How to Fight Back the Tech Takeover
“Nobody dreamed that you could get to the content of thought like we’ve been able to in the past 10 years. It was considered science fiction,” says Marcel Just at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania. Researchers have already peered into the brain to recreate films people have watched and decoded dreams.
Technology has reached a crossroads. Companies can decode your dreams and are racing to provide an international traveling requirement standard which requires your blood. We are on the verge of a tech takeover which will usher in a new age of technocracy: a global totalitarian regime with the right to own your DNA and read your mind; obliterating any notion of privacy or sovereignty and policing or even controlling your thoughts and your body. We are literally "selfying" ourselves over a cliff into large precipice; a void from which there is no return. How do we stop this now?
The answer is simple. Every AI system is just a collection of networks. The networks use massive amounts of training data to re-program themselves according to trends in the data they are given. In this seemingly insignificant fact lies the key. All we need to do to stop the takeover is to stop giving them our data. If they have no data to train their AI, they cannot get to a working product. An example of how we feed their AI and train it ourselves is facial recognition. You remember only eight years ago on facebook you could "tag" anyone in a photo by drawing a box around their head and typing in their name? That became automatic because what you were actually doing is giving their AI training data on how to recognize people in images.
Unfortunately so many people rely on these services to communicate with others and browse through lists of things the AI puts in front of them to interact with (what people just call "using a social app"). Add to that, we have already given them so much training data, the application of which has gone to things like mass surveilance states and gigantic breaches of contract which they have yet to be held accountable for. We are just meant to "trust them" with our data even though they have no responsibility in upholding the billions of contracts they have signed with people around the world.
Contract Slavery
You are, when you use any service owned by or doing business with Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, Amazon or Microsoft, signing a contract called the "Terms of Service" in which they offer you a service in exchange for owning the data you provide them. Effectively, if you look up "indentured servitude" or "indentured slavery" this is just a new variation of the same thing. You are working to give them a product they make money on, while they pay you no money for the product you have helped create. What's more is that they use your own data to create premium services which you turn around and buy, giving them more money and more data in turn. The cycle repeats itself over and and over again, all the while they get richer and you get "convenience".
When you upload photos and video to WhatsApp, Twitter, Messenger, Hangouts, Instagram, (and an interminable list of other buyouts), you are giving the AI more data not only about yourself, but also giving it data to mine features of human behavior, facial recognition and tracking, training it how to write realistic messages and better understand input and training it how to predict what you will want given your action. There is no end to the riches they can mine from the data you give them, and you gave them full permission without recourse to use your data however they want.
Unfortunately, legislation to try and curb this type of data piracy has only added extra terms to the contract instead of changing it's underlying mechanisms. It doesn't address the issue of responsibility for breach of contract on the part of big tech. Therefore it is safe to assume that politics and beuracracy cannot create the change necessary to befuddle this takeover. They have already made moves in the past to try to make us criminally responsible for breach of contract but fortunately for us, the data servants, judges have been on our side in the past.
Opt Out: No Slaves? No Cotton.
One answer is boycott. You can simply stop using these services, uninstall any apps controlled by the tech giants, and use other apps, starving them of their precious data. There exist now a myriad of other services which can be used and have not been bought out by the big tech companies. For example, this blog was written on Minds.com originally. The obvious problem with this approach is two-fold.
1. A vast majority of people using services online are using ones owned by the technocracy
2. The tech companies can just buy out any other company because we have made them so rich.
While it seems like a definitive solution, could you really live without these services? Of course. The problem is that it would cause you a great deal of inconvenience, and it could cripple the social interactions of the youngest generations if we can't show them another way.
Convenience is the thing that got us into this mess to begin with. GMail and Apple's mail services are so convenient that they own around 70% of the 2020 e-mail market share. Facebook as an app/site may be down in use over the last half-decade, but they own WhatsApp as well as Instagram, giving them all of the data they need on the demographic they want to focus on: young people who know nothing about life before the internet. When we search for things online using search engines like Google and Bing, we are also giving them data about us. When we use our smartphones, we are giving them even more data about the apps we use, where we are, who our contacts are and possibly a lot more information that can be extrapolated and inferred from. When we use their cloud services to make sure we don't lose our photos and videos from our smartphones, we get convenience, but we are signing away that data to other owners. How much more energy, life, privacy and attention will we pay them in exchange for convenience?
Give Up the Ghost
Trade some of your convenience for freedom, don't trade your freedoms of thought and privacy for a little bit of extra convenience.
How would your life look if you were able to give up your slavery contract with the tech giants? Perhaps the same way life looked before the year 2000 in regards to how we used technology. Computers were not mainly just social gateways, they were tools used to aid us in tasks. There were no devices everyone relied on, which in turn spied on us at every opportunity but there were different devices that did different things and none of them had to be connected to the internet in order to work. We could barely even make online transactions, so it was very possible to do things with cash if we wanted to truly have our privacy from prying eyes. Nobody would call us criminals for wanting privacy or using physical cash. Sure, the media might say now that digital currencies are secure because they are decentralized, but there are still plenty of scam artists out there robbing people of millions in bitcoin whereas before, this sort of a thing was unthinkable. Some of us remember how it looked before this, and it's up to us to take the first steps toward stopping the world from walking backwards off of a cliff into a deep and dark abyss.
What are some other solutions to this problem? Surely if we truly had control of how government works on a global scale, we could create some sort of basic constitutional right to the Freedom of Privacy of Thought. Unfortunately for us, the only world governing bodies with any authority currently are controlled by multiple private interests and were not elected freely by the people of the world. I don't know exactly what it will take to stop our pending fall, but I do know it will take a concerted effort among the "users" of the world to turn our backs on helping those who would wish to enslave us to AI overlords who control and rob us of our very essence. Don't let this be the last article you read about data privacy and new transhumanist technologies. Transhumanist is another word for Eugenicist. Educate yourself and others of the dangers we are all facing every time we take a photo, write a chat, or hit thumbs up on one of these services with terms we all so blindly agree to because it's convenient.
They are coming for our minds and they will not stop unless we make them. It won't take violence, it will simply take our non-action for them to succeed. Stopping them will take rejecting their lies about how wonderful their technology is for us and writing them off as fools an zealots and never signing their contracts. This is the war for our minds and we have a common enemy who seeks to control us from the virtual shadows, turning each of us into our own informer, dividing us by any limit that pattern recognition algorithms can find in a massive sea of our deep personal data.