Nothing should strike fear in our hearts like the adjective “smart”. In the virtual world it describes things and situations which we permit when we are being exceedingly stupid.
Apart from clever, “smart” used to mean well-dressed; now the smart-tech revolution has dressed a somnolent public in a clown suit. (Probably the healthiest thing to do is laugh.)
The “smart” things accumulate in our lives as one cancerous mass impairing freedom and privacy public and personal. First came the smart phone, which tracks and stalks us and spills personal data to all and sundry; then the smart car and house (run by robots much cleverer than us, with their impenetrably artificial intelligence) in the smart city, where residents are trapped by nets of surveillance. Now it's “smart borders and airports” to prevent free movement from one country to another without “proof of vaccination”. Oh great: we've transformed the world into a series of armed camps with borders bristling with police. We need to download an app to prove our vaccination. What next “proof” will be demanded, with the inevitability of function-creep?
Smart apps groom us for stupidity. How stupid, how over-policed, is the community that consents to apps that outwit self-interest? It's not a fashionable question, in a time of pandemics, but there always will be pandemics, and the question might be worth asking if we don't also want an epidemic of totalitarian social control.
See "Haunted House",
.
