How Data Collection Became Sedition
Bette member David M calls out the regulators for their dereliction of duty
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Author’s note: Bette member David M has a background in science and technology. He writes periodic guest op-eds for Bette Dangerous.—hsc
How Data Collection Became Sedition
By David M
I was in graduate school in the ‘90s. None of us were computer scientists, but nevertheless we’d been very aware of the invention of the world wide web in late ‘80s, and very aware of the dawn of the dot com era that was happening all around us.
Yes, we were excited. When Google was first formed and page rank solved the search problem we applauded. They were giving out Google t-shirts on campus and I proudly wore one. There seemed to be endless possibilities for the free exchange of knowledge and the promise of endless new discovery. But we were also worried. I participated in discussions daily about the worst case scenario.
That scenario was that someone would use the world wide web to track every website you visited, and every action you took online. There was a legitimate reason for such a technology, law enforcement. There was a slightly less legitimate reason for the technology, advertising --highly targeted advertising. We were sure both of those would indeed come to pass.
But the worst use case we could imagine was if someone were to model and parametrize human psychology. This is exactly what has happened.
Even then we could at least glimpse the possibilities, and they weren’t good. Our concern was not that the science of psychology would advance by leaps and bounds, as it surely would. Rather that the technology would allow the automated parametrization of individual personalities. That every individual human being would be modeled to the point of utter predictability. This is precisely the world we are living in now.
We feared that government, Uncle Sam, would go overboard in its law enforcement responsibilities. That was the sort of overreach we’d seen time and again in our own lifetimes. We thought Big Brother would love the power to identify never-do-wells before they’d even found a box of matches. We were looking in the wrong place.
I once heard, probably on NPR, that it’s not Big Brother you’ve got to watch out for, it’s Little Brother. Both Uncle Sam and corporate America were surely eager to surveil us all, but the corporate world would do it without any accountability. This is exactly what social media would turn out to be used for.
Ten years later we watched these social media companies quite openly engage in exactly the kind of comprehensive data collection we most feared, but we were mollified when they told us it was for targeted advertising, which is no crime. They were lying. They knew full well the true purpose of their data collection was sedition. That is a crime. It’s a crime for which they still have not been punished.
Now that the United States is in the hands of those very same data collectors it will take another world war for justice to ever be served.
Thousands of us instinctively understood that the unfettered collection of data describing personal proclivities was extremely dangerous. We didn’t understand that it would be used to destroy democracy. We didn’t understand that its most effective application would be for the most banal purpose imaginable, propaganda. This technology was used to develop a fully automated assembly line of individually tailored propaganda designed to get individuals to believe idiotic falsehoods and lose faith in vital institions.
And it works. It’s one of the most successful technologies ever implemented and it will subjugate us all.
I generally hate regulation. Look at the banking system. Both credit cards and interbank transfers are antiquated systems with paltry security that have hardly been updated since the 70s.
The one simple thing that people most wanted banks to help them with --the ability make everyday payments painlessly and securely-- they absolutely suck at. Only with some degree of deregulation have other companies been able to step in and disrupt what is a fundamentally idiotic industry that to this day can’t seem to operate a computer safely.
I think everyone agrees that banking is an industry that has to be regulated. There’s just too much temptation to dip one’s hand. But as a result of that regulation banking is perhaps the industry least capable of improvement from within. Regulation stripped bankers of their ambition and of any desire to refine their product. Their response to every question is a claim of compliance. Pathetic.
But in the dot com era some regulation would have been nice. If regulators had stepped in and decided that no one, no government, no corporation, and no individual had the right the collect such detailed information, democracy would not be in such peril.
Regulators would tell you that they didn’t know, that they couldn’t have predicted what was going to happen. But they must have, because we knew. I hope they enjoy fascism.
David M for Bette Dangerous
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