Digital Blood

sobering perspectives on the voluntary surrender of our personal data to corporations

I log in to another ‘free’ web service that usurps a little piece of me; like digital blood, donated freely by me to corporation X. I have become an insignificant data droplet on a server somewhere; gather billions of ‘droplets’ and you have a shroud of intelligence: can this practice co-opt our very humanity?

This may not be just hysteria; in Beyond the Camera Panopticon , Aral Balkan provides a splendid, bombastic analysis of corporate deception and the privacy delusion that leads us to keep hemorrhaging our precious information.

Blend privacy and security with a larger dose of pessimistic fatalism and you have the opus of Marc Goodman’s Future Crimes: Everything is Connected, Everyone is Vulnerable and What we can do about it ; this will make you collapse in a puddle, catalyze dreams of smashing your mobile phone, unplugging all your screens, nuking all your hard-drives and escaping to the wilderness.

Could the intelligence amassed by the voluntary surrender of personal data from billions of searches fuel an AI revolution? Ex-Machina affirms how a fictional search engine could aggregate its vast data sets of personal information supplied by billions of human beings to arrive at the singularity.

Are we indeed on the brink of a ‘techno-apocalypse’? Well, for a reasoned, rational analysis of this possibility check out Nick Bostrom’s End of Humanity . He incisively and brilliantly categorizes the catastrophic risk of artificial intelligence and other existential threats to our existence.

So, can a solution like the one proposed by the vibrant souls at redecentralize.org help humanity “take back the net ?”

Should we begin to disaggregate apps from the storage of personal information as articulated by Michiel de Jong and the ex-googler Kenton Varda who created Sandstorm.io

Me, well, I can’t get my digital blood back, but am hoping for a virtual reconstitution by metabolizing the wisdom on indiewebify.me