Electric non-Senses
This phenomenon has happened to us all. You’re having a conversation with a group of friends, you open your phone during or after it, and suddenly autocomplete is suggesting you things as if it were a part of that conversation. Excuse me, but can you move a bit further away? I can smell your presence all over us… Like some sort of uninvited stalker, our phones are monitoring not just our data but our surroundings. Constantly.
Our world is a maelstrom of data, information and images, ~whizzzzzzzing~ past the eyeballs and leaving a glowing streak of 101001010 01 010 10 10 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 behind it which instantly fades away. Some guy once said that money makes the world go round, well things are different now, man. Data is money. It’s the lubricant which greases the wheels of the gravy train and keeps it chugging in our highly technological society. We lead double lives; the real and the virtual, and the lines which demarcate those realities are growing fuzzy by the millisecond.
We’re plugged into the vortex - 999,000 volts of interconnected craziness surging /ZZZZZZAPPPPPPP/ through our synapses and painting the brain all sorts of electro-pastel colours with dopamine. And the people who bought us this stimulus want to get to know us a bit better. Take us out for a drink and then ravage us in some cheap motel room on the outskirts of town. Because what they’re after is our data. Human beings are walking mountains of data, and tech companies who have their applications embedded in our phones and devices want to mine us.
With 7,909,375,016 little mountains of data roaming this planet, that’s a lot of money. We give tech goliaths like Meta, Amazon, and Google, permission to take our data out of the ether, and they slide it over to advertisers and profit off it. We’re being watched, and listened, every interaction recorded, sliced, diced, iced, and spliced so that our online experience is unique to us with as many meaningless hits of dopamine as possible, digging the hooks deeper.
Which explains all the bizarro crap being flung towards us in the form of suggestions. Scrolling down one’s social media feed is like walking through a flea market, where in every direction you’re being harangued by two-bit charlatans trying to sell you the newest thing. STEP RIGHT UP! Hey there, I see you’re still wearing an analogue watch… What are you, a total idiot? Luckily, I’ve found this Apple Watch for you, and it’s discounted too. Come on, you know you want to, buster!
It's funny how we’re never recommended the truly meaningful stuff. Things that’ll be developmental to us as people. By keeping our deteriorating attention spans occupied by commodities, new sources of knowledge are obscured. Some can look past this diversion, and some, well, they just tossed their analogue watch in the bin.
Our little data leeches have become quite bold in their snooping too. Those furtive conspiratorial remarks from six, maybe seven, years ago about the government watching us are conspiracies no longer. Jokes about dystopias have become our reality and we’re the butt of it. Be careful what you say around that phone of yours. Indeed.
An article appeared on the second page of the 18th of November 2021 issue of the Evening Standard.
“YOUR FITBIT IS WATCHING YOU”
Of course, what they really meant was,
“WE’RE WATCHING YOU THROUGH YOUR FITBIT”
Scotland Yard has caught onto how valuable data is and have started working on something they call ‘digital forensics’. They’ve implemented measures to extract data from devices as banal and ordinary as satnavs, Fitbits, Bluetooth speakers, coffee machines? doorbells?? pacemakers?! Which means your morning cup of coffee suddenly turns into a hot, milky evidence bomb.
The story of Ross Compton comes to mind. September 2016. In some blocky place in Ohio called Middletown, Compton tried to game the system. Set fire to your house and then claim the insurance money. Admittedly, that idea has made a brief visit to the heads of many. So, he torches his house, packs a suitcase with his most vital belongings and breaks through the window. His cat died in the process. Compton’s account to the authorities is that he was awoken by a fire and, beside himself, grabbed whatever was most important to him and was out of there. Smelling something fishy in his story, the police and medical examiners get a search warrant for the data on his pacemaker and pick his whole alibi apart. His cardiac rhythms as recorded by the pacemaker during the time of the event did not corroborate his story, going as far as to prove that the poor fool wasn’t even asleep when the fire happened. Uh oh. A dead cat, $400,000 worth of damages, and charges of arson and insurance fraud later, Compton went down in history as the first casualty in the surveillance war. And I would’ve gotten away with it too if it weren’t for this meddling cardiac arrhythmia!
Met Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick says all this monitoring is to catch more criminals, speed up investigations, and build more successful convictions. Sure. Let’s say for a moment that the motives of law enforcement are completely judicial, that they want to lock up all the criminal scum wandering around our splendid streets. That still doesn’t soften the blow of the fact that this is just one more surreptitious step towards a full-blown surveillance state. This is one great grey double-edged sword which will cut up a lot of people on both sides of the camp.
I was buying groceries the other day and it only came to my attention after scanning all the items at the self-service checkout, that I had forgotten my wallet back home. And I had my old, lost bank card saved on my phone which would no longer work. Damn. Just as I’m about to abandon this shopping trip, I see a little notification !PING! on my phone. Upon opening it I find that my Apple Wallet had taken the liberty of adding my new bank card – which was still on its way to me in the post and hadn’t arrived yet – to my phone. That’s strange. That card hasn’t arrived in the post yet, and I certainly did not give you permission to just help yourself to my bank card… Goddamn. I put that thought on hold for just a moment, however, because it meant that I could actually buy my groceries then and there. But when I got home and cooked my shakshuka, it tasted weird. It tasted like a fucking warning. A grim reminder that our devices are many steps ahead of us, every step of the way. They can predict our actions faster than we can make up our minds about what to do next. Where in flaming Jesus is this going to go next?
Only two solutions come to my whiskey-twisted mind right now; either we all collectively throw our phones out the window right now!, but because realistically no one (including me) is going to do that, the second and more effective option is that we all start talking complete nonsense. Advocate gibberish. Confuse the data swine snooping in on our lives by running them in circles with unintelligible random mouthwash. It’s not too much of a leap to this course of action when everything coming out of the mouths of more than half the population – especially our brave and fearless world leaders – is inane stupidity anyway.
