Yes…but at the moment it’s not actually criminals we have to worry about. The ones giving us a right royal screwing are the very corporations we thought we could trust.
Please don’t laugh. Trust is the ephemeral glue that makes all of society possible. The theft of my data, all our data, strikes at the heart of that trust. We’ve always known we couldn’t trust used-car salesmen, but now it seems that we can’t trust the butcher, baker and candle-stick maker either.
…
Ah, the sweet, sweet innocence of the girl — I'm almost tempted to … but, no ... even I'm not that twisted.
The problem is reification. The moment we lose sight of the fact that ... irrespective of the form it takes or the label we assign it (group, mob, business, company, government, nation, Society, whatever) ... a body of people is made up of individuals, we lose all perspective.
If you remove every individual from a group, what are you left with?
Precisely.
And we've always known about the butcher, the baker and the candle-stick maker.
That's why we have laws covering weights and measures, to prevent doctors from dispensing the medicines they prescribe, concerning truthfulness in advertising, to prevent monopolies, insider trading, you name it.
We've always known about the unscrupulous.
That's why we have governments empowered to enforce the rule of law on our behalf and, simultaneously, separate the executive, legislative and judicial branches thereof as well ... to keep even them on the straight and narrow — because we recognise that we cannot trust people unequivocally.
The singular purpose of government is the defence of the innocent from the predations of the unscrupulous: the singular irony thereof that both consider it surplus to their requirements.
Making tracking and privacy theft illegal won’t put things back ‘the way they were’ in the good ol’ days, but it will make it possible to punish corporate offenders in the one place that counts — profits. It may also make it possible for individuals to join together and bring class actions against corporates that ignore the law.
Money talks but at the moment it’s silent because we, the people, have no mechanism by which we can demand change. Or revenge. I’d take revenge if nothing else.
And so it will continue.
Because it doesn't hurt.
The people responsible for the actions that harm us never pay for those actions. Either they've long since taken their bonuses and moved on to wreak havoc elsewhere ... or a ridiculously long investigation leaves them time to present a subordinate scapegoat ... or nobody is to blame, it was a culture of <something>, lessons will be learned, blah, blah, blah ... but nobody ever pays for their crimes.
Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property … corporate personhood the legal fiction that property is a person.
What we need is to pay attention to ourselves.
After WWII we ... for the first time in our entire history ... as an entire planet stood together and declared, unequivocally, that the individual is responsible for their actions, not 'orders'/'superiors'/'the army'/'the government'/'whoever or whatever' — it wasn't 'someone else', it was you.
We need to start remembering that.
Maybe certain enterprises are too big to fail.
It's all well and good callously declaring that it's a free market, let the failures go to the wall … but a lot of innocent people will suffer along with that.
So, we bailed out the banks.
But heads should've rolled ... and it doesn't matter whether they were guilty or innocent: the captain goes down with the ship ... the person taking the obscene bonus for not running things properly goes to jail — don't want to run that risk ... don't take the money then.
So called 'Bonus Culture' does not attract the best of people to the task in hand but the worst of them. The best do it for the love of it ... because they cannot imagine anything they would rather do … the worst are attracted by the wealth and/or power.
No position should be paid more than any other; because it doesn't matter how 'insignificant' or 'simple' a particular task may appear to be ... if you can't bring your product(s) and/or service(s) to market without it being done then it's as essential as any other role or task— because otherwise nobody, from the CEO to the janitor, is in business or taking home anything, let alone a bonus.
I’m not surprised by the way it’s been abused. Sociopaths control many of the most powerful corporations in the world, innovators rarely ask ethical questions, and the common man/woman sees only the benefits until something rears up and bites them on the bum.
Colour me 'sweetly innocent' then, because, despite qualifying in Psychology ... as a science, no less, not a wishy washy, hippy dippy, tree hugging Arts/Humanities subject with fries ... I never managed to see that in people until around ten years ago. I understood the theory but there was a disconnect between the Hannibal Lecters, Gordon Geckos, Margaret Thatchers, Gee Dubyahs and the people around me in the real World. I thought education and reason were the answer … that all you had to do was get people to see the impact of their ways and they'd have an epiphany and stop ... because they were fundamentally decent just misguided.
Nope … they won’t — they know and do it anyway.
This is nothing new. It’s happened with every single advance the human race has ever made. Now we have to rein the tech in. You teach me, I teach someone else, they teach someone, and so it goes.
Yes and no.
Yes, because, what else can we do?
No, because … after all this time … surely we should've realised by now that the only way to get people to behave properly is to rule them with an iron fist and despotically stamp out all those who would ride roughshod over others and ... er …
Where was I?
Oh, yeah ... yes, that's it ... I can't trust any of you not to be either evil, simpletons or both and you've all got to go … sorry — there can be only one and it has to be me ... it's the only way to be sure.
In the meantime however, I reckon we should bring back the stocks for bankers and CEOs and politicians and bent coppers and butchers and bakers and dildo-makers ... everyone I disapprove of basically; multistorey ones — the worse your crime, the lower down you go..
The thing the ad. networks refuse to understand is that word of mouth is now more effective than advertising can ever be. I have hope. :)
It always was.
All social media/Youtube/etc are is a big megaphone that means more people can hear your voice.
And thanks for the link to The Register. I’m on my way there now.
Have fun. Always read the comments sections with care — don't be eating or drinking unless you can afford a new laptop ... or keyboard at least ; )
