My monthly article for the local magazine I write for:
4. ‘Them’
I was invited to take part in a blog debate on the way that modern technology is invading our lives. A colleague of mine posted the following on the site:
“Starting from our very email address, a hidden host of psychological manipulators will profile us and every digital movement we make. They will track us around the web and they’ll know every sordid little thing we are up to. Every weakness, every failing, every hidden desire.
They’ll analyse every purchase we make, every specialist interest website we visit and each specific page or even word we dwell on. They’ll track us around every dating website we join and every naughty photo we look at. And then they’ll pounce. But not in our faces. Behind our backs.
Yes, they’ll sneak up on us by delivering covert and clandestine digital messages that will get to the very heart of our secret fears, hopes and dreams. And by Christ will they make us part with our money? And we won’t even know they are doing it.”
Paranoia is a dangerous thing and If I had a penny for every time someone told me that ‘they’ (whoever ‘they’ are) were watching our every move, listening to our every conversation or controlling our every desire I’d have a couple of quid. I bet good money that the first person to send a letter was scared that ‘they’ would read it. (More likely the first tablet sent in Egyptian times – or before) But there are two things that occur to me that give me hope for a future where I’m not a victim of Big Brother:
a) There are 6.5 billion people on this planet to track – a number growing at a rate of knots.
b) There is a wealth of communication channels – Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, Myspace, this blog, e-mail, MSN, other blog’s, websites, forums, live chat, video conferencing, mobile phones, landlines, broadcast radio, local radio, internet radio, You Tube, web TV, snail mail, conversations in the street, debating societies, rock god’s pronouncing on the world, film etc etc etc – and the number of options is also growing at a rate of knots.
My hope lies in the fact that there is a simple equation that will protect me from ‘Them’.
The ‘Them’ equation:
(The growing number of people on the planet) multiplied by (The growing number of channels available for communication) = (An inability for technology to track everything we do and say).
In essence people AND technology will defeat people WITH technology.
Now I’m off for a quiet lie down in a lead-lined cell – underground – but then again I hear the CIA have attached detectors to worms that can translate my thought waves at a distance of one hundred miles and through a mile of granite rock.
