Big data is like big tobacco. Presumed to be safe for decades and when we understood the cancer it brought...

Big data is like big tobacco. Presumed to be safe for decades and when we understood the cancer it brought, it was hard for people to quit.
– Peter Sunde (@brokep) June 2, 2017

Everything has gone wrong. That’s the thing, it’s not about what will happen in the future it’s about what’s going on right now. We’ve centralized all of our data to a guy called Mark Zuckerberg, who’s basically the biggest dictator in the world as he wasn’t elected by anyone.

Trump is basically in control over this data that Zuckerberg has, so I think we’re already there. Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong and I don’t think there’s a way for us to stop it

We don’t create things anymore, instead we just have virtual things. Uber, Alibaba and Airbnb, for example, do they have products? No. We went from this product-based model, to virtual product, to virtually no product what so ever. This is the centralization process going on

We’re super happy about self driving cars, but who owns the self driving cars? Who owns the information about where they can and can’t go? I don’t want to ride in a self driving car that can’t drive me to a certain place because someone has bought or sold an illegal copy of something there.

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We lost this fight a long time ago. The only way we can do any difference is by limiting the powers of these companies — by governments stepping in — but unfortunately the EU or the US don’t seem to have any interest in doing this.

So there’s still some chance for a less awful future, but it would require a huge political effort. However, in order to achieve that, the public needs to be informed about the need for decentralization — but historically that’s not likely to happen.

I would say we, as the people, kind of lost the internet back to the capitalist society, which we were hoping to take it back from. We had this small opening of a decentralized internet but we lost it by being naive. These companies try to sound good in order to take over, that they’re actually ‘giving’ you something. Like Spotify gives you music and has great passion for music, and all of the successful PR around it.

But what it does to us in the long term is more like smoking. Big data and Big Tobacco are really similar in that sense. Before, we didn’t realize how dangerous tobacco actually was, but now we know it gives you cancer. We didn’t know that big data could be thing, but now we know it is. We’ve been smoking all our lives on big data’s products and now we can’t quit

And just like with tobacco, it’s governments that need to create the restrictions. However, it’s difficult to see how any government — except for big players like US and EU — are supposed to be able to restrict the powerful tech giants.

The EU could say that if Facebook wants to operate within the EU, they have to agree that all of the data has to be owned by the user, and not by Facebook. Which would be quite simple for the EU to do, but of course that would make Facebook really upset

Then every country would be scared to be the first one to implement the law because Facebook would leave and all of its citizens would be without their tobacco. That’s the problem we’ll always have.

Figures. Enjoy your digital dystopia.

Just don't use these services. There's viable and free alternatives.
Don't call daddy government to make fagbook play nice

Funny guy.

What ISP are you on?

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