What happens in history is not always easy to grasp philosophically at once. There are 'prophets' (like, to a certain extent, the French postmodernists) but only later can we begin to understand what happened or the paradox of what did not happen yet could have. The emergence of the World Wide Web was a monumental happening in the history of mankind. Theoretically this meant that advanced knowledge and higher education (in all humanistic and theoretical disciplines as well as many technological and applied disciplines) was potentially made accessible to every human being having the leisure, patience, inclination and dedication for study and learning. This implied a potentially a complete overhaul of traditional social, educational and knowledge-guarding institutions, professions and hierarchies (both in their worthless, plutocratic, nepotic, dogmatic aspect but also in their good humanistic aspects). But this is not what happened. This potential universal diffusion of knowledge had apparently to wait for a 'dumbed down' version based on LLMs for such questions to be even seriously asked. And yet the World Wide Web became ultimately a tool not of liberation, reform and revolution but a horrific powerful tool for deception and global control by traditional power structures. Language ceased to be means of communication and conveying knowledge morphing instead into a global power-tool for psychological and cultural formatting, uniformization, manipulation and cognitive-semantic degeneration. This monstrous pseudo-culture, pseudo-communication, pseudo-knowledge (engineered and directed and financed by traditional powers) is collected together into vast curated datasets which are then processed to produced bland blends of empty linguistic mimicry. Thus the semblance of language and knowledge have become the enemy of mankind Homo sapiens sapiens sapiens - and the irony the fulfillment of the French postmodernist's prophecies. People nowadays (we could coin the term digitanttes) have all the arrogance and conceit and mindset of the worst kind of 'intellectual' while having rarely any authentic knowledge or expertise. The salvation of mankind can only come through
i) systematic, thorough and profound doubt, questioning and skepticism of all alleged knowledge and information and most specially of the alleged knowledge and information offered by LLMs, internet encyclopedias and government, religion and corporate controlled media.
-Develop one's own software for the logical representation of knowledge and the automatic checking of proofs. Restore the scientific method and the original meaning of positivism and empiricism.
A book is just a book. You can hold it in your hand and discard it. But reading a screen is plugging yourself into the matrix (running not only on electric energy but global focused psychic energy).
Owning and reading a book - or any information storing and displaying device not connected to the World Wide Web - is a higher form of revolution and freedom.
ii) a radical reform of language, communication and social interaction (and of course the complete elimination of any engagement with shallow, short, mindless, addictive, memetic, unreliable social media) - perhaps drawing inspiration from the Ch'an tradition as well as the best and most beautiful counter-cultural artifacts of the 20th century.
iii) unwavering universal dedication to international law and justice, human rights and animal rights, demilitarization and the protection of the environment.
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