What Few People Understand

Happy Halloween Everyone!

In the spirit of Halloween, which is a huge deal around our household, I want to talk about something scary that few people understand:

The battle for the fate of humanity has already begun and we are losing. 

And I’m not talking about climate change or the war in Ukraine. As big of a deal as both of those are, they aren’t the scariest thing happening in our world today. Not even close.

Over the last several decades, not only have we have voluntarily created the technological infrastructure for a kind of totalitarian control unprecedented in the annals of history but also, we have invited this technology into every little intimate space we inhabit.

Think about it. Unless you simply refuse to use phones, tablets, and computers, some company or another knows exactly where you are at all times. They probably even know what you are doing as well. At the same time, social media companies are hacking your consciousness—distracting you with nonsense, making you want to buy stuff, capturing your attention and awareness—and know everything about you, including the things you might not want anyone to know. 

Privacy might already be dead.

Authoritarian regimes, like China and Russia, are already using this technological infrastructure to exert control over their citizens and with great effect. Here in the West, we seem to be aware enough of the danger and occasionally even marshal resources to sue companies for privacy violations. But big tech remains unphased and probably just laughs off the associated fines as another cost of doing business. 

To be clear, I am no luddite and am not hankering for a return to some mythical technology-free past. The genie is out of the bottle on this stuff anyway! I use these technologies every day and with great appreciation. But I’m convinced that a better future demands two things:

1. As individuals, we HAVE to learn how to engage with these technologies and not lose our personal freedom. 

The challenge here is to learn how to maintain awareness—on-going, never ending, hyper-vigilant awareness—in the face of ever more invasive and psychologically manipulative technologies. Easier said than done! This is why self-development practices like meditation, exercise, and journaling have become so important to modern life. Without these, we literally have no chance against technology’s dark side.

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2. As a society, we HAVE to ensure that this technology cannot be used against us. 

The issue here is that this is a battle with many fronts. On one side, there’s the ever-present danger of out-of-control government. You’d have to be hiding under quite some rock not to see the threat here. In places like China, totalitarian technological control is on full display already. But even here in America, we’ve been messing around close to the thin red line. Anyone remember the Patriot Act? Given what we know about history, we have to assume that the threat from government is as real as they come! 

On the other side, there’s the risk from the corporations themselves. Look, these companies already figured out how to design technology that taps into the (mostly self-destructive) tendencies of our unconscious mind and, in doing so, created some of the most profitable businesses in human history. Do we think they are going to just stop now in the name of the greater good? No way! They are absolutely going to double down and as the tech gets better and better, the threat will become scarier and scarier.

To make things even more complicated, this is a fight that could evolve in multiple directions all at once. It might not be as simple as the Nation versus Nation battles of the 20^th Century. We could see citizens fighting their own governments, fighting each other and maybe even fighting against the corporations themselves. We could even see the rise of corporations strong enough to attempt to challenge Nations. 

What should we do about this? What can we do?

No matter what, we all need to win the awareness battle at home and in our personal lives. This is the only way to remain truly human and avoid evolving into whatever it is that TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, and Instagram wants us to be…. Keep this in mind the next time you pick up your phone or open up your laptop! 

When it comes to the bigger societal question, we need to start fighting back. What’s at stake here is nothing less than freedom itself. 

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