technology – praag.org

The crucial business advice that you should take from South Africa’s surging industries

Africa boasts some of the fastest-growing national economies in the world, with South Africa having already established itself as the second-largest economy on the continent – just behind Nigeria and its population that’s four-times the size of ZA. Businesses are always looking to improve as industries grow larger and invite in more innovative competitors.

In two of the biggest and fastest-growing industries in the country, one apparent factor runs through them both, which has, in turn, led to other industries and businesses becoming reliant on them to grow across South Africa. The main thread which runs through the two surging sectors is technology. While some say that people have become addicted to technology, its application in the world of business has become a necessity in the modern-day, as we can see by exploring the rapidly expanding industries of ZA.

The flying mobile and digital sector

The general conversation concerning the rise of mobiles across the continent often points to how the sector is growing and starting to influence each nation. In South Africa, smartphone penetration has already surpassed 90 percent, with the number of mobile users also increasing last year. It marks a huge rate of growth over the last few years, with smartphone penetration growing from around 43 percent in 2016 to over 90 percent as of 2019.

The sharp rise and general accessibility of mobile devices is changing how people perform everyday tasks, from communications to entertainment. With a fully-established mobile sector, businesses have been able to reach more customers with ease and even forge new mobile-based offerings to tailor the local internet to the people of South Africa. Alongside mobile, many digital entertainment platforms have been able to establish themselves in the ever-growing space, becoming more popular and competitive in recent times.

Around the world, a new phenomenon is taking over wherever people can play games, which is, effectively, anywhere that computers, consoles, or mobiles are widely available with an online connection. The eSports industry is growing at an incredible rate, with people evidently indulging in the chance to not just compete for grand prizes but also to watch the action unfold.

In South Africa, the value of the eSports industry is set to more than double between 2019 and 2023. Mass smartphone adoption has also created and advanced a competitive national space for the iGaming industry. Now, top-class new casinos are regularly opening up to offer a ZA-tailored offering of entertainment, which includes being able to use the rand, claim bonuses in rand, and the option to try games for free. Mobile app games have also been growing in popularity across the country, with revenue in the segment set to reach ZAR 849bn this year.

An ever-adapting yet most ancient industry

Long cited as one of the key industries for growth opportunity in South Africa, the country is gearing up to increase its agricultural exports by triple come 2030. Consumption continues to rise in Asia and across sub-Saharan Africa, allowing the growth to occur. To aid this growth, technology is being implemented across the board, delivering many useful pieces of analysis and solutions to one of the oldest practices of humankind.

Drones and satellites are being used a great deal to help farmers acquire geographic information, localizing the specific requirements of any given set-up to cut costs and ramp-up productivity. GPS-based apps have also been adopted to provide vital information, such as by monitoring crops, navigating machinery, analyzing the soil, and even making it possible to work at night or through adverse weather.

South African agriculture businesses are also getting help from foreign organizations to help implement new technological practices to enhance the productivity of their operations. This has most recently proven to be the case in chicken farming, with the US-based World Poultry Foundation supporting the build and understanding of a chicken house built with the latest in poultry management technologies implemented.
Successful and progressing businesses are leaping at the opportunity to incorporate new technologies into their practices, helping them grow at an even faster rate – advice that should be taken on by just about every business in South Africa.

EU announces antitrust suit against Google

The European Union will accuse Google on Wednesday of abusing its dominant position in Internet searches, opening the US tech company up to a risk of massive fines and enforced changes in its business model, the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal said on Tuesday.

However, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters that a formal antitrust charge sheet will not be ready for Wednesday and could take several more months to draw up.

The EU can impose fines of up to 10 percent of global turnover, or more than $6 billion in penalties in Google’s case.

An EU official said Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager would make an important announcement about Google on Wednesday, after the EU’s executive holds its weekly meeting.

The Commission’s chief spokesman would not confirm the reports, which cited EU officials, but said there would be a news conference around noon (1000 GMT) after the meeting.

Vestager, who had indicated she would not be rushed into a decision on the five-year-old case, is due to fly to the United States later on Wednesday for a high-profile working visit.

Americans, including business leaders and President Barack Obama, have questioned EU efforts to curb the power of U.S. tech companies.

The Danish liberal will accuse Google of breaching competition law by diverting traffic from rivals to favour its own services, said the FT, adding that some fellow commissioners had been concerned Vestager was narrowing the probe.

The possibility of an early announcement of action against Google was made public earlier this week by Guenther Oettinger, the conservative German commissioner for the digital economy, who has been a sharp critic of Google and has spoken up for the interests of European technology and publishing companies.

Separately, Vestager will launch an investigation into Google’s Android mobile software business, the FT said.

The Commission has been laying the groundwork for a case centred on whether Google abuses the dominant market share of Android to promote its own services.

Vestager made the decision to go ahead with charges on Tuesday together with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and will inform her colleagues on Wednesday, the Journal said.

In office since November, Juncker’s executive has put the fostering of Europe’s digital economy and free trade with the United States among its priorities, but some EU officials are concerned U.S. companies are choking European competitors.

Vestager has narrowed the case, which she inherited from her Spanish predecessor, Joaquin Almunia – who rejected three settlement proposals from Google – the FT said.

Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Andreas Schwab, a German conservative member of the European Parliament who has pushed for the EU executive to consider even breaking up Google, told Reuters earlier this week he expected the Commission to bring competition charges against the company.

However, industry and EU sources played down earlier on Tuesday suggestions that Vestager was about to announce charges against the Google.

The EU investigation is one of the highest profile competition cases of recent years, rivalling probes into Microsoft Corp, and comes amid political disquiet in Europe at the perceived dominance of U.S. tech companies.

Almunia launched the probe in 2010 and initially concluded that Google may have hurt competitors by favouring its own products and services in search results and blocking advertisers from moving their campaigns to rival platforms.

Since then, Google has offered three proposals to resolve the case.

Most recently, just over a year ago, it offered to give competing products and services bigger visibility on its website, let content providers decide what material it can use for its own services and make it easier for advertisers to move their campaigns to rivals.

Almunia initially accepted that deal, only to reverse his decision six months later and demand more concessions, leaving the ultimate decision to his successor.

Microsoft has been hit with total EU fines of more than 2.2 billion euros ($2.34 billion) over the past decade. ($1 = 0.9390 euros).

Source: Reuters

Lazy MP’s get the finger

South Africa’s Parliament has embraced technology to keep tabs on lazy MPs.

The National Assembly’s 400 members and National Council of Provinces’ 90 delegates make up the Members of Parliament who represent South Africans.

Parliament has now installed biometric finger scanners to record when these politicians pitch up for sittings.

The new biometric system replaces the old one where MPs signed a piece of paper and put it into a box to be counted manually.

But some opposition members say while parliament can now quickly and accurately record MPs attendance, it’s still up to the party’s chief whips to censure absent MPs.

Upcoming African technology takes tech world by storm

During a time when the gaze of the world’s technology lovers is firmly on technologically developed areas such as North America, East Asia and Europe, the notion that one of the least developed areas on the planet, Africa, could soon be producing some of the hottest upcoming technology and gadgets is a rather strange thought. The fact is, however, that there are a variety of new and upcoming African additions to the technology market that are going to change the face of the continent, and perhaps beyond.

Jumia

On a continent where the vast majority of transactions are completed via cash or mobile phone, the idea of Amazon-like delivery services seems a distant possibility. Despite the lack of credit and debit card capacity in African countries, however, companies are stepping in to the online realm, taking advantage of the current climate. Jumia is akin to Amazon, yet delivers good within the Nigerian cities Lagos and Abuja via motorcycle to customers, payments being made with cash on delivery.

mPawa

There are an estimated 750,000,000 SIM cards in Africa, many African people having their own mobile phones with call and SMS capacity. mPawa takes advantage of the current state of the African telecoms market, matching employers with potential employees that have the correct skill set. The service does work via online, but can also be used via SMS.

Mint Smartphone

South African technology companies Mint and CZ Electronics have teamed together recently, aiming to produce Africa’s first smartphone. The company, once a subsidiary of Alcatel, is aiming to produce an affordable, top-quality smartphone that will contain a dual core processor, camera, HD screen and Wi-Fi/3G/4G connections. Soon, Africans everywhere will be able to watch videos on Youtube, acess and get involved with social networks such as Facebook, and play online games on providers such as Springbokcasino in complete security. It’s likely all of these sites will be poised for a huge amount of growth as the African online market booms.

Kopo Kopo

In countries where the majority of payments are made via mobiles, shop owners everywhere are cottoning on to the trend and the possibilities that go with being able to conduct payments in a mobile manner. Kopo Kopo is a Kenyan start-up that allows consumers to make payments via their mobile phones at any store or merchant who has signed up to the service.

Davos: Individual privacy is dead

Imagine a world where mosquito-sized robots fly around stealing samples of your DNA. Or where a department store knows from your buying habits that you’re pregnant even before your family does.

That is the terrifying dystopian world portrayed by a group of Harvard professors at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday, where the assembled elite heard that the notion of individual privacy is effectively dead.

“Welcome to today. We’re already in that world,” said Margo Seltzer, a professor in computer science at Harvard University.

“Privacy as we knew it in the past is no longer feasible… How we conventionally think of privacy is dead,” she added.

Another Harvard researcher into genetics said it was “inevitable” that one’s personal genetic information would enter more and more into the public sphere.

Sophia Roosth said intelligence agents were already asked to collect genetic information on foreign leaders to determine things like susceptibility to disease and life expectancy.

“We are at the dawn of the age of genetic McCarthyism,” she said, referring to witch-hunts against Communists in 1950s America.

What’s more, Seltzer imagined a world in which tiny robot drones flew around, the size of mosquitoes, extracting a sample of your DNA for analysis by, say, the government or an insurance firm.

Invasions of privacy are “going to become more pervasive,” she predicted.

Political scientist Joseph Nye tackled the controversial subject of encrypted communications and the idea of regulating to ensure governments can always see even encrypted messages in the interests of national security.

“Governments are talking about putting in back doors for communication so that terrorists can’t communicate without being spied on. The problem is that if governments can do that, so can the bad guys,” Nye told the forum.

“Are you more worried about big brother or your nasty little cousin?”

“By and large, tech has done more good than harm,” she said, pointing to “tremendous” advances in healthcare in some rural areas of the developing world that have been made possible by technology.

And at a separate session on artificial intelligence, panellists appeared to accept the limit on privacy as part of modern life.

Rodney Brooks, chairman of Rethink Robotics, an American tech firm, took the example of Google Maps guessing — usually correctly — where you want to go.

“At first, I found that spooky and kind of scary. Then I realised, actually, it’s kind of useful,” he told the forum.

Anthony Goldbloom, a young tech entrepreneur, told the same panel that what he termed the “Google generation” placed far less weight on their privacy than previous generations.

“I trade my privacy for the convenience. Privacy is not something that worries me,” he said.

“Anyway, people often behave better when they have the sense that their actions are being watched.”

The World Economic Forum in the swanky Swiss ski resort of Davos brings together some 2,500 of the global business and political elite for a meeting that ends Saturday.

Source: AFP

The information Google doesn’t want you to organize

Back in February, in a San Jose courtroom, a bombshell was dropped that could have been erased from the public record.

It turns out that Google, which bases its business on collecting and analyzing huge reams of data for advertising purposes, has been scanning users’ emails even before users have a chance to open or read them, including email messages that are deleted without being opened. Google knows what’s in your email before you do.

The revelation came in a now-settled legal dispute over Google’s Gmail service. Dozens of the nation’s largest newspapers and media companies fought to make sure that the case — and its wide-ranging implications for Internet users — received a full public airing. It has been an unfolding drama ever since, affecting what analysts estimate are 500 million Gmail users worldwide.

Google tried, and failed, to redact information about its email scanning process from a transcript of a public court hearing. Last month, the judge in the case ruled that portions of the transcript from that February hearing could not be redacted retroactively, since that would be tantamount to closing a public courtroom.

The company’s attempt — akin to putting toothpaste back into a tube — was a reversal of its previous position in the lawsuit, a pledge that there would be a “fully public airing of the issues raised by plaintiffs’ motion for class certification.” The NSA recently used the very same tactic when it tried to secretly delete portions of a public court transcript in a lawsuit filed against its surveillance practices.

As a result, we now know much more about how Google collects personal information from users of Gmail and Google Apps and, in this case, how it plugged a critical gap in its data mining operation to sweep up even more of your information.

Here’s what happened:

Back in 2010, Google was facing a vexing problem. It was losing out on a treasure trove of personal information from millions of Gmail users who were slipping through its chief analytical tool, known as “Content OneBox.” Anytime they accessed their email through Outlook or on their iPhone, Google’s data machine wasn’t there to capture it all. So it needed a way to sidestep the problem.

Within a matter of months, the company shrewdly moved the Content OneBox from Gmail’s storage area to the “delivery pipeline” — meaning that it could now scan messages before they were received. As the plaintiffs explained:

“Google made a choice. They said, you know what, when people are accessing emails by an iPhone, we are not able to get their information. When people aren’t opening their emails or they are deleting them, we are not able to get their information. When people are using Google Apps accounts where ads are disabled, we are not able to get that information. When people are accessing Gmail through some other email provider, we are not able to get that information. So what they did is they took a device that was in existence already and operating just fine back in the storage area, and they moved it to the delivery pipeline.”

This move has sweeping consequences, as Chris Hoofnagle, director of privacy programs at Berkeley’s Center for Law & Technology, has described:

“Hiding ads while analyzing data takes advantage of a key deficit users have around internet services: users only perceive profiling if they receive ads. The content one box infrastructure would allow Google to understand the meaning of all of our communications: the identities of the people with whom we collaborate, the compounds of drugs we are testing, the next big thing we are inventing, etc. Imagine the creative product of all of Berkeley combined, scanned by a single company’s ‘free’ email system.”

Google’s stated goal is to “organize the world’s information,” but they fought to avoid disclosing how and why they’ve done it. Now we know.

Source: USAToday

SA science website outdated since 2008 despite R16 million grant

Despite a R16-million grant, most information on the SA Agency for Science and Technology Advancement’s website has not been updated in years.

A member of the public visiting the South African Agency for Science and Technology Advancement’s (Saasta’s) website for information about science in the country will find information that is outdated, and in some cases dating back to 2008. This is despite the fact that last year the agency received a parliamentary grant of more than R16-million. Only two links are up to date.

Saasta – a business unit of the National Research Foundation – is mandated with science and technology communication but despite a parliamentary grant, that since 2009 has averaged R15-million annually, it does not appear to have the resources to update its website. The site is an important avenue for people interested in science in South Africa.

Science communication has been highlighted as a way to increase interest among school learners in science, technology and engineering, and to encourage them to pursue these subjects in secondary and tertiary education.

Since the 2010/11 financial year, nearly R50 000 has been spent on upgrading and adding new information to the site, with the most recent being information about National Science Week 2013, which went up last week. However, the main page calls for entries in competitions, whose closing dates were in 2011. Also, according to the “Events” pages, the only events that Saasta has organised since 2009 were a staff meeting and a “Science Unlimited KwaZulu-Natal” event in 2010.

Head of corporate communications at Saasta Ina Roos told the Mail & Guardian that she was in charge of updating content, and pointed to the call for National Science Week proposals. “We don’t have a specific budget for the website,” she said, adding that the information and communications technology co-ordinator resigned last year and that a new person had just been appointed.

Beverley Damonse, group executive for corporate relations and science engagement at the National Research Foundation (NRF) and formerly executive director of Saasta, acknowledged “there is room for improvement”. However, she said: “The largest percentage of [Saasta] funding is contract [funding] … Contract funds are directed to specific projects” rather than core activities.

“Science communication is still a developing area … There are pockets of excellence driving science communications, but [Saasta] is not fully resourced in terms of a science communication entity,” Damonse said, adding that the focus has been on “educators and learners because of the science support needed in the system”.

Numerous attempts to contact Saasta managing director Dr Jabu Nukeri were unsuccessful. – M&G

Living in the cloud, with South African bandwidth

by Dan Roodt

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Ever since I lost some data in a hard drive crash some years ago, I have always been a fan of keeping remote backups online. Somehow hard drives are so fragile – especially so-called “external” ones – that even where you do have a backup, Murphy’s law has it that it too will fail at some critical moment.

Lending your external hard drive to your son for that upcoming LAN party where they are all going to exchange programs and movies is also a no no, I have found. Inevitably it will get bumped or manhandled and the result will be that sickening click-click noise indicating a damaged head.

Looking at my bookshelf, I can see a whole collection of damaged drives that I somehow keep as reminders to never trust a hard drive.

Even though I used to be a fan of the Mozilla email client, Thunderbird, I have long since given up on email clients and use online services. To the ordinary person email clients are probably useful, but with the amount of notifications, queries, asides and just normal correspondence I receive at the rate of serveral hundred a day, my email client is bound to clog up. slow down and also fill up my precious hard drive!

I am probably one of the few people who have filled up a 10 Gigabyte Google mailbox in about two or three years. Email is in itself a fascinating topic and I have tried just about every trick in the book already, in an attempt to cope with my electronic missives. That includes some very unorthodox ways too, about which I might write on a future occasion.

However, as a result of my constant need for more online space, I became an early adopter of Google’s paid service. For only $5 per year, I received 30 Gigs of mail and storage space. Then prices suddenly went up and my service was summarily cancelled in a very diplomatic letter from Google! The silver lining on this dark storage cloud was a parting gift from Google for me as an early adopter: 1 Terrabyte of cloud space, to be used as I saw fit, either for mail or storing other documents and data. That is exactly the size of my current, rather full, hard drive.

Microsoft also offers a similar service called SkyDrive which I haven’t really tried. Pricing I found on the internet for three services looks like this:

SkyDrive:

FREE account (7GB)
$10.00 per year, additional 20GB (27GB)
$25.00 per year, additional 50GB (57GB)
$50.00 per year, additional 100GB (107GB)

Google Drive:

FREE account (5GB)
$2.49 per month (25GB)
$4.99 per month (100GB)
$9.99 per month (200GB)
$19.99 per month (400GB)
$49.99 per month (1TB)
2TB, $99.99 per month
4TB, $199.99 per month
8TB, $399.99 per month
16TB, $799.99 per month

Another famous service, Dropbox, offers the following:

FREE account (2GB)
$9.99 per month (100GB)
$19.99 per month (200GB)
$49.99 per month (500GB)
$795 per year (unlimited for 5 users)

Clearly, my gift from Google is worth about $50 per month, which over five years is going to save me (12 x $50 x 5 = ) $3000. In rand terms, that is a whopping R30 000 saving over five years!

Ideally, I would like to store all my data online and just keep what I need daily on my hard drive. In fact, I have taken to writing online as well, using Google Drive mostly, but this very column is being typed online and saved as I write on another system. So if ever my computer catches fire, or an armed robbery takes place at my house, I will be smiling because every piece of information I own, every email or document is actually being kept in some data centre in the USA where presumably there is state-of-the-art redundancy, back-up generators, and the like. Barring nuclear war in America, my data would probably be safe. As a precaution, I use one or two other online email services where I keep copies of emails, so I am super safe, at least as far as email is concerned.

With my free “one terr” as my son calls it – it almost sounds like old SADF slang for “terrorist” – online, worth R30 000 over 5 years, I should be able to keep most essential stuff backed-up and accessible.

My dream is to go completely paperless, scan every document in sight and store it in “the cloud”. But the big question is: how feasible is this in South Africa, where we still have almost third-world bandwidth, especially outside the major cities? A few years ago a Swede casually told me that he had 100 Mb/s bandwidth in his Stockholm appartment. Most of us have to get by with one hundredth of that speed, or maybe one twenty-fifth. So Scandinavian or German or even French speeds are only a dream to most ADSL users in SA.

I am now on about my fourth or fifth ADSL provider and am changing again at the end of the month, because they do not seem to deliver on the stated speeds. “Somewhere along the line”, they all seem to have a chink in their armour, with high contention ratios or latency problems at certain times. Late at night until early morning seems to be the best time to do the heavy lifting as far as data are concerned.

As everyone knows, upload speeds are that much slower than download speeds. My current service provider gives me an upload rate of about 800 Kb/s. Over the last few days I have been trying to upload about 10 Gigs worth of data to my Google Drive and it is taking ages! On average, I manage to send 100 Mb into the cloud every 20 minutes. To upload one Gig of data therefore takes about 200 minutes or more than 3 hours. The entire chunk of 10 Gigs will therefore be uploaded in about 30 hours, more than a day.

In practice, it takes a lot longer. Constantly uploading data clogs up your bandwidth so I get irate groans and shrieks from the rest of my family. So I have to find times to let it run when my daughter is not watching some online series, my son is not playing an online game and my wife is not posting on the internet. Even during the golden time late at night, my gaming son and I now have to coordinate our bandwidth demands. During the current school holidays, he has also developed a nasty habit of all-night gaming against gaming nuts in other time zones.

In theory, the cloud is a nice concept, but is it worth the trouble, given South African bandwidth constraints? For my part, I reckon it might take three to six months for me to upload everything I want to, after which I should hardly ever have to run large uploads for hours and days.

Sitting in a café somewhere with a tablet or small laptop, I would be able to access my life’s work and all of my filing, as well as my entire music and ebook collection, by simply clicking on “Drive” in my normal email window.

Am I chasing the rainbow, err cloud, here? In a few months’ time, I might be able to report back.

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The Next American Revolution

The next American Revolution will not be an event, it will be a process, writes Tyler Durden.

We naturally turn to the past for templates of the future, but history has a way of remaining remarkably unpredictable. Indeed, all the conventional long-range forecasts made in 1900, 1928, 1958, 1988 and 2000 missed virtually every key development–not just in the distant future, but just a few years out.

The point is that extrapolating the present into the future fails to capture sea changes and developments that completely disrupt the supposedly unchanging, permanent Status Quo. The idea that the next revolution will take a new form does not occur to conventional forecasters, who readily assume the next transition will follow past critical junctures: armed insurrection against the central authority (The first American Revolution, 1781), civil war (1861) or global war (1941).

I submit that the next American Revolution circa 2021-23 will not repeat or even echo these past transitions. What seems likely to me is the entire project of centralization that characterized the era 1941-2013 will slip into irrelevance as centralization increasingly yields diminishing returns.

Everything centralized, from the Federal Reserve to the Too Big To Fail Banks to Medicare to the National Security State depends on the Federal government being a Savior State that must ceaselessly expand its share of the national income and its raw power lest it implode. All Savior States have one, and only one trajectory– they must ceaselessly expand and concentrate wealth and power or they will fail.

They are like the shark, which dies once it stops moving forward: the Savior State must push forward on its trajectory of expansion or it expires.

Stasis is not possible, nor is contraction; the promises made to the citizenry cannot be withdrawn without political instability, but the promises cannot be kept without fatally disrupting the neofeudal financialized debtocracy.

You see the dilemma: The Savior State cannot stop expanding, but the financial system that generates its revenues can no longer support its vast machinery of debt and phantom collateral. This is why I suggest all the centralized concentrations of wealth and power will either implode or fade into irrelevance.

If all the phantom wealth and collateral vanishes in a market clearing event, the Federal Reserve will simply become irrelevant to the vast majority of people. A handful of nimble speculators may well benefit by picking over the carcass of financialization and centralized omnipotence (i.e. central banking), and perhaps the 1/10th of 1% will still have enough assets influenced by the Fed to care, but the forces of disruption will replace centralization with decentralization.

Here is another example: Medicare may not cease to exist, but it will become increasingly irrelevant to most people because it will not longer function. The remaining doctors willing to treat Medicare patients will be working 13-hour days for sketchy pay, and as each one burns out and leaves the system, the system contracts. Eventually it contracts to the point of irrelevance.

The revolution will be in work and social innovations enabled by technology. The conventional view is that technology will magically enable the permanence of the present; this will be proven incorrect, as what technology enables is not the waste, entitlement and centralization that characterize the present but social innovations, some of which are already visible.

If we sought to summarize the profound transformation ahead in one sentence, it would be this: wages are no longer an adequate model for distributing the surplus generated by the economy.

The current Savior State model responds to this by increasing taxes on the dwindling minority with fulltime jobs and increasing entitlement payments to all those without government or private-sector jobs. This model will collapse, politically, socially and economically, as no society or economy can squander half or more of its productive labor force while increasing the burden on the dwindling cohort of productively employed. The inevitable result of this dynamic is a destabilizing Tyranny of the Majority. Tyranny of the Majority, Corporate Welfare and Complicity (April 9, 2010)

Technology is not just disrupting old industries and companies, it is disrupting the entire Savior State/cartel-capitalism model. The disruption has barely begun, but it will pick up speed over the next decade.

I suspect the next American Revolution will begin in the 2015-16 timeframe. A series of interlocking crises will lead to reforms that preserve the Savior State/ cartel-capitalism for another few years, at a lower level of consumption, i.e. burn rate.

But the process of revolution will be far from complete; this initial response of the centralized neofeudal debtocracy will buy time for the Status Quo, and every conventional onlooker will be infused with optimism and hope that the system established in the Great Depression, World War II and its Cold War aftermath–the secular religion of consumerism (i.e. aggregate demand), permanent war footing and the National Security State, and universal dependence on the Savior State and its ceaseless expansion of concentrated wealth and power–will continue.

But this Springtime for the Savior State/cartel-capitalism partnership will be brief, and by 2018-19 all the systemic flaws and disruptive trends will reassert themselves with renewed vigor.

The entire current model of governance, social order and the economy will be revolutionized not by overthrow but by the process of irrelevance. What will become relevant will no longer be in the control of the Savior State or its partner, financialized cartel capitalism.

Those currently holding all the concentrated power and wealth cannot believe they will become irrelevant, but that’s the result of projecting the present as if it is permanent and immutable.

The new system will be better, more humane, more flexible, more transparent, with more opportunity, for it will be everything the current corrupt, sclerotic, parasitic and exploitive system is not. – Zero Hedge

Digital dementia

Doctors in South Korea are reporting a surge in “digital dementia” among young people who have become so reliant on electronic devices that they can no longer remember everyday details like their phone numbers.

South Korea is one of the most digitally connected nations in the world and the problem of internet addiction among both adults and children was recognised as far back as the late 1990s.

That is now developing into the early onset of digital dementia – a term coined in South Korea – meaning a deterioration in cognitive abilities that is more commonly seen in people who have suffered a head injury or psychiatric illness.

“Over-use of smartphones and game devices hampers the balanced development of the brain,” Byun Gi-won, a doctor at the Balance Brain Centre in Seoul, told the JoongAng Daily newspaper.

“Heavy users are likely to develop the left side of their brains, leaving the right side untapped or underdeveloped,” he said.

The right side of the brain is linked with concentration and its failure to develop will affect attention and memory span, which could in as many as 15 per cent of cases lead to the early onset of dementia.

Sufferers are also reported to suffer emotional underdevelopment, with children more at risk than adults because their brains are still growing.

The situation appears to be worsening, doctors report, with the percentage of people aged between 10 and 19 who use their smartphones for more than seven hours every day leaping to 18.4 per cent, an increase of seven per cent from last year.

More than 67 per cent of South Koreans have a smartphone, the highest in the world, with that figure standing at more than 64 per cent in teenagers, up from 21.4 per cent in 2011, according to the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning.

Dr Manfred Spitzer, a German neuroscientist, published a book titled “Digital Dementia” in 2012 that warned parents and teachers of the dangers of allowing children to spend too much time on a laptop, mobile phone or other electronic devices.

Dr Spitzer warned that the deficits in brain development are irreversible and called for digital media to be banned from German classrooms before children become “addicted.” – The Telegraph

Technology is the Opiate of the Masses

Everywhere I look outside my home I see people busy on their high tech devices, while driving, while walking, while shopping, while in groups of friends, while in restaurants, while waiting in doctor offices and hospitals, while sitting in toilets – everywhere. While connected electronically, they are inattentive to and disconnected in physical reality.

People have been steadily manipulated to become technology addicted. Technology is the opiate of the masses.

This results in technology servitude. I am referring to a loss of personal freedom and independence because of uncontrolled consumption of many kinds of devices that eat up time and money. Most people do not use independent, critical thinking to question whether their quality of life is actually improved by the incessant use of technology products that are marketed more aggressively than just about anything else.

I for one have worked successfully to greatly limit my use of technological innovations, to keep myself as unconnected as possible and to maximize my privacy and independence. I do not have a smart phone; I do not participate in social networking; I do not have any Apple product, nothing like an IPod, IPad and similar devices. I have never used Twitter or anything similar, or sent a text message. I do use the Internet judiciously on an old laptop. Email is good and more than enough for me. I very rarely use an old cell phone.

So what have I gained? Time, privacy and no obsession to constantly be in touch, connected, available, informed about others. Call me old fashioned, but I feel a lot more in control of my life than most people that I see conspicuously using their many modern devices. They have lost freedom and do not seem to care about that. When I take my daily long walks I have no device turned on, no desire to communicate, nor to listen to music; I want to be in the moment, only sensing the world around me, unfiltered and uninterrupted by any technology.

I am not hooked by advancing technology, not tethered to constantly improved devices, not curious about the next generation of highly priced but really unnecessary products, not logged on and online all the time. I have no apps or games.

Those who think interactions with people through technology devices are the real thing have lost their sanity. Technology limits and distorts human, social interactions. Worse yet, people have lost ability and talent for actually conversing to people face to face, responding to nonverbal nuances, or through intimate writing with more than just a few words.

Consider these findings: “Researchers from the University of Glasgow found that half of the study participants reported checking their email once an hour, while some individuals check up to 30 to 40 times an hour. An AOL study revealed that 59 percent of PDA users check every single time an email arrives and 83 percent check email every day on vacation.”

A 2010 survey found that 61 percent of Americans (even higher among young people) say they are addicted to the Internet. Another survey reported that “addicted” was the word most commonly used by people to describe their relationship to technology. One study found that people had a harder time resisting the allure of social media than they did for sex, sleep, cigarettes, and alcohol.

A recent study by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project found that 44 percent of cellphone owners had slept with their phone next to their bed. Worse, 67 percent had experienced “phantom rings,” checking their phone even when it was not ringing or vibrating. A little good news: the proportion of cellphone owners who said they “could live without it” increased to 37 percent from 29 percent in 2006.

The main goal of technology companies is to get you to spend more money and time on their products, not to actually improve your quality of life. They have successfully created a cultural disease that has gone viral. Consumers willingly surrender their freedom, money and time in pursuit of what exactly? To keep pace with their peers? To appear modern and sophisticated? To not miss out on the latest information? To stay plugged in? I do not get it.

I see people as trapped in a pathological relationship with time-sucking technology, where they serve technology more than technology serves them. I call this technology servitude. Richard Fernandez, an executive coach at Google acknowledged that “we can be swept away by our technologies.” Welcome to virtual living. To break the grand digital delusion people must consider how lives long ago could be terrific without all the technology regalia pushed today.

What is a healthy use of technology devices? That is the crucial question. Who is really in charge of my life? That is what people need to ask themselves if they are to have any chance of breaking up delusions about their use of technology. When they can live happily without using so much technology for a day or a week, then they can regain control and personal freedom and become the master of technology. Discover what there is to enjoy in life that is free of technology. Mae West is famous for proclaiming the wisdom that “too much of a good thing is wonderful.” Time to discover that it does not work for technology.

As to globalization of technology servitude: Is this worldwide progress what is best for humanity? Is downloaded global dehumanization being sucked up? Time for global digital dieting.

Joel S. Hirschhorn blogs at www.delusionaldemocracy.com