Two days ago, my less than amicable neighbour here – eyes too close together, looks as if he should be in a Kentucky tree plucking at the banjo – mistakenly cut the telephone line to my house (and that of my very amicable neighbours) with a tractor. Amicable neighbour Francis ignored curmudgeonly farmer Philippe’s attempt to walk off muttering “Je m’en fou”, and immediately rang Orange who promised to repair the line on Monday.
“That means Tuesday,” Francis observed yesterday, “but it isn’t the end of the world”.
“Exactly,” I replied – looking forward to two days without game plans, Clubmed bonds with negative interest rates, quantitatively easing the bowels of banking buggery, and assurances from the Zog tendency that the Queen is a secret Mossad agent.
“Wanna see my new quad bike?” he asked. I nodded.
In his vast garage (entirely restored with stunning attention to detail, and a neatness I can barely imagine let alone aspire to) he showed me the new toy – and his son’s Kawasaki moto-cross monster. For a bloke utterly bored by boy’s toys, I found myself drawn in by his technical skill and descriptions of why he enjoys rural bouncing about. Some people have the knack of communicating an almost tactile enthusiasm that bids other people listen with respect, and my neighbour has it in spades.
When Francis first inherited the house, it was a wreck surrounded by a bomb site…the latter occupied by two acres of vicious bramble. Today, it stands as a tribute to quiet (but sure) artisanale perseverance, good taste, and the quintessential French desire to grow one’s own stuff.
Francis is solid, decent working class: he’s a fork lift truck driver by day, but a disc jockey by night and at weekends. Truth be told, he is in fact a rough-diamond designer of incredible ingenuity. I was uneasy with him at first, because his Sud-ouest accent sprinkled with Occitane slang I found impenetrable. But when my second wife and I split up, my neighbours went out of their way to bring me veg, encourage crop-swapping, and then invite me to Francis’s 50th Birthday party.
During that wing-ding, he showed me his latest project: rearing edible snails. He has an entire greenhouse devoted to feeding them on the perfect escargot diet, giving them a life he reckons to be vastly better than they could expect in the wild – and thus feeling no guilt at eating them.
Anyway, at the moment we share an inabilty to communicate with the outside world. After 36 hours of The Slog blogging nothing, I do not doubt that rumours are already rife among the small band of loyalist Sloggers.
Perhaps you will read this via secret transmitter….if I can find a safe Bar somewhere tomorrow from which to contact my controllers in SMERSH. This is obviously a major multinational pan-global conspiracy by the Zionist Elders of Friedman and their secret allies the Westminister Paedophile Masonic Bodge to silence me. And if that be so, then I must grudgingly admit that so far, things are going rather well from their viewpoint.
Anyway, none of that is terribly relevant to today’s insight…which is not original, but has been brought hone to me now after 72 hours without digital comms. Fasten your cerebral safety belts, here it comes:
The internet has taken us prisoner
Consider some of the following factors.
Every ISP works closely, as an accepted fact of commercial life, with the State security services of every major political bloc.
Without the internet, most of us cannot access our banked money.
We cannot run our businesses.
More and more of us use it to pay our taxes, or appeal against assumed tax liabilities.
It is the only way we can read otherwise spiked journalism under the cosh of rich, unelected and often tax-avoiding expat billionaire gargoyles….or Trotsky-Lite North London pc enclaves.
The internet has storage systems that can be altered and/or destroyed at will. This allows for the rewriting of history….already disgracefully apparent at Wikipedia, and at Conservative Party sites where inconvenient and uncomfortable former policies have become ‘unfacts’.
In the UK and US, every message we write, view we opine, conversation we have, clue we leave, site we visit, tweet we make and event we record is subject to potential surveillance. In fact, anything you say or write using the words Goldman Sachs, Mario Draghi, Leon Brittan, Merkel in the DDR, Viktor Orban, Prince Andrew, Rebekah Brooks and Boris Johnson, George Osborne white powder, Jeffrey Epstein, Elm House, To Potami, MH17, and a host of other robot magnets will result in your message being sent for analysis. If you have a history of using such word-connections, your message will be individually read for evidence of sedition.
But the main reason we’re imprisoned is that, without continuing to consume hitech junk in a way that allows us access to the Web, we will spend the restore of our lives in an isolation wing’s padded cell. We are prisoners in the same way that junkies are driven by their drug of choice. That is, for me, a truly frightening thought.
Earlier at The Slog: Greece tries to prove innocence after media find it guilty
The Slog 