Are we liberated by tech or does it enslave us?

I don't think anyone would disagree with the notion that all technology, be it digital, is bad. As we say, any thing in the world is not bad, if you use it right. Heck, as National Rifle Association (NRA) of America says, "guns don't kill people, people kill people." Undoubtedly, they are correct to an extent. After all people were being killed before the invention of gun powder or guns.

Any technology, be it the phone in your hand, or that tablet in your lap, or that laptop on your desk, or those video game boxes attached to your giant TV, or the latest gadgets in your car, or even those kitchen & household machines, are not bad, in themselves, but ultimately their usage defines their "villainous" ability. Their "unintended consequences" are ultimately dependent on the user.

For instance, a common complaint from parents, & healthcare professionals, is that childhood diabetes is increasing all over the world, because children are not spending time outdoors, but are always engrossed in their smartphones & video game boxes. True. But the problem is not to ban that tech, but to take children out to park & spend time with them outside of the house. That's the responsibility of the parents. However, parents themselves are busy spending time on those tech marvels, like sticking their smartphones on their faces 20 hours a day. Due to spending so much time engrossed in their phones, they don't have any time left for their loved ones, to enjoy life (instead of watching & showing off how their lives are, to others), or to do healthy activities themselves, like sleeping 6-8 hours at night.

That's the problem at a micro level. Let's take an example at a macro level; digital technology creating (or will be creating) mass unemployment at a national, or even an international, level. People study & spend a significant portion of their lives in a specific profession or industry. Then, they get the shock of their lives when they are laid off because their skills are not in demand anymore, because digital tech is replacing their skills. In these kinds of situations, governments & industry need to step in & jointly take control.

It's true that nobody can control the march of technology but the damaging effects, or the "unintended consequences" can be controlled, or perhaps, mitigated to some extent. For example, all those people who are laid off should be retrained at the expense of the government, & those companies, which have disrupted the industry through their technology, should also financially contribute in the retraining of those people. Those people can also be hired by those same companies, after their retraining. Because, those people are a financial, economic, & social burden on the governments and society, but they can be tax-paying, productive part of the citizenry, who would pay back the cost of their retraining, to the government, in the form of taxes. Governments can also look ahead in the future & see what professions should be promoted through educational institutes & the educational pipeline (schools, colleges, & universities) & connect the educational side (the supply of labour) with the industry (the demand of labour), so the public has an idea as to what should be studied now to earn its fruits later on.

Technology, in itself, is never bad. As the author says in the opinion piece that its "unintended consequences" can also never be predicted beforehand. But technology's bad consequences are often the bad practices of users. Users need to keep in mind how to properly use that technology, & how that technology is affecting others; be it their loved ones, their social circle, their professional circle, or their community at large, or even themselves.

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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/09/are-we-liberated-by-tech-or-does-it-enslave-us

Technology is unruly. New innovations bring with them a host of unintended consequences, ranging from the troubling to the downright depressing. Social media makes us lonely. Too much screen-time makes teenagers fall behind their peers. And at the more feeble end of the spectrum, many of us have walked into an obstacle while texting. Whatever glorious vision animates the moguls of Silicon Valley, it surely can’t be this.

We’re much better at designing complex systems than we are at predicting their behaviour, argues the writer Edward Tenner. Even though unintended consequences are inevitable, Tenner thinks they can be powerful catalysts for progress. But even the notion of an “intended consequence” is problematic when it comes to tech. Evgeny Morazov points out that we tend to confuse the positive consequences of information technology with intended ones, downplaying the significance of other natural, but rather less noble, upshots like pornography, surveillance and authoritarian control.

Free time is a case in point. Technology makes us more productive, but it’s also accused of unreasonably extending the domain of work. So does tech liberate us, or enslave us? And what does it really “intend” to do?

Tech and ‘free time’: a confusing picture

In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that the most pressing concern of the man of the future would be “how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him.” It hasn’t quite turned out that way - but Keynes wasn’t entirely off the mark. When we consider the lot of the average labourer of the past, our complaints about work-life balance start to sound pretty peevish. And the rise of technology really has, it seems, given us more free time than ever. So why do we still feel harried?

It’s worth noting that modern leisure is just as tech-saturated as work. Americans who subscribe to Netflix spend more time on the site than they do eating and having sex combined, TDG research found. The average Briton spends 1 hour 20 minutes every day monitoring four social media accounts, according to research from the Global Web Index. But all this screen-time makes us uneasy. To co-opt David Foster Wallace’s description of attitudes to television in the 1990s, there’s a “weird hate-need-fear-6-hrs-daily gestalt” about the whole thing.

But technology doesn’t just offer us escape. It promises to transfigure our bodies, our minds and our very souls by making us fitter, happier, and more productive - but it does it by insinuating that we’re, well, a bit suboptimal as we are. “There’s an app for that” comes with a whispered aside: “You know you’re doing it wrong, right?”

Everyone’s a bit of a Luddite

Criticisms of tech can sound shrill, but it’s not antediluvian to notice the impossible desires technology breeds. Our devices present us with simulacra of beautiful, fit, fulfilled people pursuing their dreams and falling in love, and none of them are browsing the web at 11pm on a Saturday night - unlike us. We click and swipe our woebegone way through a vibrant world where nobody who is anybody spends their free time in front of a glowing screen, painfully aware that our only access to that world is through that very glowing screen.

But we’re no fools. We know that nothing on the web as it seems. We long to detach ourselves from the whole circus for once and for all - and so we turn once again to the internet to research digital detoxes and vent our tech-related spleen. The web has a way of dancing around us, knowingly and self-referentially and maddeningly deflecting every attempt we make to express our unease.

Is ‘free time’ a misnomer?

But prying our free time from the clutches of technology isn’t necessarily the answer. The German philosopher Theodor Adorno argued that “free time” is an artificial concept – and it’s anything but free. For Adorno, free time is the very propogation of work: it is “nothing more than a shadowy continuation of labour”.

Today’s tech-saturated leisure trade – to say nothing of the trillion-dollar behemoth that is the “wellness industry” – is an integral part of a world in which we are treated as consumers first and citizens second. Talk of reclaiming free time is missing the point. What we need is control of the time we already have.

But in yet another twist, this is just what Paul Mason thinks information technology might allow us to do. For Mason, the “sharing economy” contains within it the glimmer of a genuine alternative – a post-capitalist society structured around liberty instead of economics. If Mason is right, tech might free us from the need for “free time” entirely. But how does this complex narrative fit into the storybook of “unintended consequences”?

The myth of ‘unintended consequences’

Well, it doesn’t. Unintended consequences are a myth, because anticipating the effects of even the simplest innovation is a fool’s errand. Forget about information technology, or calculus, or Linear B: even the toaster would be a challenge.

Tech innovators frequently profess aspirations to improve the lot of mankind. Such aspirations are admirable, but we shouldn’t forget that there’s one rather more concrete intention they share: to make money. They’re vendors, we’re consumers: it’s as simple as that. Still, it’s a huge leap from there to the claim that tech is, in Foster Wallace’s words, a “diabolical corrupter of personal agency and community gumption”.

But even if tech companies aren’t really trying to enslave us, or to make us feel inadequate, that doesn’t mean that the current situation is a case of good intentions gone awry. There’s no more reason to think that tech is intrinsically good, but occasionally getting it wrong, than there is to think that it’s a remarkably successful villain.

We love to praise tech, and we love to condemn it. We equate it with chaos, power, love, hate; with democracy, with tyranny, with progress and regress - we laud it as our salvation, while lamenting it as our scourge. Like any technology that has come before it, digital technology is all of these things. But it’s essentially none of them.

Criminal Minds, S1E18 quote

Beware inspirational online images – they may be more insidious than you think

Loved this opinion piece. A great piece. Thanks to social media, every ignorant moron in the world (who has access to internet & social media) blatantly & very easily shares inspirational pics & quotes, without thinking even for a couple minutes, what is that inspirational pic or quote is saying.

I agree that we all need inspirational stories, pictures, & quotes from time to time, to push us in the right direction, to do whatever is necessary to do, to achieve our goals. But, these inspirational items need to be taken with some context.

Nowadays, I've come across a lot of Paulo Coelho's quotes. Now, he might be a great person. He might be the nicest guy one will ever meet. But, several of his "inspirational" quotes rub me the wrong way. Why? Now, there's nothing wrong with those inspirational quotes, in & of themselves. And we have to keep in mind that those quotes might have been taken out of context, too. But, many of his quotes are not suitable for Muslims. And it really bothers me when Muslims 'like' or 'share' his quotes all over social media. His quotes are coming out from his background in Christianity or perhaps, non-Islamic, background.

Similarly, & as the opinion piece correctly points out, it is much easier to say "when there's a will, there's a way" than actually finding a way to resolve the problem. If we say that to graduates in Canada, Australia, Greece, Spain, Italy etc. that they can find a way to climb out of poverty & find a great job, then you may prove yourself a complete ignorant. It's not easy for everyone to do anything there is to do to climb out of poverty. There are several external factors, which are out of one's own control. Perhaps, they are disabled, or hold a religious belief that prohibits them from working in certain industries.

For instance, as a devout Muslim, I refuse to work in financial services, alcoholic beverage, arms manufacturing, casinos & gambling industries. Heck, I cannot even work for real estate brokerage firms because then I have to sell mortgages, which involves interest-based payments. Many more grads are struggling in the job market because they don't have the right connections in the labour market, since academic qualifications mean nothing.

So, it's very easy to quickly share mind-numbingly stupid & inane "inspirational" quotes & pictures, but if we stop for a minute & think before clicking that "like" or "share" button, then we'll realize that without context, that "inspirational" quote or pic is meaningless.
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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/10/inspirational-online-images-daniel-cabrera-homeless-filipino

While walking past a McDonald’s restaurant in the Philippines a medical student, Joyce Torrefranca, spotted a young boy sitting outside doing his homework at an improvised table. It was late in the evening, but the boy could read & write using the lights coming from the nearby restaurant.

Moved by the scene, Torrefranca took a photograph & posted it on Facebook. “For me as a student,” she wrote, “it just hit me a lot, like, big time.”

Torrefranca wasn’t the only one inspired by the nine-year-old boy without a home. Since Daniel Cabrera’s house burned down, he has reportedly been living in a food stall with his mother & 2 brothers. His father is dead. Reports also say he owns only one pencil. A second pencil was stolen from him.

As the story went viral, people emerged to help the boy, giving him books, pencils & crayons. He also received a battery-powered lamp so he would no longer have to do his homework in the car park. A fundraising page was set up to help cover the costs of his schooling.

This is far from the first inspirational story to attract attention online. Whether it’s a limbless man surfing, a cancer survivor climbing some of the world’s highest peaks or a homeless woman making it all the way to Harvard, we are easily touched by these stories, & there’s nothing strange or wrong with that. But we might want to examine some of the reasons why we – or others – love them so much, or at least question the conclusions some of us wish to draw from them.

One tabloid newspaper has recommended parents show the picture of the hardworking boy to their children next time they are moaning. In a similar vein, someone has turned the picture into an inspirational postcard with the caption: “If it is important to you, you will find a way. If not, you’ll find an excuse.”

In these interpretations, the picture is used to suggest that there are no excuses for failure or poverty. Even if you are poor & live in a makeshift home, you have the choice to work yourself out of that predicament. All you need is determination, willpower & the right, can-do attitude. Private troubles, whether poverty or unemployment, should remain private troubles. They should not be regarded as public issues because that is merely a way of trying to find an excuse. Such is the lesson we should teach ourselves & take from this.

It is depressingly easy to find other examples of this mindset today, the idea that we can all rise above our circumstances – however difficult – through a programme of self-improvement.

In Los Angeles, for instance, the New Village Charter High School is using transcendental meditation not just to release stress but also, in the words of its principal, Javier Guzman, “to combat poverty”. This may help some of the children to achieve better results at school. But the problem is not personal when the bottom income quartile in the US make up only 5% of enrolments in top universities.

Another proposal to fight poverty comes from the US Republican politician Paul Ryan. Inspired by the writer Ayn Rand, he recently presented an anti-poverty plan in which he proposed poor people should sit down with a life coach & develop an “opportunity plan”.

This might sound a uniquely north American venture but Sweden, popularly known as the land of equality & welfare, is probably the country that has come closest to achieving Ryan’s dream.

In the course of only 4 years, the Swedish state paid out 4.7bn Swedish krona (£360m) to job coaches. The actual benefits of this initiative have proved modest, & the methods used by these coaches, including healing & therapeutic touching, have been called into question.

But more problematic than their questionable usefulness is that these methods implicitly encourage socially vulnerable groups, whether poor or unemployed, to stop looking for answers in the public sphere. They are told instead that the barrier lies within themselves.

One US study, which followed unemployed white-collar workers who attend support organisations, found that jobseekers were encouraged to stop reading the newspaper and go on a “news fast”. They were also asked to stop using the word “unemployment”, since that would betray a negative attitude.

Similar observations were made in Ivor Southwood’s auto-ethnographic account of UK jobcentres, Non-Stop Inertia, in which he describes how jobseekers are told to do “three positive things per week” or else they might be disciplined.

In his recent ethnography of the Swedish equivalent of Jobcentre Plus, Roland Paulsen describes mandatory humiliating exercises, so-called brag rounds, in which the long-term unemployed are encouraged to show off in front of their fellow jobseekers.

In a distressing article recently published in Medical Humanities it was suggested that these types of exercises, intended to modify attitudes, beliefs & personality, have become a political strategy to eradicate the experience of social & economic inequality.

Again, there is nothing wrong with being moved by a picture of a young boy concentrating hard on his homework. But we should remember that pictures of this kind may serve more sinister purposes when paired with “inspirational” messages. Serious discussion of external circumstances – including a proper understanding of inequality – is not helped by the suggestion that the only thing holding a person back is their attitude.

Paranoia (movie line 1)

IMDB          RottenTomatoes          Wikipedia

Especially true for our "modern" age of smartphones & social media.

Facebook isn't a charity. The poor will pay by surrendering their data

A great opinion piece.

People are fawning over the modern technology & connectivity (internet, smartphones, apps etc.) & they have truly disrupted the business & labour markets alike. But what we gloss over (seeing the trees but forgetting the forest) that these same technologies, if brought some good things in this world (e.g. Wikipedia & WikiLeaks), they also brought a lot of pain in the shape of, for instance, millions of job losses, cyber-bullying, lack of privacy, much closer integration of financial systems (which, in turn, helped spread the financial crises of one country, globally).

Internet now is turning into a device for exploiting the poor, & with the help of dire economic & financial situations, at least, in the near future, billions of poor will keep getting exploited by rich (who became rich with the help of internet in the first place).
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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/26/facebook-isnt-charity-poor-pay-by-surrending-their-data

Luxury is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed. Such, at any rate, is the provocative argument put forward by Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist. Recently dubbed “the Varian rule”, it states that to predict the future, we just have to look at what rich people already have & assume that the middle classes will have it in 5 years & poor people will have it in 10. Radio, TV, dishwashers, mobile phones, flatscreen TVs: Varian sees this principle at work in the history of many technologies.
 
So what is it that the rich have today that the poor will get in a decade? Varian bets on personal assistants. Instead of maids & chauffeurs we would have self-driving cars, housecleaning robots & clever, omniscient apps that can monitor, inform & nudge us in real time.
 
As Varian puts it: “These digital assistants will be so useful that everyone will want one & the scare stories you read today about privacy concerns will just seem quaint & old-fashioned.” Google Now, one such assistant, can monitor our emails, searches & locations & constantly remind us about forthcoming meetings or trips, all while patiently checking real-time weather & traffic in the background.
 
Varian’s juxtaposition of dishwashers with apps might seem reasonable but it’s actually misleading. When you hire somebody as your personal assistant, the transaction is relatively straightforward: you pay the person for the services tendered – often, in cash – & that’s the end of it. It’s tempting to say that the same logic is at work with virtual assistants: you surrender your data – the way you would surrender your cash – for Google to provide this otherwise free service.
 
But something doesn’t add up here: few of us expect our personal assistants to walk away with a copy of all our letters & files in order to make a buck off them. For our virtual assistants, on the other hand, this is the only reason they exist.
 
In fact, we are getting shortchanged twice: first, when we surrender our data – eventually, it ends up on Google’s balance sheet – in exchange for relatively trivial services, &, second, when that data is then later used to customise & structure our world in a way that is neither transparent nor desirable.
 
This second life-shaping feature of data as a unit of exchange is not yet well understood. However, it’s precisely this ability to shape our future even after we surrender it that turns data into an instrument of domination. While cash, with its usual anonymity, has no history & little connection to social life, data is nothing but a representation of social life – albeit crystallised into kilobytes. Google Now can work only if the company behind it manages to bring vast chunks of our existence – from communication to travel to reading – under its corporate umbrella. Once there, these activities can suddenly acquire a new economic dimension: they can finally be monetised.
 
Nothing of the kind happens to today’s rich when they hire a personal assistant. Here, the balance of power is clear: the master is dominating the servant – & not the other way around, as is the case with Google Now & the poor. In a way, it’s the poor who are the true “virtual assistants” to Google – in helping it to amass the data that the company later monetises.
 
Varian never asks the obvious question: why it is that the rich need personal assistants? Could it be – as seems likely – that it’s not because they like personal assistance but because they like free time? However, to frame the argument this way would be to reveal that the poor, perhaps, are not going to be enjoying as much free time as the rich, even if they get all the latest gadgets from Google.
 
The dialectic of empowerment works in mysterious ways: yes, the smart devices could save us time – so that we can spend it working to pay our higher, personalised insurance costs, or send that extra work-related email, or fill in an extra form that is required by some newly computerised bureaucratic system.
 
Facebook, Google’s closest competitor, pulls the same trick with connectivity. Its Internet.org initiative, which now operates in Latin America, south-east Asia & Africa, was ostensibly launched to promote digital inclusion & get the poor in the developing world online. Online they do get but it’s a very particular kind of “online”: Facebook & a few other sites & apps are free but users have to pay for everything else, often based on how much data their individual apps consume. As a result, few of these people – remember, we are talking about very poor populations – are likely to afford the world outside Facebook’s content empire.
 
Here is the Varian rule at work again: on the face of it, the poor do get what the rich have already – internet connectivity. But the key difference is not hard to spot. Unlike the rich, who pay for their connectivity with their cash, the poor pay for it with their data – the data that Facebook would one day monetise in order to justify the entire Internet.org operation. We are not dealing with a charity here, after all. Facebook is interested in “digital inclusion” in much the same manner as loan sharks are interested in “financial inclusion”: it is in it for the money.
 
Any service provider – be it in education, health, or journalism – would soon realise that to reach the millions using Internet.org, it had better launch & operate its apps inside Facebook rather than outside. In other words, the poor might eventually end up getting all those nice services that the rich already have, but only with their data – their congealed social life – covering the costs of it.
 
The free connectivity that Facebook offers to the developing countries is essentially a giant financial derivative that finances the development of its infrastructure: Facebook gives these countries connectivity in exchange for the right to monetise the lives of their citizens once they have earned enough money.
 
The Varian rule, it seems, needs a major correction: to predict the future, simply look at what the oil companies & banks have been doing for the past two centuries & extrapolate to Silicon Valley, our new default provider of infrastructure for all basic services. In that future, alas, virtual assistants would not be enough – we would be in dire need of virtual psychoanalysts.

NSA's plan: improve cybersecurity by cyber-attacking everyone else

I can do whatever I want to do to you, & if I even hear a peep out of you, then you will be branded as a terrorist for life. Sounds like modus operandi of a bully.
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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/21/nsa-plan-improve-cybersecurity-hacking-everyone

The National Security Agency wants to be able to hack more people, vacuum up even more of your internet records & have the keys to tech companies’ encryption – &, after 18 months of embarrassing inaction from Congress on surveillance reform, the NSA is now lobbying it for more powers, not less.

NSA director Mike Rogers testified in front of a Senate committee ..., lamenting that the poor ol’ NSA just doesn’t have the “cyber-offensive” capabilities (read: the ability to hack people) it needs to adequately defend the US. How cyber-attacking countries will help cyber-defense is anybody’s guess, but the idea that the NSA is somehow hamstrung is absurd.

The NSA runs sophisticated hacking operations all over the world. A Washington Post report showed that the NSA carried out 231 “offensive” operations in 2011 - & that number has surely grown since then. That report also revealed that the NSA runs a $652m project that has infected tens of thousands of computers with malware.

And that was 4 years ago - it’s likely increased significantly. A leaked presidential directive issued in 2012 called for an expanded list of hacking targets all over the world. The NSA spends ten of millions of dollars per year to procure “‘software vulnerabilities’ from private malware vendors” – i.e., holes in software that will make their hacking much easier. The NSA has even created a system, according to Edward Snowden, that can automatically hack computers overseas that attempt to hack systems in the US.

Moving further in this direction, Rogers has also called for another new law that would force tech companies to install backdoors into all their encryption. The move has provoked condemnation & scorn from the entire security community - including a very public upbraiding by Yahoo’s top security executive - as it would be a disaster for the very cybersecurity that the director says is a top priority.

And then there is the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) the downright awful “cybersecurity” bill passed by the Senate Intelligence Committee ... in complete secrecy that is little more than an excuse to conduct more surveillance. The bill will do little to stop cyberattacks, but it will do a lot to give the NSA even more power to collect Americans’ communications from tech companies without any legal process whatsoever. The bill’s text was finally released a couple days ago, &, as EFF points out, tucked in the bill were the powers to do the exact type of “offensive” attacks for which Rogers is pining.

So, when do we start caring about privacy?

So at what point does the public mobilize? Privacy should, by every right, be the essential debate of our modern digital era; it is the newest & most pressing issue on our plate. ... Yet stories & revelations of our fumbling & slouching to Bethlehem—or, in some cases, our government’s rather insidious machinations—continue to earn yawns & swipe-pasts.
 
We are convinced, of course, that privacy is a matter that affects other people. R v. Fearon? That guy deserved it, because he... committed a crime; I don’t commit crimes. Breaking European law? Well, that’s not in North America! And government emails? So what? I don’t send them anything incriminating!

 

Except that creating caveats for our standards in these early days of an entire field is profoundly problematic. If Canadians don’t set the tone for what we want in our privacy, we will allow companies & governments to set the rules for us. This is indeed a problem, then, of other people—that is, the fact that other people will be setting the agenda for our own privacy.

 

Good thing there’s no upcoming bill in Canada that could set the stage for a genuine debate over our country’s privacy rights.

 

http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/so-when-do-we-start-caring-about-privacy/

How the internet is destroying us

Super loved this article ... left me speechless. Flawless. I tried picking a few lines to put it here, but it seemed every line was more important than the previous one, so I ended up putting here almost the whole article. Ironically, regardless of how much I loved this article, I still gotta use social media.
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The internet, its many evangelists tell us, is the answer to all our problems. It gives power to the people.
 
It’s a platform for equality that allows everyone an equal share in life’s riches. For the first time in history, anyone can produce, say or buy anything.
 
But today, as the internet heads towards putting more than half the world’s population online, all this promise has evaporated.
The dream has become a nightmare, in which I fear we billions of network users are victims, not beneficiaries.
 
In our super-connected 21st-century world, rather than promoting economic fairness, the net is a central reason for the growing gulf between rich & poor, & the hollowing out of the middle classes.
 
Rather than generating more jobs, it is - as I will explain - a cause of unemployment. Rather than creating more competition, it has created immensely powerful new monopolists such as Google & Amazon in a winner-takes-all economy.
 
Its cultural ramifications are equally chilling. Rather than creating transparency & openness, it secretly gathers information & keeps a watch on each & every one of us.
 
You need only have read the stories ... about how smart TVs can spy on us in our living rooms to realise that Orwell’s vision in Nineteen Eighty-Four, of a Big Brother society, is becoming a reality.
 
And thanks to the explosion in social media, rather than creating more democracy, the internet is empowering mob rule.
 
The internet has also unleashed a seemingly unstoppable flow of increasingly hardcore sexual materials. Only this week it emerged that half a million pornographic images are posted on Twitter every day.
 
Britain’s most senior judge warned recently that online pornography is a serious danger, fuelling rape & murder. Where will it stop?
 
And when people are not looking online at other people with no clothes on, they are looking at themselves.
 
Rather than fostering an intellectual renaissance, the internet has created a selfie-centred culture of voyeurism & narcissism.
 
Far from making us happy, it is provoking & channelling an outpouring of anger at the world around us.
 
Of course, the internet is not all bad. It has done tremendous good in connecting families, friends & work colleagues around the world.
 
The personal lives of 3 billion internet users have been transformed by the incredible convenience of email, social media, e-commerce & mobile apps.
 
Yes, we all rely on & even love our ever-shrinking & increasingly powerful mobile devices. Yes, the internet can, if used critically, be a source of great enlightenment in terms of the global sharing of ideas & information.
 
The app economy is already beginning to generate innovative solutions to some of the most pervasive problems on the planet, such as mapping clean water stations in Africa & providing access to credit for entrepreneurs in India.
 
But the hidden negatives outweigh the positives. Under our noses, one of the biggest ever shifts in power between people & big institutions is taking place, disguised in the language of inclusion & transparency.
 
Rather than providing a public service, the architects of our digital future are building a society that is a disservice to almost everyone except a few powerful, wealthy owners.
 
It’s easy to forget the crusading intentions with which the internet revolution began. But then the mantle passed from the techno wizards & visionaries to businessmen.
 
The internet lost a sense of common purpose, a general decency, perhaps even its soul. Money replaced all these things.
 
Amazon reflects much of what has gone wrong. Now by far the dominant internet retailer, it has achieved this position by crushing or acquiring its competitors & selling everything it can lay its hands on.
 
It has felt the need to expand so ruthlessly because in its type of e-commerce, margins are extremely tight & economies of scale vital. In 2013, Amazon made sales of $75 billion (£49 billion) but returned a profit of just $274 million (£178 million).
 
To succeed, it has to make itself a virtual monopoly, stifling rivals along the way. Inside the company this is known as the Gazelle Project, after founder Jeff Bezos instructed one of his staff that ‘Amazon should approach small book publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle’.

The book trade - which is where Amazon began - was initially quite enthusiastic about the new arrival but now sees it as a predator as shops close down, unable to compete.
 
As Amazon expands into more retail sectors - from clothing, electronics & toys to garden furniture & jewellery - it is having the same effect there.
 
The impact on jobs is huge. While bricks-&-mortar retailers employ 47 people for every £65 million in sales, Amazon employs just 14, making it a job-killer rather than a job-creator.

‘Robotisation’ in its warehouses may reduce job numbers even further, until eventually Amazon eliminates the human factor from shopping completely. The ‘Everything Store’ is becoming the ‘Nobody store’.

Then there is Google, which discovered the holy grail of the information economy with its search engine sifting & indexing the mass of digital material on the worldwide web.
 
Last year Google processed 40,000 search queries a second, equal to 1.2 trillion searches a year. It controls around two-thirds of searches globally, with 90% dominance in markets such as Italy & Spain.
 
The service is free to use. Advertising pays the bills & makes the profits.
 
The irony is that Google was invented by a couple of idealistic computer science graduate students who so mistrusted advertisements that they banned them on their homepage. Now it is by far the largest & most powerful advertising company in history, valued at over £260 billion.
 
Unlike Amazon, its profits are mind-bogglingly high. In 2013, it returned nearly £10billion for its investors, from revenues of nearly £39billion.
 
Even more valuable, from Google’s point of view, is what it learns about us. And Google, for better or worse, never forgets. All our digital trails are crunched to provide Google & its corporate clients with our so-called ‘data exhaust’.

From this concept other internet services have developed, including Facebook, Wikipedia, the business networking site LinkedIn, & self-publishing platforms such as Twitter & YouTube.
 
Most pursue a Google-style strategy of giving away their tools & services free, relying on advertising sales for revenue. In the process, they have created significant wealth for their founders & investors.
 
On the surface, this seems like a win for everyone. We all get free internet tools & the entrepreneurs become super-rich.
 
But there is a catch. All of us are, in fact, working for Facebook & Google for nothing, manufacturing the very personal data that makes these companies so valuable.
 
The result is another massive loss of jobs. Google needs to employ only 46,000 people, compared with an industrial giant like General Motors, which is worth just a seventh of Google’s £260 billion but employs just over 200,000 people in its factories.
 
For all the claims that the internet has created more equal opportunity & distribution of wealth, the new economy actually resembles a doughnut — with a gaping hole in the middle where millions of workers were once paid to manufacture products.
 
Take the photo app Instagram, which allows anyone to share their own snaps online for others to see. When it was sold to Facebook for £651 million in 2012, it had just 13 full-time employees. Meanwhile, Kodak was closing 13 factories & 130 photo labs & laying off 47,000 workers.
 
Or WhatsApp, the instant messaging platform for which Facebook paid £12.4 billion. In one month it handled 54 billion messages from its 450 million users, yet it employs only 55 people to manage its service.
 
That’s because we are the ones doing most of the work. In this e-world, the quality of the technology is secondary.
 
What’s important — & what is actually being traded when these companies change hands — is you & me: our labour, our productivity, our network, our supposed creativity.
 
Yet for our input in adding intelligence to Google, or content to Facebook, we are paid nothing, merely being granted the right to use the software free. And that’s what is driving the new ‘data factory’ economy.
 
We think we are using Instagram to look at the world, but actually we are the ones being watched. And the more we reveal about ourselves, the more valuable we become to advertisers.
 
From social media networks such as Twitter & Facebook to Google, ... the exploitation of our personal information is what counts. These companies want to know us so intimately so they can package us up &, without our consent, sell us back to advertisers.
 
Another great irony in all this is that the internet was created by public-minded technologists such as the English academic Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, who were all indifferent to money, sometimes even hostile to it.
 
Yet the internet they produced with such high humanitarian hopes has triggered one of the greatest accumulations of wealth in human history.
 
Jeff Bezos has made £19.5 billion from his Amazon Everything Store that offers cheaper prices than its rivals. Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has accumulated his £19.5 billion by making money out of friendship.
 
In 25 years, the internet has gone from the initial idealistic banning of all forms of commerce to transforming absolutely everything into profitable activity. Especially our privacy.
 
Tim Berners-Lee never imagined that his ‘social’ creation to help people to work together more easily could be used so cynically, both by private companies & by governments. Yet that’s what is happening.
 
As the internet transforms every electronic object into a connected device, we are drifting into a world where everything — our fitness, what we eat, our driving habits, how hard we work — can be profitably quantified by companies such as Google.
 
Faceless data-gatherers wearing all-seeing electronic glasses watch our every move. Our networked society is like a claustrophobic village pub, a frighteningly transparent community in which there are no longer any secrets or any anonymity.
 
We are observed by every unloving institution of the new digital surveillance state, from big data companies & the Government to insurance companies, healthcare providers & the police.
 
Google & Facebook boast that they know us more intimately than we know ourselves. They know what we did yesterday, today &, with the help of predictive technology, what we will do tomorrow.
 
And it is, frankly, our fault for choosing to live in a crystal republic where cars, mobile phones & televisions — hooked up to the internet — watch us.
 
Far from being the answer to our problems, the internet, whose pioneers believed it would save humanity, is diminishing our lives.
 
Instead of creating more transparency, we have devices that make the invisible visible. The sharing economy is really the selfish economy. Social media is, in fact, anti-social. And the success of the internet is a huge failure.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2962509/How-internet-destroying-pioneers-hoped-web-transform-society-devastating-new-book-says-way-diminishes-humanity.html

Edward Snowden quote