Big Tech Is Watching You!
Big Tech what is it? It’s your mobile smart phone, computer, and all those digital networks reaching into your home, work and where you play. Modern technology has long been considered a boon for all those able to afford its gadgets and devices. Everything is quicker to record and communicate to others within the network. Computers are essentially recording and filing systems. The chips inside devices, cars, and electronics are recording everything we do these days. The upshot of this high tech is that we now all carry devices that connect us to centralised data hubs and networks. We carry digital screens with us to view the designated world through. Big Tech is watching you!
Who Pays The Big Tech Ferryman?
I remember reading George Orwell’s 1984 and the way Big Brother communicated with his subjects always struck me as somewhat contrived. We do not have that problem because Big Tech makes that so much more convenient. We carry these devices with us religiously and spend countless hours peering into screens. Social media means that 200 million people get to read what Elon Musk has to say whenever he tweets. Similarly, Donald Trump has this reach into tens of millions of lives when he posts on the social media platforms and networks he chooses. In the coming authoritarian age (are we there yet?), this is going to make things so much easier for the imperative voice to reach us all.
“Trump’s largest campaign donor and the world’s wealthiest man, Musk was tapped by the president to lead the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) in a radical and opaque cost-cutting drive that allows him to keep control of SpaceX, Tesla and other huge companies with billions of dollars in federal contracts.”
Billionaire Big Tech Oligarchs
Already, the influence of billionaire oligarchs like Musk is making waves globally. The majority of human beings are followers like sheep and like to be told what to do. All this democratic choice of the last century or so has worn the tiny minds of many out. They long for orders and instructions to blindly follow. Follow the money is the mantra of many. Follow the loudest voice in the room is the default position of many more. Don’t think too deeply about anything and keep your head down is the pathway for a majority of citizens. ‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose’, so goes the lyrics of a song anyway.
You Carry Your Own Surveillance Device
Big Tech is watching you! Every breath you take, every word you make – it will be watching you. That phone you love so much in your pocket, in your purse or bag, is keeping tabs on you. You carry with you the means of your own surveillance and control. The price of that digital convenience is 24/7 monitoring. The news feeds you read and the social media conversations you follow are technologies capable of coercing and directing you. Is it another human being or a bot spreading disinformation? That text is likely from a scammer. Emails carry the links to defraud your identity for criminal gain. There is an online war happening between the forces of light and darkness. Who wears the black hats? This, alas, is not so easy to answer, definitively. The government are not the good guys anymore, if they ever were.
Big Data Owns You
Your thoughts are no longer your own, if they ever really were. Every episode of your life you record in words and pictures is transported and stored. Big data sheds with a trillion servers blinking in the dark. AI needs more power, so Big Tech is going nuclear to feed the electronic beast. The beating heart of a giant machine. Geeks and techs type in algorithmic spells like digital incantations. Your little life is caught up in a sea of digitally filed data. It waits to be used and reused endlessly. The leadership of nations has gone downhill. Transactional Trump will sell you out in the blink of an eye. Integrity has been voted out by the unthinking masses. Devalued in a buyer’s market on steroids. The art of the deal between dictators hell bent on the destruction of the planet for personal gain.
Big Tech is watching you!
Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of America Matters: Pre-apocalyptic Posts & Essays in the Shadow of Trump.
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