THE Internet never really evolved along the lines of users' needs; corporations quickly took over the Web back in the 1990s and used it -- or brutally leveraged it -- to expand their monopoly power. Proprietary extensions were added for no reason other than domination (recently DRM was added in "EME" clothing, after W3C had been captured). This rogue trajectory is all very well documented (including in antitrust material). What started as a project of a CERN scientist, inspired in part by Richard Stallman and looking to share his physics papers, turned into Social Control Media with spying on everything from mouse movements to clicking. He is dissatisfied to see this trend, but it's too late... as he lost control of his own creation. He and Stallman nowadays have another thing in common.
"Corporations strive for greater wealth for themselves and governments wish to control their population, if not in seemingly harmonious ways ('soft power') then by force."Technology isn't a new thing. It started well before computers. Machinery for calculating things and for spying on people doesn't need a central processing unit when similar things can be done by people equipped with pens, papers, and many piles of documents, ranging from travel records to family trees (birth, marriage, death certificates and so on).
Corporations strive for greater wealth for themselves and governments wish to control their population, if not in seemingly harmonious ways ('soft power') then by force. So it's hardly surprising they'd leverage anything within their means to get richer and stronger, respectively. In a lot of countries there's no real separation between corporations and government, only perceptual separation.
"At the moment the revolt comes from the top (looting of trillions disguised as "stimulus") and the riots are perpetrators by goons who work for the state, shooting rubber bullets at reporters (eyewitnesses) and gassing people with legitimate grievances."Apathy among citizens and 'customers' (or 'consumers') is our biggest threat. If people unquestionably accept anything thrown at them by corporations and governments, e.g. contract-tracing 'apps' and so-called 'phones' that mostly spy on people 24/7, then resistance against misuse of power would seem hopeless (until it's too late). Right now, for example, even in the United States, the DHS is 'kidnapping' people based on predictive models (the assumption they may simply gather peacefully to protest injustice). This relies on surveillance, of course...
No need to ask where the data comes from. The DHS made it no secret that it's harvesting and analysing Social Control Media.
Recently we wrote a bunch of articles about IBM's history of oppression and assistance to ethnic cleaners, including blatant eugenics in Jamaica. With the Internet the data gathering process (data-mining people's thoughts and intents) became a lot more extensive. That's nothing to be celebrated but feared. Look what companies control this data and examine their track record (Facebook, Palantir, Cambridge Analytica, Microsoft etc. -- all in the same data pool); they're not your friend and they're not "social". They sure "follow" you, but not in a good way (think of police officers who follow protesters around). At the moment the revolt comes from the top (looting of trillions disguised as "stimulus") and the riots are perpetrators by goons who work for the state, shooting rubber bullets at reporters (eyewitnesses) and gassing people with legitimate grievances. Just because you do nothing wrong doesn't mean you have "nothing to hide..." (especially when the state does many wrong things) ⬆
"In this country we have no place for hyphenated Americans." --Theodore Roosevelt