Where, a decade or so ago, the tech world\u2019s products served to liberate us from the control of big institutions \u2014 I wrote a book on that! \u2014 now they seem designed to keep us under the thumb of big institutions. People used to start blogs to express themselves. Now they communicate via giant quasi-monopoly \u201csocial media\u201d sites that mute and ban users over their politics. Your computer and phone used to be ways for you to learn more about the world than had ever been possible before in human history; now your devices have turned into tools for governments and corporations to keep tabs on you in ways that have never been possible before in human history.<\/p>\n
And now we have the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Cambridge Analytica allegedly scraped data from Facebook users \u2014 apparently in accordance with Facebook rules at the time \u2014 but that has a lot of people hot and bothered. To be fair, if someone working for Hillary Clinton instead of Donald Trump had done this, there\u2019d be less outrage in the press (in fact, when Obama’s campaign collected Facebook user information in 2012, the press mostly praised their ingenuity). But that doesn\u2019t mean there isn\u2019t an issue.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The whole thing is worth a read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s been my theory for a long time now that Federal law enforcement, not the military, have become the “Standing Army” that the Founding Fathers worried about. Likewise – who needs a surveillance state, when you can can get over-wealthy, under-wise nerds to build it for you? Where, a decade or so ago, the tech […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[323],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-leftymoney"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66428"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66465,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66428\/revisions\/66465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}