“It’s only going to get weirder. The level of contradiction is going to rise excruciatingly even beyond the excruciating present levels of contradiction. So, I think it’s just going to get weirder and weirder and weirder and, finally, it’s going to be so weird that people are going to have to talk about how weird it is….”
— Terrence McKenna
I have known for some time that things are getting very weird in the world; however, I had no idea how quickly the acceleration was afoot until a recent journey from Krakow to Bangkok with a layover in Sharjah, UAE, in between.
As a result of what I have seen the past couple of days, I confess I am probably more distraught than is warranted. Hearing my complaints about Orwell’s hellish vision come to life, my wife shrugs her shoulders and says, basically, this is the way things are now.
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Anyone familiar with international travel understands the well-established routine: when going through passport control (either entering or leaving a sovereign country), an immigration officer — sometimes friendly, sometimes not, sometimes diligent, sometimes not — looks over your passport, asks you a few questions about your business if he feels like it, and sends you on your way. It’s been like this since I started venturing abroad.
Imagine my surprise when literally the entire passport control process in Sharjah was instead performed by a machine looking on from above.
Via RS Web Solutions (emphasis added):
Dubai International Airport… employs an 80-camera system to scan visitors’ faces and irises, permitting pre-checked passengers to authenticate their identification in seconds without showing passports or other documentation.
Since then, the system has grown to include more than 120 smart gates located across the airport. Similar technology has been adopted at numerous airports in the United States and abroad, providing travelers with an alternative to the cumbersome security processes that have come to define contemporary international travel…
The system has improved and been built for additional characteristics, such as current attempts to algorithmically detect tourists who are infected with the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 yet have no symptoms…
Smart ID Engine is a complete AI-based solution for automatic ID scanning, document verification, and data internal consistency of over 1810 varieties of IDs from 210 issuers worldwide, which is put at electronic gates, and passport control delays may become a distant memory*.
“Give me convenience or give me death!” as Jello Biafra would say.
I scanned my passport as the soothing robot lady voice commanded. She then pushed me through one set of gates into a sort of enclosed pen where she commanded me further to look up at the camera overhead. I did as told once more; she said thank you, opened the additional set of gates, and ordered me to pass.
Related: TSA Rolls Out 'Voluntary' Face Scans at Over a Dozen American Airports
The process felt very much like I imagine livestock might as it is being branded.
Things continued to be weird from there.
The legacy human security guard who was tasked with watching luggage roll through the x-ray machine barely looked up. I thought he was sleeping until I realized he was watching a soccer match on his tablet, which was very reassuring.
One of the floor polishers that used to be driven by humans rolled by — minus the human — like a giant Roomba.
All the while, we bathed in the light of extremely gaudy, extremely large screens advertising all manner of unnecessary rubbish, from cosmetics to condos to whatever else.
Not a single person, at least not visibly, seemed to care about or even notice any of these things.
This is, I suppose, the way things work now, and I guess any of it bothering me makes me an anachronism.
This, it would seem, is the machines’ world now; I’m just living in it.
