Letter: An exclusively digital world is one to be very wary of - let's not let a nightmare become a reality
A letter from Louis Shawcross:
In the future when [if] everything is digital, they - the authorities - won't need prisons to imprison people and take away their freedoms.
They'll just limit people's digital spread, and this will be the same as limiting their freedoms through imprisonment, though they'll be partially, or in gradients, locked out of that digital system.
(Of course, violent people who pose a risk to others' safety will still need to be physically confined in some way, but they amount to merely a fraction of the actual prison population today.)
The limiting of one's digital spread will mean not being able to buy in certain stores, maybe barred from working, or only allowed to work in certain base areas of employment which is dirty work, low paid, or has anti-social hours, etc.
It might involve a curfew on being at home between certain lengthy periods.
Foreign travel will be out of the question. Commercial products will be limited for sale and limited in quantity if allowed digitally to buy.
We really don't realise what's coming... or what potentially is coming.
We can proclaim the convenience this system will supposedly bring as much as we like, though we forget that such a system can be switched off completely for whatever reason.
(With legal physical currency in circulation, such a switch can't happen as everyone's money can't be wiped at the press of a button.)
I wonder if Gaza had been exclusively digitally run, would Israel not have switched the system off and allowed the mayhem engendered to ensue.
Well, in some future time in such an exclusively digital world, the switch off option will always be held over our heads; and given the satanic nature of our present world and past and present happenings in the world, such eventualities are not out of the question - anything but.
Louis Shawcross, Co Down