In the end this is our world - the world of human beings (and of course the millions of other species that share it with us). It is most definitely NOT a world that belongs to just a few richest and most powerful who can use their megarich, megapowerful corporations do exactly what they want.
Once most of us held that this was also the world of a deity or deities, and - however much wrong may at times have been done in that name - there was at least a feeling of something else beyond the everyday. Now that something else beyond the everyday is not a spiritual world, or even a world in which we fear divine punishment or look for divine inspiration and salvation. Now it is a world in which what goes on behind the scenes is a perfect fusion of money and data, and even governments have far less access to that than do corporations. If this has a moral compass at all, it's a humanist one, and perhaps one whose boundaries can prove very vague indeed.
This is not the world we asked for, or dreamed of, but it is the world we've got, and of course we are already far past the situation in which we can understand more than a fraction of it. But that does not mean we sit and let it all wash over us, without even giving the matter a second thought; it does not mean either that we eschew a balancing of the benefits and costs for us of the world in the way it is going. And it does not mean that good and bad have been replaced by "information" of no moral content whatever.
Jacques Peretti (he's much more British than he sounds) is here to help with this, and - in his insightful 2nd episode on money, which I saw - he presents his own thesis interestingly enough, while enslisting in friendly banter a host of talking heads both responsible for recent mega-changes, and in a position to assess those more critically, to show us how money and data became one, and how cash - while certainly (strongly presented by those who don't want it as) a medium for use by organised crime and other ne'erdowells is still something that can allow us to keep a residual measure of our freedom, if we so choose.
And choosing doesn't sound a bad idea right now - while we still can, that is...
Once most of us held that this was also the world of a deity or deities, and - however much wrong may at times have been done in that name - there was at least a feeling of something else beyond the everyday. Now that something else beyond the everyday is not a spiritual world, or even a world in which we fear divine punishment or look for divine inspiration and salvation. Now it is a world in which what goes on behind the scenes is a perfect fusion of money and data, and even governments have far less access to that than do corporations. If this has a moral compass at all, it's a humanist one, and perhaps one whose boundaries can prove very vague indeed.
This is not the world we asked for, or dreamed of, but it is the world we've got, and of course we are already far past the situation in which we can understand more than a fraction of it. But that does not mean we sit and let it all wash over us, without even giving the matter a second thought; it does not mean either that we eschew a balancing of the benefits and costs for us of the world in the way it is going. And it does not mean that good and bad have been replaced by "information" of no moral content whatever.
Jacques Peretti (he's much more British than he sounds) is here to help with this, and - in his insightful 2nd episode on money, which I saw - he presents his own thesis interestingly enough, while enslisting in friendly banter a host of talking heads both responsible for recent mega-changes, and in a position to assess those more critically, to show us how money and data became one, and how cash - while certainly (strongly presented by those who don't want it as) a medium for use by organised crime and other ne'erdowells is still something that can allow us to keep a residual measure of our freedom, if we so choose.
And choosing doesn't sound a bad idea right now - while we still can, that is...
