UNITE! Info #291en:

The Internet and the quality of life

09.09.2007

Intro note:

In July I was invited to attend, or at least submit papers to, some conferences previously unknown to me and described as a series of multi, inter, and trans disciplinary conferences dedicated to advances in computer/internet science and engineering, called VIPSI Conferences, with a website at http://internetconferences.net/ipsi/.

One planned to be held in Bled, Slovenia, on 08-11 October 2007, whose main topic is to be Quality of Life (Computing, Science, Humanities, ...), I offered to submit a paper to, notifying the organizers that I would be unable to attend that conference itself. This was accepted. Here is the article I submitted, which I'm now also putting at my homepage as this Info.


The Internet and the Quality of Life

By Rolf Martens, Malmö, Sweden, 08.09.2007


01. Introduction

Since humans very much are "herd animals", a fact on which the entire civilization depends, that possibility of people's getting into contact with each other internationally which the Internet provides already today has large consequences for that which you can call their quality of life.

This inevitably and ironically is the case above all concerning such contacts which those who began organizing the Internet in the first place have good reasons to dislike. It offers a new possibility for the very many to unite against the very few. And this improves the quality of life for the former very much, even if they may not always realize this consciously.

Actually, of course not for all of those "very many" does the Internet provide a possibility of improving their quality of life, I must add at once. In many countries in the world today, obviously, there are millions of people who live under such conditions that their main or even only concerns for improving their quality of life, or even for staying alive, is to find sufficient food, shelter and clean water for this, and/or to avoid dire consequences for themselves of a war of aggression to which they are being subjected.

For those people, who make up a significant part of mankind today, the question of what advantages the Internet may bring or may not bring is not so directly relevant anyway, since because of those same conditions, they don't have any Internet access of their own.

Perhaps in some cases, despite this, some of those people who live under such conditions will have contact with some others who are friendly disposed toward them and who on account of their somewhat higher standard of living and, in connection with this, perhaps better education too, do have Internet access and thus can convey to them some information acquired, because of this, which may be of some use also to those stricken in the very worst way by poverty and/or aggressive warfare in the world.

Having made this important restriction above, I can specify that what I'm writing about here is:

For those already many "ordinary people" today who do have direct or indirect access to the Internet, this particularly modern communication method and network has important effects on their quality of life.

And one important aspect of this, I think, is that it's liable to strengthen that "hunch" which probably most people already have: That the future of mankind is very bright.

Already by his or her having such an outlook, a "normal" person's quality of life no doubt gets improved considerably.

Of course there are many practical advantages, for such a person, with the Internet and with access to it: Such things as shopping, travel tickets ordering, various payments which are necessary, getting to know the addresses of institutions and of other persons, etc, etc, can be made much easier with this. These self-evident positive consequences I don't intend to deal with any more in this article than just mentioning them.


02. The return to the "herd" - the Internet as one important part of this

I wrote above that humans very much are "herd animals". This needs to be commented on some more and in one respect qualified a little.

From the dawn of mankind on and up until some thousands of years ago, up until perhaps 8,000 years ago or so, people everywhere did live, archaeological and anthropological research has found, in what can be described as "herds" too. They lived in tribes within which there was complete solidarity among its various individuals. The phenomenon of private property, so important in society today, was unknown. There were no particular armed bodies, within the tribe, such as those known in the societies, the states, of today as the police or the army, which is the same as saying that there were no states either. That is, there reigned, everywhere on earth, social conditions of communism - a primitive such in that it was limited to existing only within each tribe.

The fact that the Russian word "mir", for instance, "happens to" mean both "world" and "peace" no doubt is a result of, and a relic of, those earlier existing primitive conditions. The territory which one particular tribe controlled, this it considered its "world", and within that world, there was peace too. With all neighbouring ones, the tribe was in a constant condition of what we today would call "war".

Today, and since thousands of years back, things of course are very much different from those early conditions. There are conflicting classes in society and there is private property, lots and lots of it concentrated in the hands of some very few people, while others are much poorer and many quite destitute, and states existing to uphold this order of things.

But many facts, which can clearly be seen today and which were visible even yesterday, point in the direction that mankind now has reached a stage at which these conditions will change most radically again, in the not too distant future.

As early as in the late 19th century, the anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan in the USA, who investigated the social order in existence then among the North American Indians, got adopted into a tribe of such and found that the terms for relatives in the (American-)Indian languages pointed to there having existed earlier a system of relations quite different from the then recent one based on families, and wrote that:

"'The new system' towards which modern society tends 'will be a revival in a superior form of an archaic social type'."

That is, Morgan held that modern society tends (already in the 19th century tended) towards a return to the "herd", to the tribe, only one in a superior form.

Agreeing with Morgan on this, Karl Marx in a rather well-known first draft of a letter to Vera Zasulich in Russia in 1881 noted that that American writer was "quite free from any suspicion of revolutionary tendencies and subsidised in his work by the Washington government". (The draft can be found at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/03/zasulich1.htm.)

Of course, Karl Marx even in his lifetime was a very "controversial" writer, and is so even more today. This is natural in that class society which exists in our epoch too. I on my part hold - as readers may have gathered already from what I've written so far above - that his ideas are correct and very important.

A "world herd", or "world tribe", is on its way, replacing the present class-divided society, I'm certain. Bringing of course a "mir mira" (as is the term for it in Russian), a world peace. But a state of things also impossible to bring about - Marx and his adherents have always held - without the most extensive and perhaps prolonged revolutionary wars. Such is the contradictory nature of many things, in my opinion and in that of probably rather many others.

And the Internet no doubt importantly is contributing towards bringing such a state of things, such a "world herd", about.

Among other things, it also helps towards developing further internationally such "sub-herds" which there already were earlier, consisting of people with common interests in certain elements of culture such as various sciences, or kinds of music, say, or sports or games such as chess - which happens to be one particular interest of mine - and of course today there are many new kinds of games precisely developed as computer games, which many young people are playing via the Internet too.

Does the demonstrative brutality of some of those computer games, caused of course by the interests of certain people within the existing class society, perhaps risk poisoning the minds of some young people? This sometimes has been maintained. But I think it cannot or need not really be the case, considering that actual brutality that many are being confronted with in real life and considering the fact that parents can always explain to their children the difference between illusion and reality.

Those internationally developing "sub-herds" clearly also are things which are contributing somewhat to that future general "world herd" which the entire development is pointing to.


03. Contradictions of the Internet and of other modern things - in their origins vs present use

That very instrument of the Internet, the computer, of course was developed as a war instrument. Like the jet engine and nuclear energy, it arose during World War II, and it was developed at that time for the decrypting of enemy states' codes, in which it already at that early stage was very successful.

Later it was used in the new discipline of interplanetary navigation. The Moon landings from the 1960s on, for instance, would have been impossible without it.

And it was the 1960s too that saw the embryo of the Internet, likewise developed for a purpose of war. It was in the military interest of avoiding total blackout of certain important computers in case of a nuclear war that, originally, a number of computers were connected with another. And some computer scientists and operators then took the opportunity to send private messages to each other - apparently at first concerning science fiction literature, in which they happened to have a common interest.

Thus came into being the first discussion group or newsgroup. Today the so-called Usenet - a third constituent of the Internet beside the World Wide Web and the e-mail function - has thousands of such newsgroups, discussion forums for all sorts of things including political matters in which people all over the world can discuss with each other and which, importantly, it's practically impossible for even quite powerful forces to censor. My Internet provider for instance is showing me a list of over 25,000 such forums, the discussions on which I can read and also participate in. Discussions also can be and are being held at e-mail lists and at blogs, which are part of the www.

The Internet has also gotten importance as an instrument for organizing joint mass actions by people in many countries. For instance, immediately before and after the start, in 2003, of the aggressive war against Iraq, there were simultaneous mass demonstrations against this on a scale never seen before, concerning any matter. Something similar took place when Yugoslavia was being bombed in 1999. And I remember being surprised at the speed with which, already in 1989, the movement against the oppression in distant China then obviously inspired a similar and very strong one in the then DDR (East Germany), which in that same year led to the breaking through and soon reducing to rubble that infamous Berlin Wall (plus its bigger "cousin") which had been separating people from each other for decades. The Internet as already developed a bit then must have played a certain role in this, I'm guessing in retrospect.

Because of this pro-democracy role which the Internet, thus, has come to play, there also on the part of some few people have been vilifications of it, as "mainly" an instrument for disseminating child pornography, Nazi propaganda, bomb making recipes and "terrorist" propaganda and organizing - in which context it's necessary to note of course that some few people always have wanted to vilify freedom fighters as "terrorists" and also that clearly, there behind certain infamous actions, in the last few years, of actual terrorism, killings of innocent civilians, have lurked precisely those same few powerful people who, at the same time, are pretending that they are waging "a war against terrorism".

Certainly, the existence of the Internet should not be painted out as "a bad thing" because of the possibility also for a few to make bad use of it. Those vilifiers of the Internet whose predecessors or friends, ironically, were those who started organizing it in the first place now increasingly also are talking of their own "need to" control and/or to censor that instrument of communication. These ideas above all come from some persons in the USA, while the probably worst example of their being put into practice is that which has been called "The Great Firewall of China". A website by that same name, attacking this phenomenon, you can find at http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/.

Pornography (in the main, not pedophile such) does make up a considerable part of Internet contents today, a fact which is being used by some few people, in China for instance and in America and in Europe too, as a pretext for their wanting censorship. Such of course remains a very bad idea, and, it needs to be pointed out, will not stop interest in pornography either, since this is due to that separation and split between the sexes which exists in large parts of present-day class society due to such social systems' always having had a patriarchal, women-suppressing character.

Getting rid of the Internet altogether those who today would really prefer this cannot do either, of course, since it already is such an indispensable instrument of communication for the big governments, big banks and big other corporations. Thus it will remain as an open people-to-people communication channel.

Incidentally, if some persons want to communicate to friends of theirs some information which they don't want the constantly-snooping big governments to listen in to - and this applies both to criminals and also, more importantly, to ordinary honest people - there actually is one way in which they can do this too, some mathematicians have found out, investigating further that question of making secret codes versus breaking them which initially gave rise to the computer.

If you, person A who wants your friend person B to be able to send messages to you over the Internet which only you and nobody else can read, then you can just (well, this is a little bit complicated but quite possible anyway) find a couple of prime numbers (only divisible by 1 and by the number itself) as big as, say, having some 150 digits each. (There are such big prime numbers, to be found by using the mathematician Goldbach's method of multiplying a a batch of smaller ones and then adding 1.) Then you multiply those two big prime numbers with each other, getting as a result a whopping big number of some 300 digits. That number you show to B, and publicly too; all those who want to send secret messages to you are to use this for encrypting such messages.

For decrypting the messages, you'll use those two prime numbers of 150 or so digits each, about which only you will know that these are the ones that, by multiplication of them, produce that big number of some 300 digits. Will not the intelligence services of some big governments find out, using their supercomputers, what those prime numbers of some 150 digits are, and thus be able to read that secret mail to you too? No, they'll guess that you're using this method, but the beautiful thing about this is, that the only way to find out whether a certain (big) number is a prime number or not, is to test each such up until ½ of the number investigated to see whether it can be divided by any of such smaller prime numbers. And such testing, in the case I've described, will take even some governments' supercomputers some 50 years. (I've read about this in "The Code Book" by Simon Singh, from 1999.)

Thus, even complete privacy is possible, on principle, on the Internet too.

The jet engine I mentioned above as one other thing initially developed out of war interests during World War II. Today since long it too actually also serves that interest which ordinary people have in better communications. The jetpropelled big passenger aircraft the Boeing 747 "Jumbo Jet", built from the 1970s on with over 1,000 such existing today, reportedly has revolutionized international travel, making this cheap enough to be accessible to a large number of people - though of course, as is the case with the Internet too, by no means to everybody on earth.

On - among other things - nuclear energy, a kind of (even bigger, and likewise warborn) "sister" to the computer and thus to the Internet  too, more in a later section.


04. The Internet as life-quality-improving revealer of certain big secrets

One result of the class character of the presently reigning social system on earth is that the ruling persons of many states, in particular the "leading" big and strong ones, systematically are lying to the masses of people about various important matters.

About questions of politics and history, such persons always have lied, from as far back as recorded history goes. But in the present era, in particular in the time from the early 1970s and onwards, they are advancing the most absurd lies also in several fields of the natural sciences.

These are lies which, firstly, are intended to cover up actions of the ruling persons' which are very detrimental to the quality of life of practically everybody, and which, secondly, in themselves are detrimental to the quality of life of anyone who believes them, since they all have that in common that they are painting out a very bleak and scary picture of what is mankind's future.

One early example of a collection of such lies, already containing most of those main ones advanced by politicians and mass media later, was the publication by the so-called Club of Rome in 1972, "The Limits to Growth", a horror story, purportedly developed and demonstrated as to its (however quite absurd) theses with the help of computers, which was liable to make anybody who believed as much as half of it quite depressed.

According to that book and to later and even much bigger followers-up in the mass media on various themes it contained, there was - or is - no end to those disasters which will befall mankind if modern civilization, and in particular, modern industry, continues to develop as earlier.

But with the help of the Internet you can find, at least if you make some efforts towards this, that those purportedly looming disasters are all mere fantasies, in reality nothing to worry about at all.

Take the typical often-repeated proposition, "We'll soon run out of oil!". Clearly this would mean very big problems for very many people, if it were true. But in reality, mankind will not run out of oil at all, at any point in time before that substance becomes quite outmoded as an energy source. This is because oil, like also natural gas and coal, does not have that biological origin, in the decomposition of old plants etc, which the mass media almost always maintain that it has and which would indeed make it rather scarce on earth if this were true. In reality, it instead has an abiotic origin, in vast amounts of hydrocarbons which constantly are surging up from the earth's mantle, not very difficult to extract quite cheaply in many land and sea regions all over the globe.

How can ordinary people ascertain this? One way is to look up some actually scientific websites to which I'm linking from the "Science" part of the "Links" section of my homepage, at www.rolf-martens.com. This goes for those other unfounded scares which I shall mention here too.

Among which a quite big one, in the mass media at present, is that of a so-called "harmful manmade global warming", supposedly threatening all sorts of dire consequences. But this is a fairytale too, one of many invented by a few powerful people in order to cover up their ongoing actions, out of some very reactionary motives, to make all energy scarce and expensive.

Another scare, about so-called "ozone depletion" in the stratosphere, was quite "popular" some 10-20 years ago. This is an utter fantasy too, and the bans against those excellent chemical substances the CFCs or freons, which this propaganda has covered up, are environmentally unjustified and cause considerable harm to the quality of life for many.


05. The Internet as a helper against some actions which will threaten your health

In the preceding section I mentioned some lies disseminated in a big way which are liable directly to decrease a person's quality of life only in that somewhat subtle and perhaps not very big way that, if he or she believes them, this will make him or her unjustifiedly pessimistic about the future. But there is one field in which certain very big lies, also very common today, directly are threatening the health of very many people; indeed they can kill, and already are killing, quite many. That's the field of medicine.

And here the Internet can even help a person avoid serious dangers to his or her health, by providing information about certain goings-on in that field of medicine whose actually most damaging effects all the "official" mass media are continuing to keep completely silent about.

One infamous example of this is that massive campaign concerning so-called "HIV" and so-called "AIDS" which has been going on all over the world since back in the mid-1980s.

I for instance heard and read about that mysterious "new virus" and "new and lethal disease" from that time on too, and could absolutely not figure out what was behind this thing, or which was true or false among the various statements behind it.

Via the Internet however I, living in Sweden, in August 2000 got a tip from someone in Canada, who like myself was trying to support the people in the DR Congo against that aggressive war to which that country was being subjected, about a certain website managed by some people in yet another part of the world quite distant from mine, Australia. It had, and still has, the in itself informative address www.virusmyth.net. How I got to see it was a typical example of the Internet's truly global scope.

Reading the information at that website, I could see at once that what it and also some others were saying must be the - to me very surprising - truth: There never was any "HIV", nor any disease which might justifiably be called "AIDS", at all. These things were inventions, for some very nasty purposes.

But many people in the world continue to get "tested for HIV". These "tests" are complete frauds and are bringing "positive" or "negative" "results" quite arbitrarily. Persons who don't know this and get "tested HIV-positive" are liable, firstly, to get such a shock (quite unfoundedly) that already this may seriously damage their health. And furthermore, they will be subjected to massive pressure to take some purported "medicines against AIDS" which however are very poisonous and will only harm them most seriously.

Reading further on this subject on the Internet, I got to find out that not only is that purportedly lethal "HIV" a mere invention for terror purposes, and the later appearing so-called "bird flu virus" "H5N1", about which there was a large propaganda campaign in 2005-2006, likewise nothing but a phantom, but all purportedly diseasecausing viruses and bacteria in reality are inventions too.

The practice of vaccinations, in many countries considered a quite normal one since many decades back, in reality does no good whatsoever to a person's health but only can damage it, since the vaccines always contain dangerous poisons.

This is something which I on my part rather recently have discovered, precisely via the Internet, together with one and in part even bigger thing too, namely that some other theories and practices of the now internationally prevalent medicine likewise are quite wrong and harmful, the correct theory on this being the still very unknown one of Ryke Geerd Hamer, called the German New Medicine. (See my homepage, or look it up via Google.)

Information about these things, which is available to most people practically only via the Internet, can even be a lifesaver for many.


06. Another and parallel "genie out of the bottle", which some people now would like to squeeze back into it - too

Like the Internet, nuclear energy is an extremely modern and important invention of our times. The well-known (chemistry) scientist Linus Pauling in 1954 - not very wrongly, I think - described it as "the greatest discovery since that of the controlled use of fire by primitive man". And already in the late 1940s some people predicted - no doubt likewise correctly - that it as further developed was likely to make electricity too cheap to meter.

But that would mean something like communism - that return to the "herd", only at a superior level, to which the Internet is pointing too.

Today, some small but powerful cliques of people absolutely don't want nuclear energy to be developed any more but want to get rid of that energy source altogether - as far as its civilian, peaceful use is concerned, that is. They are portraying it, in their propaganda, as The Devil itself, in lots of ways are trying to make people suspicious or scared of it. How can that be?

The abovementioned (likewise) "controversial" Karl Marx in fact explained this, in principle, already more than 150 years ago, for instance in a speech in London in 1856 - on the Net at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1856/04/14.htm.

He said, among other things:

"Steam, electricity, and the self acting mule were revolutionists of a rather more dangerous character than even citizens Barbès, Raspail and Blanqui."

And:

"This antagonism between modern industry and science on the one hand, modern misery and dissolution on the other hand; this antagonism between the productive powers and the social relations of our epoch is a fact, palpable, overwhelming, and not to be controverted. Some parties may wail over it; others may wish to get rid of modern arts, in order to get rid of modern conflicts. Or they may imagine that so signal a progress in industry wants to be completed by as signal a regress in politics."

To the Internet as to nuclear energy, the same applies. It too is a very modern "art", born under - very "mature" - conditions of class society and of class struggle, born out of a purpose of war too, but pointing to, and furthering, the transition, not backwards but forward, to a society of the "world herd", "world tribe", and also of world peace. Which lies, how many decades or centuries ahead? This of course it's most difficult to predict anything about with any semblance of certainty. But undoubtedly, I hold, the world is advancing in that direction, amidst great turbulence and violent sanguinary struggles. The quality of life in the not too distant future, most probably, will become much better for everybody than it is for anybody today.





On the "UNITE! (etc) Info" posting series, see Note.

Previous English-language items, see UNITE! Info series, 1995 -.


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