea of shutting down large swathes of the economy have even been entertained?
Vaccine passports on mobile apps using QR codes happened because they could happen.
The government and media complex had the technology, and the collaborative partnership was already in place owing to surveillance methods developed during the “War on Terror.”
The mRNA injections themselves were rolled out because the technology was at hand, not because they were deemed effective. No successful trial has ever been carried out of the gene therapy.
And the very essence of the event relied upon the technology of mass testing, the daily case and death counts beamed out on 24/7 media channels, alongside the viral images of hospital wards in Italy and Wuhan.
Masks themselves, along with the brief but deadly ventilator obsession, represented for many the quaint ideal that “citizens” and “workers” could also participate – by analogy – in the same great technological project to eradicate the virus, not using binary codes but pieces of old cloth and 20th century style mechanical tech. We are all in this – the great technocratic project – together. And together, something had to be done. Anything. The precautionary principle was to be unleashed like never before.
All of this emerged from the hubris and narcissism of bureaucrats, philanthropists, and journalists, a hubris itself soaked in the progressive notions that “science” and “technology” could solve intractable human inefficiencies.
Life, for decades, has seemingly been one TED talk away from achieving a final great leap of rational progress, of cleanliness. If only the right people could get a firm grip on the right machinery…<<<Read More>>>...
