Given the present situation in the Middle East, it’s not easy to write about something like, say, the FEMA emergency broadcasting system test alert that we all experienced October 4, like it or not, and attention does need to be paid there – coming!

The invasion by Hamas into Israel and the attacks and wholesale murder and/or kidnappings of innocent civilians was amoral, to put it mildly. The world is gobsmacked, no matter which side you’re on, and since we opine on tech rather than politics, there is very much a lesson here for us all in tech overreach.

Huh?

We speak specifically of the intrusion of tech into our lives, unchecked and amoral – and we in no way mean to trivialize the horrors of the Middle East situation.

‘What’s the difference if we give up more of our privacy? They already know everything there is to know about me,’ we hear and repeat yet again, because here’s the difference.

As we reported last week with Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s latest product announcements, they’re clearly targeting kids, and given the company (meaning the umbrella company) formerly known as Facebook’s long history of doing so, to the point where kids who use Facebook and other social media platforms commit suicide (Is Social Media Contributing to Rising Teen Suicide Rate? Rates of suicide and self-harm are rising in teens. There’s no one reason why, but experts say smartphones have made it harder to escape bullying and bad news). Yet Facebook et al have done nothing to address the problems. How is that not amoral, when, not unlike Hamas, they are targeting innocents?

By design.

How the God Complex of 4 Billionaires Could Destroy Society, the Daily Beast reported, based on the title of a new book by Jonathan Taplin.

“Elon Musk would like us to give him $10 trillion to go to Mars. Mark Zuckerberg thinks you’re gonna spend seven to eight hours a day with a virtual reality helmet on because you’ll be at home without anything to do. Peter Thiel would like to live to 200 and has got lots of plans for how you can do that. And Marc Andreessen is wanting to sell you an NFT, which as someone noted yesterday in The Wall Street Journal, 95 percent of those holding NFTs that they bought in 2021 are worthless investments today.”

“My feeling is that some of these guys think they’re gods,” Taplin said. “I think Elon Musk… thinks that nobody can rule him and his vision of the future is to replace humanity and nature with a machine. I mean, he wants to put a sensor in your brain with Neuralink.

“We have to resist this because the future that [Sam] Altman describes in which the owners of the AI have all the wealth… the largest market capitalization companies in the world are the big tech companies,” he said.

Tech has gone beyond merely collecting your information to ‘bring the world closer together,’ as Zuckerberg used to tell Congress, and did you believe him? How many of his platforms are we currently using and how many people have added the new Meta Ray Ban spy glasses to their holiday shopping list? At the risk of sounding redundant and apologies with d) all the above, how often have we contended that tech on balance and the cabal in particular have no moral core?

You also have to wonder who truly owns your tech. You might have bought the various appliances, but consider this: as Vox reported a while back, This is how Facebook collects data on you even if you don’t have an account. There’s little you can do about it.

As for bringing the world closer together, “Social Media: Fueling the Epidemic of Teenage Depression,” said The Epoch Times. And “Facebook users tend to be lonelier than non-users.”

Opting out is always an option, as one could do with the October 4 FEMA test, but how do you opt-out if you’ve never opted in?

Of course, there was no opt-out with the FEMA test, so is your phone et al truly yours? And on which other appliances are the various platforms functioning, with or without our knowledge or consent? Consider the LLMs, which aren’t just scraping the web: they’re scraping your files, too.

Then there’s FEMA. Fun factoid: the pandemic lockdowns were orchestrated not by the CDC, but by FEMA, which is not a cabinet position, and whose powers supersede those of the Department of Health and Human Services, which is (Government’s National Security Arm Took Charge During the Covid Response). Bet you didn’t know that…

What to speak of the weaponization of tech that has been widely reported: that the current administration used social media platforms to promote their talking points/agenda, as The Hill, for one, reported (Biden’s social media manipulation is exactly what the Framers feared).

Tech is a double-edged sword, there’s no doubt about it, and even more frightening considering the (growing) power that the monolithic tech platforms have in our lives and potentially can hold over us. The tech cabal might not be storming through the streets and killing and pillaging, as is happening in the Middle East, but make no mistake about it: they are no less potentially dangerous than the terrorists, and considering the control they have over our lives, also have a veritable gun to our heads. Onward and forward.