Various wonders

(danas.rs)

I'm not afraid that machines will take over the world like in Pekić's “Atlantis.” But I am afraid that, just like in the novel, we have become incapable of living without machines.

We lack imagination. What are we thinking about so important while Google Maps is leading us along a route we've taken ten times, but haven't bothered to remember?

Artificial intelligence works faster, stronger, better, it doesn't ask for a hot meal, vacation pay, or secure employment. It just asks for electricity, lots of electricity, and water to cool computer centers. We'll build one like that in Kragujevac!

No one asked the people if they wanted to put police work in the hands of robots and live in a surveillance state, if they wanted a machine to make movies and write the news, to chat with us and collect data. Those who don't want to can be highlanders, to pitch a tent if they find a piece of land that someone else doesn't already claim.

Everything will be bursting with production efficiency! Granted, people don't have much of that, except for a few hundred billionaires from Silicon Valley. Will anyone work less because they have the help of a machine? No way, only a smaller number of people will work, and the rest will envy them.

From Trump and Xi to Merz to Vučić, leaders big and small are on the side of general progress! They tell the working man that he is not trying hard enough, that he must do better in the future we strive for.

More free time, leisure, rest, socializing, meaning... that is not what working people are supposed to do. Because who knows what working people could come up with if they had the time.

I don't like it when the cynic in me takes over the keyboard. It must be admitted that artificial intelligence performs miracles. They say it has solved a decade-old mathematical problem, that it has invented a new important drug. Who could argue with that?

But it is precisely with these miracles that they will advertise to us the fateful role of artificial intelligence, which must not be opposed.

* * *

Speaking of miracles, the Vračar Temple houses the Belt of the Virgin Mary. Both those who knew and those who didn't want to know have learned that it is one of the most valuable Orthodox relics.

Our church claims that, in the first ten days, 478.000 believers paid homage to the Belt. That's one believer every 1,8 seconds. Perhaps the church counted a little, but the rush to the Temple was certainly unprecedented. Day and night, hot sun or cool breeze, the line winds for kilometers.

There's a fashion to it, of course, but it's obviously important to people. Waiting in line for eight or ten hours is a much bigger sacrifice than going to a protest against the government. Maybe people are hoping for a bigger miracle.

Some pray for health, some for offspring. Perhaps someone kisses the Belt and wishes that the working class would take ownership of the means of production. The prayers should not be read as a criticism of worldly life or, far from it, of Serbian health and social care, but rather as a complement to them.

Our state policy is also a miracle. The first among us - religious as needed - hopes that external enemies will break their teeth on the Belt. One Belt and one computer center, so we are unstoppable!

* * *

Ivica Dačić, who until now knew about the cameras to get a piece of cake at the celebration, has now started to believe in miracles. He says that the fact that he recently escaped the gravedigger's shovel must be a sign.

Such an omen should not be lightly missed because, apart from being objectively beneficial to Dačić - better alive than dead - he could be beneficial to the party and the state. With these words, the leader of the Socialists recommended to his comrades not to give up on him, and he will not give up on the first among us. Until the first opportunity.

One of the wonders of Serbian politics is Ivica Dačić's juggling act on the edge of political existence. From the emergence of the young SPS spokesperson with a split to the present day, he is an artist of the possible, a man who knows that the hardest currency is to be necessary.

It is a miracle that this SPS has managed to pervert the idea of ​​socialism and yet remain something of the left on the political scene. For a small man, there is not much there except folklore and clientelistic flattery, but still!

And the fact that the so-called socialists managed to disgust the people with the idea of ​​the left, so that for thirty-five years no authentic left option has emerged, shows that we were prone to this decline and that the propaganda purge was thorough. People prefer to believe in miracles than in workers' organizing in a country of tycoons, criminals, and the famous intermediate category of "controversial businessman".

* * *

The trend is global, and that is not comforting, on the contrary. It is difficult to create a more just society in a more unjust world. Utopia as an island exists only in fiction.

Tectonic plates are shifting to crush the little man. In a world of surveillance and algorithmic addiction, where attention spans are as long as a TikTok video, man is less than a number in a new feudal division.

When he doesn't seek refuge in escapism - on TikTok, in empty, presented news, and the World Cup is coming up! - the little man hopes for miracles. He adores magical objects and phenomena, the belt of the Virgin Mary or the "free hand of the market", it doesn't matter.

Or it falls into the oldest form of fighting against declared demons - migrants, people of other religions, nations, skin colors, into exhausting identity conflicts of little people against other little people.

No one hopes for a miracle anymore, that ordinary people will recognize each other as allies, and then recognize their true enemies.