Last week Amnesty International published a report about the online platforms of the leading surveillance giants – see my brief post about it @ Find News.
What I find particularly signficant about the news is not the recommendations for public policy, but rather the recognition of the free markets that there are now two (2) surveillance sherrifs in town – just about a decade ago, the online surveillance market was completely dominated by one (1) single surveillance monopoly power. That monopolist company still rules the Internet, but now at least most people realize that Google is no longer the only game in town.
Nonetheless, most fools on the Internet still don’t understand how foolish they obviously are.
Innumerable fools – among them the billions of suckers and leading stalwart, public companies – continue to sign up and give their private data freely in exchange for worthless garbage. The platforms they sign up for are a convoluted mess of smoke-and-mirrors that are reminiscent of a Kafka-esque machine-in-a-box, run by some Dr. Seuss character ready, willing and able to sell „stars upon thars“ to anyone prepared to cough up a little (and in some cases a lot of) cash.
The magic machinery promises to deliver results.
Western civilization has been here before. The results were: The Protestant Reformation and The French Revolution. In case you’re having difficulty connecting the dots – the story doesn’t end well for the Roman Catholic Church (even though it still seems like they’re doing OK today).
Another result was Gutenberg’s invention of the Printing Press – yet this was probably at least as much a result of the humanistic attitudes developing in Renaissance Italy… perhaps a century (or more) earlier. Another result of the Printing Press (besides The Protestant Reformation) was the birth of The Scientific Method, which in turn resulted in The Industrial Revolution, which led to further economic development … and finally: here we are!
Most of the significant technological development over the past 5 centuries are built upon a strong foundation of open and transparent information. Why would any rational human being ignore this obvious fact, and instead invest their entire future in a clandestine organization which promises better results brought to you by a secret formula?
Your guess is as good as mine! 😉