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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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 20 2016, @08:17PM
What Carr is saying is that the profession of IT administrators, and of many other techies, is going the way of the music and journalism professions. It won't disappear entirely, but industry won't need nearly so many workers.
I just find the juxtaposition of "Unlimited sharing of digital content: YAY! Migration of tech jobs away from pricey American workers: BOO!" to be jarring. They're really just manifestations of the same economic tidal wave. People say that one can't be stopped and the other can, given our political and economic environment. I think they're wrong.