Text by Corey DeVos
This episode of Daily Evolver features a special guest, our friend Wayne Guenther. Wayne wrote Jeff a very well articulated email concerning comments he had made about the issue of massively increased data collection from private citizens that is currently taking place by many major social networks, web sites, and search engines. While Jeff expresses a somewhat different level of concern about the ever-shifting line between our public and private lives, Wayne really educates us about what he perceives to be a foundation for abuse currently being put in place by the powers-that-be….
It seems that in the battle for the future, George Orwell lost, and Aldous Huxley won. We aren’t living in 1984. We’re living in a Brave New World, paddling through a rapidly rising sea of trivia, frivolity, and digital graffiti—giving companies like Facebook and Google ample room to track, store, and monetize our online personas with very little resistance from a largely uninformed public.
Jeff observes that we do not seem to be on the same track toward some Orwellian vision of a tightly controlled monoculture, similar to what we see in North Korea. Rather, he sees an Internet and social network culture that is offering widely diverse views, perspectives, and behaviors, including illegal or illicit activity. Wayne counters with a list of facts that suggest that although Orwell’s nightmare may not be the end result, a foundation for abuse is 
nonetheless being laid aided by a naïve public who seems all to willing to sacrifice privacy for convenience and connection.
As of now, more data is being collected than ever, and laws are being passed that govern who your data can be shared with and under what circumstances. When we look at the evolutionary dance going on between what private companies are collecting on each of us and how the public sector is regulating them, Jeff’s concerns get particularly triggered when private ISP’s offer total anonymity to their clients, with no chance that illegal activity could be monitored in any way.
This is a complex subject, shining some light upon an important topic that we, as integralists, should all be concerned with.
The genie is out of the bottle. Social media is rapidly revolutionizing our communities all across the planet. What has been your experience? When you use social networks like Facebook are you concerned about how much data is being mined from your activities and who it could be shared with? How do you discern the risk to your own privacy by participating?
Image by JBH Mareyd.
Listen to an excerpt below. The full audio is here on integrallife.com.
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