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SoylentNews is people

posted by n1 on Sunday November 20 2016, @04:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the made-of-money dept.

Hannes Grassegger contemplates the themes of Big Data and the price of free in this essay (and his book). Probably most of that will be familiar to fellow Soylentils but I think it made a surprisingly refreshing read anyways. Now would be a great time to cut the cord, stop feeding the monsters.

Privacy. Transparency. Surveillance. Security gap. I can’t stand to hear the words anymore. They simply downplay a radical new condition: We no longer own ourselves.

You want proof? If personal data is the oil of the 21st century—a commodity companies pay billions of dollars for—then why aren’t we, the source of such data, the oil sheiks?

This new oil, this content, big data, it’s personal data—it's me. My digital personality. Today "going online" is no longer a choice or a potentiality, but rather a necessary condition of existence. It is essential. Part of me. I spend at least half of my time online: both professionally and privately. As Artie Vierkant recently said, we live in a “post-internet” reality. The internet is not a separate realm anymore, it’s become an integral part of life. My identity remains unified, but it’s become partially digital. We’re made of atoms and of bits. The internet is the externalization of my inner world. And this inner world is clearly linked to the rest of me.


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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 20 2016, @05:38AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 20 2016, @05:38AM (#429814)

    Thank RMS. Give your hero Dick "Bathroom" Stall-Man a blowjob through the glory hole. You'll want to swallow, else you might not eat anything at all today.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 20 2016, @07:06AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 20 2016, @07:06AM (#429839)

    Bathroom Stall-Man wants you all working retail by day and githubbing for free by night. He said as much in his prophetic manifesto.

    Actually, many people will program with absolutely no monetary incentive. Programming has an irresistible fascination for some people, usually the people who are best at it. There is no shortage of professional musicians who keep at it even though they have no hope of making a living that way.

    [...] Probably programming will not be as lucrative on the new basis as it is now. But that is not an argument against the change. It is not considered an injustice that sales clerks make the salaries that they now do. If programmers made the same, that would not be an injustice either.