Jonathan Wexler - Survival in the Relentless New: The Montreal Edition

Ukraine under Vlodomy Zelenskyy burns.

Not all Russians are responsible for the carnage in Ukraine, but all of the Russians who are backing Vladimir Putin in any way ARE responsible.

It is true Russian has had a terrible, brutal, and largely miserable history, under the Tzar, then a police-state called Communismit never even mildly resembled Marxs utopia, now under the rat-killer Vladimir Putin and his rich coterie of gaz-tycoon-collaborators.

Nonetheless, there is such thing as free will and each and every Russian, whether in the army, or a supporter back home in Moscow, or St. Petersburg, or some small industrial town, even under physical threat and heavy duty propaganda, is morally responsible for the rape, pillage, murder, and destruction happening in Ukraine right now.

No one official seems willing to admit we are right in the middle of World War 3. Just because officials define World War 3 as being Russia against NATO, does not mean that is the definition of reality as politicians always obscure the truth.

WE ARE FIGHTING WORLD WAR 3 RIGHT NOW.

NO QUIET ON THE CYBER FRONT.

SLAM EFFECT.

Bill Gates is the original cyber-criminal when he hoodwinked IBM with the so-called DOS (disk operating system) that he stole effectively from a programmer in New Mexico.

The rest of this book is merely commentary derivative of that moment.

Anyone in todays work world or that is just coming up will be faced with an almost overwhelming set of moral and ethical dilemmas.

Now with the question of .

Do they question things as an individual, apply some kind of ethics and meaning to thingsfrom whatever traditionor dont they?

Because of the ever quickening pace of technology and the increasingly obscure ways the powers that be control any kind of critical thought, especially when your own livelihood is threatened, becomes a very difficult thing.

I would like to think I tried to be critical. And yet. And yet it landed me in a lot of very compromising positions.

My only ability, and option, at this late date, is to recount my stories and thoughts. So that, hopefully, others will not remain in a post-modern slavery, as my friend the Mexican singer Valentina Gonzalez sings.

For a long time now and certainly after the Pandora Papers leak and the Facebook outage, it has been apparent to me that closed systems are doomedor should be.

The best things in life, the best techniques, the best words & phrases, the best people, are often those no ones ever heard of. Kept hidden to protect institutional secrets of one sort of another. Protecting investment, reputation, but more often than not now, as has become apparent after scandals infinitum: corruption, incompetence, outright lies, conspiracy, and malfeasance of one sort or another.

Welcome to the machine.

Propaganda techniquesin development since, not only the dawn of industrialized communication, but the dawn of religion and language too: are tough to tussle with. And these are now at the very heart of what we are subject to, both in Western societies, in China, and really throughout the post-modern world.

Perhaps the best at getting past the veil, as maybe only Kafka novels had done back round the turn of the last century, had been Ivan Illich, but moving just a bit forward: who do we have now talking about now? A good start could be Jaron Lanier.

Because you must both understand and be immersed in bleeding edge software development as well as have honed linguistic/cultural antennae to get at the coming crossroads.

That is: all debate and power, now or soon, will either have a significant technical component, or will be all about technologyhow it will be wielded and by whom.

The movie from several years ago Ex Machina really hits itthe moral dilemmas that an ever increasing technological sophistication brings, as it is wielded ultimately by an ever diminishing few.

The future of commerceAmazons Echo devices (whose voice recognition software was developed via mass wiretap according to the book Amazon Unbound by Brad Stone), the Apple Watch, another wearable or ePayment method or cryptocurrency of some sort.

We are each participating in the technical construction of what Howard Bloom had called the Global Brain in one of his books, as well as creating its content dailybut where is the democracy?

Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion.

He is just like Donald Trump and Peter Thiel in this respect: he wants to control the narrative.

With their equivalents in Quebec being Francois Legault, Simon Jolin-Barrette, and Mathieu Bock-Ct.

All these moronic so-called tech bros are ruthless mysogynists, starting with Bill Gates and even Steve Jobs, on down.

Economically, starting with Zuckerbergs Libra Pay, they all want their own currency, Musks is Dogecoin, only Jeff Bezos I think is smart enough not to enter what is a futile game.

Bitcoin will be pegged to the US dollar, as a Frenchman with a Masters in finance, and who spent a lot of time in Australia, told me, wich I think is accurate.

Musk is a terrible and racist boss and what he did to Grimes, as she is a fellow Montrealer, is unforgivable.

He basically got her pregnant to spread his seed and then spent all his time trying to get to Mars and now buys into Twitter to spread his anti-vaxx crap and other idiocies of a typical engineer, and one with roots in South Africa: Musk is an ASSHOLE.

There was once a newspaper in Montreal that was indepedant and covered the news called The Montreal Gazette.

This newspaper went through many hands but is now owned by a company called Postmedia which in turn is owned by Chatham Asset Management.

There is no free speach in Montreal in English or French or in any other language.

The finances of The Montreal Gazette are not even controlled by the stock market in this case, but by the scam of all scams: an Amercian hedge fund.

I have for a couple of years been trying to make reasonable edits to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia which is supposedly so unbiased and perfect with its filtering process.

But NO.

There is a small coterie of power brokers, probably white men though I cannot be sure as there are not pictures of them or real ways to identify them, that do in fact, and I am convinced, control especially sensitive topics on Wikipedia.