There is a dirty feeling. The profession is starting to feel dirty.
Maybe - its not a good idea to connect all people. Maybe - its not a good idea to collect and analyse all data - especially about people. Maybe - its not a good idea for all people to be able to communicate with everyone else on the planet. I do seriously question this.
In the long run, we are growing towards being a "mono-culture" - a single planet tribe. But, that is (maybe) a hundred or so years away. And these intervening decades are just going to be full of strife and confusion and needless suffering. And really - is a "mono-culture" what we want? I feel it will be boring and mono-chromatic.
Back to the profession. The mad grab for data collection, the ad-revenue based profit models, the hiding of people and their lives behind fancy charts and graphics - all feels dirty and sickening.
The rulers have always wanted to keep a "pulse" of their subjects. The "Arthashastra" - through a series of measures like internal espionage with constant reporting to a heirarchical bureaucracy of officers - it recommends the ruler to keep a close watch on the masses. The recipe for Empire - I do not think this has changed much.
When the printed word was becoming popular - there were similar arguments about how easy it was getting to be influenced. What is writing and reading - if not "programming" for the mind? The reach of this "mass medium" exploded in the form of daily newspapers. The literate mind cannot but read what appears before its eyes - this was quickly discovered and used to "encourage" this and "discourage" that. Here, finally was a powerful mass instrument - which can not only be used to sense the "pulse" of the populace - but also actively coerce it into directions desired by the rulers.
Some decades later, we have mass radio and finally broadcast television. These were used more and more - in almost all nations eventually, I think, in more or less effective degrees - as an instruments of control of discourse and herding thought in the public space. The word for this, of course, is Propaganda.
Continuing then, we have the Internet, cookies and finally mobile smart phones - which are delightfully disguised but funcional as very effective spying devices - which the subjects are carrying along with them - and helping the rulers.
Anyway, here we are now - as Gandalf would say.
It is becoming increasingly clear to me, that we are building the total security state. Pulse of everyone and everything. All the time.
This is the cause for my increasing dissatisfaction with the programming and computer engineering world.
We - we programmers - had magic. And we turned the world into an advertisement and distortion filled existence.
Humans are extremely visual creatures. And, are easily programmed into useless stories, narratives and agendas through the ubiquitous Screens. We - we programmers - gave them the tools. Indeed, we built them.
Let's not fool ourselves. What is this "Big Data"? Its a running stream of more and more information about more and more people. We are building - brick by brick - the tools for Big Brother - even more terrifying than Orwell's 1984.
Here is an extract from an engineering blog of a typical Silicon Valley tech giant.
A Pinterst user performs many kinds of actions: repins, pin clicks, searches, comments, and many more. These realtime user actions play a critical role in various ML applications, especially for large-scale sequential modeling applications. Knowing a user’s recent actions in real time can provide a huge boost in improving the recommendations for a user. The problem statement to the storage team was to provide a realtime database to store and serve the last few relevant actions of a user.Seems innocuous, but these are indeed the bricks...
Some examples:*
There is petabytes of this kind of data which is gathered and stored everyday by multiple large organizations. (And, Big Govt simple mandates all data to come to it.)
The insertion of advertisements into every screen you see - the "Ad" model - has been the leading cause of plumetting trust in the world - online and bleeding into offline. I wrote earlier about this here