( Ten minute read)

No matter what sort of life you might wish for it will be governed by technology, that you have little or no control over or of.

Is this true?

I want my life back. I want my soul back.

I don’t want my life to be fodder for Data harvesting.

I want digital blockchain ownership rights, so I can trade my investment into technology against profit seeking algorithms. 

I want to bring us back to a more practical reality, which is that technology is what we make it, and we need to stop abdicating our responsibility to steer technology toward good and away from bad.

I don’t think any technology has some deterministic endpoint. 

But there’s a catch.

Data is only as valuable as the insight you derive from it now or in the future. If we’re to avoid technological extremism we’re going to have to draw a line in the sand somewhere.

We know that, at the very least, some technologies are harming our natural world, our societies and, ultimately, ourselves, turning everything into Data.

According to a prediction from Gartner, “By 2024, 30% of digital businesses will mandate DNA storage trials. This is a future that can only arrive when we learn to unlock the storage and computing capabilities of nature that have allowed life to thrive for billions of years.

Throughout human history, it has always taken significant resources to store data. Therefore, data has been stored only to the extent that it makes economic sense, if data cannot yield value, it is no longer an asset but rather a liability.

If all is turned it data stored in the cloud, the exponential growth of data will overwhelm existing storage technology. The average person makes 35,000 decisions per day.

————

So where are we?

By way of this vicious technological cycle, we are consciously causing the sixth mass extinction of species.

Technology destroys places.

Aside from the oceans, rivers, topsoil, forests, mountains and meadows, it helps us massacre and pollute with ever-improving precision and speed, its complex set of cogs quickly spreads us out all over the world, safe in the knowledge that we can stay in touch with loved ones via technologies that offer what is really only a toxic substitute for real connection and time together.

It is badly injuring, perhaps fatally, rural communities, luring their youth into industrial and financial centres – cities – whose existence is premised, as the American writer and environmentalist Wendell Berry said, on the devastation of some other far-flung place, which consumers don’t have to look at thanks to the out-of-sight, out-of-mind distance afforded by technology.

And now look at the state of us.

Capitalism’s survival now depends not just on recapturing all of this data but the CO2 it is a releasing.

Workers must work and produce value. Capital must exploit them, connected, by a peculiar sort of invisible cable, to the global network of quarries, factories, courtrooms, mines, financial institutions, bureaucracies, armies, transport networks and workers needed to produce such things. Reflective of a generic, transient and whimsical culture, spending more time watching porn than we do making love. Because we stare into screens instead of eyes, while social media are making us antisocial.

Technology destroys people.

We’re already cyborgs (pacemakers, hearing aids) of a sort, and are well on our way to the type of Big Brother dystopia of the techno-utopians. Our toxic, sedentary lifestyles are causing industrial-scale afflictions of cancer, mental illness, obesity, heart disease, auto-immune disorders and food intolerances, along with those slow killers, loneliness, clock-watching and meaninglessness.

If one rejects technology that means no laptop, no internet, no phone, no washing machine, no tapped water, no gas, no fridge, no television or electronic music; no anything requiring the copper-mining, oil-rigging, plastics-manufacturing essential to the production of a single toaster or solar photovoltaic system.

It destroys our relationship with the natural world. It first separates us from nature, while simultaneously converting life into the cash that oils consumerist society.

Without biodiversity, life on earth as we know it would cease to exist.

And it’s not just about rare or endangered species, it’s everything from genes and bacteria to entire ecosystems like forests and coral reefs, not technology. So think about it this way. Biodiversity is us — it’s like a big, interconnected web where each species has a role to play, and the only way to achieve this is that we all invest and benefits from investing in  world of green energy.

Awareness of the importance of biodiversity remains low, inclusion of biodiversity in development projects is rare. Time is running out for our planet, for its people, and the delicate ecosystems that hang in the balance.  This is not the life that anyone would chose.

——————–

Rejecting technologies that my generation considers to be the basic necessities of life, one might instead of making a living to pay bills, make a living of ones life, denouncing complex technology simply by renouncing it.

Our cultures need to make a Faustian pact, (a pact whereby a person trades something of supreme moral or spiritual importance, such as personal values or the soul, or data for some worldly or material benefit, such as knowledge, power, or riches ), on my behalf, with Speed, Numbers, Homogeneity, Efficiency and Schedules, are not listing when I say I want my soul back.

Our brains have become wired to process social information, and we usually feel better when we are connected. Social media taps into this tendency.  “

When you develop a population-scale technology that delivers social signals to the tune of trillions per day in real-time, the rise of social media isn’t unexpected. It’s like tossing a lit match into a pool of gasoline.

About 3.5 billion people on the planet, out of 7.7 billion, are active social media participants. Globally, during a typical day, people post 500 million tweets, share over 10 billion pieces of Facebook content, and watch over a billion hours of YouTube video.

Social media has become a vehicle for disinformation and political attacks from beyond sovereign borders.

What can we do about it?

We’re at a crossroads. What we do next is essential, so I want to equip people, policymakers, and platforms to help us achieve the good outcomes and avoid the bad outcomes.

People obtain bigger hits of dopamine — the chemical in our brains highly bound up with motivation and reward — when their social media posts receive more likes.

Researchers found that on Twitter, from 2006 to 2017, false news stories were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true ones. Why? Most likely because false news has greater novelty value compared to the truth, and provokes stronger reactions — especially disgust and surprise.

Social media is an attention economy, and businesses want you engaged. How do they get engagement? Well, they give you little dopamine hits, and … get you riled up. That’s why I call it the hype machine. We know strong emotions get us engaged, so [that favours] anger and salacious content.

Simply counting clicks is not enough.

To understand how we got here and how we can get somewhere better.

We need to.

Interduces automated and user-generated labelling of false news, and limiting revenue-collection that is based on false content. However tagging some stories as false makes readers more willing to believe other stories and share them with friends, even if those additional, untagged stories also turn out to be false.

To allows people to find out what information companies have stored about them for data portability and interoperability, so consumers would own their identities and could freely switch from one network to another. We need to embrace this longer-term vision of a healthier communications ecosystem.

This can be achieved with Blockchain plate forms.

Blockchain is a shared, immutable ledger that facilitates the process of recording transactions and tracking assets. An asset can be tangible (a house, car, cash, land) or intangible (intellectual property, patents, copyrights, branding). Virtually anything of value can be tracked and traded on a blockchain network, reducing risk and cutting costs for all involved.

A blockchain network can track orders, payments, accounts, production and much more. And because members share a single view of the truth, you can see all details of a transaction end to end, giving you greater confidence, as well as new efficiencies and opportunities

Each block is connected to the ones before and after it.