You are the Product Data-Boy
“Welcome to the machine. What did you dream? It’s all right, we told you what to dream.”
“Welcome my son. Welcome to the machine. Where have you been? It’s all right, we know just where you’ve been.” And so it goes in the modern digital era, though those lyrics were aimed at us back in 1975. Go figure. Little did we know back then, or suspect what music, media and entertainment are used for. Back then up was still up, down was still down… or at least that is what we thought was true. But here we are, 55 years later waking up to the fact that nothing is as it seemed all those decades ago. And as “The Grand Illusion” is unmasked in the modern era, there is no doubt that – you are now the product. This raises the question; will the product remain the product after mass realization?
We are beginning to realize that the systems and generational pastimes once considered normal, are actually carefully planned strategies designed to control behavior and thought. It is also clear that controlling society has been part and parcel of existence on Earth for as far back as we can see. But with the onset of the surveillance capitalism model, and data collection, the old methods of social engineering have received a shot in the arm, to make a bad pun. As Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff put it, “Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data.” The collection and processing of endless data streams provides real-time information to those who dream up and run what amounts to social engineering. According to cybersecurity firm Secureframe, social engineering “bypasses technical defenses by manipulating people into revealing confidential information or making security mistakes.” Mass data collection is also used to predict the future with a high degree of certainty. Google now openly defines predictive analytics as the use of “data analysis, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and statistical models to find patterns that might predict future behavior.” This was possible in the past, which can be confirmed by considering the Law of Large Numbers, and The Wisdom of the Crowd. In the present AI + mass data collection adds the ability to “sell certainty”.
Everyone has seen the old spy movies where the KGB or CIA has a “dossier” on a person of interest. Surveillance capitalism and mass data collection has enabled those with access to the data, the most complete “dossiers” ever created, making the old file cabinet documents equal to the stone age. But here is the rub, these data sets can be derived on most of us in the developed world. If you still think social media was created to “connect” people, I have bridge to sell you in Brooklyn. Facebook indeed. A book of faces – and nearly every other thing it is possible to know about the owner of said faces in that digital book. To include what you eat, who you know, where you have been and worked, what you like, what you do not like, etc. It was written by you, and everyone else you ever knew, and everyone else they ever knew. Giftwrapped in real-time and delivered to God knows where, to be used for God knows what. Except we do know, at some level, what is being done with the data we all generate. Byron Tau describes it clearly: “The U.S. national security establishment has used commercially available data to craft a creeping panopticon.” As a matter of fact, we were all assigned reading in middle school that informed us of the direction intended by those who control society. Do you recall reading “Brave New World”, “Fahrenheit 451”, “1984”, and “Animal Farm”?
Forwarded fromCrrow777 Radio
August 16, 2026 22 1
