I'll be honest with you, fellas: Much as I try to keep a stiff upper lip about the decay of civilization, there are days when any attempt at optimism seems hopeless, and the vision of a nightmare world that surpasses anything Orwell ever dreamed of seems not merely imminent, but already present.
Facebook is not your friend, despite the happy college-kid face it presents to the world. They now want to "partner" with banks to "improve customer service" and "benefit the consumer." If you believe that, you are a fool. It's a
business, a huge, sprawling, corporation without a human soul. A corporation is a machine to make money with - like any tool, it can be used for good or ill purposes. But what all corporations want is to increase their stock prices and dividends, and too many corporate leaders tend not to care if any and all consumers get screwed in the process - hey, too bad, it's
progress, wheeeee!
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"Privacy" notice I got a few days ago from Google. Even what your or I watch on YouTube or what places we look up on Google Maps are all tracked under the unceasing, unblinking eye of Big Brother, and filed in his unforgetting, ineradicable memory.
If Google can follow your every stray thought, who else can too? And is? |
I could go on and on and on about the madness that has engulfed us all in the last 25 years since the advent of the Internet - and even though some antisocial types, like me, have never joined Facebook, there are who knows how many other companies, like Google, and countless little ones nobody ever heard of, all busily digging into everyone's privacy every minute of every hour of every day.
There is in fact no privacy left in the world for anyone, except maybe for some of those lost tribes in the Amazon jungle, and even their remote little world is being steadily invaded.
And it's not merely things that you think of as data-sharing sites. There's also the ghastly Internet of Things, which to put it another way, means that your car, your refrigerator, your dishwasher, your microwave, and just about any other electronic gadget can in fact be made to spy on you and report everything you do, every word you say, and how you spend every second of your life, waking or sleeping.
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| From "sponsored content" about harvesting your privacy from the Internet of Things at Politico, 7/16/18. Click to enlarge. |
And every utility - electricity, gas, water - is produced, distributed, and metered by mini-minds that can also be misdirected or shut down.
And furthermore, every last one of those devices, in your home, or at the power plant, can be unlocked and controlled, probably, by some teenage hacker down the street or some spymaster on the other side of the world, with a few taps on a keyboard.
Just last year, somebody in Dallas broadcast a radio signal that activated all 156 of the city's tornado alarms, an amazing feat of digital malevolence. Lily Hay Newman
reported for
Wired:
The Dallas incident fits with the broader uptick in infrastructure hacks around the country. From electric road signs to emergency text alert systems to suburban dams, hackers have targeted vulnerable structures with increasing boldness. And while the Dallas sirens did have some alarming secondary effects—over 4,000 calls to 911 flooded the city's emergency response lines for several hours—it's nothing next to the real danger that hacks like these could cause.
"There’s a steady drumbeat of these types of attacks and they’re all pretty benign right now, but what’s next? Is it water? Is it sewage?" says Chris Pogue, the chief information security officer at the data analysis firm Nuix. "Let’s not waste the potential lessons learned by saying it’s an isolated incident."
I don't want to be part of this nightmare. And I don't want to be part of this ugly, vulgar, hate-filled century, which I'm afraid will one day make the horrors of the 20th century look like a Sunday-school picnic. But what can any of us do now? We walked into the enticing trap of the Internet willingly, all unsuspecting, and now the doors are closing on us, it seems. One day, sooner than you think, Siri and Alexa and other talking boxes will not be optional - they will be required in every home. Maybe even in every brain. And then the last hope of resistance - of truly independent human personality - will have vanished.
And it won't be fresh-faced, innocent-looking types like Mark Zuckerberg pulling your strings. It will be the ruthless, power-hungry leaders of the left or right - when they have a good grip on you with the ruthless digital hand, it won't much matter which side they are.
You may say, "Oh, Russ, you're just being melodramatic, don't get so excited, just chill." Well, okay, boys - if you all don't think there's any danger to worry about, you just sit back and relax. While you can.
But when a day comes that your bank balance is zeroed out, your credit cards too, and your car won't start, and you have no electricity -
unless you do as you are told - for gosh sakes, don't come whine to me about it, "Oh I never dreamed this could happen."
It can. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
You have been warned.
P. S. -- Of course, I could be wrong. So was
Orwell, so was
Bradbury, so was
Forster, so was
Wells, and so were a lot of other writers who have rung the alarm bells about present trends and coming events, if you look only only at the small details of what they prophesied. I don't have the talent for spinning a fascinating yarn as they did, either.
Nevertheless, no one doubts that they were right to sound a warning. Forewarned is forearmed.
