What Is Today’s Trojan Horse?
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I don’t know if you have ever heard of the Trojan Horse? This is a device contained within the ancient story known as The Iliad. Whether it actually existed is debatable but it has become a popular symbolic metaphor down through the ages. Basically, it was a very large, hand constructed, wooden horse like tower. The story goes that the invading Greeks built it, hopped inside, and had it moved in front of the gates to the city of Troy. Eventually, the Trojans were intrigued enough to move it inside their city gates and later that night the Greeks snuck out and opened the gates for their army – final outcome the fall of Troy. Why someone would want a bloody big wooden horse structure, I don’t know. There are reasons given that the Trojans thought that it might be a gift from the gods. ‘Beware of Greeks bearing gifts’ – is one of many sayings to emerge subsequent to the reading of this chapter of The Iliad. What is today’s Trojan Horse?
Your Smart Phone Is A Trojan Horse
Anyways, The Trojan Horse has become a metaphoric symbol for something given as a gift, which has a nefarious ulterior purpose. Thus, we come at last to the mobile phone, the smart phone device, which now sits at the heart of modern life. This gleaming technological marvel has been embraced enthusiastically by billions. Young people, in particular have been passionate uptakers of this device. How many heads tilted down to gaze into their phone’s screen have you beheld today or this week? Every TV show contains smart phones repeatedly and regularly used by the characters in the show. The average human being goes just about everywhere with his or her phone – it rarely leaves their side. This gift from the gods or Big Tech is beloved by billions.
Surveillance Capitalism & The Trojan Horse
What is today’s Trojan Horse? The popularity of smart phones has been nothing short of fanatical. Kids drool over them and hunger for them. Identities are caught up in the possession of these high tech marvels. Communication devices, music storage and players, game consoles, video screens, and the modern equivalent of a Swiss army knife providing high tech tools. This Trojan Horse is much loved and billions of folk are invested in it heart and soul, it seems. Therefore, the creepy truth about surveillance capitalism and its ulterior motives for providing such a device is chilling. Indeed, stupid people will not immediately realise the danger that they are currently in.
Big Tech Mining Your Data For Free & On Selling It
If your business model depends upon every human being having a device capable of carrying your app or software programme – then, you are in luck because this is where we find ourselves. Human beings have become so enamoured of their mobile devices that they trust them more than their family and friends in many instances. These smart phones connect them via social media apps to a network of users purporting to be human. And some of them will be their friends and family members but others will be of questionable provenance. Bots and scammers populate the digital space in vast numbers pretending to be genuine humans online. The Internet is a fraudulent place where the absence of sensory data blinds us ordinary humans from utilising our common senses. It is a grifter’s paradise, a scammer’s delight, and hundreds of billions of dollars are purloined every year. Not to mention hearts being broken and trusts betrayed.
What is today’s Trojan Horse? Surveillance capitalism, however, is the legal harvesting of your data for profit by corporations set up to do this. Shoshana Zuboff explains:
“ZUBOFF: I define surveillance capitalism as the unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. These data are then computed and packaged as prediction products and sold into behavioral futures markets — business customers with a commercial interest in knowing what we will do now, soon, and later. It was Google that first learned how to capture surplus behavioral data, more than what they needed for services, and used it to compute prediction products that they could sell to their business customers, in this case advertisers. But I argue that surveillance capitalism is no more restricted to that initial context than, for example, mass production was restricted to the fabrication of Model T’s.
Right from the start at Google it was understood that users were unlikely to agree to this unilateral claiming of their experience and its translation into behavioral data. It was understood that these methods had to be undetectable. So from the start the logic reflected the social relations of the one-way mirror. They were able to see and to take — and to do this in a way that we could not contest because we had no way to know what was happening.
We rushed to the internet expecting empowerment, the democratization of knowledge, and help with real problems, but surveillance capitalism really was just too lucrative to resist. This economic logic has now spread beyond the tech companies to new surveillance–based ecosystems in virtually every economic sector, from insurance to automobiles to health, education, finance, to every product described as “smart” and every service described as “personalized.” By now it’s very difficult to participate effectively in society without interfacing with these same channels that are supply chains for surveillance capitalism’s data flows. For example, ProPublica recently reported that breathing machines purchased by people with sleep apnea are secretly sending usage data to health insurers, where the information can be used to justify reduced insurance payments.”
What A Cool Trojan Horse You Have
What is today’s Trojan Horse? So you pay hundreds and/or a couple of thousand dollars for one of these smart phone devices, your Trojan Horse. You let these data harvesting corporations into your life and package up your data for them via your interaction with the apps on your phone. You receive diddly squat in return. Indeed, you often pay more via subscriptions for endless Big Tech products and programmes. All the time they are harvesting your data and selling it for billions more. No wonder we have all lost the war and have become slaves to the oligarchs who own these massive corporations. The Elon Musk’s, the Mark Zuckerberg’s at Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, the boys at Google, and the list goes on of billionaires feeding for free on our data. All of these oligarchs supported Donald Trump to become President of the US because the Democrats had been coming after them with new regulatory anti-trust FTC actions. Trump has since sacked the 2 FTC commissioners aligned with the Democrats.
Trump & Musk Dismantling The Watchdogs
People in the United States are so stupid they don’t realise that the unrestrained Big Tech sector is sucking them dry. Trump’s dismantling of the federal government will create a kleptocratic paradise for macro corruption to flourish. These people are ruthless operators and will brook no opposition. America has chosen the fast lane to destruction and dictatorship. The billionaire oligarchs won’t care, as they will move to a private island with their private armies. It will be the ordinary working schmucks who will suffer. If they voted for Trump they have only themselves to blame. Social security run by an Elon Musk company? Good luck with that if you are a vulnerable American.
Surveillance Capitalism & The Now
In terms of surveillance capitalism and its human behaviour modifying effects, our governments have failed to act. Prof. Shoshana Zuboff has been warning about this since 2007, at least. Our elected representatives have been too stupid to realise what has been happening and the intelligence ratio in the GOP has plummeted since Trump came on the scene. Combine this with Democrats being in the pockets of Big Tech through Bill Clinton’s time and into Obama’s. The recent moves to tackle their immense power under Joe Biden have been outmanoeuvred by the oligarchs embrace of Trump and getting him re-elected. The mainstream media in America is so corporatised it is easily manipulated by those with a vested interest. The American people just don’t get to hear what is actually going on and driving the bus. The culture wars take centre stage whilst the big money machinations go largely unheeded by the polarised electorate. Corruption is about to have a renaissance on a grand scale, macro corruption, and the Trump regime has conveniently removed all the Inspector generals whose job was to guard against it. Unfortunately, America is such an economic power that this will impact countries far and wide. The crumbling of an adherence to law and order in Washington makes the US an unreliable ally. The latest today informs us that these incompetent idiots in the Trump regime inadvertently sent their war plans to a journalist at The Atlantic. One wonders who else got sent this national security, usually top secret, information? God help us all.
“Surveillance powers in Australia
Lizzie O’Shea is a lawyer and writer and the founder and board chair of Australia’s Digital Rights Watch. She is renowned internationally as an expert in the fields of digital rights and human rights. For nearly a decade, she has been observing and discussing the impact of data mining, excessive data collection and retention, and the increasingly clever ways corporations use data collected in the name of identification authenticity to target individuals with their advertising and political agendas.
O’Shea says, “Australia has a large number of national security laws that require and [conduct] surveillance, including requiring private companies to hold information in case it’s needed by agencies at a later point. There are also business models available to companies that enable them to extract large amounts of information from people and then engage in microtargeting advertising.”
She adds, “In both instances, most people would be unaware of the extent to which this occurs. I think people would be surprised to know how many surveillance powers exist for national security agencies.” “
Get Off The Trojan Horse Before It Destroys You
Perhaps, it might be time to look down at the Trojan Horse in your palm and consider what it is costing you on so many different levels. It may not be the greatest thing since sliced bread, after all. You may be entirely unaware of the behaviour modifications it has ushered into your life. You might not know any better. Someone once dear to me used to say, ‘never assume anything in life and question everything.’ Your relationship, indeed, love affair with technology may require some dispassionate examination. Is the tail wagging the dog? To use an old saying about uneven power relationships. My advice is to ween yourself off your phone dependency. Do it in gradual stages so that you can witness just how dependent you are upon it. Much of what exists in the digital sphere is not what it seems. A life full of smoke and mirrors collapses completely when these props are removed. The oligarchs running the Big Tech show are evil bastards. Get off that Trojan Horse!
Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of America Matters: Pre-apocalyptic Posts & Essays in the Shadow of Trump.
©MidasWord
