We live in an age of excess - excess of news, excess of information, an excess of expert advice, excess of ads, an excess of media driven consumerism, an excess of pretty much everything!
It is therefore human nature to jump to shortcuts while navigating this highway ridden with minefields of excesses. We look at the synopsis of an article, the cover page of a book, the review of a movie or eating outlet to jump to quick, easy and definite conclusions.
What fascinates me is how quick we are to give information to things that we agree with - via reviews, ratings or any survey / form that simplifies information and is presented in a format that we understand.
Imagine a scenario where you searched for the bride/groom of your choice. Would a synopsis, rating or review of the said person interest you? Would companies that rate / market / review you as a person and com-modify you as another item of consumption offend you? Would institutions that rate your marital harmony and your ability as a parent or care-giver be acceptable to you? Would a group that decides how every person on planet Earth must be rated and reviewed scare the living daylights out of you?
All of this is not science fiction or wishful thinking anymore. There are teams of people and organizations doing research based on mining data from all sorts of databases and social networks that you and I may be a part of. These social scientists, data miners or researchers (call them what you want) work for various organizations on various specified and unspecified activities, tasks and goals.
Some of these activities are overt and well-known but much of the work undertaken is covert. It is away from the eyes of the general public, away from the drumbeats of popular media and safely ensconced under the watchful eye of private organizations, defense establishments and snooping agencies.
If you are already spooked by reading all of this, my apologies.
That is not my intention. However, let me tell you what I intend for you to know.
You need to be aware of the existence of technology that can hunt and scrutinize personal information and assemble a 360 degree profile of everything a person does, eats, watches, spends or buys. This could be his/her daily activity at work, at home, school, on-line, at the market or at any place where a commercial transaction takes place.
Many of you have read or might have known about Edward Snowden. This post does not seek to elaborate the hows or whys of what he did. But it does focus on an activity relevant to this blog post.
Data mining of Information & 360 Degree Profiling.
In short, Edward Snowden knew he was going to offend a lot of people in high places when he blew the whistle on the NSA's data collection activities. Why did people get so riled up with data collection for intelligence purposes? Isn't that a noble activity conducted by all governments for the safety and well being of their nation and their citizens?
What was unique was that this was no longer an activity where a select few individuals who were suspect were targeted. This was a net that was cast out wide, across countries, populations, diverse races and ethnicity. The agenda was no longer to narrow down on 'rogue' characters or people who could be troublemakers. It was to maintain data on each and every person! If you think that's scary, it is!
The NSA is not the only organization involved in such activities. There are many other organizations - some which are deeply secretive and some which are run by highly influential and wealthy private groups.
While not all of these organizations may have state / government sanction for their actions, what is interesting is that ALL of these are interested in you and me - how we live our life, what we eat, what we talk, what we wear, what we spend, who we hang out with, who we befriend, who we associate with, who we give our money, where we spend our time and what we do for a living.
You would ask why?
Why not?
These organizations know that real wealth is in information. Information is power.
Let me repeat that - "Information is POWER".
It's no longer just enough for them to control wealth through the control of oil, trade, gold, currency and natural resources. Today it is information that drives the engines of organizations and economies.
So the rat race for supremacy in the information stakes has already begun. It began several decades ago. What we are now seeing is the race heading into the final laps.
For example, do you think Facebook would give 19 billion dollars just for free chatting software that sits on practically one third of the mobile phones in the world?
Absolutely not!
Facebook paid Whatsapp for the number of subscribers it has and for the information that it gets when it connects with Whatsapp's private and personal information database - millions and millions of phone numbers with information on every detail, picture, discussion, chat they have ever had on Whatsapp.
I can see Facebook's scientists and data mining teams rubbbing their hands in glee. And the NSA beaming with joy!
You might say that's not possible due to data security and confidentiality laws. But would you ever come to know if they broke the law? Would you know what exactly is being shared, what kind of information is being processed or analyzed and handed over to which organization under what pretext - national security, criminology, population studies, heuristics, social data studies, research etc. etc...
No, you wouldn't. That is why organizations are behaving like it is the Wild West all over again. Like in the horse & wagon races for potential landowners at a time when unexplored parts and vast hinterlands of the US were over-run by new settlers and new migrants from Europe, today it is all about who can run the fastest, use the maximum resources to capture the maximum possible information.
Though land has not lost its value or glimmer even today, the new owners and elite are the ones who control personal information - the dissemination, the manipulation, the supply and the use of personal information according to their own set of rules bypassing every safeguard to privacy and freedom of a person.
It is therefore no longer wishful thinking to state that there are active programs seeking to quantify human experiences such as love, family, marriage, courtship, interpersonal relationships and put a price tag to information catering to these spheres of human interaction.
The Bible talks of an age that will be prevalent in the time to come where no person will be able to eat, buy, sell, spend, live, interact, transact or communicate without a certain mark on the forehead. Micro-chip technology that embeds personal information and RFID tags are already used and present worldwide across a host of applications and industries. We may be closer to an unveiling of data collection of personal information using laser technology or some other format to mark each individual as a unique number or identity.
Imagine an ID card at a global level that helps you bypass visa, embassy and passport restrictions and helps you travel swiftly and be across many places with the least hassle. Strangely this reason and many more reasons could be offered to an uninformed and gullible public in the years ahead. Technology to map each person is already in place. Many organizations have tried embedding micro chips that are the size of a grain of rice into the forehands, palms and wrists of volunteers in trials over the last several years. It won't take a great leap of technological expertise to perfect doing this on each person's forehead!
We are surrounded by wearable technology - whether it is Google Glass, sensors in clothes, clothes that change colour based on heat, clothes that are anti-bacterial or clothes that have information pods and sensors that communicate intelligently with other devices via WiFi, infrared, radio signals etc.
Soon we will be able to communicate effectively without having to open our mouths. Technology is already in place for a 'handshake' that communicates all information between one person to another and is being used in many places by business professionals and researchers who are too 'busy' to talk but still want to network with other peers at conferences, seminars & common platforms to meet up and do business with.
Many skeptics who used to dismiss the prophesies in Revelation as an exaggeration or ancient myth are now delving deeply into how they correlate to the happenings around us and give a spiritual perspective into the unrelenting march of organizations who are collecting greater amounts of personal information in order to search, profile, rate and review every activity, object, person and thing on planet Earth with each passing day.
If you have never read the Bible before, I urge you to start reading it today. Start from any book you want to. But if you want to see for yourself what I'm talking about in this blog post, you can start reading from the last book of the Bible - the book of Revelations.
Why wait? You can read it right away, right now! Some options for your reading comfort are as follows (all are free)
You can just click on the links below :
