Terms Of Disservice

Our need, as a species, to reach out to each other, to communicate, to interact, to cooperate, is our greatest strength. By joining our forces through collaboration and organization we've become the dominant species on top of every food-chain on the planet. This is the story of how our greatest strength has been converted into our greatest weakness...

We live in great times and we live in terrible times. Never before have we had so much technology to make our lifes better, more comfortable and productive, we're exploring the bottom of our deepest seas and we're exploring space. Building upon the knowledge gathered by thousands of generations we're able to breach into the regions of the unknown at a pace never seen before. This is wonderful. There's a big problem though; all this technological and scientific know-how is at the same time being used to create the biggest transfer of power in human history, on a global scale, and because power and wealth go hand--in-hand, we're seeing the biggest transfer of wealth as well.

It is in the sectors that enable a great deal of control over our lifes and behavior where we see this happening most readily: the military industrial complex, big pharma, big tech, mainstream and social media, and the politicians who serve all those institutions instead of their people. Apart from the insane redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich, power is being redistributed in the same direction through technology that's being used to spy on us, to wage war and to manufacture consent with mainstream and social media. This technology reaches everywhere, it knows no borders, we interact with it constantly, and I don't believe we're even close to realizing how thoroughly we're being played by and through this novel power structure. If the Devil was human, and if he wanted us to voluntarily hand over our souls to him, he would use exactly the same trick as Big Tech; he would politely ask us to agree to his Terms Of Service, and he would make it very easy to do so, like click on a check-mark, and he would politely ask us to please read those Terms Of Service and even provide an easy clickable link to take us to the document that contains the Terms Of Service... And he wouldn't even use small print. No, he would just make the document a hundred pages long, filled with nigh unreadable legalese, as to discourage us to actually gain an understanding of what exactly we agree upon. And there would go our souls...

Fortunately our souls are safe; it's just our freedoms we click away by agreeing to the Terms Of Service on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Google. This is how a democracy should work: the government should be 100 percent transparent and citizens should retain 100 percent of their privacy. The government should work for us, remember? In practice, and with assistance from Big Tech, it's the other way around: the government is not transparent at all, and we have no privacy. The government knows everything about us, and we know nothing about the things the government does in our name. Government agencies, like the NSA in America, make deals with Big Tech corporations and give them fancy names, like PRISM:

PRISM is a code name for a program under which the United States National Security Agency (NSA) collects internet communications from various U.S. internet companies. The program is also known by the SIGAD US-984XN. PRISM collects stored internet communications based on demands made to internet companies such as Google LLC under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms. Among other things, the NSA can use these PRISM requests to target communications that were encrypted when they traveled across the internet backbone, to focus on stored data that telecommunication filtering systems discarded earlier, and to get data that is easier to handle.

PRISM began in 2007 in the wake of the passage of the Protect America Act under the Bush Administration. The program is operated under the supervision of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court, or FISC) pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Its existence was leaked six years later by NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who warned that the extent of mass data collection was far greater than the public knew and included what he characterized as "dangerous" and "criminal" activities. The disclosures were published by The Guardian and The Washington Post on June 6, 2013. Subsequent documents have demonstrated a financial arrangement between the NSA's Special Source Operations (SSO) division and PRISM partners in the millions of dollars.
_{source: Wikipedia}

What I find most disturbing though, is the way our greatest asset, our need and urge to socialize, is being used against us. This starts with one way communication, TV, magazines and newspapers, that's being used to feed us the (dis)information that benefits the status quo. And now it's come to the point that social media is being used to do the same, but also to set us up against each other, all the while following our every move, communication and desires. It's so sad. All this progress, all this knowledge and technology we've built over the course of centuries, could be used to do so much good. But instead it's the Devil incarnate, stealing from us everything but our literal souls. Please watch the below linked video, where Edward Snowden explains just how deep this hellish rabbit hole goes. I hope you'll never look at your mobile phone the same way again...

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