The Great Hack

I have not written here for a few weeks. Sometimes, those personal insecurities become a block. I’m OK now.

I love to write, because I love life. Today, I am compelled to write, because I love life, compulsively.

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Have you watched the documentary, The Great Hack? It’s on Netflix right now. 

I urge you to see it, listen and think deeply about what is being said. The human angles are clear. The story is of the dismantling of Western democracy as we understand it. It is one of electoral manipulation and an erosion of free choice. 

A group of clever but immoral individuals clubbed together to swing votes using social media data and the targeting of vulnerable demographic groups. Why? Power and money. What else? Money and power.

Imagine the script; narration and dialogue typed out on a page, double-spaced. On screen, we witness injustice; we know the poverty gap widens, we feel disgust at the racism, mysogeny and prejudice. Now, imagine what may breathe within the spaces between the lines; beyond human, the majority of biomass on Planet Earth. The voiceless. The utterly disenfranchised. 

When the climate deniers and free marketeers are free to roam, non-human lives are held captive, marginalised and viscerated. So injured are they by the machinations of the data-dupes, the skewed votes, the power-players, that our life-systems dry-up and vaporize.

There are people with bad intentions towards interconnected living systems (climate, biodiversity, equity). Have no doubt about that. Just when the biosphere is ‘rupturus’, and the opposite is needed.

The good work continues, of course, on oil, gas, coal, land, poverty. But dangerous change-makers using technology are at large. After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, they are more likely driven deeper into the dark web.

@ExtinctionR and others are spreading the message on #EarthCrisis,  gaining publicity and making their mark. Education is vital. Fronts are opening up against the destroyers, there is some shift in public perception.

I’ll call them fronts ~ battles or storms ~ but of course I’d favour storms over battles. The tech-front is hopelessly unchallenged by people like us. Tell me if I am wrong.

The super- power of the decade is in the hands of datum-archs.

Let us, who work on Earth Crisis, accept and confront this. The Great Hack has shaken me to the core, not so much for the impact on modern democracy (we know it needs fixing), but for the impact on LIFE itself. 

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Origin of the word ‘data:’ PIE root ~ Do ~ to give. 

Data ~ facts that are given. 

The fact is, our data is NOT given, it is duped from us. And so all life is duped, because all life, at present, is in all our power.

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