Slashdot Mirror
Dataland: the Emerging Dystopia
An anonymous reader writes "Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell's novel 1984, resorted to hiding the bushes with his lover in a failed attempt to escape the government's ubiquitous surveillance. Orwell was concerned with totalitarianism and explicit thought control enforced by police action. While that is still very much an issue for many of the world's residents, here in the West there is an unsettling feeling about a more subtle form of thought manipulation, as more and more of our activities are watched, cataloged, and analyzed by more and more institutions — governments, businesses, non-profits, political parties, mostly for predictive purposes. At least we have a name for it now: 'Dataland', a term suggested by Kate Crawford of Microsoft Research, who studies the sociological effects of networking technologies. Crawford has been written up in Slashdot before. She's criticized the indiscriminate adoption of Big Data analytics on several grounds, including the loss of anonymity, erroneous conclusions from skewed datasets, and the prospect of secret discrimination."
I, for instance, follow the advice of gman003, me too I am an ordained minister in Norse Paganism (Reformed), a registered card-carrying Communist, a decorated veteran of the Third Punic War, the second in line to the throne of Emperor Norton I, and the true assassin of Archduke Ferdinand. Big data gets pretty useless once it's full of nonsense.
Reminds me of Google's data collection on its hard disk failures and hiring good programmers.
They couldn't find any sort of predictive factor. GPA, brain teasers etc had zero correlation. There was no hiring person that had statistically better performance at hiring good programmers.
There are some things that are just random.
Perhaps being able to predict accurately is the flying car of our generation. Or, perhaps some will say the answer is more data.
Currently banks and lenders can ask a clearing house about our finacial activities and get a standardized credit score that can then be used to assess the risk of making a loan.
With ubiqitous data collection, we are already seeing the sale of lists of users who might be interested in a given marketing campaign, i.e. Target sending pregnacy sales/coupons to teens whose parents didn't even know yet.
It seems that at some point, organizations will want to know "How good is the available data on a given individual?" For a millenial who posts every minute of their lives online, it is likely that the available data is very high and pretty reliable. For a non-technical individual who carries out most of their activities off-line on a cash basis, the available data is pretty sparse and not very reliable.
Will data collection, big data, and continuous surveliance by business and governments lead to a data score similar to ones credit score? Will people be refused jobs/clearance based in part on this score? How would such a score and organizational behavior affect our society?
must come big responsibility. Internet empowered all of us, we should be thankful for that. But having that power implies new rules of convivence. And abusing of that power just because you can always have undesirable consequences in the future.
The absence of data is even more suspicious. No facebook, gmail or Linkedin account? Not carrying your cell phone or laptop when entering the country? What are you trying to hide? I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think you can put enough chaff into the system to make a difference. The botnets can sort it out pretty quickly.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
"Winston Smith . . . . . resorted to hiding the bushes with his lover "
I don't remember any bushes in that story.
You know, neither did I, so I checked and there was a new paged taped in with bushes in the story. I guess I was wrong, there were always bushes in the story.
"Winston Smith . . . . . resorted to hiding the bushes with his lover "
I don't remember any bushes in that story.
Exactly. Because Winston hid them, you never saw them.
+Turn On Mobile Phone only a few times a day to check for new calls.
+ Use Cash as far as possible
+ TOR
We wring our hands at the accursed sellers and buyers of our browsing habits. We glibly ignore what happens when we sit for a few hours in front of a television screen. Knowing our browsing habits gets us targeted ads. Getting our minds in a receptive mood by showing the trash that passes for content on commercial TV, then cramming crafty advertising into those receptive minds impels us to do things we wouldn't be predicted to do, which is manipulation.
Why do Americans lust after 2-ton gas-guzzlers to taxi the kids to school and fetch a couple of bags of groceries from the supermarket? Why does PHaRMA spend untold billions advertising expensive drugs that, in many cases, are no more effective than over-the-counter remedies? Why do so many of our people live in McMansions so expensive they are a paycheck away from foreclosure? Because advertising to minds pried open by "must-see" TV works.
The TV tells them what they want and how to get it - no money down, pennies per week. And this relentless barrage of hard, soft, and subliminal sales messages passes into the TV-watcher's mind with nothing getting in the way like critical thinking, priorities, or social or environmental concerns.
We ought to be more worried about what 10-20 hours watching TV every week is doing to us and our society than whether Google is showing us an ad for suntan lotion after we've booked a trip to the Caribbean.
This stuff you're talking about is all behavior driven by the need to keep up appearances. Guys in the US have to drive trucks or they're not going to get laid. You need to own a large mcmansion or there is obviously something wrong with your finances. Even the pharma stuff is like that. You should hear my relatives bragging about how many prescription pills they need to stay alive.
Pop culture is the driver. You need to be conversant on americal idol or the latest failures of your football team at the water cooler, or risk spending lunches by yourself. Conversely, publicly worrying about the NSA makes you some sort of conspiracy paranoiac and once again, solo lunches.
Ads have something to do with all this, but are certainly not the cause. Media manipulation is present, but the cause of all this is peer pressure.
Are you kidding me? We have two political parties in the USA with very powerful propaganda arms designed to tell people exactly what to think. They use half-truths, flawed statistics, and exaggerations. These lies are not difficult to refute, yet people willingly accept the lies just because they're so willing to gravitate to the political echo chambers that are Fox News and MSNBC, among others. In a republic, if a representative is able to control what his/her constituents think, he has essentially become dictator-by-deception. Thought control is here, it's just that people have become willing recipients of the propaganda.