April 22, 2025

You are the Product Data-Boy

Crrow777
” Welcome to the machine. What did you dream? It’s all right, we told you what to dream.”

“Welcome my son. Welcome to the machine. Where have you been? It’s all right, we know just where you’ve been.” And so it goes in the modern digital era, though those lyrics were aimed at us back in 1975. Go figure. Little did we know back then, or suspect what music, media and entertainment are used for. Back then up was still up, down was still down… or at least that is what we thought was true. But here we are, 55 years later waking up to the fact that nothing is as it seemed all those decades ago. And as “The Grand Illusion” is unmasked in the modern era, there is no doubt that – you are now the product. This raises the question; will the product remain the product after mass realization?

We are beginning to realize that the systems and generational pastimes once considered normal, are actually carefully planned strategies designed to control behavior and thought. It is also clear that controlling society has been part and parcel of existence on Earth for as far back as we can see. But with the onset of the surveillance capitalism model, and data collection, the old methods of social engineering have received a shot in the arm, to make a bad pun. As Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff put it, “Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data.” The collection and processing of endless data streams provides real-time information to those who dream up and run what amounts to social engineering. According to cybersecurity firm Secureframe, social engineering “bypasses technical defenses by manipulating people into revealing confidential information or making security mistakes.” Mass data collection is also used to predict the future with a high degree of certainty. Google now openly defines predictive analytics as the use of “data analysis, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and statistical models to find patterns that might predict future behavior.” This was possible in the past, which can be confirmed by considering the Law of Large Numbers, and The Wisdom of the Crowd. In the present AI + mass data collection adds the ability to “sell certainty”.

Everyone has seen the old spy movies where the KGB or CIA has a “dossier” on a person of interest. Surveillance capitalism and mass data collection has enabled those with access to the data, the most complete “dossiers” ever created, making the old file cabinet documents equal to the stone age. But here is the rub, these data sets can be derived on most of us in the developed world. If you still think social media was created to “connect” people, I have bridge to sell you in Brooklyn. Facebook indeed. A book of faces – and nearly every other thing it is possible to know about the owner of said faces in that digital book. To include what you eat, who you know, where you have been and worked, what you like, what you do not like, etc. It was written by you, and everyone else you ever knew, and everyone else they ever knew. Giftwrapped in real-time and delivered to God knows where, to be used for God knows what. Except we do know, at some level, what is being done with the data we all generate. Byron Tau describes it clearly: “The U.S. national security establishment has used commercially available data to craft a creeping panopticon.” As a matter of fact, we were all assigned reading in middle school that informed us of the direction intended by those who control society. Do you recall reading “Brave New World”, “Fahrenheit 451”, “1984”, and “Animal Farm”?

Has trust been the biggest issue in helping us to arrive where we currently exist? It bears consideration. After all, can you imagine collecting your own DNA and then sending it off to a private corporation? Can you imagine what happens to all that collected DNA when the company goes out of business? As the Electronic Frontier Foundation warns, “Your DNA is the most personal data you have. When you give it to companies, you can’t control how it’s used.” How is it that so many of us were willing to trust a company we know nothing about with the building blocks that uniquely make us? And all for the promise of informing you about your heritage, with no way to fact check the data given.

I am told that my Grandparents generation had to be socially engineered to accept aspirin. They were apparently very suspicious about the claims attached to the little white pill. And this brings up another thought I have had. Why is a generation marked at 20 years? My Grandparents were born at the end of the 1800s. My parents were born near 1930, and lived until near the new millennium. I was born just past halfway into the 1900s. Now consider the social engineering in play now with regard to Boomers, Gen X, Gen Z, Alpha, Millennials, and so on. There have always been differences in the generations, but steroids have been added for current social engineering usage. Much like the invention of the term “teenagers” which was employed for social engineering purposes in the 1960s.

Setting aside my ramshackle thought train, I was getting at the reality of “trust” in this era. An era where we opt into so many things with a click not knowing anything about what we have just agreed to, or with who we are agreeing. Again, in my Grandparents time trust was not so readily handed out. It had to be earned, and once it was, that meant something. Something firm. Something that could be counted on. Back then, the idea that a man was only as good as his word predominated. I was witness to agreements sealed and counted on through a handshake between those who had gained trust. To be fair, this was a time where so much of the world was tangible, which is closer to nature. The world now is driven through intangible systems that very few of us understand, never mind being able to hold it in your hand. But this too lends itself to those who are dead set on total world control. They will not succeed in the long run. Though, they may gain control of a “short season”.

My main point in all these words is to offer the idea that trust needs to be earned. Also, that once dishonesty is discovered, do not give that a pass. It is evidence of character whether in a company or a person. It is also evidence that it may well happen again, now that the source has shown dishonesty. The days of parading every detail of your life online needs to come to an end. Not only do you have no idea what is done with your data, you have no reason to trust those who are collecting it. In one revealing experiment, a journalist tried to hide her pregnancy from tracking algorithms and found it nearly impossible. As she put it, “Through our phones, we are under perpetual surveillance by companies that buy and sell data about what kind of person we are, whom we might vote for, what we might purchase, and what we might be nudged into doing.” This was called “The Hidden Pregnancy Experiment”. It should go without saying, it is not in your benefit whatever is done with the data. It is up to us whether or not we choose to claim the rights of ownership over our lives and data thereby generated. If we choose to continue on as we have recently, a “short season” is almost certain to follow.

We have entered into strange days. But all days are strange when hyper change sets in. The emerging new era is certainly representative of vast change. In closing I want to mention a conversation I recently had with someone I trust. I started to explain how I sometimes use numbers to get a bearing on an idea. I was then asked, “What is it?” I responded, “It” is a two-letter word that begins “I” and ends in “T”, often referring to one previously mentioned, or a nonhuman entity… and it encodes 911.

I would like to wish you all a happy, healthy, and higher-minded new era and vibrational reality.