Likely you’ve heard of the recent imbroglio involving Facebook, a ‘data breach,’ and a company called Cambridge Analytica. While the underlying problem--which is the selling of Facebook users’ private information to a constellation of nebulous data merchants--is certainly not new, this is one of the first times it has triggered outrage on a mass scale in America.
It comes at a time when Facebook--in fact, many--tech companies, are facing increased scrutiny over privacy issues, government collusion, and anti-trust violations. It also comes at a time when the three gatekeepers of Internet content--Facebook, Google, and Twitter--recently appeared before Congress promising to push homegrown centrist propaganda, or ‘counterspeech,’ to users who are deemed amenable to extremist or radical views. In other words, there are larger systemic issues and anxieties at play right now, involving the ‘surveillance capitalism’ system cannibalizing our privacy and (despite the temporary illusion of friction between the government and Facebook) the growing trend of synergy and collusion between Silicon Valley and the State.
While the primary reason this story became an internationally known scandal is its affiliation with the Trump campaign--seemingly the only reason the mainstream media will attack any establishment institution--it taps into a long-festering anxiety over humans as products on tech platforms. Do we really want to live in a future in which institutions comprised of tech companies working with the government steal our personal data and use it to craft advertising campaigns to manipulate us into supporting these same institutions?
We're being exploited, surveilled and corralled into a control grid by a predator class. The time is now to embrace decentralized peer-to-peer models of technology and culture.