The New World

When the Spanish Conquistadors landed in the New World they were so alien to many of the natives that they weren't capable of processing the images they were seeing. Having never seen such technologies or blatant materialism they were simply incapable of making judgments as to the dangers they presented so they welcomed them as gods of a new age. Clarke's third law says that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. We don't like to think of ourselves as being the natives sufficiently unadvanced but the evidence seems to suggest we are at the moment.

The world is changing pretty dramatically. I know that every generation says that and it true for each generation as well but I'm not sure we have ever seen changes like those that have come about in the last 20 years or so.

In the last century we saw the power of states with authoritarian rulers bent on controlling nations lead to destructive wars of massive scale. Words like Freedom, and Liberty seemed at risk from these powers that be within these states. The human race has always had a disturbing tendency towards self destruction but that period seemed especially dangerous for some of our leadership's efforts to control and dominate.

Now, we face a different kind of danger to our freedom, liberty, and self determination. This threat doesn't invade or destroy from the outside, it does it from within. It isn't a state or a government, it is a business model. We willingly let it into our homes and our minds but make no mistake, it's goal is to take over and control us and it is well on the way to doing that.

It ignores privacy laws and constitutional protections across the globe because these were largely put in place to protect us from overweening governments, not private business interest. No one imagined in the past that such private interests could gain enough power, influence, and control to actively control our actions; much less our thoughts.

Like most human disasters it has been a confluence of events and actions that led to this change. 9-11 and other terrorist actions across the globe woke us up to the idea that we were in danger from people we hardly knew. Organised terrorist attacks made it seem reasonable to give up some of our freedoms and rights in order for our governments to protect us. The timing of these events happened to coincide with our gradual awakening that our privacy rights were being usurped and ignored by this industry but we looked the other way and our governments became encouraged by the tools of unlimited surveillance these companies were already utilising to sell us products and herd us towards a complete lack of privacy rights.

Now, they blatantly gather, sell, and gradually successfully control our thoughts and actions in thousands of different ways each day. Cell phone apps tell them where we are each moment. Cell phone and smart house apps and devices tell them when we move, how we move, and what we say in ways that allow them to predict what we might buy next. Facebook clicks and likes allow them to categorise our thoughts, beliefs, values, and habits in algorithms designed and perfected to influence what we do next.

None of this is legal in this country or most of the rest of the world, yet the profits from this information sold to the highest bidders in competitive auctions is so massive that it's worth the risk of collecting and selling it. Governments turn a blind eye for the tradeoff in security in knowing who might be plotting the next terrorist act and most people see it only as a matter of convenience and improved technology.

Meanwhile, our children spend hundreds of hours a month being shaped, pushed, pulled, and controlled by these same algorithms latched on to their very real need to be accepted by their peers. We have long known that the adolescent years produce psyches especially prone to suggestion and peer pressure but Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have made it into an exacting science of gathering huge logs of data available to the highest bidder.

If what they know isn't bad enough, what they intend to do with the information is even worse. These companies believe with some certainty that by gathering and stealing this information, the information that tells them what we think and when we think it, that they can control what we do next. If that sounds scary it's only because it is. They believe this because they test, retest, and perfect their algorithms daily. They are able to sell this information because it is accurate and it works.

We have never in history faced such a threat. No small group of people have ever owned the information that would allow them to control our actions. Orwellian horrors of big brother or big other are here. They didn't come from government, they came from private entities who stealthily managed to make us believe we were getting something for free while they steadily and illegally mined our thoughts and actions like so many strip miners swarming around a gold mine we believed we owned, the thought processes in our own mind.