BIG BROTHER Is Here and We Barely Notice It!

Growing up in the 50's there were all kinds of threats and fears about the Commies. There was a show I watched as a kid where the "good" guys caught a "Commie" each and every week. No kid could escape the fear of a Soviet atomic bomb with the regular drills to drop and cover under our desks during an atomic bomb attack. Yeah, we would have all fried in place under our desks. Even at 9 and 10 I could understand the fear of Eugene McCarty's list of Communists in government and the blacklisting of many in the movie industry.

   As a late bloomer in reading I soon caught up and was reading any book I wanted after my mother sent a note to the local librarian with that very message the 7th grade. I remember seeing the movie first and then reading George Orwell's chilling 1984. Shot in grainy black and white, it depicted a society (what we thought it was like living in the Soviet Union) where every citizen was watched and for any deviation of correct thinking was removed for "education" much like several societies I can think of today. It was, for a young, red-blooded American an almost unbelievable concept. We lived in a free society and could do and say just about anything we wanted. Or so we thought.

     Over the years much as been made of the idea of "1984's Big Brother" both coming toward and after. The 1984 Super Bowl ad of Apple introducing the Apple Macintosh is one of the more memorable concepts. Yet while the Mac definitely revolutionised computing becoming the first salvo into the technological world we live in today, it was not quite what Orwell had in mind. OR, was it?

     I just finished Christopher Wylie's book MINDF*CK and if he gives us any warning it is that not only is Big Brother here, so is big sister, Uncle Sam, just about every government, politician and every advertiser in the world. We are definitely not alone.

Christopher Wylie

     So we have a 30 year old telling how from about the age of 16 he became a kind of technological wiz in understanding and harvesting "big data." For those of you that don't know, big data is all the information various agencies have on file about us, about you! Whether we have a card for credits at the grocery store, our census records, doctor records, credit cards and payment histories, what we do online through Facebook, YouTube, SnapChat, WhatsApp, Twitter and a whole bunch more of online looking and shopping; data is collected about you.

     From a rather small beginning in the UK, the firm SCL whose purpose was to collect not only data but big data that could be used to influence people. Money came from the British government, our DARPA, the Russians and was used to test the idea they could sway people to do things. They used this data in Caribbean islands and African elections. But they needed more money and far more data. So Wylie helped in the creation of a company called Cambridge Analytica (CA) that managed to get data that FACEBOOK was collecting on it's social network to drum up more advertising. Yes, every click, and share and photo post gives them more and more information about you.

   About this time, around 2014-2015 Steve Bannon, a close friend of Donald Trump and owner of the very rightwing BREITBART was brought in to see and hopefully invest in this big data. Bannon instantly understood what could be achieved and the rest is history. However, not only did the Trump Campaign understand this but so did the Russians. With a population of less than half of the United States and far fewer resources and under heavy sanctions they figured out that the best way to demoralize America was to turn it against itself via propaganda.

    There was an immensely popular movie in the early 60's called THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, starring Frank Sinatra I might add, that tells the story of Korean prisoners of war that were brainwashed during captivity and at a certain signal would complete the program they were hypnotized to finish, in this case, an assassination. The original was a nail biter and for many, it was something that couldn't be done though some thought it could. However, CA proved that using your data it could be done based on your likes and dislikes. They discovered that what people said and what they privately thought were often different. This could be and many fear it has been exploited.

     Soon after Facebook was forced to allow users to download and print out the data they had on them, a reporter on ABC was stunned to find there was over 1,000 pages on her and finally she stopped the printer. There, on her desk, were hundreds of sheets of paper all detailing the data Facebook had on her.

     What Wylie is saying that in that 85 million user breach on Facebook that CA harvested, the actual number was far greater. Every person who was a friend, friends of friends and so on were included. Not millions but hundreds of millions of profiles and data on each and every one was harvested. 

     While he left before the politicians were using it in the United States he could see the results from Canada and felt that he had no choice but to blow the whistle on the monster that he had created.

     Design, design, design. You may be sick of my mantra but everything we do is designed for us or against us ... we even do the same thing to ourselves and others. You cannot hide your head in the sand anymore. It may be too late and now, at the age of 74 I could see why Issac Asimov created a world in his FOUNDATION TRILOGY that outlawed robots. However, they did use psycho-history to predict future events, quite similar to predicting a world not unlike ours today. Will we allow it to be true or, finally, put the brakes on what we share, finally learning what privacy really means? I urge you to read this book. If you are reading this blog you are on the Internet and they are watching.

Thank you for reading my blog. I invite you to take the time to read earlier blogs where my emphasis is to explore the ways art and design affects our daily lives ... and always has. I share with you what inspires me with the hope that it will inspire you as well. Comments are always welcomed! 

Be sure to check my ETSY store ... KrugsStudio.etsy.com. I am adding many new and exciting, collectible birdhouses and craft items. Many of the items talked about here will be for sale there!