How technology has degraded the way we communicate

No-one wants to hear this.
No-one wants to put their smartphones or tablets down long enough to give their distracted brains a respite. But, if you do, then you might want to wonder why we gave up so easily and became so enslaved by technology. Why are we so hopelessly dependent on communicating in such a sterile, soulless way? Are we so overwhelmed by our own smugness, our own cleverness that we have forgotten what makes us real and human?

I don't understand why the majority of people have embraced smartphone and tablet technology to the extent where they have become hopelessly preoccupied with the technological means of communication at the expense of everything else. Is this symptomatic of a culture that has become dumber by letting machines do their thinking for them while convincing themselves that they're clever because the technology they're using appears sophisticated?

These are all valid questions and I have been caught up in this way of thinking myself. It's ok. I'm clever. I work in technology. I am validated!

Only I know that validation comes from within, it is not defined by external states or circumstances. I don't need to convince myself of this anymore. I know it to be true.

Something I have been very concerned about is the way in which the internet appears to have changed my memory and ability to recall things. Pre-internet we relied on books to furnish us with knowledge or passed knowledge amongst our peers and family from traditional media sources and word of mouth. It has been argued that since the internet has become such a pervasive and accepted part of our everyday life, there is less of a need to recall specific pieces of information as it can be readily pulled from the vast reservoir of information that is the world wide web. The result of this is that our brains can become lazy as we convince ourselves that we don't need to recall certain facts anymore. I guess this is the area I am most concerned about as could it also have a knock on effect and mean that we don't recall important things that influence our daily lives as well?

Taking this a step further, will technology make us more lazy in our general communication as well? Already there are signs that this is happening as quality friend and family time spent chatting is replaced by x number of people sat around a table in silence staring at an LED slab. To me this is a pretty disturbing trend and yet, more disturbing, is how socially acceptable it seems to have become. Why aren't more people challenging it? Well, maybe they are starting to in cultural and artistic circles as the following example illustrates:

http://www.artthesystem.com/2013/12/after-i-saw-this-i-put-down-my-phone.html

In the meantime, I believe it would be a lot healthier if we challenged the rampant advancements in communication technology in terms of its effects on how we communicate because, if we don't, then I'm concerned as to where we might end up.

One day at a time - recovery from heroin addiction

I'm 35 days clean from heroin at the time of writing this blog post which feels like a mini miracle. It's a miracle I'm profoundly grateful for. I have had challenges in those 35 days and they include addictive patterns of thinking that have led me to speculate as to whether I could use replacement drugs to keep myself level. I haven't succumbed to these thoughts, however, and what keeps me from doing so is that I have asked for help from a higher power each time I've had those thoughts and every single time I have received an answer.

It's taken me a little while to realise that the "answer" I get isn't always a thought but more often than not it is a feeling - a sense of love and belonging. A sense that I am worth more and my life is not simply about giving in to self destructive impulses. The last time I had such an impulse and didn't give in to it, I sat down in the car and felt profoundly well and at peace. I can only attribute this to feeling the support and love of my higher power for making that decision.

There is always another choice when you feel the urge to take drugs. Even in the worst throes of addiction, someone can make that decision to do things differently. Opening yourself and surrendering is the first step. As adults, we do not like to admit that we cannot cope with an aspect of life as it can appear as a sign of weakness. But it's actually a sign of strength to ask for help. I've learned that in recovery.

If you are in the grip of addiction or recovering from addiction - keep hope and if you haven't done so already, open yourself up to help and support. There is a lot available and some of it is free.

Peace x

Waking the Dead: addiction and recovery

Winter is coming. I can feel it in the cold chill of the morning when I wake up for work and the last echoes of the night are clinging to the coat tails of morning. Sometimes when I wake up I feel a sense of unease or a physical symptom manifesting itself but then I say a gratitude prayer and give thanks that I'm not waking up dopesick or having to use just to drag my broken body out of bed.

I can taste food properly again but, most of all, I can taste my emotions. At first this is a frightening prospect as they tend to pinball around you bumping against the corners of your soul without any regard for whether you want them there or not. This is a blessing not a curse but if you're the sort of person who uses drugs to mask and hide your emotions, it's bound to come as a big shock.

Just recently I relapsed after 3 months clean and this had a devastating effect on my personal life, work life and involved an encounter with the law..again. In the words of my sponsor, I got past the "little fluffy clouds" stage where the relief of being clean began to pass into the cold reality of having to micro manage your life and addiction on a daily basis. Recognising what went wrong when you encounter a relapse is one thing but acting on it and putting things in place to prevent it happening again is another thing altogether.

For me, each relapse feels like a little fragment of my soul comes loose never to be seen again. I wonder how many pieces I can lose before I become unable to put myself back together again.

Sometimes your actions result in devastating consequences and the ripple is felt for a long time to come. Other times you fall over and pick yourself up again with not so much fuss. I know that once you start to isolate yourself and believe that the addiction voice is your voice. Well, that's the moment that things truly begin to unravel. And if you don't pick up the phone then relapse becomes more than just a thought but an inevitability.

But what happens when your sponsor isn't available and the feelings of wanting to use begin to cascade and feel like they are taking you over?

Let them.

Sorry, say that again?

Let them.

They are happening for a reason and the more you try to resist them and follow them then the more likely you are to build up the levels of frustration and anger that will make a relapse more than likely.

Yet, a strange thing happens when you sit and observe your thoughts rise and fall like your breath. You start to accept them for what they are. No more and no less. Advocates of mindfulness will know what I am talking about here.

It isn't easy to accept damaging thoughts when your cunning addict brain wants to act on them but one of the paths to recovery is discovering that you have a real choice when it comes to how to look after yourself. A question you might want to ask yourself when in the grip of consuming thoughts about recover is this: Will using drugs make things better for me?

The answer is a resounding "No".

The fall of the Silk Road: The Aftermath

So, the silk road has fallen and its so called leader, the Dread Pirate Roberts (hereafter referred to as DPR) is in FBI custody awaiting arraignment. I can't help but wonder what the repercussions are of this development in terms of TOR anonymity and security and also how it sits as an incident in the continued spectacular and catastrophic failure of "The War on Drugs".

No doubt the FBI and other involved law enforcement groups are giving themselves a collective slap-on-the-back right now. They did, after all, take down a site that may have generated upwards of $80 million in illegal revenue in the two and a half years it was online. In the process of taking it down it has been reported that they seized $3.6 million in Bitcoins - which may have been DPR's commission earnings from the site. Taking this many coins out of circulation is no small blip especially considering there is a finite supply on the open marketplace. The reality is, however, that this is not a large bust in the grand scheme of things and is designed more to frighten inhabitants of the dark web who think they can discreetly and anonymously involve themselves in illegal trade without consequences. Right now, on the Silk Road forums, a lot of the site's former vendors are scurrying away to the nether regions of the TOR network to lie low or, in some cases, giving up their trade altogether. As for the site's moderators, who were reportedly paid between $1000 and $2000 a week - many have gone into hiding, not surprisingly fearing for their safety.

A lot of questions have arisen now that the news of the bust has settled. Namely, what will the FBI's next move be? They have already taken an image of the site's server and have had this in their possession since July 2013. No doubt they will be examining the server for clues relating to the location of the site's vendors and those who did not encrypt their communications using PGP or Privnote are probably wondering when the knock on the door is coming.

And what about the site buyers? Will the FBI be drilling down into this data and passing on what they find to police authorities across the world or will the sheer task of trying to piece together the ebb and flow of Bitcoin transactions amongst what is estimated to be nearly 1 million users prove too overwhelming and beyond their resources? We can only guess and over time I am sure the picture will become more complete.

It seems that DPR made some catastrophic errors of judgement in terms of concealing his identity, especially in the early days of trying to promote the web site - leading the feds to a simple gmail address and, ultimately, to the identity of the man himself. This seems inconceivable from someone who was so concerned about keeping a tight ship in terms of the site security and safety of its vendors and customers. Why didn't he practice what he preached? Well, to a great extent he probably did but he got sloppy and careless when it came to covering his tracks which lead to his undoing.

As I have already mentioned above, at the time of writing the Silk Road forums are still open and full of confused souls trying to make sense of the fallout from the site's collapse. Questions are being raised as to how truly anonymous the site's transactions were. It is alleged that once an order was marked as shipped by a vendor, the buyer's address was deleted from the server. It is not inconceivable however that this data could be recovered by law enforcement and possibly used to justify a raid or ten. Also, questions are being asked about how truly anonymous you can remain on the darknet as a result of this raid. Although the smartest buyers and vendors encrypted communications using PGP, even the strength of this encryption method is being called into question by some forum users in the current atmosphere of paranoia.

"Maybe the NSA have cracked PGP already?", wrote one user.
"We should be worried," wrote another.

How worried they should be remains open to debate for now. There will always be those who take their digital security so seriously as to be ultra careful when it comes to concealing their online identity and covering their tracks. So much so that it would prove futile, expensive and time consuming to try and uncover them. Unfortunately for the million or so users of the Silk Road, the Dread Pirate Roberts wasn't one of them.

Authority figures - Elliott Smith lyrics Part 2

What I find curious when I dive into Elliott Smith's lyrics are the plethora of references to institutions of authority in some way, especially the army or the police. Figure 8 is particularly awash with such references in the form of metaphor or more explicit referrals:

Now I'm a policeman directing traffic
Keeping everything moving, everything static
I'm the hitchhiker you recognize passing
On your way to some everlasting...
(Junk Bond Trader)

This metaphor of a policeman directing traffic reoccurs towards the end of the album in the song "Happiness/The Gondola Man"

Activity's killing the actor
And a cop's standing out in the road 
Turning traffic away

Now the title of the album is "Figure 8" and the later reference is probably deliberate as Smith explores the movement of life and the idea of infinity. We can almost imagine this constant flow, constant movement. The policeman in "Junk Bond Trader" is Smith himself, acting as a living contradiction because the traffic is both moving and static, illustrating how we are almost perfect contradictions as human beings. Later on in "Happiness", the traffic is being turned away which could hint at an accident or on a symbolic level an attempt to deflect away from finding the deeper, emotional meaning to the situation at hand. We are not led to understand what truly happened in the song although it touches on regret, and the importance of listening to friends and receiving advice properly when it comes to how to handle an emotional situation. Then Elliott picks up the third party references and transfers them onto his own view of his own mortality and the root of his true desires:

What I used to be will pass away and then you'll see
That all I want now is happiness for you and me

"Happiness" is certainly one of his most moving songs as it reaches us on so many levels and is, for me, one of his best lyrics because it starts off with what seems a simple theme and delves deeper - stretching out to touch our hearts with the final, emotional plea outlined above.

Continued in Part 3 (Coming Soon)

Dead on my feet - a poem for Elliott Smith

Dead on my feet

Falling through my ears
like soft, aural snow your

Voice has a scent
like sweet wine in summer
or dirty whiskey winters

I wish I could
write words across years
across sounds like these

Maybe I won’t but there
will still be your songs
to keep hold of
and wonder at

While time draws
strange patterns across my chest
and twilight dancers form

A figure of eight
head to toe

Sunshine
to go

(For Elliott Smith)

A natural realignment

In a previous post I asked the question: How do you live a radically different life? I did not propose a defining answer to this question but it has since occurred to me that there is a perception in the west that if you do want to live a radically different life then it would likely involve "dropping out" of society in some way.

I personally dislike this phrase "dropping out" because it implies that everyone in society is included in some way anyway - which they aren't because the nature of society in the west is that competitiveness results in a feeling of exclusion if you not one of the successful alpha types. Additionally, I hear a common theme when this idea of dropping out and living a greener way of life closer to nature is discussed at length on message boards and other areas of the internet. This will be something along the lines of "You won't last two weeks before you miss all the comforts of your life such as tv, internet, computers, washing machines etc. The reason we invented all these technological advancements is to make our lives easier so harking back to some bygone era will not make you happier as you are just romanticising the idea that things were better in the past."

There is some truth in this statement. There is a tendency for someone of an idealistic nature to over romanticise the past but it is worth asking the question: How much better are our lives truly with the benefits technology has given us? We are more distant from each other than ever before. While it is undoubtedly true that technology has made things easier on a practical scale it has not resulted in an increase in our overall happiness as much as we think. There has been a sharp increase in diagnosis of mental health conditions in western countries over the last thirty years which coincides with an increase in cheap, affordable technology. We have an over abundance of devices to communicate with each other but we have become obssessed with the means at the expense of the value of what we are communicating.

The truth is, it would be easier to drop out and live closer to nature if you are already the type of person who does not feel reliant on technology in their lives and has the necessary skills to allow them to make the transition to a way of life that is kinder to the environment. It is about shifting your viewpoint and looking at a natural realignment of your life priorities. Even if we all made the effort to do just one simple thing that allowed us to find a way of aligning to nature instead of our daily obssession with our social media profiles and updates then that would be a really important achievement; because it would allow us to see more clearly that we are an integral part of nature and not an aloof observer of it.