Baiting the Comfy Trap.

Yesterday I had a text message from my mobile provider telling me that my subscription is being increased by over 100%. Today I had an email from my ISP telling me that my broadband subscription is being increased by approximately 25%. (And all dressed up in friendly language in a pathetic attempt to convince the gullible that the capitalist, corporate machine is not really as heartless and psychopathic as it must surely appear to be even to the gullible.)

The message is becoming more and more obvious with each passing day.

What’s obvious is that the corporate world generally, the technology wing especially, and Establishments all over the ‘developed’ parts of the planet have quietly been constructing a trap and calling it progress. Almost all functions involving any sort of communication are now done by email, text message, or online facilities. Anybody who wants to live a conventional life in these cultures is now required to have well-functioning computer equipment of some sort or other, preferably several sorts. And that means that the providers of these facilities are now free to rip us off as much as they want to, no matter how outrageously.

The only way out of this trap is to cut loose and take to living in a tent, a car, or a van. Difficult as such a move would be, at least it’s still possible in Britain. Over in America it seems it isn’t. If you do that in the land of the free (dare I for once offer a hearty LOL?) you will be regarded as a vagrant, accused of being either mentally ill or addicted to illegal substances, and locked up. So how far will this spread and how long will it take?

It seems to me that the western world is primed for revolution, but of course it won’t happen. Why? Because the American middle class and its equivalent in other cultures has been carefully softened up by the lure of convenience, lifestyle obsession, and the imperative to climb shamelessly on the backs of others in order to be ‘successful’ as defined by the Big Bother system. It’s a sort of mob mentality in lavender.

The only people likely to take to the streets in protest are the PBI (an abbreviation of the British phrase ‘poor bloody infantry’). And when they do, the Establishment will revile them as criminal, mindless mobs, while the other mob – the lavender variety – will nod knowingly and call for more containment facilities. It’s happened before, even in the UK when Mrs Thatcher preached the American Dream and tagged us to America’s coat tails. And it's fascinating to note that Orwell saw this coming even before I was born.

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Last night I had another of those awful dreams I was having some months ago – trying to negotiate a dark, depressingly wet world in which everything was falling apart; and every apparent road out led inevitably back into the nightmare. I woke up at 5.30 feeling trapped and terrified, a feeling which lasted until I took a walk up to the fairy glen above the village. Hardly surprising, is it?