Saturday, March 22, 2014

Scamocracy, A Walk On The Dark Side

  The web is two things at once, it appears to me. The level of business growth through directed advertising is down right scary. Find a demographic group you would care to "reach", denote a region, and then, stand back and watch the the laws of large numbers kick in! The likes of Google, Facebook, and Amazon are increasing at increasing rates. Perhaps an explosion would better illustrate here? Words like "exponential, roiling, and dynamic" come to mind. As business qua busy, there has never been the equal.
   The modern big-businesses, the Rockefellars, Morgans, and Carnegies of today; are these odd looking consortiums, these rafts, these committees of bundled entities. Intertwined, and co-operating in web presence, this new generation of giants; in a collaborative kind of "mutualism" (if that is a word) is altering everything you ever thought you knew about "business". It would be a bit like this; if you desired to reach a market of left handed, female, red headed, golfers, and them only...you could, and easily! This entangled platform of compound effort is awesome, powerful, and more than a bit shady.
   Micro-targeting of demographics is only going to grow, and whether we discuss dogfood sales, or the marketing of presidential candidates, the finding of the audience, and the successful targeting of them, is the new norm. And whether one loves or hates this constant gathering of data on you (so to market-at you), this kind of thing, it is one half of the apple, it is the "apple to come", and also is already here! We would ( I guess) prefer to think in terms of "pro and con", or of "on this hand, versus the other", and such like stuff. The problem here is, if that type of opposition analysis is correct in the first place, then we do not, in fact; get a "light versus dark". Instead, here; a kind of twilight, as opposed to a total black-out is what crops up. If such intrusive and nosy market analyses exist (and they do!), so as to predict nearly all of your purchasing patterns, your voting tendencies, and only God knows what else, then we have only little light left. Rather, it turns out to be a kind of dusk, versus pitch black! What we get then, as a dusky cyber progress theme, is a poorly lit and shady nosiness; and this from the legit half! There remains another half to our apple.
   The "other side" of the web is much darker than any merely questionable, and nosy intrusive corporate snooping. I am speaking of a the lie. How else to describe here? One radio show host I know of, calls the monster in question, a "scamocracy". The host may have coined the word, I wouldn't know. But it is a clever term you must admit, so I shall proceed to borrow it. The weird come-ons, the rip-offs, and the massive fraud occurring, all exist, loosely under the umbrella of the explosive growth of the legit business empires. The chronic scamming, frauds and outright thievery all exist as "just-part" of the "explosive growth" (of legitimate businesses), so allowing (mainly unchallenged) for a kind of P.T. Barnum style "a sucker is born every minute" grifter ethic to flourish. So with "legitimate" explosive growth, we also find it's ugly twin sister, that other half of the apple; which is an explosive growth of shameful misrepresentation, and criminal fraud. If the "honest half" is a dusk and twilight world, in which we deeply distrust the snooping and meddling of today's robber barons, then the pitch black half is downright loathsome. I argue in this, that we need not merely "accept this, as just a part" of the (more-so) desirable changes around us. To think otherwise is to purposely fool our own selves.
   So, let's get this correct for once, shall we? In a "dusk" or twilight world, we keep making the same types of errors. In this world (the one we live in), it has never been a choice between a light versus dark, or black versus white. It is precisely the lack of light that we are commenting upon, or it's low level at minimum. That black and white sort of consideration is ahead of us (in time) and that would be when the Son arrives. Then, in that hour, things become truly polar, and opposites are separated forever. Instead, we deal with a foggy dimness (in which you can barely even recognize friends!), versus a blackness impenetrable. Therefore, our idea that things are a matter of right and wrong, is itself wrong! In this world of shades of grey, and chronic fog, it is wrong to be wrong, and we know that. Further, it is also wrong to be right, and comparatively stated, it is wronger to be right, than it was to be wrong! Almost always, almost all of us are consistently fooled right here. For this reason alone, the grifter ethic flourishes.
   We all want the same things. We desire "greatness", to "go-up" to ascend the ladder, to quit being a working stiff, and become a philanthropist! We desire to become "generous souls", but not just yet. First, we must "ascend" and only afterwards, we, at that time personally having plenty, then; (then!) we will have something to give. Such crap as this, in our heads, is what generates and guarantees the grifter ethic.
   The grift works this way. To be a "failure" in our world is a bad thing, and so to repair or modify ourselves, so to make ourselves "good enough", we just go out and succeed. How hard was that to figure out? The problem with success, is that it works! My humble goal of "me, not being dependent", means that (face it), that when that succeeding happens I no longer need you! And the more I succeed, the harder, meaner and more self involved I become. Think back to the big shots you know. How many of them do you actually like? Men often say; "You're damned if you do, and damned if you don't". They temporize with: "A guy just can't win!". They are correct. It is bad for us to fail, and worse (for us at least) to succeed! The truth of the grift is that in the end, you will not alter the system it will alter you, and we know that, going in! It ain't much, but at least the "failure" has a few friends left. It is out of darkness that our desires arise.
   The thing generates itself! Who does not want to be loved, to be respected in the community? Who does not want to provide "the nice things" for his own? We wish to join the high to the low, the great to the small, in ourselves. Thus we want tons of money, and also to remain "a regular guy". The little fact, the tiny truth, that (News Flash!) regular guys, by definition, don't have great wealth; consistently "eludes" us. More realistically, we are hiding from the heart within us. By "loved" don't we actually mean "loved like those other wealthy guys"? The desire to be that "helper" of the weak, that "benefactor" for the poor, isn't it more realistically true that; we are saying; "Unlike those other rich bastards, I remember my roots!" The grift is arriving into the dusk, passing through our hearts, and coming from the dark.
   The Christian faith has been taken captive right about here. We are "trying our best" and almost always "mean well". In reality we do not express our shame because we have no words in our vocabulary of motive to speak it. We are "taken in" by the scamocracy, and do not report it, because we were wrong to want to be "right". Having ingested the desire to "go-up", having "believed in progress", we are thereby forced by our own inner logic to make the error.
   We "buy" the grift because we ourselves have been previously "bought". The "right" ambition in our heads and hearts seems "somehow" to always go wrong. Meanwhile, we think it wrong to "think too much" about the error. The "aheader" we get, the narrower and harsher we ourselves become. We know this about ourselves, but out of the darkness comes the lies, into our personal twilight. I (personally) "shall not be so", is how those lies all begin. Unable then to believe that others may be "greater yet, than me", we lose vision in the top half of our view. We are prohibited from looking "up", because we are it! Next, we "cannot be pestered" by those petty fools around us. So then we start noting that the blinders also are blocking the  left and right view. Soon, we see but one thing. Alas, it is a delusion.
   That Nobody, Hillbilly Carpenter comes along, rightly declaring the situation. He propounds that: in order to go up, you must go down. The first is last. True "greatness" stands the world upon it's head, and loves the poor. This upside-down feature to the King's words could mean either that He or we (choose one) is upside wrong. I have placed my bet on which it is, have you? Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement! Prayer was designed for us to grow up believing the true. But what is true is that we are wrong. Similarly, it is wrong of us to be wrong. It is true also that (for us) it is wronger-yet to be merely "right"! You, (of yourself) simply "cannot ever win" at this game. Further, we know this to be true, and steadily refuse to say so.
   Friend, reality was designed to break your heart. We thought it was a good thing to have a strong-healthy heart, didn't we? And besides that (after all), isn't it painful to have a broken one?...He is saying that if we do not "allow" breakage now, we have only a grim forecast of a future-breaking to come, of what will be by then, an overly large, overly hardened man, in "that great and terrible day". And the collapse of that house will be a dreadful thing to watch.
   It is bad to be broken, and worse to not be. This alone, with Him as friend, let's in enough light to keep the grift at bay.

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