The two biggest threats to human liberty: Escapist unreality and Smartcash

Thanks to a recently established relationship, I am just beginning to get to grips with Tik-Tok. Tik-Tok is an app with which you can sit there looking at a live video selfie and then move various levels up and down and watch as digital paint turns you into either a Barbi Doll botox victim (girlies) or an ageing juvenile lead with a wrinkle-cream habit (blokes).

The final overall effect resembles the work of a sadistic plastic surgeon who promised a face-lift and delivered a menopausal baby.

I found the experience of being youthified creepy in the extreme, but its success suggests that many addicts [mainly women, I have to say] see the process as one of idealisation. For me, it is blatant and tragic escapology. During the never-ending 1930s depression, escapism flourished in the shape of Fred Astaire and Busby Berkely movie fantasies. Today's version - a fleeting diversion, I fear, from the daily experience of uncaring sociopathic thieves - somehow foretells the coming transhumanism. It represents a depraved manipulation of reality.

I would dearly love to escape the Broadmoor of daily 21st century life, but such is now clearly impossible. Working at home somehow morphs into State homework set by Mr Quelch at Greyfriar's School.

My day yesterday consisted of hassling a Smartphone calls/Whatsapp data supplier to make the router work properly *, persuading a major UK Bank that as 'verification' was their aim, they should pay for the phonecall, not me ** , asking a major Gambian bank why they had rejected a money transfer, having told me it would be 'fully automatic' *** , and trying to work out an algebraic equation of internet failure with too many unknowns to solve it ****.

But here's the bottom line:

**** When the algebra consists of 'Is it the phone, the network, the router, the pc, the connectivity or the charger?', all you will get from the guilty parties is lies, obfuscation, self exculpation and useless Windows troubleshooting.

The answer to all the other asterisks is (going 3,2,1 here) 'All Bankers are wankers', 'All bankers are tight-fisted sociopaths' and 'All Smartphone ISPs blame you for pressing the restore button when every swamp-dwelling plancton knows that you must not ever do that otherwise the sky will fall in chicken-licken'.

I hope now that you're all up to speed on The Big Issue here -----

We are all being groomed to accept the unacceptable

....that is to say, planned financial entropic chaos, non-existent service replacing human employees with AI, digitalised money via unreliable Smartphones, endless mendacious excuses for Snafu, mandated cooperation with the New World Order, and minority-clique fake democracy insisting that we obey all rules at all times.

This from the MIT Review:

So then: a World run by Microsoft, Amazon and Google. Hands up all those who are totally cool with that....