Some Solutions?

This.

Yesterday, I kept a ‘telehealth consultation’ phone appointment with my GP, who decided my condition warranted a swab test for COVID-19. (The disease that SARS-cov-2 causes.)

The frontline elite infection control team at the local hospital processed me through in what would normally have been my lunch break, and left me plenty of time to finish my theoretical lunch.

At 8:30AM today I got my – clean,thank goodness – test result back. All in all it took only twenty-one hours from the phone appointment to the result.

UPDATE: This article was partially written 2 – 3 weeks earlier. The above paragraphs were added 16 April 2020.

Given how SARS-cov-2 has suddenly turned our world on to the idea of doing so much more online, imagine every person in the world had a unique ID, an app that asked them their opinions on various matters, and then organised the ‘income’ that person had. Much like social networking influence, but assigned by a global AI whose only job was to do that one job properly, to get a majority decision and then issue credits.

Why? Imagine if you could ask a global gestalt composed of everyone on whom your question has any bearing whether to do something. And imagine that the gestalt program just gives each person a vote, and assigns their vote a weighting that depends on how closely the answer to your question will affect them.

“I’d like to extend my hobby farm by 5 acres” whizz whirr clunk – your neighbour on the other side of that 5 acres is deadset against losing the privacy barrier. The other people are ambivalent. 252,000 people around the world think you’re greedily usurping a piece of the Earth you don’t really need, but their combined vote has a weight of juist 16.37% People in town for whom you grow some of your crops are mostly in favour, but that’s only 2,000 people and their votes, while quite heftily weighted, only adds up to 11%. The gestalt says you have only 38% vote.

The thing is, you can still clear that 5 acres but you lose a large percentage of your vote weighting for everything else. Want to vote yourself a new Tesla in a year? Tough titties. Crowdsourcing works both ways.

SOME technology could be the death of us, but some could usher in Utopia…

AND SO NOW… (In light of CoV19.)

SOME technology will be the saving of us. People are becoming more used to doing things online. I predict that online shopping sites will increase in number ( Online shopping site hacks will increase in number exponentially … ) and that some growth industries PC ( Post COVID19 )will be in the delivery and fulfilment sectors, especially the delivery sector.

UPDATE: Already, many bricks and mortar shops have announced either closures, temporary pivots to online shopping, or full pivots to online forever.

Imagine Australia Post having to either shape up or be trampled into the ground. What a shame, tsk, tsk … ( Of course I’m being sarcastic, I LOATHE Aust Post with the kind of deep abiding loathing most people reserve for tax departments, used car salespeople, and politicians. And I hate all of those about equally … )

UPDATE: Australia Post (our national postal service that our neoliberal retarded government privatised decades ago) have two days ago announced they’re waving a white flag and exposing their bellies to the mercy of the government and the people, and may have to start only making once a week deliveries due to the pressure. I won’t say I was right but I was right…

People are also becoming used to managing the country online. In the CoV19 pandemic, we’ve been getting our information from the TV, from news sites, and from the government sites. We’re slowly getting the idea that the Internet is THE one indispensable Anthropocene right. (See what I did there? Segued into yet another 21st Century issue. Oh and oops, I managed to slip in the label “21st Century” like almost casual like.)

I’ve personally signed off on a few dozen petitions that have to some degree guided and informed the decisions that have been made to stabilise the economy (such as it is) and support people in the crisis.

So:

  • We’re seeing how we don’t so much need a government as an online forum.
  • We don’t so much need millions of acres of land under useless “bullshit” business uses. Carparks and HUGE cities are a result of consumerism that has been encouraged and nurtured to a fever pitch.
  • We don’t so much need HUGE shopping malls as we need good online sites and much better fulfillment and delivery services.
  • Because of the above points, we don’t need to travel so much for work and day to day living and instead use travel more for leisure and education. (Not some jobs, obviously – you can’t plant public gardens or dig at archaeological sites online, for example.)
  • We’ve just become used to seeing Nature return and things begin to look up – many will prefer the pace of that to the haste and hustle and bustle of capitalism.

There may not be a full blown revolution of the proletariat (and ain’t THAT an outmoded concept now?) nor a total collapse of capitalism and economies. But there WILL be changes.

Remember that a great many office workers have just discovered how their jobs are “bullshit” jobs that serve only to service capitalism. And they’ve seen that the government can pull HUGE sums of money out of supposedly ‘debt-ridden’ budgets for a Universal Living Income that could free those same workers to do useful and valuable jobs.

They now claim it’ll take years to “pay it back” but we know different. We know that without 75% of the government, that surplus has always existed but stashed away in bullshit departments and funds, that most of it is just what the big corporations actually owe to the populace and to repair the Earth.

Speaking of that. We also now KNOW that climate change (ermahgerd – four controversial topics!) is primarily caused by us but by the active agency of the big corporations and their insatiable appetite for indoctrinating us into giving them our wealth.

In a way, we can say that all that wealth in the corporations is a form ofsavings bank that we the people put away for a rainy day, and that THIS is the rainy day when we make a withdrawal. There’s a line between corporations as people and the people that form those corporations, and it needs to be erased.

Because we now also know that we could always have done without more and more of bigger and better cars and consumer trash, without so much pollution, without so many fucking avocadoes to smash on the breakfast sourdough when avocadoes DON’T EVEN GROW WITHIN TEN THOUSAND MILES OF US AND OUR ANCESTORS DIDN’T NEED THEM AS AN “ESSENTIAL DIET SUPPLEMENT” FFS! That’s just capitalistic consumerism bullshit!

We can make do with a nice locally made soft cheese and fruit, or a locally-sourced pesto over some nice pasta.

This is a fairly important point I think –
Why DO corporations feel the need to hoard inordinate and disproportionate quantities of wealth tokens when they can see what their greed is doing to the people and the planet?

Perhaps the conspiracy theories about lizard people have some truth, and dragons actually exist …