The tech industry’s sci-fi shakedown is out of control
The good news is that tech companies are not allowed to copy your brain waves. The bad news is that they never stop trying to rob us all of our humanity.
The governor of Colorado this week signed into law an amendment to its privacy statute that means the state’s privacy laws would at least extend to your private thoughts. Specifically, the bill gives the protections currently afforded to fingerprints and facial images to the electromagnetic radiation emitted from our bonces.
Until the passage of this bill I hadn’t realised anyone wanted to scoop up and flog brain waves. Somehow I am not surprised that someone in the always very ethical technology sector had that particular brain wave, though.
Meta, for one, wants not only to capture the outward expression of your thoughts, as posted on its social networks Facebook and Instagram, but apparently also the private stuff. Last year, the company demonstrated a neural interface presumably intended to be used in its blocky-graphiced waking nightmare ‘metaverse’.
Others are at it, too. Elon Musk’s Neuralink company hopes, for some reason, to convince people to have chips stuffed into their heads like toddlers playing with marbles. Apple, meanwhile, is rumoured to be working to add neural gubbins to its Vision Pro gadget. Happily, no-one seems to actually want to strap a iPhone to their faces, so it may all come to nothing.
This poses a question: is the tech industry evil? Some of it is. Some companies certainly appear to be run by thin-skinned, anti-social and amoral chief executives who appear to have become billionaires precisely because they, as they say in psychiatry, ‘lack affect’.
Most of it is not, though.
What it is is stupid and greedy, and having discovered that fortunes are to be made by high-volume, low-value transactions, more and more tech businesses pile up great fortunes by digitally turning us all upside down and shaking us in the hope that a few crumbs of data fall out of our pockets.
Interestingly, attempts to use digital telepathy to suck tasty morsels of data from our minds follows in the wake of the much-desired and soon to come death of cookies, the dreaded tracking technology that we have all been living with since Marc Andreessen and co. unleashed the Netscape browser on us.
The reason for this race to the bottom of the brainstem is that more and more of what we flatter with the word ‘technology’ is little more than sales, marketing and advertising stapled to a semiconductor and Wi-Fi radio.
Still, even companies that still manufacture actual products to sell, such as Apple, seem hell-bent on changing their business model in order to rise, as did Google, to the dizzy heights of the newspaper classified ads page, only bigger.
The lack of ambition would actually be funny if it was not the case that social media, advertising and all the rest of it is now obviously having a deleterious effect both on individuals and on society at large. It’s time to put big tech, toys and all, back in its box.
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