Yuval Harari said, throughout all of history, if you were not trying to understand yourself, that would be fine because no one else cared. But today, the big companies have so many data points about you, they are constantly trying to predict your behavior, mood and mapping your pattern to keep a hold of you for the longest time in their ecosystem, and feed the most amount of advertisement to you.
These pattern recognition got so good, that Cambridge Analytica helped political campaigns to pin point which households to visit and which ones to leave, and the specific message to carry to each of them, when trying to convince people of voting about Brexit, and for Trump.
We saw in black mirror that a program could analyse past chat history and mimic a dead person to keep on chatting so well that soon it could nearly mimic the person in a android body.
We are missing a big point though: that we humans are very good at hiding a lot about our thoughts. We never search these things even in incognito mode of the web browser. We don't even think them out loud. Often there are deep and dark patterns of our emotional being, that we are not even consciously aware of, to channel them into our chats and social media presence. This dark side, or this ebb and flow below, inevitably drives a lot of the directions we take in life. It drives us in a way that often we do not know why we do things, why we can't tolerate certain people and certain movies, why we have certain repeating thoughts again and again even though they are unspoken and unsurfaced.
So even if a program is there to take in all of my outputs in the world, dna too, to make a replica of mine in future, giving my consciousness a second life of sorts, it will not be quite me.
Here from the discussion above, you can choose one of two paths: the first one is to reduce sharing, so that the big companies can't predict to sell to you. This is unlikely to be very successful in the short run though, as they already have enough data on you.
Or you can aim for the second path, that is to increase the right kind of sharing. The kind of information that is not there to impress others, it is not moderated by a hungry ego, but it is out there as an expression of your inner being. This will not stop the companies from predicting you, on the contrary - it will enable future data miners to predict the real you, more accurately.
Or you can aim for the second path, that is to increase the right kind of sharing. The kind of information that is not there to impress others, it is not moderated by a hungry ego, but it is out there as an expression of your inner being. This will not stop the companies from predicting you, on the contrary - it will enable future data miners to predict the real you, more accurately.
Make artworks that are true to you, write prose that speaks to your dark side, put it out there, for everyone will recognize something very powerful in it. And maybe one day a program will take it all in and give your consciousness a second life on Earth.
So the next time you feel like it, don't be afraid to say it out loud, "I am lost. I feel terrified. Sometime my core says this is all make-believe and the glass walls are coming down every second shattering what I call reality. But then I get up and try to hold on to a sort of sanity, conformity, and back on the wheel."
Keep creating.
Radi
13 October 2019
Dhaka
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| the two selves - photo art by the author |