Pubdate: Thu, 10 Aug 2017
Source: Truro Daily News (CN NS)
Copyright: 2017 The Daily News
Contact:  http://www.trurodaily.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1159
Author: Jim Vibert
Page: A2

POT'S JUST ONE SOLUTION FOR DIGITAL DISCONNECTION

Legal pot was inevitable the moment society became inexorably bound to
runaway technology.

Friday, with a digital lifeline severed, pasty-faced, disoriented
humans stumbled out of the disrupted dichotomy - separate connection -
to join other disoriented, confused survivors wandering, lost and
untethered, in the foreign world of a decade back.

Sitting stoned alone in your backyard would clearly be a healthier
psychological response. When everything depends on one thing, and that
one thing is undependable, dupable and destructible, there needs to be
a fallback, and "who gives a crap" is a viable option.

By consensus, marijuana offers a relatively harmless trip to the
desired abandon.

Cellulus interruptus - of the kind endured hereabouts Friday - is a
raindrop in a hurricane.

Moderate cognizance as to what's going on confirms time on steroids.
Before the Enlightenment, centuries passed without fundamental shifts
in how folks lived. By the dawn of the 20th century, change on that
scale occurred over two generations. Now, seven years is considered
the duration of technological evolution so vast as to create new
global realities.

The exponential rate of change exceeds the human ability to adjust,
leaving two possibilities.

The course preferred by the deepest thinkers, whose books and essays
most people do not allow themselves time to read, is a comparable
revolution in the pace of human adaptation.

Unfortunately, a necessary participant in the legal, educational and
ethical acceleration of human capacity for adaptation is, help us all,
government. Governments sail in wooden vessels wondering what strange,
glinting objects leave thin threads of cloud in the sky. That,
tragically, is a metaphor for democratic, legal and ethical station
vis-a-vis technological celerity.

Deluded "early adapters" scoff, secure in the fantasy that the latest
techno-innovation is theirs to conquer. They need to join the
techno-peasantry and get past denial. The truth is opposite.
Technology is the conqueror. Our role is to surrender and offer fealty
with vast monetary tribute.

Legal access to calming relief is a rational response to a world you
can't understand or catch. As fast as you run, your chances of gaining
are nil, absent a full social bolt forward.

The relentless march of science and obscene profits dictate that each
technological advance spawns, within the lifespan of your average
house mouse, another that renders the previous obsolete.

Lest the reader concludes Silicone Valley alone controls the pace of
the race, perish the thought. At places like John Hopkins U., advances
in biotechnology collide and accelerate to a velocity that renders
"innovation" a quaint perhaps antiquated term. While mortals wrestle
with the moral and legal implications of sexting, the death of death
is in the crosshairs of the bio-techno-brain thrust. Science fiction?
Go smoke a joint.

Back home, digital disruption triggers the restoration sequence.
Unplug stuff or press buttons without prior knowledge as to their
function. When that doesn't work, digest panic.

Head for the internet to solve a phone problem or to the phone for an
internet interruption. Except, service complaint management has been
perfected by the telecoms. Indeed, that was right above "create
reliable networks" on the priority list.

The provider offers a toll-free number to call in case of interrupted
phone service. There's a handy website to consult for internet
disruption. Diabolical.

Word that the province, even the region was united in division brought
individual relief and communal anxiety. None of this is complicated,
merely incomprehensible.

In Nova Scotia, awareness that change is gonna come has kids learning
computer code from the day their fresh faces arrive in the school
house. The train left the station and we send our kids chasing it on
foot and in the opposite direction. Nova Scotia's curriculum
innovation is roughly the equivalent of training kids circa 1800 to
shovel coal faster to feed the steam-fired industrial revolution,
which began around 1760.

By the time these kids graduate, coding, if not entirely automated by
thinking machines, will be a career choice for stoners, alone in their
backyards, fulltime.

Teach the children well. Let them learn how to adapt to a world that
changes fundamentally and irrevocably a couple of times each decade.
Either that, or teach them how to build a better bong.

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Jim Vibert grew up in Truro and is a Nova Scotian journalist, writer and 
former political and communications consultant to governments of all 
stripes.
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MAP posted-by: Matt