I tried for decades to explain these things to fb users with very little success. The corporations we are in bed with via ‘social media’ are gathering incredibly dangerous information about us. If you know enough about someone’s habits, history, friends and life… you can essentially directly control their minds and, eventually, their activities. The corporations are psychographizing their users (this is a method of categorization used by advertisers and ‘others’ to influence people via media or other means).

The data we produce today would be absolutely lethal in any situation where a fascist government had any kind of access to it. But it’s incredibly dangerous for corporations to have access to… especially because we are on the verge of our devices constantly reading our vital signs, eye activity, pupil dilation, and matching those to our online activity.

Even simply knowing your friends and associates could prove unimaginably harmful. An Iranian friend told me of a vast array of executions that took place during a shift in power in the early 1980’s. It depended on nothing more than computerized records of family members, friends, co-workers and relations, which, back then was extremely primitive compared to what is being produced today.

Personally, I think it’s urgent that we develop networks that keep the analytics we produce private (for our own use only), and anonymize those that are shared with any ‘organization’. I have a model of a network like this, and it would revolutionize the way we interact with electronic media, data, and each other. It would create a situation in which we could actually forge and have meaningful roles in intelligent societies, rather than subscribing to societies that effectively use our own activities against us or for profit. In general, our present interactions with the internet tend to make us more ignorant or susceptible each time we use them. The system I have in mind would have the opposite effect — our interactions with media and each other would, in general, educate us constantly…

These are not ‘what if’ questions. They are facts. And Alex isn’t paranoid — he’s talking about »far less than what is actually going on right now… all around us… every moment of every day… a million times per second…