Rich people running large companies don't want you to be poor. Really they don't. Those people want you to be rich because when you're rich you're going to buy more stuff. And when you buy more stuff, these folk can buy yachts, footballs clubs and space programmes helping make the world still more spiffy than it was before we started.
Some of those rich people run technology companies - the dark evil of Facebook, Google and so forth. We're told (mostly by politicians or by people who know there's more book sales in imaginary demons than in truth) that these big technology companies are bad because of algorithms, machine learning, profiling, psychographics and other scary things we don't really understand. The message of these politicians (and the people with books to sell) is that without some controls these tech companies will become the 21st century's robber barons impoverishing us so they can have more power and money. For the answer I refer you to the first paragraph above - rich businessmen and big businesses are really not interested in you being poor.
So, if the motives of businesses are clear ("we want to make money") how is it that we now have an escalating moral panic about tech? This sort of thing from one futurist person on Twitter - "...and if we don't start now, we will be nothing but pawns of large tech companies."
The thing for me with all of this is that the alternative to us being pawns of large tech companies (who essentially want to flog us goods and services) is to be what exactly? It does seem that those riding the moral panic of techno-fear - a sort of 21st century luddism - are proposing that the power is shifted from those terrible people selling us stuff and folded into the caring, sharing arms of government.
This is the government that wants to tax, ban and regulate you into changing your lifestyle to their official prescription (for your health, to protect, for the children). This is the government that demands identification from you for the most mundane of ordinary activities, from voting or opening a bank account to buying some glue to fix the shelf in the den, This is the government that, without democratic authority, is testing face recognition systems and enhanced surveillance. The government that installs cameras to track your every move and introduces Public Space Orders to give them power to arrest and punish you for things that aren't a crime. And this is the government that's introduced new blasphemy laws - supposedly to combat hate crime - allowing them to police our words and punish us for 'wrongthink'.
You should be a lot more scared of government and its agents than of businesses that just want to sell you stuff. Government exists only for the purpose of power and control - some of that is necessary but most of it suits the tidy organised minds of the bureaucrats (who, of course, know so much better what's good for you that you do). And all wrapped up in the hollow reassurance of "if you've done nothing wrong then you've nothing to fear".
As with all actions of government - and so much of it is beyond the scope of democratic accountability as to be essentially beyond control - you have to imagine these tools of surveillance and restriction in the hands of a more authoritarian government. And we have a little glimpse of it with places like Singapore (how it makes me mad to see supposedly freedom-loving Tories telling us that South East Asia's pseudo-democratic and authoritarian city state is marvellous) and, of course, the ex-communist autocracy of China which is introducing a Social Credit system straight out of Brian Aldiss's "Primal Urge".
You've a choice folks - live in a free consumer society or else run from the imaginary demons conjured up by the great and good to scare you back under their control. For me this is a simple decision - if the price of freedom is me getting ads with my online searches directing me to things I might like to buy then it's a really cheap deal. And the motive of government, in so far as it is clear at all, has always been to control and direct what you do, the very antithesis of freedom.
“Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not. This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.”
Choose freedom.
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2 comments:
Well said. It is too easy to be pessimistic about the wrong things.
It's a good point, but you have to ensure that the "benevolent" corporation doesn't come to be a de facto government and end up being just as controlling. It's a work of fiction, but The Circle by Dave Eggers is worth a read on this situation- it's pretty much aimed straight at Google, of course.
We need to be equally concerned about anyone with too much power, and it's a mistake to think the tech firms have our better interests at heart compared to government just because they want us to keep spending. So long as their revenue stream continues they care little about anything else. That's the job of the private sector, of course :-)
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