“Alexa, I’m a moron.”

Amazon acknowledged this week that some of its Alexa-enabled devices have developed a new skill: creeping out their owners with unwarranted bursts of robotic laughter. The outbursts come at unexpected times – often in the middle of the night. Customers have been terrified. The company received hundreds of complaints.

Amazon knows the demographics of the customers who purchase these devices: clueless, gullible, easily led; will fall for anything and will pretty much buy any shiny new toy of the moment. You know: people who don’t mind having all their private conversations monitored and recorded. People who are too lazy and incompetent to actually function in the real world.

Most people, in other words.

Why on earth would anyone allow a device into their home that listens and records their every word, creating a profile for each user, generating mass amounts of personal data which will then be sold and resold by Amazon and other companies, constantly data queried by the government?

I know most people still in this day and age, despite all the evidence, don’t believe this is true or that “they” (whoever they are) can do these kind of things. Why then, if someone mentions a product name in passing conversation…suddenly pop-ups begin to appear on all your devices advertising that very thing? People don’t want to believe this level of social control is possible because a) they are just plain dumb; or b) they are entranced by this technology and unable to give it up.

Pretty much every electronic device produced by Umerkin companies have some sort of NSA-enabled back door installed in it.

These fucking devices don’t make your lives any easier. They create complex layers of stress and anxiety never before seen in society. The desire to remain glued to your phone is clearly destroying actual human interactions and it’s having a detrimental effect on human mental health. This is destructive, highly addictive behavior exhibited on a global scale.

And yet, even the most progressive critical thinkers I know simply can’t accept the fact that being virtually unable to function without the aid of one of these vile contraptions is not necessarily a good thing.

If I had said back in the 70s (when I was growing up) that within 20 years very human being on the planet would be voluntarily carrying a monitoring device on their body every waking moment, they would have laughed at me, called me a crazy conspiracy theorist and said I was nuts.

That’s because it IS nuts. The advent of smartphones has destroyed the quality of life for everyone. It’s so obvious to someone who doesn’t use one. Human interaction – even in social situations – is almost non-existent. Yet no one bats an eye. Nobody’s gonna give those fuckers up: no way. You can’t even convince them it’s a problem. And these are intelligent people. It’s like living in the movie The Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. There’s no one to turn to. NO ONE.

But back to Alexa: I mean, lets’ face it: anyone who can’t turn on their own lights on or play a CD is pretty fucking helpless to start with. If you are too lazy to turn up the thermostat or open a window, your quality of life is pretty fucking low.

Maybe that creepy laughter coming from Alexa is the staff at NSA headquarters coming through, laughing at all the suckers who not only voluntarily installed a ready made spying device into their own homes – but paid out of their own pockets to do so!

It’s called the “Stepping-stone” approach. Soon it will be no big deal to have AI recording devices installed in every home. It may take a while, but eventually all resistance will pass and nobody will mind at all. I am old enough to have seen this pattern repeated over and over again. It’s all about maintaining the illusion of agency.

Our ability to behave as free, autonomous citizens is being steadily eroded. But we’re given an illusory sense of agency through conspicuous consumerism. We’re “free” to buy stuff – lots of shiny new stuff! – all the time. This fools people into thinking they have agency.

Alexa is a cunning example of this tactic: you allow a high-tech monitoring device into your home, but hey, you’ll still feel powerful and important because you can give it commands, as if it were actually your servant. Soon all the smart people will insist on having Alexa installed in their homes, too. It’s inevitable.

What a brilliant con!