Comment Articles

Technology addiction makes us unwitting slaves

Richard Forno ZDNet.com

Published: 03 Oct 2003 12:40 BST

Members of these high-tech heroin cartels are not only promoting and profiting from their products. They're also developing the laws and methods to govern and regulate the use of products, all the while protecting themselves from any negative side-effects and ensuring their established revenue streams.

Each industry and vendor wants to assert its proprietary technical and legal authority over who does what, when, how, and under what conditions with their products and services, even if their profiteering desires are incompatible with our law-abiding ones. And if their technical or legal efforts to maintain law and order in their respective fiefdoms fail, they can always turn things over to the federal government for action as a convenient backup.

Combining these perverts of profit with the fickle, often-ignorant nature of our elected lawmakers has produced an information age in which the rights and abilities of the individual don't matter. Neither does facilitating society's evolution by allowing it to take maximum advantage of technology's capabilities for its collective benefit. Today, what matters is only how much money and freedom people are willing (or forced) to pay (or sacrifice) to their corporate masters for the privilege of living within the various information-based fiefdoms provided for them to generate revenue.

The information age will not be remembered for the fun, high-flying and overwhelmingly feel-good dot-com days. (That memory exists despite the ongoing exploitation of technologies developed by the dot-coms.)

Rather, the information age will be remembered as a period when:

12-year-old girls from New York slums, senior citizens and innovative college students are harassed by greedy cartels seeking to scare their future customers into submission.

The profit goals of high-tech vendors determine how client businesses and people are organised and interact.

Everyone is presumed a potential criminal until proven otherwise, according to oppressive industry-defined criteria.

A once-awesome revolution in global communications became converted into a cesspool of unsolicited and offensive marketing messages.

Knowing how to do something that's illegal is just as illegal as actually doing something that's illegal.

The legal protections over freedom of speech are trumped to preserve corporate secrets or market share while hiding vulnerabilities that endanger the public.

Our lives are monitored and dissected by marketing firms looking for the best way to sell us things we don't need or want.

Technology's promise and alluring capabilities are used to surreptitiously entrap and willingly imprison members of the information-age society instead of truly empowering them.