Commentary
What’s the most powerful commodity in the world?
Gold? Tesla electric vehicle technology? Bitcoin? Oil?
Actually, it’s none of these things.
As we’re now discovering, care of the Big Tech gang in Silicon Valley, the world’s most valuable commodity today—and for the foreseeable future—is data. In fact, Wired magazine has declared that “data is the new oil of the digital economy.”
It seems as if they’re right about that.
From a Digital World to a Data-Driven One
A brief look back provides some context for where—and why—the global economy is headed where it’s headed, and very, very soon.
In the late 1990s, the emergence of the internet began the digital transformation of the analog economy. That transformation has been proceeding apace, including the debut of Facebook, Amazon, Google, Twitter, and all the rest.
Today, with the digital transformation well established in everything from banking to dining to dating, it’s thoroughly entrenched in our lives. Smartphones, delivery drones, and connected homes are an integral part of our daily activities.
Data Is the Key to the World
The deep and total manipulation of our data via artificial intelligence (AI) is the next step. (And by the way, it’s happening without our approval.) The incredible power of AI and predictive analytics are already being applied to so-called smart cities that are actually surveillance cities, on the order that China has made famous.
Everything you do—or don’t do—from wearing a mask outside in this era of the CCP virus to watching the wrong news channel, is observed, often recorded, and added to your data profile. Human beings are thus commoditized, reduced to nothing more than labor units.
Surveillance cities are part of a larger effort in China and other parts of the world to freely access and capture your data, which is then used to capture you.
Today, the global economy is dependent upon data—everyone’s data, by the way—for virtually everything. Where you bank, how you spend your money, who you vote for, what shoes you buy, what media you consume—everything you do and even think or write on Facebook, is recorded, quantified, categorized, and commoditized for everyone who can make a buck from it.
Your Data Is Not Yours
What’s more, the big plans that the “Great Reset” is so excited about can’t happen without having total access to all of your data and the right to use it in almost any way they wish.
What? Do you think your data really belongs to you?
Think again.
You signed your data rights away years, if not decades ago, in any number of user agreements that you never read or even looked at before clicking, “I agree.”
And, as you may already be aware, the apps on your phone are primary sources for personal data that’s being mined and forwarded to private social media companies and foreign nations such as China and others.
A ‘Brotherhood of Man’—Or Not
But “data sharing” is what a digitally connected world is all about, isn’t it?
Like John Lennon’s globalist hymn “Imagine,” we’re well on our way to “a brotherhood of Man,” right?
Or, as some might say, are we closer to completing a world based on the “servitude of Man?”
It looks that way.
The world has become small and connected, and we’re all getting to know each other really well—but not half as well as the cluster of technology czars that none of us elected know us.
Big Tech Hates You
Unfortunately, what the Big Tech oligarchs such as Facebook, Google, and the others know of millions of Americans, they don’t like—especially our tendency to value our right to free speech.
In fact, they’re completely against free speech and are using our own data to suppress it.
“Freedom of expression,” an amorphous and politically neutered concept based in “European civility,” self-created identity, and obedience to authority is what they have in mind to replace the raucous, free-wheeling, politically activated free speech rights that we’ve enjoyed in America since the birth of the country.
As the Heritage Foundation makes abundantly clear:
“In fact, the freedom of speech in its original understanding can bring harm to the new notions of self-expression, as Google and Facebook make clear. The conflict between free speech and expression is being brought into the open by our tech giants, who seem to have both a moral and monetary interest in promoting only expression.”
Thus, the path to wiping out free speech is paved with the “good intentions” of not hurting anyone’s feelings, particularly with regard to their chosen gender, while stripping all Americans of their rights. That’s the role of hate speech—to shame you into self-censorship until free speech becomes offensive and—ultimately—a criminal offense.
Now that the new regime has taken power with the coordinated and pervasive power of Big Tech behind it, the drive to muzzle us may well take on an extra urgency.
Still, undoubtedly, global peace and understanding are the inevitable outcome of our data-driven world and the suppression that accompanies it …
What could go possibly wrong?
James R. Gorrie is the author of “The China Crisis” (Wiley, 2013) and writes on his blog, TheBananaRepublican.com. He is based in Southern California.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
