Bill Gates may be the second (or is he now the third?)
richest man in the world.
But despite his wealth, something tells me he may not be the
happiest man in the world at the present moment.
Primarily because about 7 billion people--minus the 50,000
who are hacking into computers and networks--are all looking at him and
wondering: why on earth did we trust this college dropout?
Granted, the story was cool. College dropout starts amazing
technological innovation (wait, I think that was Steve Jobs, but never mind)
and becomes richest man in the world. Lets revise that-college dropout markets
tech toy invented by another college dropout, and become a global force in
marketing. Transforms everything, from education to banking to medicine to
every known interaction mankind makes with each other.
Cool. Awesome, in fact.
Unfortunately, anything that gets described as “awesome”
should have been taken with a grain of salt. But somehow humanity forgot to do
it this time around. Around thirty years after the Big Bang of the computer’s
ascent, it seems it is finally coming to rest to earth. With people wondering:
why on earth did we ever put every single important and precious data in a box
this easily broken, hacked and tampered with?
Seriously. Lets think about this. Was there some mass
delusion and hysteria that hit people around 1973-2013, in which people simply
didn’t notice that they were putting all their most precious data in some of
the most leaky, untrustworthy and easily-wiped out technology on earth? What is
it about American triumphantalist rhetoric that makes people ignore common
sense?
Right around the time the World Trade Centers came down,
George Dubya Bush went on record to boastfully say he was going to bomb
Afganisthan “back to the Stone Age.” Now the more you think about it, the more
the Stone Age appears a golden age of resilient humanity. All people needed to
survive was, well, stones. They hunted with stone implements. They took only
what they needed. They sat around the fire and told stories at night, and made
some great art. They probably looked at the stars and the constellations and
had some notions of divinity, and no doubt they followed rites and rituals which
gave them a sense of calendrical regularity. They died at a good age, without
having to face the senilities of old age or the horrors of modern allopathic
pharmaceuticals.
Then along comes the Post-technological age, or the Digital
Age. Now what do you get? You get one electricity blackout in New York City on
a hot summer day and everything—I mean everything--closes down. Traffic lights,
ATMS, fridges, TVs, radios, trains. The world stops functioning because
technology failed and the lights went off. Doesn’t it seem the more “developed”
humanity gets, the less resilient and less able to survive it becomes?
Then there’s the hypothetical scenario of one smart thirteen
year old who decides to create a computer virus and let it loose on the world,
and suddenly everything from Bill Gates to Wall Street will be shitting bricks.
This is a hypothetical scenario, folks—but I would bet there’s quite a few
teenagers out there who are on the cutting edge of creating “neat and cool”
computer programs that can just do a whole lot of damage.
So here we sit, in the post-industrial age, looking at this
giant mess we got ourselves into, wondering: WT...?
Well, lets get back to the Stone Age. Stone Age folks were
using stone implements to dig out their yams. They got their yams and they ate
it, without having to worry some college dropout would one day wipe out their
storehouse of food by tampering with their genetic blueprints. Because now Mr.
Gates is course on to the next cool thing--inserting viruses into perfectly healthy
food plants. This process goes by the “awesome” moniker of “genetic
modification,” and everyone’s keen to invest in it.
At the heart of GM
technology seems to be this interesting little process--inserting a virus into
something perfectly healthy (BT cotton, anyone?) and screwing with it. Maybe
somebody with some power and authority to stop unbrindled capitalism should
scratch their heads right around now and say: Pray, Mr. Gates, why would you
want to do that?
Just as we said “Awesome!” when Bill Gates started to market
us a little old box that promised to do everything from computational
calculations to photography, we also said “Awesome!” when he just sold us this
notion of the genetically modified yam (delicately, his Foundation leaves out
the “controversial” word GM in his address to his adoring followers in 2013).
Apparently this yam is now curing hunger in Africa.
So that’s the next neat and cool invention embraced by the
Great Mr. Gates—who not only owns a rather good chunk of Monsanto stock, but
also seems to be out and about forcing this technology on the people of Africa,
and no doubt sneakily in places like South Asia. The mainstream press presents
these activities as those of an enlightened philanthropist who aims to wipe out
world hunger.
Or perhaps just to market the next great invention onto a
captive world? The Davos crowd of course have wasted no time painting Bill
Gates as the Saint of Poverty Reduction. It seems they are less keen to examine
where exactly this saintly humanitarian philanthropist may have more commercial
motives at stake.
I was in a small little mountain town in the Kathmandu
Valley for Maghay Sankranti—a calendrical festival that celebrates the shift of
the stars. This festival has no doubt been celebrated since the Stone Age. What
interested me was the thirteen different kinds of yams I saw being sold in the
market. And then I heard these words from a standing bystander, and it sent a
shiver down my back: “But the bikasay yam still has to ripen.” The bikasay (“developed”)
yam? Anything with the term “bikasay” probably hides the horrors of new,
unexamined technology that are being spread around the world with the speed of
light and with the intent to enslave people to the grand old God of Profit.
Introduce a virulent new GM yam to an unsuspecting mountain town in Nepal under
the guise of “technical co-operation” or “support from the embassy,” and it
could probably cause all of our thirteen different varieties of yam to become
sterile and not propogate the next season.
Let me be upfront here—my blog post is not primarily about
computers, or the frightening commercial greed of Bill Gates (or the stupidity
of people who gave him that immense power to shape the world), but about what
may be humanity’s even greater error than the blind embrace of digital
technology thirty years in the past. Mainly, the power to screw with our food,
which people with the apocalyptic power of unbrindled capitalism can now push
on everyone.
With genetically modified seeds
being seen as the next “frontier” of profit, and the free market ruling the
world, humanity must do some quick thinking before we find all of our seeds
have been wiped out by a few smart college dropouts. Mainly, humanity needs to
learn that rich men are not always right, and that we should step in with the
international judicial system to stop them before they destroy our food base.
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