With babies developing with a tablet in their hands, the next logical step, ostensibly for the sake of everyone’s convenience, is to implant a cellular communications device — yes, a mini mobile phone — in the bodies of our children.
Tablets should be part of a baby’s world from birth,” claims Professor Annette Karmiloff-Smith, a highly influential developmental and cognitive scientist whose study found that getting your toddler to scroll through a digital tablet actually improves their motor skills.
And — I hear you ask: What about the accompanying risks? Shall we just ignore them? Let’s face it — our kids’ tablets provide such a useful means of keeping the little ones occupied, giving stressed parents a break.
Have you witnessed anything about children and their relationships with technology that makes you uncomfortable, bearing in mind the importance of subconscious programming during the early years of life?
Do they constantly pull their phone out of their pocket during a conversation? Do you see them scrolling, seemingly mindlessly?
What have you witnessed when walking in your local neighborhood: perhaps children with their heads buried in their devices and empty quiet parks?
Whichever way you cut it: family dynamics are changing rapidly as digital technologies take an ever more important role in our lives, and our children’s lives, and, courtesy of social media, human relationships are becoming increasingly virtual.
With babies developing with a tablet in their hands, the next logical step, ostensibly for the sake of everyone’s convenience, is to implant, a cellular communications device — yes, a mini mobile phone — in the bodies of our children.
This technology is a key part of the development of the currently emerging Fourth Industrial Revolution that includes everything from artificial intelligence (AI) to the Internet of things and robotics.
In fact, in case you think this idea is fanciful, it’s given as “Shift 1” in the book of the same name, by none other than Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF).
Think just how many of today’s teenagers might be up for an implantable mobile device: imagine the convenience! No need to subscribe to any platforms, and they’ll never need to worry again about losing their mobile phone!
Mobile phones are becoming an extension of today’s youth. But is there a more sinister agenda unfolding?
How about this for an idea, the first part of which has been borrowed from the playbook of a number of industries, tobacco and opioids, to name just two: create digital addiction or extreme dependence, disconnect humans from each other and from the natural world around them and re-program them in ways that prevent them operating as independent, free-minded citizens and make them compatible with the grand masterplan of the world’s current puppet masters.
In the process, you’ll also be able to surveil their every move via the devices they use to communicate, shop with, bank, drive with, meditate with, recreate with. The mobile device, its associated apps, and its ever-improved camera and recording capabilities have literally become an extension of ourselves.
The notion that dependency or addiction is created on purpose to surveil and control us, is of course just a theory. But disconcertingly, there are a lot of facts along the way that suggest that our dependency on our handsets and computers might be part of a very deliberate plan that leads humanity — at least those that conform — into a transhuman and posthuman future.
This is the future of humanity that the likes of futurist and Google engineer, Ray Kurzweil, historian Yuval Noah Harari, Schwab, and many others in influential positions, are increasingly considering an inevitability. But, like most addictions and psychological re-programming — it is a choice, albeit one that might be difficult for many to avoid.
Defining the problem
Digital or social media addiction can be described as “being excessively concerned about SNSs [social networking sites], motivated by a strong desire to log in to or use SNSs, and devoting so much time and energy to SNSs that it impairs other social activities, studies/job, interpersonal relationships and/or psychological health and wellbeing.”
It’s fair to say that based on this definition, the vast majority of our youth could be considered to be addicted to social media.
The World Health Organization recognizes gaming addiction as a disorder, but not digital addiction (also known as technology overuse) more broadly.
Other studies disagree that digital technologies have a “standalone addictive power” and distinguish between true addictive disorders and negative side effects of social media use.
Even if one disagrees that it is a pathological addiction, just as disconcerting is the development of an extreme dependency on digital technologies to such an extent that a new term, nomophobia, entered the Collins Dictionary, as “a state of distress caused by having no access to or being unable to use one’s mobile phone.”
Whether our youths are addicted or “just” nomophobes, there is a sinister problem here, part of a bigger plan of Big Tech that’s been unfolding for some time.
Watch Paraschiva’s interview with David Charalambous
Paraschiva Florescu recently spoke to David Charalambous, founder of Reaching People and a behavior and communication dynamics expert about the very real issue of digital addiction in young people and how we can combat it. Or listen to the interview here.
Big Tech’s big plan
Nothing that goes on social media platforms, data such as messages, photos, texts, etc. belongs to us anymore. It becomes the property of the platform itself. Data is currently one of the most valuable assets in the world.
The incessant attempts of big corporations to transform everything into data is a form of control.
It’s being used maliciously to feed into AI systems in order to understand our human behavior. How we think, what we buy, how many steps a day we take — all this is valuable information that Big Tech is gathering.
These AI systems are designed to control us.
Our data are also used to inform new developments such as neuromorphic computers, which are artificial “brains,” and “pervasive neurotechnology.”
It might not surprise you that the CEO of SharpBrains, one of the leaders in this field and an allegedly “independent market research firm,” is also on the panel of the WEF’s Council on the Future of Neurotechnology.
Data from social media sites are collected by business owners.
Eighty-six percent of business owners gather data from their customers, with 64% using data from social media sites, mainly Facebook and Instagram.
Our data are used to inform propaganda campaigns from voting to vaccination, as portrayed in the Netflix documentary “The Great Hack.”
Tristan Harris, tech “ethicist” featured in the movie “The Social Dilemma,” (see here and here) suggests in his piece at the Nobel Prize Summit 2023 that social media is about “re-wiring the flows of attention and information in our society.”
Think of it this way: life on this planet has always revolved around an energy exchange of some sort.
A carnivore eats a herbivore, yet the energy of the herbivore’s body returns to the ground to fuel other life forms, including the progeny of the herbivore. The currency of exchange for a beautiful work of art is typically money.
The transaction that occurs is typically regarded as a fair exchange for raw talent, years of experience and hours and hours of attention and creativity expression, a value that can be subsequently traded (recycled).
With social media, the exchange is often very unbalanced. We give to it (attention, time, ideas, creativity) and we get little more than a dopamine hit in return.
It leaves us feeling more empty and unfulfilled, a bit like trying to fill a bottomless bucket, but we go back for more dopamine. We are turning our youth into dopamine junkies.
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The perspective of big science
The formal science of evaluating the risks and benefits of social media appears to give the impression of balance. Some (see here and here) identify negative consequences of social media such as cyber-bullying, cyber-racism and issues relating to the exchange of sexually explicit content between minors.
Yet many papers deny or ignore any link between depression, anxiety, social disconnection, low self-esteem, poor self-image or body dysmorphic disorder with the amount of time spent on devices.
That’s despite these effects being frequently cited in the popular press, because they are widely observed, being supported by limited studies. On the contrary, the literature (that often in turn reflects the interests that fund research), frequently bigs up the benefits of digital technologies used almost ubiquitously by our youth.
For example, a recent review reminds us that social media is now the “primary mode of peer interactions and communication among adolescents,” this trend has been further magnified by the COVID-19 era.
Another review finds that “social gaming may also increase feelings of connection and sense of community.”
In Indigenous communities, “mobile phones are viewed as an extension of a person and may be shared by family members” whilst “forming community through social media can act as a process of uniting and healing for the Indigenous community,” finds Emma Rice, a researcher at Georgetown University.
Others go as far as saying that isolation in young people is more common among those who are disconnected from digital sources of entertainment and social media.
Yet, does social media offer genuine connection, and is a digital connection equivalent to a real-world connection?
Edward Hallowell, Harvard psychiatrist, writes in his paper about the “human moment” to illustrate meaningful connection as “an authentic psychological encounter that can happen only when two people share the same physical space.”
This might have something to do with our improved perception of non-verbal communication when we are in close proximity to one another.
But it may also be linked to the close interaction of proximal human biofields (the electromagnetic field that radiates beyond every living being). With digital technologies, we can all agree that we have connectivity, but perhaps we don’t experience connectedness.
This is the “Story of Separation” that contemporary thinker and philosopher, Charles Eisenstein, elaborates on in his book, “The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible.”
In this story, we are led to believe that we are “separate individuals in a universe that is separate from you as well … you are a bubble of psychology, a mind (whether brain-based or not) separate from other minds and separate from matter.”
Technology of course is just viewed as a further (and inevitable) separation of ourselves from the natural world, with neurotechnologies and AI increasingly being sold to the youth as the champions in this adventure that we must embrace, not reject.
