My wife was talking last week to somebody who is afraid to be tested for COVID-19 because it’s another way the government can implant tracking devices into our bodies.
I’m trying to imagine what this looks like. Maybe nanotechnology is lurking on the cotton swab used for the test, inserted up the nose and boring into the brain, all while some seemingly benign nurse or doctor makes small talk about the weather.
Or perhaps the trackers are implanted subcutaneously via a touchless thermometer that acts like a mini nail-gun — HeadOn! Apply directly to the forehead! — opening a cerebral window for the government to exploit. We could then become unwitting assets for shadowy, alphabet-soup organizations, able to seize control of us whenever they want.
I’m not sure why any agency folks would want to spy on me, let alone use me as an assassin.
I mean, every once in a while I forget to recycle a milk jug and throw it away in the trash. I am a glutton for potato chips and french-onion dip. And I still owe Columbia House for a bunch of cassette tapes I bought for what I thought was just a penny back in 1984.
That’s about the extent of my nefariousness.
People who worry about tests and vaccines on the premise of pure privacy don’t realize how much personal information Americans willingly surrender every day.
We allow third-party apps on our phones to access a proverbial boatload of data about our whereabouts and shopping habits. Some of this information is used to match us to other products we might enjoy, and some of it is sold to still other organizations.
Much of the information is aggregated, so it can’t be (easily) matched to individual users. Still, those are a lot of data points and numbers for computers to crunch and for marketers to exploit.
And these are verifiable uses, not sci-fi extrapolations.
Let me go on record as saying I don’t believe the government is implanting tracking devices into our bodies — not through COVID-19 testing or any vaccines on the horizon.
How do I know? Well, I guess I don’t, except I know human nature. Perpetrators have been unable to stay quiet about far less complicated criminal activities, including a bungled burglary at the Watergate and alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 election that seems obvious to everybody except Republicans.
The amount of coordination and collusion necessary to pull off the insertion of tracking devices into Americans — again, for the purpose of ... what, exactly? ... even if it were technically and financially feasible — would dwarf any past government secret initiative by a power of ten.
Yet such ideas persist, taking root in the country’s psyche much more deeply than any microscopic GPS device ever could.
Part of it is self-aggrandizement. We want to believe that we are more essential than we are, that somebody out there would find us important enough to track, manipulate, control.
Part of it is an appalling failure of the education system to teach critical discernment that could safeguard us from such conspiracy theories. The same phones and devices with which we so willingly share credit-card and social-security numbers give us, in return, access to a wealth of misinformation.
Much of this bogus material is trussed up in very appealing ways. It is cleanly typeset. It links to other sources, some reliable and many not, lending a sheen of authenticity to the spurious portions. Going down the Internet rabbithole is fast and easy, and what begins with facts quickly devolves into made-up stories about George Soros being a reptile and the Illuminati controlling our procreation.
We live in a society where the legitimate news media have been vilified — not completely without cause, I’ll grant you — and where unscrupulous players can use that vilification to cast doubt on everything we read and hear, including situations where contradictions are part of the natural course of evolving stories.
Take COVID infection and death numbers, which will fluctuate as monitoring systems become more robust. It is understandable numbers will change, sometimes dramatically, which does not mean that all the data is fabricated or that the coronavirus is a global conspiracy.
Ultimately, though, baseless conspiracy theories persist because they are just plain fun. So maybe your boss isn’t a scaly monster from Venus. But that guy who lives down the street? Hey.
Still, “fun” is not a valid reason to eschew science.
You’re not going to die from wearing a mask at the grocery store. You’re not going to get a tracker implanted from being tested for the coronavirus.
Let’s get real and focus on real problems.
Like murder hornets. Remember them? They’re still out there, and they still want to take our blood to their masters in the center of the (flat) earth.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
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