Am I alone in being horrified by the reality that many people today consume most if not all of their news and entertainment holding a camera and microphone on proprietary communication systems running software controlled by the same entities producing the content?
How is this not the greatest threat to democracy in the entire history of democracy?
It's just another step in the long slow boiling of the pot. The mass media already are nearly uniform in their interpretation of events with the exception of how they inflame cultural grievance. The American public is the most heavily propagandized in the world.
> Here's an example of someone that has encased himself inside of corporate propaganda so completely that it physically surrounds him at work, at home, and even his inner thoughts:
Interesting piece, but was the rent of that place $4800 per month? How does that make any sense?
If in the 1980s, during the height of the Cold War, you had predicted that in 30 years virtually everyone would voluntarily be wearing tracking devices that pinpointed their location 24 hours a day, and voluntarily carried recording devices which could at least in principle record everything they and anyone they talked to said, you'd be branded a conspiracy theorist or a believer in sheer science fiction.
Today it's no longer a paranoid fantasy but a reality, yet even those who aren't in denial about it are mostly not choosing to opt out of the surveillance.
I am coming around to the idea that this particular grievance-- at least the camera and microphone bit-- is the "terrorists" of privacy.
That is to say: it's an absolute bad thing and is a concern. But because it's so easily visualisable and conceivable, the actual threat is blown way out of proportion, and much less sexy threats that are much more important are ignored.
You're more likely to die slipping over in your bathtub than being killed by terrorism, etc.
I guess the "slipping in your bathtub" for privacy would be the consumerist / capitalist / deregulated culture that allows, normalises and incentivises trading away privacy for convenience with no real pushback. Which in turn actively discourages keeping your privacy, because it's like: why play some constrained rule-set that disadvantages you and no one else plays by?
So it started with being Facebook is secretly recording you. Now it is Apple has secretly embedded a backdoor in the hardware and OS of the phones. Specifically so Facebook can use it to secretly record you.
A conspiracy of thousands of people ? No that doesn't sound crazy at all.
The point is we don’t know what goes on inside our computers, they’re proprietary, they’re closed and we’ve had some pretty shocking revelations already. It’s absolutely not outside the realm of possibility.
It's also possible that Apple has embedded a grenade inside each iPhone.
That's about as likely as them enabling the microphone specifically so Facebook can invade everyone's privacy and commit espionage on a scale never before seen in human history.
How is this not the greatest threat to democracy in the entire history of democracy?