Digital Dictatorship

By Jurgen Depicker

The collection and processing of data of all types will condition the coming century. Never in the history of humanity have we had access to such production of information. A revolution comparable to that caused by oil in the field of energy at the beginning of the 20th century.

This digital revolution is not content to shape our way of life towards more information, more speed of connection, it directs us towards a state of docility, voluntary servitude, transparency, the end result of which is the disappearance of privacy and an irreversible renunciation of our freedom. Behind its sweet promises, its undeniable attractions, the digital revolution has triggered a process of laying bare the individual for the benefit of a handful of multinationals, mostly american, the famous big data. Their intention is to radically transform the society in which we live and to make us permanently dependent.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jurgen Depicker
• Release date: Jan 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201253158

Book preview

Digital Dictatorship

In a Democracy, you Believe it or not. In a Dictatorship, you Believe it or Else.

By Yurgen Depicker

Introduction

TERRORISM AND BIG DATA...

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO BIG DATA

PLATO'S PROPHECY

THE PACT

ORWELL, IF YOU KNEW

THE AWAKENING OF OBJECTS

THE DINNER OF KINGS

GOOGLE KILLED ME

THE CONJURATION OF 0S AND 1S

THE FUTURE IS AN EQUATION

THE MASTERS OF TIME

TOTAL UNEMPLOYMENT

I CONSUME, I WATCH, I PLAY

WISDOM 2.0

THE RETURN OF ODYSSEUS

THE WORST IS NOW CERTAIN

Introduction

The collection and processing of data of all types will condition the coming century. Never in the history of humanity have we had access to such production of information. A revolution comparable to that caused by oil in the field of energy at the beginning of the 20th century.

This digital revolution is not content to shape our way of life towards more information, more speed of connection, it directs us towards a state of docility, voluntary servitude, transparency, the end result of which is the disappearance of privacy and an irreversible renunciation of our freedom. Behind its sweet promises, its undeniable attractions, the digital revolution has triggered a process of laying bare the individual for the benefit of a handful of multinationals, mostly American, the famous big data. Their intention is to radically transform the society in which we live and to make us permanently dependent.

It all started in the mid-1980s in US Army laboratories. What emerged was an indestructible, sprawling communications system that now spans the entire planet. This digital canvas, disproportionately enlarged by mobile telephony, has radically changed our relationship with others.

At every second of our existence, we generate information about our health, our mental state, our projects, our actions. In summary, we emit data. This production is now collected, processed, then correlated by computers with gigantic storage and calculation capacities. The objective of big data is neither more nor less to rid the world of its unpredictability, to put an end to the force of chance. Until now, statistical and probabilistic reasoning on more or less large population samples left room for interpretation. With the big data revolution, random reasoning is gradually disappearing in favor of a digital truth made from personal data, which 95% of the population, those who are connected, agree to give up. In a few years, it will be possible, by multiplying the correlations, to know everything about everything. Connected technology will soon be able to carry out a permanent check-up of the human being like the central computer of a car does, and almost all heart attacks and strokes will be able to be detected before they occur. Likewise, we will eventually be able to predict epidemics based on symptoms detected by scrutinizing the reactions of Internet users. The promise of a better life will undoubtedly sweeten the price to be paid on privacy. Health is certainly the area that will evolve most rapidly under the influence of big data. The digital data revolution is not confined to medicine, however. Everything that affects human beings is concerned. To know everything about him is to allow the most audacious and improbable correlations. In a universe where 95% of the information emitted by man and machines will become available, we will no longer reason on representative samples but on integral knowledge. All the moments of connections will be used to intensify the collection. Internet consultations, telephones, watches, cameras and connected objects of all kinds, the world will be organized so that each individual emits the greatest possible amount of data. Already, this harvest of information, most often collected free of charge, has given rise to a colossal market. Between companies, we exchange consumer habits, their GPS readings, their relationships on social networks... The largest data broker, digital data broker, is of course American: Acxiom alone holds detailed information on 700 million citizens in the world. With absolute knowledge of ourselves and our environment, abyssal perspectives open up. most often harvested for free, has given rise to a colossal market. Between companies, we exchange consumer habits, their GPS readings, their relationships on social networks... The largest data broker, digital data broker, is of course American: Acxiom alone holds detailed information on 700 million citizens in the world. With absolute knowledge of ourselves and our environment, abyssal perspectives open up. most often harvested for free, has given rise to a colossal market. Between companies, we exchange consumer habits, their GPS readings, their relationships on social networks... The largest data broker, digital data broker, is of course American: Acxiom alone holds detailed information on 700 million citizens in the world. With absolute knowledge of ourselves and our environment, abyssal perspectives open up.

Progress, however fantastic, always has its downside. Oil has plunged us into modernity, but after a century and a half of using fossil materials, we realize the disastrous side effects for the environment. This resource, long considered an absolute good, threatens the fundamental balance of the planet and therefore the prosperity of our species. The same is true for the atom, which has revolutionized energy and health, but poses a threat of total destruction to us.

Big data will certainly advance our scientific knowledge like never before in human history. Transhumanism, this current of thought financed by big data firms, already promises us an augmented man. In a century or two, it will no doubt be possible to fully reconstruct a human being from the billions of data collected on him. Thanks to all this information collected on our health, Google now aims to tackle death! Big data, driven by the idea that the machine will save man, cherish the dream of reaching that eternity one day. To defeat the original plague.

The promise of a better life sown by the digital revolution must not hide the exorbitant price to be paid. The man of massive data, fully connected, will live completely naked under the gaze of those who will endlessly collect information on him. Over the course of our existence will be recorded on our individual file all our intimacy, our habits, our behaviors, our commercial, psychological and ideological profile. Near is the time when companies will offer, before marriage, the complete file of the future spouse. We will thus be able to know everything about him, his consumption and spending habits, his relationship with alcohol, his real sexual preferences, his genetics, his risk of developing cancer or neuroses. The level of knowledge about everyone will soon be such that we can predict our behavior, including the most reprehensible. Surveillance of all human beings will be the rule. Few will be able to escape it, except by agreeing to be part of a new category of marginalized people. The naked man will find it difficult to find the strength to resist in a society where health, longevity and security will be the official pretext for his transparency.

The intelligence services were not long in considering the tremendous opportunity represented by the world of big data for the control of individuals. At a time when security has become a central political issue, when terrorism is declared a major threat to our way of life, the digital industry has immediately been put under the supervision of the major intelligence agencies. And all the more easily since the massive data market is an ultra-concentrated economic sector in the hands of a few, Google, Apple, Microsoft or Amazon, who have taken a considerable lead. Today, between our phone calls or those from those around us, our email exchanges, our browsing on the Web, our movements tracked by GPS or captured by cameras,

The dictatorship envisaged by Orwell in 1984 was inspired by known models of tyranny with their attendant brutalities. The world of big data puts individuals under glass, in a much more subtle and painless way. The data piles up with no other purpose than to feed bases for commercial purposes, in which the services can draw at discretion when a connected man becomes suspicious. The day is probably not far off when, alongside the funeral urn which contains the ashes of the deceased, families will be offered all the digital data accumulated during his life, such as the indigestible history of his existence. containing his medical file, his emotions, his consumption habits, his sexual and intellectual preferences.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, a growing gap has developed between the omnipresence of technology in our daily lives and the low level of understanding that we have of it. The general public is kept at a distance from the emerging issues, misinformed by an industry that favors opacity behind which its economic interests prosper. The short-term advantages of massive data overshadow this major transformation in the history of humanity which is the voluntary enslavement to an information system.

Big data deploys enough energy to promote the benefits of the digital revolution for it to be unnecessary to recall them here. We will therefore not dwell on the positive effects of the digital revolution, but rather on the sneaky threat it now poses to our individual freedom, private life, our right to intimacy, and more generally to the danger that she stands for democracy. Fascism and communism broke millions of human beings, but they failed to transform them, nor to make them transparent. The naked man is in chains without immediate suffering. Before the end of this century, he will be completely dependent, intellectually and financially, on this system which will gradually define the terms of exchange between a longer life, less physical and material insecurity, and quite simply freedom. It is about the Machiavellian success of an industry which definitively took control of the Earth, without coercion or apparent violence, that we are going to talk about.

TERRORISM AND BIG DATA...

The attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 pushed humanity into the era of total surveillance. Bruised and vexed to have been beaten on their soil and to have seen nothing coming, the United States under the presidency of George W. Bush completed the wiretapping of the planet for the greatest happiness of an industry electronic monitoring. A post-September 11 digital net that did not prevent new attacks on American soil. We remember the Boston marathon in April 2013, or the San Bernardino shooting last December during which a couple acting on behalf of Daesh killed 14 people, not to mention this radicalized military doctor who in November 2009 killed 13 of his compatriots on a base in Texas. A relative efficiency therefore, at a disproportionate cost in terms of civil liberties. Under pressure from civil society, the United States has had to unravel some of the meshes of the net.

Conversely, Europe sees the absolute surveillance put in place by the NSA as the model to follow, an effective means of protecting itself from terrorism, even at the cost of increased dependence on the conglomerate. American security. In France, the Charlie Hebdo and November 13, 2015 attacks that bloodied Paris have intensified this belief. We have made technological surveillance a magic wand at the instead of seeing it as one weapon among others, in our panoply. For seventeen years, the French intelligence services were able to thwart all the attacks fomented on national soil. Then, in 2012, Mohamed Merah killed soldiers in Montauban and perpetrated a massacre in a Jewish school in Toulouse. A failure of the services which followed the reform of internal intelligence wanted by Nicolas Sarkozy, in 2008. That year was born the DCRI, the Central Directorate of Internal Intelligence, a new entity, since baptized DGSI, which then merged the counter- espionage and General Intelligence. For experts in the field, this forced marriage will have dealt a fatal blow to local intelligence in which the RG excelled thanks to an imposing territorial network. Between the act of Mohamed Merah in March 2012 and the massacre of November 13, 2015, the deadliest ever committed in France with 130 dead and more than 300 wounded, France suffered four other jihadist attacks: the attack on a police station in December 2014 in Joué-lès-Tours, the killings at Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher in January 2015, the suicide operation in June in the Lyon region against a Seveso factory with beheading of a victim , then the shooting of the Thalys in August. Added to this, the same year, a plan to attack churches, aborted solely due to the clumsiness of the apprentice jihadist who shot himself in the leg after killing a motorist. Similarly, the neutralization in Saint-Denis five days after the November 13 attacks of the commando leader, Abdelhamid Abaaoud,

Despite everything, under François Hollande, the state apparatus persisted in strengthening electronic intelligence to the detriment of human intelligence and the infiltration of terrorist networks. Each failure becomes an argument – ​​even a pretext – to always enlarge the net, to tighten the mesh without really worrying about the quality of the fishing. The amount of information brought on board continues to take precedence over the quality of the collection. Almost all the terrorists who acted on French soil were known to the intelligence services, wearing the famous S sheet. Because we have disinvested in human intelligence, our services have not been able to discriminate the sixty or so priority targets to concentrate all means. As former NSA agent William Binney recently acknowledged: "If your goal is to find people who have committed a crime, having bulk data on everyone on the