The Business Data Evangelist Has an Ideology

*EDITORS NOTE – I had written this piece last [AUGUST 2017] but was unable to post it because my entire professional blog was removed from the Internet. The timing of my blog’s sudden disappearance was suspicious due to the current event of nearly 75 employees adopting an RFID chip.  People expected that I had things to say.  Someone wanted me to shut up. While there are delays, I cannot be put off forever.  It was encouraging to see the voices speak up.  People tend to respond wildly to invasive measures against bodily privacy. That’s the reaction of a very healthy human animal.

It would be  naïve to think that cultists aren’t aggressive. They pick their targets and behave illegally toward outspoken advocates who run contrary to their own views. [It's the plot of this season's American Horror Story:Cult.] 

Employee privacy is the least protected area of privacy law in the United States today.  The timely DVD/DVR release of The Circle is an opportunity to learn that less than half-of-a-percent of the global population is attempting to ply a belief system on both employees and the public for their own gain.  Please go see the film, but keep in mind the screenplay was written by a European.  Sometimes if you don’t die in the ending, you get unfininshed business; which makes American moviegoers uncomfortable.  It’s still a great creative illustration of what we are contending with today. 

Technocrats want money, power and control just like other groups constantly trying to shimmy up the greased pole of Power. They are encouraged to believe technically unenhanced humanity are an inferior product.  How that translates is, unless they are in charge ,you are poorly qualified to run your own affairs without their deep, invasive technical “assistance”. 

As I have said in the past, you don’t owe them anything.  However, when you volunteer information into their system, it has more epistemological meaning now than it did in 1996, when the Internet emerged as an information space.  It’s now a form of corporate religion.  Unfortunately, the tech industry wants acolytes.  It’s not enough for them to have a professional relationship where engineers and marketers produce hardware and software solutions. 

Don’t be too concerned for my blog.  I am working steadily to troubleshoot how it happened. I was very pleased to see Joe Jerome at CDT perform an ethical write up about employee privacy and microchipping. I was equally happy to see IAPP follow up on the matter, as it is difficult to manage procedural privacy facing aggressivepanoptic agendas from both the public and private sectors.  So I do encourage more people to add their voices. Speak up for yourself. Write and blog yourself about how invasive bodily surveillance at work, through things like microchipping, impacts you.

 

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Data-as-Technocratic governance is a belief system. They want a quick conversion.

 

By Sheila Dean

 

Privacy is an interesting field for current events. Most of the issues impact our lives in real time.  There are housecleaning robots mapping your home networks and reporting back to a central mainframe. Trump’s election committee just made demand for voter information, both public and private.  Most people don’t use their Date of Birth to vote or the last four of their SSN#, for that matter, but hey, who’s counting?  50 - 75 employees in Wisconsin volunteered up for microchipping body modification at the urging of their employer.  A global bank organization wants to make biometric identifiers a requirement for monetary exchange.  What do these all have in common?  They all have a Business Data Expert who has convinced company governance privacy is already gone and that it’s best to teach the rest of us how we had better get along without it.

 

Business Data experts are intimately connected to data architecture, information flows and most importantly, the brokerage of all data as a saleable good.   When you hear them speak about privacy conflicts there are many common refrains.

 

When you see things through their eyes you see someone who views people as data sets.  They create code to parse a person to get to know them intimately with no introduction, to read them as science.  So tools like Facial Recognition technology with an aggregate social media AI may read someone as gay or straight, up or down, left or right, on demand and by intention.

 

When a Business Data Expert is campaigning, in the case of public policy or governance development, you’ll hear a few ideas repeatedly.  Most of them are not true on a holistic or principled plane.

 

·      “You have already lost complete control of your data.”

·      “Privacy is dead.” or “Learn to cope with a post-privacy world.”

·      “The algorithm is omnipotent/omniscient (and/or because I built it).”

·      “I see what happens to real people who lose privacy (and I still demand privacy forfeit).”

·      “I was a hacker once upon a time…”

·      “I ran a start-up from my mom’s basement. I am successful. Believe me.”

 

TRANSLATION: If you want privacy you’re an obstructionist cave man, you need to submit so <ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US>.  If privacy were actually over, there would be no public policy persuasion necessary, no fight and no lawful arbitration needed. Sadly, privacy is not something you can wave away dismissively from a TEDX Stage or CSPAN.

 

We don’t have to demonize the Data Business Expert. He’s already moving in a self-evident manner contrary to thousands of years of human anthropology for the sake of data exchange business.

 

THE CONTEXT OF DATA AS AN IDEOLOGY

 

Where does this ideology come from? Some would argue it comes from the graduate business colleges at Stanford or Harvard.  Others would argue it comes from a variety of ancient and recent high-strange cults both online and off who believe that people can be made magically transparent so there are no boundaries to ever run afoul of.  Some believe your physical form is just code, or math, and that engineers can achieve godhood by recoding 1s and 0s, making people do what they want or becoming healing gurus.  Some believe that past, present and future has been predetermined by a simple common denominator, based on DNA or genomic genetic data.  Some believe animals and people are just simple technologies whose sole purpose is to be upgraded to higher robotics and shot into space.  Ethical relativism abounds because, “Science is what really matters.”

 

The purpose of the belief system is to transfer humanity to an intangible object: data.  In most of these belief systems, there is little to no psychic distance between the magical thinking and taking whatever is in your bank account and making it theirs.  All things and people are objects to be based or debased by an engineer. Like the rest of us, they need a temple and a community who supports what they believe, as they are religious.  They get it from the business community who pats them on the back and rewards them with big contracts and business renewals.   So, no matter how high concept this all is, it is a very pragmatic belief system after all.

 

Like a lot of other belief systems they evangelize and they have ritual sacrifice. They demand online, physical and bodily privacy as a sacrifice to their belief system.

The same way cult leaders demand indefinite labor from followers, to give up their families and life savings, it only benefits about 1- 2 people IRL.  Those 2 people end up living really extravagant lives on your private data sacrifice. They consume and share the information as both a mundane and sacred act on a routine basis.  They do it for money and for personal satisfaction.

 

This may explain why the Business Data Evangelist wants that post-privacy world now.  Get to know him.  He’s making decisions with your data with or without you.  Humanize him.  He doesn’t have to be your enemy.  You need a new way to make him your friend.  Give him cause to respect what’s yours in the rational natural world of real consequences.