They Live
I’m a child of the 80s which is why I love the book “Ready Player One,” the band Duran Duran, and parachute pants. Very much kidding about the last one. Seriously.
Among the many great movies made back then was one I bet you’ve never heard of; They Live from 1988. It ‘starred’ one of my favorite ‘athletes’ from televised wrestling, Mr. Rowdy Roddy Piper. Yes, I wrote athlete and televised wrestling in the same sentence. This movie was awesome! It had one of the best, all-time mano-a-mano fight scenes ever filmed, and perhaps my favorite work quote: “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and I’m all out of bubblegum.”
The premise of the movie is quite unique for 1988. Basically, Rowdy plays a drifter who discovers a pair of sunglasses that allow him to wake up to the fact that aliens have taken over the Earth. More disturbingly, he finds that the ruling class aliens are concealing their appearance and manipulating people to spend money, breed, and accept the status quo — all with subliminal messaging they’re sending through mass media. (The movie was directed by John Carpenter of “Escape from New York” fame and the story is based on the 1963 short story “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” by Ray Nelson.)
You have to watch it.
Last week, as I watched Mark Zuckerberg testify in front of my parents and grandparents — err, our political representatives — I had a personal epiphany. With equal parts awe, sympathy, and voyeuristic pleasure, I realized that many Americans were putting on their own version of these sunglasses. We had a sense about certain things… “I keep seeing those ads,” or “how am I seeing an ad for something I just spoke to my friend about?” But, we never quite put it all together. That is, we didn’t put it together until we realized that giving one company and one person control of TWO BILLION PEOPLE’S thoughts, desires, moods, photos, messages, purchases, networks, locations and smartphones could produce real “offline” outcomes that we might not like. We might experience more sadness than we would otherwise experience. We might be compelled to buy more than we need. We might be manipulated into thinking the causes we support are authentic. Hell, we might even open ourselves up to hacks that upend our very democracy!
Yes, despite the nothingburger that these hearings largely represented, I think we all put on the sunglasses. We all have better clarity around what Facebook is and isn’t. It is a platform to share literally everything about oneself in the digital universe. It is not a platform designed by a Harvard dropout to “connect the people of the world.” Let’s remember his own words:
(http://www.businessinsider.com/how-facebook-was-founded-2010-3#im-going-to-fuck-them-4)
“Connecting the world” is simply a nice-sounding message…sort’ve like Google’s “Don’t Be Evil.” Anyone who has read the Aeneid by Virgil (one of the very few benefits of a slightly liberal education) knows the quote “Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts.” I would suggest we drop the r in Greeks and apply the maxim to everything we hear coming out of Silicon Valley today. There is great spin, hype and high-mindedness being spouted to a public that has been rewired to not pay attention.
But now, like Rowdy, I think — I hope — just maybe, we’re all wearing the sunglasses and benefitting from the clarity they provide. Maybe we’ll think twice before sharing our lives with unknown strangers. Maybe we’ll pass on that quiz about our personality. And just maybe, we’ll take a moment to consider what it means to put all that information — and all that information about our information — into the hands of a company whose founder is on record as saying (http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims-wont-help-facebooks-privacy-problems-2010-5):
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don’t know why.
Zuck: They “trust me”
Zuck: Dumb f*cks
Steve Shillingford is a recovering cybersecurity and surveillance expert who recently founded Anonyome Labs, a startup dedicated to shifting the balance of control over personal identities back to individuals.
