We're Sleepwalking into a Surveillance State
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The benefits of being tracked are many. It helps your productivity, quality of life, and breadth of what you can get out of it.
But what happens when the state or the corporation decides that YOU are someone they suddenly decide they don't want to be in their system?
They have far too much power, and our legislators seem incapable of doing anything about it. It's out of control, and it's also creating a gross inequality of wealth.
Is this Orwellian power bubble going to grow until an apocalyptic burst happens 20 years from now? Or can we start turning the cameras on them and truly democratising surveillance? How about a series of exposés on the exact real-time locations of powerful and famous people by using cheap legal commercial surveillance tools? What is it going to take?
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It's not just surveillance of the population, it's also 'remote control'. We can be psychologically and behaviourally controlled, like puppets, from a single source, through 'nudging'. They can control not only what we see, but now, get an increasingly comprehensive set of instant, real-time feedback data on our bodies' reactions to this centrally nudged media.
I see in-home casting and entertainment working fucking terribly for the average consumer who can't set up, NewPipe and Kodi, for example (Chromecast, Smart TVs et al have become embarrassingly buggy vestiges messes).
I see people burning their food because their internet connected barbeque acted up...while they were working a weekend shift to pay double the price on their cc for that BBQ.
The less connected I have made myself, and the simpler tech I've harnessed, the better my experience has become.
Snapchat doesn't keep us in touch. It keeps us at too far of a distance from our loved ones, while tricking us into thinking we're in touch.
Escape the ads and the mainstream.
- Google Maps in saving a great deal of time when travelling from one physical location to another.
- Google News, in Google serving me up information I legitimately want to know, only because it tracks so much of the activity I'm doing online. This actually helps my productivity, it relates back to my line of work.
The list goes on. Full and meaningful participation in society in 2020 requires being tracked.
I think it might have been Citizens United, but I don’t have the first hand evidence to prove that belief.