“We’re all equal, but some of us are more equal than others”

Toward a rational View of Society: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 , 9 & 10

[Update: in case you wondered if this was topical, another article today on a corporate giant hoovering our data for their benefit outside the limelight]

I’ve been asked why I masked the license plate in the title picture? That’s because I have neither asked for consent by the driver ahead nor had any purpose to. Not only was it irrelevant to my Instagram post [“How did I lust for a car that seems so ugly to me 25 years later?”], but it also would violate privacy rules around registration information.

I live two lives on Twitter, one in geospatial and one in societal concern, mirrored via professional and current affairs channels here. Two posts in short order highlighted the fast&loose treatment of geodata on one hand, and on the other hand the sheer disingeniousness of GAFA toward privacy and data. Contrast this against a standards organisation’s efforts to clarify with government the rules of open data.

[I’ll let you follow the links without explicitly naming names, as there’s enough free propaganda already, and I only want to get to the issues here as I’ve done before.]

Against a backdrop of IT companies illegally sharing private data in thus-quasi-illegal political campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic, it raises two interesting questions:

• are businesses arrogant &/or desperate enough to get ahead, that they contravene internal and external data sharing rules?
• and/or are government rules falling behind enough, to open windows of opportunity that businesses are sure to exploit?

A lot of (virtual) ink has already flowed on these topics , so let me offer you a particular angle based on my previous three-part series. The first title was originally “Capitalism be afraid, very afraid” until I matched up the series titles.

Same as around Climate Breakdown in my recent previous title of this series, nothing less is at stake than our current ‘modus operandi’.

While we argue how much of our information we leave on the table, who grabs it and what is done with it — I say, “don’t post anything online that you don’t wish to share, as it will be passed around for sure” — I cannot but think it’s really a first world problem. Internet access is still a privilege afforded from 1 to 2 billion out of 6 or 7, depending on how they/we’re counted.

The same way SUVs were a demand generated by the auto industry 20 years ago to boost its flagging sales, is the internet not “the next big thing” to try and bolster flagging economies today? A lot has been written on this too, but let me highlight three aspects:

• for over a decade private and public services have been pushed off service desks to the internet as a way to cut costs — we the people are the biggest ticket item
• high street shops and department stores have been cannibalised by online stores — scattered infrastructure is also the biggest ticket item
• and “digitalisation” is seen as a must-do across all walks of business life — apps and the web are seen as the answer to monolithic IT backbones

Again these concern the upper échelon of society that is connected. But politics concern the full population, privileged or not, and the current wave of populism and demagoguery reflects that dichotomy. More and more “have nots” are getting educated and access to media that makes their voices heard. And politicians see the disenfranchised as the “next growth market” — that is why the Occupy Wall Street, Trump and Brexit took everyone by surprise — people want change in both a Capitalism and a Democracy they no longer believe in as it no longer works for them.

George Orwell’s words in my title were prescient indeed — Animal Farm was published in 1945 about pre- and post-WWII totalitarian regimes — and we ignore them at our peril. In other words, Democracy is as much under threat today as it was then.

The big difference, however, is that we now tie the political through the societal into the ecological in a more wholistic — and ironically a more comprehensive and dangerous — view.

Footnote: did you know that “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” — the more things change, the more they’re the same — was uttered by Charles de Gaulle, who took refuge during WWII in London, to Churchill when comparing Prussian to Nazi Germany? That according to a docent a decade ago at the Churchill War Rooms Museum in Whitehall, London.