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What Hath Tech Wrought…This Time

What Hath Tech Wrought…This Time

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Photo by TheDigitalArtist @Pixabay

The world was up in arms when Russia says it’s blocking Facebook in alarming new censorship push. Meta president of global affairs Nick Clegg then tweeted in response to the move, saying “Soon millions of ordinary Russians will find themselves cut off from reliable information…and silenced from speaking out,” The Verge reported. Yet, how long has the tech cabal been censoring people and posts that are not in lockstep with what they deem appropriate, or do not conform to their agendas?

 

Meanwhile, we’re witnessing The creeping authoritarianism of facial recognition that’s being adopted more and more. “The same technology that Russia uses to keep its people in line has come to America,” Spectator World reported. Of course, it’s all in the name of  lowering crime rates, but note to self, More States Than Ever Passing Laws For No Cash Bail and Pretrial Detention, including New York, where the NYPD provide(d) hard proof that no-bail law is causing a crime spike. Said the New York Post, “Since Jan. 1, 482 suspects busted for serious felonies were released without bail only to commit another 846 new crimes. Over a third were arrested for one of the seven most serious crimes: murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny and grand larceny auto.” Read More...

Think Small

Think Small

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Companies are easy to start, right? People do it all the time. Seeing it through to it becoming a thriving business and/or having a successful exit, well, that’s quite a different story. Stated another way, we had a professor in a fiction writing class in college who started the semester with: “I met a fellow at a party and asked, ‘So, what do you do?’ To which he replied, ‘I write the beginnings of novels.’”

Which, for the record, doesn’t make you a novelist. You’ve got to see it through to that last page. And publish!

Igor Jablokov, who is a founder rather than investor, spoke at one of our investor breakfasts a while back, and it’s amazing what you can learn from someone who has been there, done that – and who has had a successful exit. Igor had a company, and as he was building, he would go to various conferences and expos to network, and to see what he might learn. At one conference, he spoke to a group who had had a very successful exit and he asked how it had happened. Read More...

Thanksgiving in the Tech World…and what better time to flip Big Tech the bird…

Thanksgiving in the Tech World…and what better time to flip Big Tech the bird…

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It’s Thanksgiving this week here in America. We know that there are lockdowns in some states, but some of us will be able to enjoy the holiday with friends or family and more likely, both, since we will be joined by friends who are unable to gather with their families due to the lockdowns, and for the records, there is no difference in the number of reported ‘cases’ in states with lockdowns and those without them. But it’s Thanksgiving – one of our favorite holidays – so let’s talk turkey.

This past week, we watched a movie from the late 80s. There were computers in the film or rather, terminals, but not the sort that were social media or surveillance enabled. People who gathered in pairs or groups had conversations with each other. No one pulled out one of those dang disruptive cellphones. And wonder of wonders, people still managed to get sh*t done.

As the industry promised, tech was disruptive, but on many levels and in many instances, is that a good thing (Alexa ruins Christmas by blurting out girl’s gift)? Read More...

The Data Collector’s Holiday Gift Guide

The Data Collector’s Holiday Gift Guide

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Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

Let’s face it: privacy is gone. Still, there are a few people out there in the wild who don’t use electronic payments, still shop at actual brick and mortars – where they may even pay in cash – and feel that they have no use for social media, with the possible exception of a Facebook profile, and only because they were missing too many of their friends’ and family’s social gatherings and announcements.

Since we’re nearly 20% of the way into the 21st Century, it may be time to change all of that and what better time than the holiday season?  So we’ve compiled a short list of gifts that you may want to consider giving those on your list who are still living in the past:

23 & me or some other DNA-tracking/sharing genetic testing service. Who knows? They may discover long-lost relatives. Or an ethnic background that they never knew they had. Or you may discover that your friend is a criminal and you’ve given the police the break they had been looking for, since there are no rules or oversight when it comes to law enforcement collecting that information. Win-win! Read More...

Overdue: The Internet Declaration of Independence

Overdue: The Internet Declaration of Independence

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Image by WikiImages from Pixabay

The U.S. just celebrated Independence Day, when we pause to take stock of what the founders fought for: liberty and justice for the citizenry, which were not necessarily granted to them in the countries from whence they’d come.

There are always fireworks.

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger recently published his proposed Declaration of Digital Independence, and it’s a must-read. “Humanity has been contemptuously used by vast digital empires. Thus it is now necessary to replace these empires with decentralized networks of independent individuals, as in the first decades of the Internet,” he begins, and he does delineate the many abuses of the tech oligarchs, including: Read More...

Don’t Look Now, But Tech Just Became Way More Dangerous (Actually, You Need to Look)

Don’t Look Now, But Tech Just Became Way More Dangerous (Actually, You Need to Look)

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While we’re not big on conspiracy theories – we’re simply too busy to get sidetracked – we do love to follow trajectories to see where things may be going. Or to once again quote Wayne Gretzky, if you want to know where the puck is going, look to where it has been.

The news this week was the banning that has been happening with the social media platforms. War on Free Speech: Facebook Bans People It Considers “Dangerous”, and Twitter is at it, too. While the question seems to be coming up more and more – Is it time to break up Twitter, or regulate it as an edited platform (Big Tech Trying to Have it Both Ways as Platform and Publisher)?, and this would extend to all of the socials – let’s be honest, aren’t they publishers, after all? In fact, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself is calling for regulation, and that should be concerning, especially given his focus, which is in lock step with that of the tech cartel, trust us. As Wired reported, Platforms Want Centralized Censorship. That Should Scare You.

So, why now?

Forest through the trees time, and Big Tech has gotten the four Ds down to an art, and yes, four – Deny, Deflect, Defend, Delay. Important, considering what else has been going on in tech to which not many people have been paying much attention: the rise of the Fakes, or as we prefer to call them, PHAkEs, which is our acronym for Post Human-Acknowledged Entities. Read More...

Surveillance Capitalism: We Are Definitely the Product

Surveillance Capitalism: We Are Definitely the Product

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The tech cartel has been labeled many things. “Attention Merchants” being one of them. In her new book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Shoshana Zuboff has designated a new category for them: Surveillance Capitalists. “Surveillance capitalism,” she writes, “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data.

The Business of the Internet

“When the security expert Bruce Schneier wrote that “surveillance is the business model of the internet,” The Guardian reports, “he was really only hinting at the reality that Zuboff has now illuminated. The combination of state surveillance and its capitalist counterpart means that digital technology is separating the citizens in all societies into two groups: the watchers (invisible, unknown and unaccountable) and the watched. This has profound consequences for democracy because asymmetry of knowledge translates into asymmetries of power. But whereas most democratic societies have at least some degree of oversight of state surveillance, we currently have almost no regulatory oversight of its privatised counterpart. This is intolerable.” Read More...