Big Brother

Introduction

This is another interesting one from my Seven Days In blog that you can read here if you are so inclined. It deals with how our digital devices "spy" on us and then try and get us to buy things or provide information to the data collecting machines and agents.

In a recent post, I observed how people said they would not be vaccinated because they did not want Bill Gates tracking them with the (non-existent) chips in the vaccine shots. They were doing this on their phones, computers and tablets apparently unaware that their devices allowed them to be tracked while they were switched on.

I've left the text as I originally wrote it just correcting spelling and grammatical errors which, you know that I am prone to.

Big Brother

Something happened yesterday, I'm sure it was just a coincidence, but it may have been something else. I had been listening to David Bowie's "Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)" and "Ashes To Ashes" had been playing when I got on the bus, and decided to watch a TED talk about waste in the fashion industry (see the bottom of this post) and it was very illuminating. I finished the talk and resumed listening to the album and it started playing the song "Fashion". Now this follows "Ashes To Ashes" but I cannot be certain that that song had finished. It probably had but I can't help thinking of the phone apps that require access to everything on your phone for no apparent reason.

This is like when you look for something online, then the cookies allow whatever you've been looking for to influence the adverts that appear around the page. You will probably see it on this blog.

Then there are the devices like Alexa and Google Home which have the ability to record everything they hear (and sometimes misinterpreting what they hear). There was the murder case where the authorities asked for recordings to be made available (see here) and think about the implications of that.

Then Fiona was telling me how she and a friend were talking about handbags when her friend said she was certain that our phones were actively listening to us as later her feed started including what they had been talking about.

While we complain about the government and local authority intrusion it seems that we are happily surrendering our privacy to corporate entities that certainly don't have our best interests at heart, they just want our money or preferably to put us in debt to them to create a permanent subservience. I remember David Cameron saying he wanted a "Big Society" where people served the community out of the good of the heart and then started closing down libraries and facilities that helped the neediest in society. In order for that to happen people need to have an income stream that allows them to give their time for free.

The thing is that gives me an idea for a story the opening line of which is "Could We?", which hopefully I will turn into a least a short story if I put my mind to it.

For me, the natural accompanying song for this is the menacing "Big Brother" the real closer from David Bowie's "Diamond Dogs". It's a rainy Monday but you have a good day.

Conclusion

Thank you for reading this repurposed piece from Seven Days In. Make sure you watch the TED talk. If you found my Vocal Story interesting then the TED talk by Amit Kaira on shopping for clothes in thrift shops should resonate with you.