Barcodes. They're everywhere these days. It seems you can't even buy an apple without a barcode being scanned. Barcodes really should be called bars. I can think of no greater symbol to represent the prison we all now live in than these black bars with numbers running along the top of them.
As a child I remember small price stickers stamped onto every single item on all the shelves in the supermarket. So that when my parents filled their shopping trolley, completed their shop and went to the checkout the checkout operator would know how much to punch in on the till, and therefore how much to charge them.
Not Progress
Apparently the barcode is progress. No longer do we need price guns spitting out price stickers or those old cashier tills, little more than big clunky calculators, that laboriously need humans to punch figures into them. No, we live in modern times now, don't we? We live in the age of the barcode to help make our lives easier, right? Wrong. Those now abandoned price stickers represented a freedom we no longer enjoy.
The whole concept of barcodes isn't actually anything nefarious. It is true to say there is a basic convenience to using barcodes and the corresponding data they store. It's what the barcode represents in our society which makes me quite depressed at the site of one.
Consumer Society
The barcode is the classic visual representation of consumer society. Yes that's right, it's not a society anymore, it's a consumer society we all live in. We must keep buying otherwise we're not part of the crowd and we'll miss out. We must keep being or we won't be happy. We must keep buying to set ourselves free. Why would you not want to live in this paradise? Of course it's nice to have nice things, and yes there is such a thing as retail therapy. It's nice to go shopping from time to time. But we are way past that now. We're no longer shoppers.
To fund our shopping habits most of society need to build up debts, and lots of debts if they are to keep purchasing things they don't need. Most people need that ball and chain around their ankle in order to be a fully developed consumer citizen. If we're not building up debt then we're not a fully functioning member of society. We're not normal. Something must be wrong if we're not spending and indebting ourselves to our slave owners - the banks.
Debt Slaves
We are now little more than consumer robots and debt slaves. It's not entirely our fault things have ended up this way. We know that corporations, banks and governments have engineered all of this. They have crafted this type of society, they wanted brainwashed consumer robots as citizens, incapable of autonomous thought. That is all they want. And for the most part they have got what they wanted. Just look around you.
Too many people think they are free. They are deceived. Western society is consumer society. Consumer society is a prison society. You are not free. A society obsessed with the pursuit of material gain instead of a healthy pursuit of human bonds, societal knowledge and truth is a society destined for misery.
The Solution
The answer to all this mess, as with anything, starts with the individual. Society can not change if the people of that society don't embrace change. It may not seem like it but we have the power in our hands right now to start changing society. We do not have to continue to accept the status quo, despite what they may tell you on television. Things can get better.
We now have technologies such as blockchain that are literally revolutionising the human experience. Hive is testament to that. Here we all are working and playing in our own blockchain community and making money from it too. If someone had told me 10 years ago this would have been possible I would have laughed in their face. Good things can happen when humans and technology work together.
Positive societal change is a genuine prospect with blockchains like Hive. Funding our way out of the corruption and misery is a key factor in achieving our true freedom. Hive and cryptocurrency have financially empowered us, while simultaneously reinventing the whole concept of societal governance.
So use it and spread the word.