Nineteen Seventy-Five

I've been meaning to write something about 1975 for months now, but the year is nearly over.  So I'll just post a few thoughts today, and may post some personal reflections another time.

Bernie asks a question that can only be answered by those who are old enough to remember the time: Was life better fifty years ago?

Regardless of Bernie's remarks, the truth is that the question has no factual answer. Whether life was better then depends entirely on one's point of view. And indeed, no matter what year you want to talk about, in human life it is always the best of times or the worst of times - for somebody.  Your answer hinges on whether you feel loved or unloved, content or unsatisfied, hopeful or despairing.

I am annoyed by some people's comments on YouTube and in other places, people who were children or young teens then -- Oh, what a glorious time it was to be alive, a golden age! The music, the clothes, the cars - and everybody was so kind and courteous and loving. Well, no, that's not the way it was -- it was far from a golden age, as this CBS news summary makes clear, for anyone who cares to look back at the reality of 1975:

After long, dreary years of conflict and protests, defeat and deceit, Vietnam and Watergate were finally behind us.  Tricky Dick Nixon was gone, and steady Jerry Ford was in the White House; he survived two assassination attempts by wild-eyed leftist radicals (seriously) in this year.  Other wild-eyed leftist radicals blew up the State Department, and the Patty Hearst kidnapping ended horrifically.  The Middle East was still in turmoil, as it always is, and the Cold War was still on, with the spectre of nuclear war always in the background. The crime rate was rising, and there was a growing sense of decline in American power, politics, money, and manners, from the bold optimism of the Kennedy years to the stagnant malaise of the post-Nixon era.  Many felt the country was going to pot.

The change was felt most acutely in the pocketbook.  Inflation was out of control:  the Oil Crisis of '73 had made the prices of everything go up sharply.  I remember that the price of sugar zoomed from, say, a dollar a bag to five bucks.  (That equals $30 today.)  The same with coffee.  And for the first time in my life, there were empty shelves in the supermarket.  The recession of 1974 was still going strong, and jobs were hard to find.  Your Head Trucker was finding out the hard way that it was just not possible to live well on minimum wage - $1.60 an hour, so take-home pay was about $240 a month.  Rent on my first little cottage was $80 a month, plus phone and utilities.  For comparison, an apartment in a nice complex with swimming pool cost about $120 a month, or more.

My first home after high school was very similar to this one - but the front door was on the side, under a porch roof, and there were no basement stairs, so the kitchen was wide enough for a table and chairs.  It wasn't new, but it was decent, and it was MY place, where I could do as I pleased.  I felt very grown-up,

The placid "happy days" of the 1950s and early 1960s were long gone by this time, as I remember discussing with my friends.  However, I will say that compared to the state of the world today and the polarized society we now live in, it was easier to live without constant fear and dread back then. The world was already quite complex in those days, but it all seemed more understandable somehow - and it was easier to hope that tomorrow would be better.  

In the Deep South, far from the tumults and convulsions in the big cities up north and out west, everyday life was mostly calm and pleasant as long as you could pay your rent and feed yourself:  books, magazines, records, radio, television, movies, church doings, and simple outings with friends were enough to keep a young man occupied.  Nobody had a home computer; cable TV was non-existent, as were VCR's and DVD's.  Phones still had dials, and they were hard-wired into the wall.  You didn't buy one, you rented it from the phone company for a nominal fee, with a choice of four styles and half a dozen colors.

All that would soon begin to change, but as yet, no one felt a need to be "linked in" every single waking moment, and broadcast to the world pictures of their cat, or their butt, or what they were eating at the burger joint.  People would have fallen down on the floor laughing at the very thought of such nonsense.  

But now we live in a world seemingly controlled in nearly every detail by nosy machines and callous trillionaires. Since this old man's exit will be coming up sooner rather than later, I don't obsess about these things, though I deplore them heartily. But God help the younger generations.

Speaking of whom, someone has come up with a way to assimilate them even faster into the Hive Mind: watch this report on a new school with no human teachers -- and shudder.

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Nightmare World: Facebook Wants Your Bank Account

I'll be honest with you, fellas:  Much as I try to keep a stiff upper lip about the decay of civilization, there are days when any attempt at optimism seems hopeless, and the vision of a nightmare world that surpasses anything Orwell ever dreamed of seems not merely imminent, but already present.

Facebook is not your friend, despite the happy college-kid face it presents to the world.  They now want to "partner" with banks to "improve customer service" and "benefit the consumer."  If you believe that, you are a fool.  It's a business, a huge, sprawling, corporation without a human soul.  A corporation is a machine to make money with - like any tool, it can be used for good or ill purposes.  But what all corporations want is to increase their stock prices and dividends, and too many corporate leaders tend not to care if any and all consumers get screwed in the process - hey, too bad, it's progress, wheeeee!

"Privacy" notice I got a few days ago from Google.  Even what your or I watch on YouTube or what places we look up on Google Maps are all tracked under the unceasing, unblinking eye of Big Brother, and filed in his unforgetting, ineradicable memory.  
If Google can follow your every stray thought, who else can too?  And is?

I could go on and on and on about the madness that has engulfed us all in the last 25 years since the advent of the Internet - and even though some antisocial types, like me, have never joined Facebook, there are who knows how many other companies, like Google, and countless little ones nobody ever heard of, all busily digging into everyone's privacy every minute of every hour of every day.  There is in fact no privacy left in the world for anyone, except maybe for some of those lost tribes in the Amazon jungle, and even their remote little world is being steadily invaded.

And it's not merely things that you think of as data-sharing sites.  There's also the ghastly Internet of Things, which to put it another way, means that your car, your refrigerator, your dishwasher, your microwave, and just about any other electronic gadget can in fact be made to spy on you and report everything you do, every word you say, and how you spend every second of your life, waking or sleeping.

From "sponsored content" about harvesting your privacy from the Internet of Things at Politico, 7/16/18.  Click to enlarge.

And every utility - electricity, gas, water - is produced, distributed, and metered by mini-minds that can also be misdirected or shut down.

And furthermore, every last one of those devices, in your home, or at the power plant, can be unlocked and controlled, probably, by some teenage hacker down the street or some spymaster on the other side of the world, with a few taps on a keyboard.

Just last year, somebody in Dallas broadcast a radio signal that activated all 156 of the city's tornado alarms, an amazing feat of digital malevolence.  Lily Hay Newman reported for Wired:

The Dallas incident fits with the broader uptick in infrastructure hacks around the country. From electric road signs to emergency text alert systems to suburban dams, hackers have targeted vulnerable structures with increasing boldness. And while the Dallas sirens did have some alarming secondary effects—over 4,000 calls to 911 flooded the city's emergency response lines for several hours—it's nothing next to the real danger that hacks like these could cause.

"There’s a steady drumbeat of these types of attacks and they’re all pretty benign right now, but what’s next? Is it water? Is it sewage?" says Chris Pogue, the chief information security officer at the data analysis firm Nuix. "Let’s not waste the potential lessons learned by saying it’s an isolated incident."

I don't want to be part of this nightmare.  And I don't want to be part of this ugly, vulgar, hate-filled century, which I'm afraid will one day make the horrors of the 20th century look like a Sunday-school picnic.  But what can any of us do now?  We walked into the enticing trap of the Internet willingly, all unsuspecting, and now the doors are closing on us, it seems.  One day, sooner than you think, Siri and Alexa and other talking boxes will not be optional - they will be required in every home.  Maybe even in every brain.  And then the last hope of resistance - of truly independent human personality - will have vanished.

And it won't be fresh-faced, innocent-looking types like Mark Zuckerberg pulling your strings.  It will be the ruthless, power-hungry leaders of the left or right - when they have a good grip on you with the ruthless digital hand, it won't much matter which side they are.

You may say, "Oh, Russ, you're just being melodramatic, don't get so excited, just chill."  Well, okay, boys - if you all don't think there's any danger to worry about, you just sit back and relax.  While you can.

But when a day comes that your bank balance is zeroed out, your credit cards too, and your car won't start, and you have no electricity - unless you do as you are told - for gosh sakes, don't come whine to me about it, "Oh I never dreamed this could happen."

It can.  Be afraid.  Be very afraid.

You have been warned.


P. S. -- Of course, I could be wrong. So was Orwell, so was Bradbury, so was Forster, so was Wells, and so were a lot of other writers who have rung the alarm bells about present trends and coming events, if you look only only at the small details of what they prophesied.  I don't have the talent for spinning a fascinating yarn as they did, either.

Nevertheless, no one doubts that they were right to sound a warning.  Forewarned is forearmed.