Архив метки: Smartphone Spy in Your Pocket

Father Christmas doing something on a chimney pot

2023 UK Woke Hits an All Time High!

Bing Crosby’s White Christmas Symphony No. 9 in Morris Minor

20 December 2023 ~ 2023 UK Woke Hits an All Time High!

It was cold in April. It was cold in May. Come to think of it, it was cold in the UK, not to mention wet, from April to September. I was staying with a friend for some of this time, where I only had the gas heating on for two hours a day. Even so, the gas bill, together with electricity, ie one light bulb ~ my friend is a tight old sod ~ clocked up about 200 quid per month! I know, I know, it’s all ‘a certain president’s fault’.

We were in Aldi’s supermarket, the only place we dare shop nowadays without taking out a mortgage, when we heard a woman (I think ‘it’ was a woman. You never can tell these days.) behind us at the checkout complaining bitterly about the hike in food costs. Suddenly, my brother Joss, who never takes with him or buys a carrier bag at the supermarket (he’s saving his pocket, not the planet) but always transports his groceries in one of those open-ended, partially broken, sad and saggy inadequate boxes kicking around in supermarkets, on hearing the woman’s complaints, slaps the box upon his head and proceeds to vituperate: “I know! It’s all so terrible in this country. I’m going to hide in this cardboard box. Maybe they’ll go away.” He did actually say, ‘they’ll all go away’. I looked around the supermarket, and I think I know what he meant. However, we don’t know for certain what he meant, because with a cardboard box upon his head, he could have said virtually anything and could have been almost anybody. He could have rowed up the village brook in an inflatable rubber thingy with a Royal Navy escort, declared he came from the land of Cardboard Bongo and, consulting his list of rights and benefits, demanded of the police that they chauffeur him to the nearest hotel. None of your bed and breakfast, mind; anything less than 5-star treatment would degrade the red-carpet welcome.

Anyway, as the box in question had an open end, I twizzled it around on Joss’s head, an action which would have certainly turned his toupee back to front had it not been stuck down with UHU. Now the box was a  TV set, so Joss decided to read the news. “Here is the news from the BBC. Whatever it is, it’s all P….’s fault!”

Before leaving the supermarket, I apologised to the people gathered at the checkout for having mentioned Mr Ps name numerous times in the space of two minutes, but, showing them the roubles in my wallet, went on to explain that we have an arrangement with him, viz every time we mention his name in Britain, he pays us a hundred roubles.

I’m not one for confessions or for making and signing statements, but I must confess and state simultaneously that I cannot remember the last time I had so much fun in a supermarket, certainly not recently and possibly not since a childhood friend and I were nabbed in one by a store detective. I can see him now, this stocky, cocky, store detective, striding up behind us, just as we were about to clear checkout, his face wreathed in triumph. He thought he had caught a couple of shoplifters, but we were nothing of the sort. So, he had to let us go, never knowing how close he had come to revealing the identity of the notorious local stock shifters.

Before adopting a moral stance, you must make allowance for the fact that in those days, before the advent of Play Station and when enslavement to the smartphone was just a twinkle in Bill Gates’ eyes, we had, as the expression goes, to make our own entertainment, and how we used to do this in the supermarket was to amble around from shelf to shelf surreptitiously shifting things from one place to another. It was, indeed, a rewarding sight to behold jars of Marmite amongst the saucepans and a tin of baked beans or two sitting next to the Brillo pads. Just think what fun could be had today, now supermarkets sell condoms. The possibilities are endless (I’m sure there’s a Freudian reference here?).

But don’t you talk about supermarkets! Shocked, I was, and I said so to Mavis. Didn’t I Mavis? Didn’t I say I was shocked!  And it is shocking, not to mention inexcusable (But, of course, it’s all that ‘certain president’s’ fault!) — Britain’s escalation in food prices: Weetabix £4 a packet! A bottle of brown sauce £3.30! A packet of crisps £1.50 … Well, you know for certain you’re a hopeless old fart when you carry on like this. But what about the price of beer! If I carry on like this, I’ll wear out my exclamation key! There, did you see that! There it goes again!

2023 UK Woke Hits an All Time High!

My brother Joss won’t drink in certain pubs and in certain pubs he can’t because he’s barred. He won’t drink in pubs where he knows that the beer is priced at over a fiver a pint and in pubs where he doesn’t know and is taken unawares, he always complains. He also complains about the quality of the beer, ergo poor quality, and always rather loudly.

“It’s alright,” I said in a resigned voice, when the offended look on the barmaid’s face caught my eye and her eye mine (Were we wearing eye patches?), “I’m used to being ashamed of him”.

Summer in the UK

Since summer in the UK was such an abysmal washout, it enabled me to get down to some serious … beer drinking? That too, but I was going to say stuff shifting. In order to accomplish this gargantuan feat, I had to  resort to eBay. I hadn’t used the eBay platform for quite some time, but I soon got back into the swing of things, once I had complained my way through their two-step verification system.

Two-step verification, indeed! I told that globalist, that pseudo-leftist Gaters. “Gaters,” I said, I call him that, you know, “Gaters, what’s it all about then, ay, this two-step verification? If you ask me, it’s more globalist quick step than two step: the swiftness of the feet deceives the arse you’re kicking and whilst we are feeling the pain, you’ve snatched our mobile phone numbers and locked your global trackers onto our locations. It’s all grist to the surveillance mill, the keeping tabs on us all, the inverted 1984, where it’s not the fascists we have to watch out for, at least not in the traditional sense, but the fascistic sanctimonious, pseudo-liberal lefties led by the usual suspects (those well-known US rich families (really my boy, my boy) and their friends in the Davos set).  

Of course, I could have gone on saying this until the proverbial sheep came home (‘Merrr, I’ve had my jab!’), but as you, me and the gateposts know, the gateposts we have in parliament, it would not have made a ha’peth, or rather billions of quid’s worth, of difference, because already the globalist mob is no doubt plotting their next Plandemic and rubbing their hands in anticipation of the monstrous profits to come.  However, I would have said something to that effect had I not been deplatformed first, labelled a far-right extremist, been banned from tweeting on Twatter and suffered the near misfortune of having my bank account nobbled, as they tried to do with Nigel Farage. Now that wasn’t two-step verification, it was a step in the wrong direction! The goons who pulled that stunt were soon up on their feet doing the shithouse shuffle, as good old Nigel proved again, he is just too strong and too astute for the pseudo-libs to take on.

Woke Watch PC UK!

WOKE WATCH UK!

You know, being a conspiracy theorist and a far-right extremist is not as easy as might be imagined. It would be a lot less difficult to go with the flow, go down to Dover harbour with a bog roll in my hand and beg the third world and its wife (don’t want to be labelled sexist), please can I wipe your arses before the taxpayer-funded police chauffeur you to your waiting hotels and shower you with benefits. What a terribly ‘wacist’ thing to say!

I thought it a bit racist, although not entirely unapplicable, when I heard a bloke down Wetherspoons say … I think he was bloke?  (Once you could tell a bloke from a gal by the tattoos that he was sporting, but now that women have taken to tats and to shrapnel shoved in their lips and snouts, it’s difficult to determine who has and who hasn’t the meat and two veg. (By the way, how’s your memory? Do you remember Ena Shrapnel? Give me the hairnet any day (Corrr!) rather than tats and bolts.) Anyway, getting back to the point, which is? Well,  I heard this manly man, who may or may not have been a man, say: “Turn that telly off! If I wanted to watch the coonmercials, I would have stayed at home!”

Ah! there goes the theme tune to Love Thy Neighbour.

Britain’s social engineering programme has advanced quite spectacularly over the past five years. The Tories have excelled themselves. They have stolen a march on the Liebour party, beating them at their own game, and flushed with their success are leading with the initiative in sexual engineering. The adverts are a case in point. The next time you go to the pub, presuming that you still go to the pub with beer the price it is, see how many men you can spot who look as though together they have recently won the lottery.

Where’s Frankie Howard and Larry Grayson when you need them most? Now it’s no longer a Catholic sin, let’s hope that they are having fun bumming around in heaven. 

They’ve won the lottery!!

My particular favourite sexual engineering advert is the one where the les goes into the shop, says something to the girl behind the counter, the girl behind the counter replies, and the les, who misunderstands her, says, “I’m sorry, I already have a girlfriend!” And the nice black man behind her, who doesn’t look like a mugger at all and besides is a British citizen, titters away as though he knows that the advert he will star in next will see him relishing Sunday lunch around the family’s middle-class dining table.

And what is it about British TV, I hear you ask? If Billy Cotton was still around he would not be shouting ‘Wakey! Wakey’ so much as ‘Wokey! Wokey!’

I threw away my telly many years ago, long before British broadcasting sank beneath the surface of degradation. Did you Mike? You do surprise me. And it wasn’t because of the BBC licence fee, as so much joy can be had from receiving their threatening letters. But this summer, probably because it was so inhospitable that we spent more time inside, the telly at somebody else’s house could not always be avoided. I saw, for example, a segment or two (and that was quite enough) of the Ukraine Vision Song Contest, some of The King’s Coronation on the Royalty Abolitionist Channel and couldn’t really miss the seeming perpetuality of big butch pony-tailed ladies charging around the football pitch, who seem to have no qualms at all about muscling in on what little remains of Britain’s emasculated working-class males’ last bastion of blokeyness.

I also allowed myself the wonder of watching  the news on the odd occasion, the wonder being whatever happened to the impartiality ethic? Time was when the news anchor (now re-spelt with a capital ‘W’) would simply read the news. Now they no longer report, they lead, invent and manipulate and for nebulous liberal ends. However, every unpaid licence fee has a silver lining, which is that as long as you know it’s not really the news, it can be entertaining.

For example, have you heard the one about the fire service chap who allegedly suffered a mental breakdown. He was interviewed in his home, looking all wan and lachrymose, by a young ~ I think he was male ~ reporter, who really did overdo it slightly on the ‘I’ve got to look so serious’ level. Perhaps he works for the BBC, where woke is a serious business.

Every now and again, between solemn interludes of conversation and OTT serious looks, the camera would pan, zoom in and focus on a broken mirror on the sitting-room wall, which looked, by my experience, as if someone had put their fist through it. Gritty symbolic stuff, ay! But try to remember that this is the ‘news’, or rather the news is what it professes to be, not a dramatised documentary.

Given the nature of the job, it is common knowledge that firemen suffer breakdowns (note the traditional use of the proper word ‘firemen’). Heaven knows how these men contend with their lot. In the course of duty, they are subject to unthinkable scenes of horror and human tragedy. Hardly surprising, therefore, that even the strongest men crack (Now, now, it’s not what you’re thinking!). But it was not danger or tragedy, tragedy in the accepted sense, or so we were asked to believe, that had caused this gentleman’s breakdown. According to the ‘news’, which was heavily biased in tone and format, his illness had been brought about by his having been ignored when repeatedly calling out the fire service for its alleged culture of systemic sexism.

2023 UK Woke Hits an All Time High!

WTF?! Call me old-fashioned (You Old Fart, you!), but my long-held belief has been that first, centre and foremost, the duty of the fire service is to put out fires and save lives. I certainly don’t recall anything in my primary school books, Janet and John (now Abdul and Lola), about sexist firemen running amuck with their choppers in their hands. I do remember the Village People sliding down a greasy pole not looking like chaps and in nothing but chaps, but that was the 1970s, when men were men and poofs were poofs, and never the twain would meet (so we were led to believe). But a fire service that lets off damp squibs for the sake of claiming compensation, why you’ll be asking me next to believe that public money is actually spent on funding wokist causes, for example something as unimaginably silly as black and pink police associations! It’s Monty Python’s UK Circus!

Ho!Ho!Ho! Hark! Which Santa is that who is coming down the chimney. I hope he’s wearing a condom. Sorry about that, and everything … around me … all over the UK … but as Frank Zappa once famously said, “I can outrage anybody, if they want to be outraged.”

Don’t try this at home, or if you live in Brighton!

More recently, I outraged myself ~ and bear in mind, please, that ‘outraged myself’ is not the same as ‘outed myself’. For years I have been at the forefront of the Smartphone Resistance League, so successfully I might add that my avoidance of the smartphone earnt me this saintly sobriquet: ‘The last man on Earth to own a mobile phone’.

Thus, it was with great sorrow and a distinctly uneasy sense that I was not only letting myself down but anti-technocrats everywhere, when I allowed myself to be dragged, proverbially kicking and screaming, along to the mobile phone shop, where, with a heaviness in my heart beyond the expression of indescribable, I signed myself away to that … to that, terrible, terrible mobile thing!

“Yet something else,” I grumbled, “to cart around in your pocket.” It will be difficult fitting it in [“It’s so big you’ve got to grin to get it in!” ~ do you remember the Wagon Wheels advert?], with all the street survival kit you need in Britain today ~ CS gas cannister, stun gun, beam-me-out-of-the-21st-century flip-top radio, mugger’s alley cloak of invisibility etc etc. Thank heavens my stab- and bullet-proof vest has pockets!

“This ‘aint very Christmasy is it?! Let’s see what’s on the other channel.”

A party-political broadcast on behalf of you can put your cross where you like, but it won’t stop mongrelisation.

Wherever you go in life, even in somebody else’s, there’s always a heckler. But what the heck, it might only be a linguistic device! Anyway, whilst you and your family are sitting around a blazing Christmas fire, with coal you’ve stolen from the next-door neighbours, wearing party hats, wondering why, and cracking your nuts. I shall be pulling my own cracker and … That’s odd? What is? Everything. I thought I just heard someone sing, “I wish it could be Christmas every day.” Those hats! Those nuts! Pulling your own cracker! For eternity! No fear. Ha! Ha! I can see the Christmas TV adverts now: More black than white and oh so extremely gay.

Right, bugger all that, I’m off to make a cup of tea. Ginger, the cat, is squinting at me, but only with his right eye. I think he wants a monachal for Christmas. This is something that’s easily fixed. It’s what Bing Crosby is dreaming of that isn’t.

Image attributions
Santa on a chimney: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Santa-Claus-on-a-Chimney/87236.html
Men with television heads: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Men-with-television-heads/71285.html
Vintage exotic dancer: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Vintage-exotic-dancer/73821.html
Football: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Soccer-ball-with-shadow-vector-drawing/14654.html
Men shaking hands:  https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Business-People-Shaking-Hands-Vector/2306.html
Merry Christmas: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Retro-Christmas-Text-Banner/87299.html

Copyright © 2018-2023 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.

Smartphone how Smart is it to have one?

Smartphone how Smart is it to have one?

Smartphone Spy in Your Pocket or Liberator?

30 November 2023 ~ Smartphone how Smart is it to have one?

The last man to leave the sinking ship; the last man to go to the Isle of Man before they change the name to the Isle of Person; the last man to be the fourth man, as you know there was a third; the last man out at the wickets; the last man to be allowed to be called a man; the last man to play the white man; the last man behind the penultimate man; the last man ~ real man~ to win the lottery; the last man on Earth; the last man in Islington (even more rare than the last man on Earth) ~ you probably wanted to be, if not all of these, at least one of them, in the same way that I had led myself to believe that I was and would be the last man without a mobile phone. I didn’t plan things to be that way, neither did I design my phoneless status, as rumour has it, according to some highfalutin principal. It just happened. I never had a mobile phone, because I never had a mobile phone.

As with being a vegetarian (I became one of those in the 1970s.), I discovered, and I must confess with some delight, that not possessing a mobile phone became other people’s problem not mine, but when those around me who were most effected by my not possessing a mobile phone began to turn up the morality and invoke the strains of guilt, viz that my not having a mobile phone did not prevent me from using theirs, I had to agree, they did have a point.

There cannot be many of us who do not realise that the mobile phone (and I use this term generically to also include the smartphone) is, as with every other technological communication system, a tool for mass surveillance. Whenever you use a smartphone, they know where you are, what you are doing, what you are saying, and, once they have compiled that electronic dossier on you, you can bet your life they presume to know what is on your mind, even how it works, if indeed, it does work after you have enlisted yourself into the ranks of the twiddling masses. So, there it is, the smartphone, but for whom is the smartphone smart? ‘The Spy in Your Pocket’ my brother calls it.

Smartphone how Smart is it to have one?

Mass surveillance is the price we pay for our addiction to technology. Some of us rail against it; some of us accept it; most of us ignore it. I, personally, am not so much bothered about Big Brother as ending my life as the Lone Ranger to become one of the twiddling cattle-driven.

Not having a smartarsephone is a little like not being saddled with children. Without both, you can sit back at comfort’s distance and watch with a heartfelt sigh of relief as it passes you by. But as Nature and habitualisation dupes us into doing things that others think we ought to do, so William Gates and his band of silicons coerce and cajole us, hunt us out, hound us down and round us up until, with no place left to hide, the last stop is the twiddler zone. Remember, just because your paranoid does not mean that they’re not out to get you!

Whilst having children is not so much of a stigma as a life sentence, having a mobile phone is incalculably stigmatic. As soon as you pull out that phone and twiddle, an arrow seems to flash out of the ether, pointing the caption at you, “One of the brainwashed masses!” Tell me, in some American states is it still a felony not to guzzle alcohol inside of a brown paper bag? Taking this as my cue, I was thinking of disguising my phone as a sandwich or rubber duck, but that would never do, because twiddlers who twiddle their lives away do so as if by self-enslavement, they are wearing a badge of honour. All for one and look like all! WTF! (The World Twiddling Forum).

Don't walk and talk on a smartphone!!

It astonishes me how inveterate twiddlers, who twiddle whilst they walk, do not meet with a horrible accident. An acquaintance of mine, an elderly gentleman, has seen fit to turn this banal practice into a source of entertainment.

Whenever a pedestrianised twiddler is heading in his direction deaf and blind to all around them, he takes up position on the pavement, having first worked out their approximate trajectory, and stands there whilst they collide with him. Judging by the average response, it would seem that even the demigod smartphone, with all its apps, bells and whistles, is powerless to resist when it comes to timely embarrassment.

My personal favourites of the twiddling fraternity are pub twiddling couples. I have seen couples come into pubs twiddling, buy drinks whilst twiddling and then spend the entire evening sitting next to each other, never saying a word, just twiddling. Are they beyond repair, or do they actually ‘talk to each other’, for example on the WhatsArse messaging system?

“What an interesting evening, darling. Time to twiddle back home.”

You’ve probably guessed by now where all this is leading. Correct, no matter how much I might rail against it, and in the process vainly hope that somehow, somewhere along the way, I will exonerate myself, the indisputable fact remains that crumpling under umpteen pressures, I eventually succumbed. Yes, I went out and bought a twiddler (‘Arrrggghhh!’)

So, whatever could have gone wrong to have brought about this extraordinary U-turn?

For all its social and psychological evils, whilst it irrefutably is an implement for mass surveillance, the smartphone also doubles as a cloak of invisibility.

Before the smartphone and its mass uptake, going to the pub on one’s tod was a peculiar exercise in self-consciousness. If you hadn’t got a newspaper to hide behind, and even if you had you might end up reading it cover to cover, upside down and back to front, all you could do was to stare into space. Thankfully, the days have gone, except in some up-North benefit-class clubs, previously ‘working man’s’, when a knuckle-dragging neanderthal clocking how you were sitting there with seemingly nothing better to do than letch would adopt a confrontational tone: “Are you looking at my girlfriend?” which obviously you were, or, if he hadn’t got a girlfriend, which usually he hadn’t because he was far too stupid to have such a thing: “Are you looking at me mate?” The temptation to reply, “Given any number of variables, I would rather look at a piece of s_ _t!” was often too hard to resist, even though as a means of closure, it often ended in fisticuffs and sometimes a trip to the local nick.

Today, pubs, in the main, are much more civilised. Possibly because they are more food, and therefore family, orientated, and also because some of the ‘men’ who frequent them would be positively miffed if they didn’t catch you looking at them. You can usually tell who these men are. You’ve seen them on the adverts. They’re always winning the lottery.

How many men have stopped doing the lottery since adverts like that appeared is a question for another day. It does not alter the fact that sat there in the boozer looking like Billy No Mates, constantly checking your watch, as if someone you had arranged to meet is late, or coddling the delusion that after you have finished that long, that slow, that lonely pint you are going on somewhere else, are no longer ruses you have to resort to in an age where everyone looks and acts as if they are everyone else.

Smartphone how Smart is it to have one?

As long as you are a paid-up member of the Zombified Smartphone Club, nobody is going to bother you, nobody is going to question you. With that little (not so little and also rather heavy) rectangular glass-front phone, a voyeur’s window on the world, not so different from Pandora’s Box, flings itself open to you.  You can kerb-crawl the net at will, take as many selfies as you like ~ hundreds if it floats your boat ~ before seizing on that magic one that looks not remotely like you. As long as it hides those sags and wrinkles and makes you believe you look 20 years younger (Likes and Followers! Likes and Followers!), you’ll kiss the ass of your mobile phone until all the old cows come home. Ahh, shrine to delusion, vanity, narcissism, thy name is social media!

I instinctively knew that to take a selfie of myself was something I should avoid. And was I ever right. But for the sake of historical record, I took that selfie. Good heavens, I thought, when I looked at my selfie, what on earth do I think I’m doing wearing the nose of Charles de Gaulle? 

This first sorte into the realm of selfie-taking taught me in no uncertain terms that there is obviously more than meets the eye (and nose) when it comes to taking fawning photos for mass consumption on Facebook, especially abracadabra ones that transform you from what you really are into the oil painting you never can be. Indeed, every photo on Facebook is intrinsically an art form, art meaning ‘artificial’, and not everyone can master it. The trick (and what a trick!) is to make your faithful believe that the life your photos say you are living is primarily better than theirs and certainly better than yours.

Look out! Selfie in Victory Square!

My next trick was to put the smartfun away, cease repeating “He nose you know!” and shoot off on my solo run into Kaliningrad’s city centre, where, it embarrasses me to confess, that in front of the monument in Victory Square the compulsion took me again. I had to try for another selfie! (You can see the way it goes, can’t you?)

This time I would bring into play the much loved sucked-in cheeks and ubiquitous silly pout. At the very last minute, however, drawn in cheeks were dropped (they tend to do that, don’t they?), as I had noted in my dotage that my impression of Peter Cushing was already quite advanced and that to remodel my cheeks into two squeezed lemons might prove a bridge too far. If only I’d have stuck in my youth to murdering animals and eating them, by now my cheeks would be lovely and round like two plump rolls of prime pink brisket!

Even though my lips had not been enhanced, pumped up so that they looked like slugs, and I had no Frankenstein’s bolt through my snout, which given its size on my debut selfie could easily have accommodated any number of scrapyard pieces, this was destined to be my first (and also my last, I might add) outdoor-taken selfie. All that I succeeded in doing by pouting my lips like a retard was to convey the regrettable impression that although I was out on the town tonight my false teeth had not come with me. They were probably still in the gherkin jar into which they had landed when I let out that sneeze.

“Well, bugger that!” I said to myself, and shoved my Toosmart phone deep within my inside pocket, and I did not take it out again until I was standing outside the bar to which my feet had been programmed to take me. (Blame it all on the technocrats!)

Bavarian themed, Zötler Bier, and the other Czech, U Gasheka in Kaliningrad

Here are some facts for you. There are two bar/restaurants in the centre of Kaliningrad which are joined at the hip: one is Bavarian themed, Zötler Bier, and the other Czech, U Gasheka. The only pubs in the UK I know which had a similar arrangement, occurred in London’s Greenwich. They were the Richard I and The Greenwich Union (since vandalised by Young’s Brewery, which, with typical corporate disregard for social history and heritage, knocked them into one).

How embarrassing it was that on one occasion when a group of us had gone to the Richard I, I somehow ended up halfway through the evening accidentally in The Greenwich Union. I had stepped outside the front of the Richard for a quick puff (that’s right, I said ‘puff’!) on my King Edward cigar and when I went to return inside unknowingly entered The Union. Thinking I was in the Richard and that my friends were playing a silly joke, ie they had gone into hiding somewhere, I took the pint I had freshly ordered and went and sat in the beer garden to ponder on what I should do. It was only when I heard my friends chatting away behind the fence in the Richard garden next door that I realised my folly: it wasn’t my friends who had played a joke; it was beer and navigation!

“Well, that’s nothing to be proud of. Is it!”
Hmm, I’ll have to think about that one.

Out of the two Kaliningrad bars mentioned, my first bar tonight would be the Bavarian one, an establishment where, if you are lucky, you get to sit down the centre of the room inside a make-believe beer barrel. Unfortunately, my luck was out this evening ~ it had probably gone to Maxims ~ and I was shown to a line of seats and tables that ran along the perimeter of the room. Good! A young couple sitting together at right angles to my table would provide the perfect opportunity for testing the cloaking function of that recently purchased gadget that was jumping out of my pocket.

A businessman, to the left of me, who had obviously not just bought his phone, was so absolutely invisible to everyone in his orbit, with the exception of himself, that had his skills at twiddling not been so well endowed (which seemed to beg the question, was he born with his smartarse in his hand?),  I would never have thought to notice him.

Smartphone how smart as mass surveillance systems?

He was a pro, I was a novice, and I have to say it showed. My first message on WhatsArse was an all fingers and thumbs job. It took me 20 minutes to compose a reasonably legible paragraph which, had I been working on a laptop, would have taken perhaps a minute or less. Nevertheless, I stuck to my guns, and over the next 40 minutes, managed to shoot three messages into and across cyberspace complete with photos attached. During those 40 minutes, the young couple facing my profile (and thinking “It’s Peter Cushing!”), and whatever it was the man was doing down the other end of the room with his Bavarian sausage, were so plainly indistinct as to issue the suspicion that I had come as close to vanished as Davos had to resetting the world. Had I been any more gone, I would have been shaking hands with H.G. Wells!

Next door, in the Czech bar, I was again unlucky. The best seats had been taken, and I ended up perched upon a sponge-filled leather-look bench, which was, I suppose, alrightish, except that being so high off the ground it left one’s little legs dangling with nothing to rest one’s feet on, rather like sitting in the barber’s chair when you were six-years old. How fortuitous and kind of fate that she had arranged a stool in front of me so that I could use its stretcher as a foot rest.

Mick Hart's shoes with microphone attached

In this bar, I tried out my phone with an email or two. Fine, although when it came to attaching images, the process became a tad mysterious. Exit quickly and onto Google. I had never opened websites using a smartarsephone before, and now that I have, I cannot say that I found the experience particularly positive: yards and yards of constant scrolling. It’s like an electronic version of bog roll. But twiddling and swiping go hand in glove, and for me, the man with the reputation for being the Last Man on Earth to Own a Smartphone, the gauntlet had been thrown.

In the bar up in the clouds (the Pivovar Restaurant Brewery) overlooking the spot where I shouldn’t have taken my second selfie, and now on my third beer, not only had I become more confident in my twiddling and more comfortable with my twiddler, but my Russian language had improved no end. Crabtree from ‘Allo ‘Allo (“Good Moaning”) may well have had good reason to feel proud of me, but could his approval be half as rewarding as thinking you’re getting it right, whilst most likely you are not, or rather not quite, but not knowing nor either caring because sitting snuggly in your pocket, if you haven’t already lost it, is your little spy and pie in the sky, your customised, very own smartphone ~ ahhhh.

By the end of the evening I was able to say two things. No, I had not drunk so much that I could only say two things, I mean two things pertinent to my smartphone experience. The first was something I had always suspected: Never take a selfie and, if you have to think again, never take a selfie. The second was that my expectations of the smartphone as an instrument of lonely-guy concealment when sitting alone in a bar or pub was vindicated. And yet, the keeping-tracks-on-you downside that inevitably comes with owning a smartphone, unless you keep it switched off, continues not to sit easily with me.

In more recent years, I have heard people say that the Silicon Valley Mob have turned up the heat in their racket to enslave people and to extort as much personal information about everyone on Earth as completely as they can. Like the Capone organisation, which, after Al’s demise, moved with the help of Sam Giancana into the labour rackets, the Silicon Outfit found a new racket in 2-step verification.

Conspiracy theory or not, with the roll-out of 2-step verification for online banking, as a sign-in function for websites and blogs and as the only option for identifying yourself on ecommerce sites, such as eBay for example, the message is loud and clear, either get a smartphone or else be bolloxed.

The one-step further exploitation than 2-step verification is fingerprint and/or eye recognition. Now it’s getting personal. Where will it all end? The clue may lie in the word ‘end’. In other words and words more plain, is Anus Authentication already passing from science fiction into the realms of science fact? It is too much of a coincidence that AI (Anal Intelligence) is the state of the art abbreviation on the tongue of every news editor. AI is everywhere, so there must be something in it, as I’m sure there must be someone out there, in a small secluded brick-looking building in Silicon Valley’s back yard, who is poised with the paperwork in his hand for the biggest breakthrough yet. Zappa may have the answer …

Image attributions

Man with phone on couch: Image by <a href="/ru/”https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/character-playing-videogame_7734013.htm/#query=clipart sitting using a smartphone&position=17&from_view=search&track=ais&uuid=00c57546-c79e-4db8-a98c-c064c40ce15e”">Freepik</a>

No walking with Smartphone: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/No-smartphone-while-walking/81731.html

Spectacles: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Glasses-with-eyes/44056.html

Microphone: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Vector-clip-art-of-electric-microphone/28206.html

Copyright © 2018-2023 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.

A couple more posts

It’s that man in the Russian Hat in Bedford!

Secret Weapon in Kaliningrad