At this point pretty much everyone has entertained the idea of Facebook and Twitter as a giant ocean of personal information where the governments of the world go fishing for what they need, or want, to know about their populations. For those who defend the idea of civil rights this is of course a matter of concern, the potential for such information to be misused abusing freedom in covert manners. A valid concern, but not the only genuine threat to freedom revolving around such social technologies.
It is a fact that a person’s livelihood, the way they earn their living, impacts on their freedom every bit as much as the governmental structures of their world. In many ways it is the larger impact. The entities of commerce, the companies and corporations of the world, have grown to challenge the governments of the world in terms of overall power. Their policies and practices therefore should be of every bit as much concern to those who champion freedom as are the policies and practices of the various governmental structures of the world.
It has come to light the entities of commerce are attempting to access that ocean of information contained in the social networking sites at the same resolution as might the governments of the world. It has been revealed they, lacking the technical ability to simply access that ocean directly are essentially holding peoples’ livelihood for ransom demanding the passwords to access their employees accounts on the social networking sites. They are in all fact executing a form of extortion and blackmail on their employees undreamed of thirty years ago.
No citizen of the United States could be subjected to such treatment at the hands of their government, the First and Fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America prohibits the government from such actions. The mechanisms of government are far older than the mechanisms of commerce, older, wiser and far more mature than the current prime mechanism of commerce, the publicly owned corporation.
To an objective eye it is easily seen these new entities of commerce are now of such scope as to rival the national governments of the world. The actions of these entities heavily influence the actions and interactions nation to nation, they are true power players on the global scene controlling the manufacturing capabilities of planet earth opposite the nation states control of raw materials and manpower.
The corporations have grown to wield powers quite comparable to the nations of the world, the corporations wage covert cultural warfare, one people against the other, to influence their market share in the target land, it is time for the governments of the world to quit protecting them and demand they be held accountable and judged by the same standards of civility and respect for human rights that are applied to the various nations of the world. Mankind really doesn’t have the resources, human or otherwise, to wait for them to re-invent the concepts of civility. We don’t have time for their version of the Magna Carta or The Bill of Rights to make it through every major boardroom in the world.
I've been saying similar things for decades, but never as clearly or openly as you just wrote. You're exactly right that in all that matters in our lives--the money we "earn," the food we eat, the art and entertainment we enjoy--the big corporations wield far more power than the government. But is it already too late? Many governments, most notably ours, are deeply in thrall to them. The Mark of the Beast (see Revelation 13) may well be a microchip implanted in our wrists. I keep wondering when to flee to the mountains...
ReplyDeleteJochanaan, it is not to late. The corporations are each in their own right a collective entity, they respond to their environment in order to survive. The same social forces that sway governments will sway corporations, if enough individuals agree to commit their time to the cause (effectively becoming a competing collective organized around the point of contention… like all the old hippies who are even yet members of ceProtestMovement). The efficiency of the large structures is needed to support the physical, it is the motive definition of the collective that needs parenting into a maturity (to social/historical time scales) both ethical and sustainable.
DeleteAs for implanted microchips? I wouldn’t worry so very much about that... the cost to benefit ratio really doesn’t support such a system as a practical thing. And anyway, there are already a great many microchips implanted into the culture, effectively negating the need to implant them under skin. Look at the all but ubiquitous cell phone. Once it is a culturally accepted standard that everyone must have a cellphone in order to be socially acceptable the same functionality has been achieved with even higher surveillance capabilities. And guess what? The collective successfully talked the individuals into paying them for the system!
Running to the mountains isn’t really such a good idea, not from a combat tactical perspective. Any force of social repression already knows that’s where ceSurvivalistRebel has agreed to assemble... effectively putting the majority of them in the same geographical region making it much easier to set a siege/surveillance around them. From the perspective of the big collectives if the rebels want to hide in the mountains that’s just fine by them, far cheaper to maintain just enough of a snarl and growl in their direction they want to huddle there imprisoned by their own fears than try and dig them out of the general population and set up prisons! Again, using cultural conventions they’d have talked the population into not only supporting their agenda but effectively paying for it at the same time! Covert Cultural Warfare is the art of cultural manipulation to match your agenda, it requires a different mode of thought than conventional conflict/warfare.