Digitally Screwed

By the Son of a Tool Maker

Every now and again I find myself having a ‘suffocating’ moment.

Maybe you can relate.

It’s a feeling somewhere between how I imagine Dita Von Teese feels when shoehorning herself into an ever tighter corset, and a netted fish in the last throes of death.

Then again, it’s also the feeling you get when you’ve worked out who the villain in the scary movie is, but the characters haven’t.

It’s a feeling I first experienced in spring 2020.

I felt it again today as I listened to Herr Harmer, announcing a social media ban for under 16s.

He’s doing it ‘for the kids’ of course.

He wants them to be happy.

What’s not to applaud?

• The same kids he wanted jabbed with experimental vaccines to ‘save granny’.

• The same kids he wanted deprived of their school, friendship circles and extended family gatherings for months on end.

• The same kids who - until last year and mounting pressure - he was only too happy to cap welfare payments for.

Go figure……

‘Loosey Left and Righty Tighty’ has gotten me through many a ditsy DIY moment.

But it is not a mnemonic one can apply to politics.

Either way, we are being screwed and the drill remains the same.

But whether it’s needing online ID to ‘stop the boats’, ‘counteract terrorism’ or ‘protect the children’, too many of us now no longer see such projects in isolation.

We see them as parts of something much bigger and more nefarious.

We see patterns.

Chaos is unleashed to the inevitable public outcry and natural response of ‘something must be done!’

We see solutions readily ‘found’.

Fixes that just happen to involve ever greater state overreach and intrusion.

But never without having a ‘conversation’ first, right?

Yes, Starmer - like the rest of them - is quite keen on ‘consultations’, isn’t he?

Remember the one about Digital ID?

People didn’t hold back, nearly three million told him in no uncertain terms via a petition, that they didn’t want it. It was a full on rejection.

Still, like any son of a tool maker worth his salt, by hook or by crook, that screw was going in, damn it.

And he has done something despicable in how he has gone about securing it.

He has taken the tragic deaths of children and young people and weaponised their grieving parents.

Make no doubt about it, they are all in it together - the tech giants, the left, the right, those producing sensationalist headlines, as well as many charities lobbying for change. I really believe that. It’s a self serving machine with many cogs.

I don’t know my VPN from my VPL but certainly kids will run rings around it, just as they have in Australia.

What it will mean however, is ever more hoops to jump through for everybody else.

You could say it’s Digital ID by the back door.

We are fast becoming little more than barcoded parcels, tracked and traced and reduced to sequences of profitable and non profitable data.

There we sit in life’s depot.

As we each become further buried under layers of needless, infuriating packaging, maybe at the bottom there’s a bumper sticker with our name on. A sticker with the tagline

“I used to be a person”.

But hey, at least we’ll have saved the kids.