Digital Natives Or Digital Peasants?

Property, defined as,
possessions, belongings, things, goods, worldly goods, effects, personal effects, stuff, chattels, movables.

We think we own our stuff. And we do for the most.

But increasingly we have it only on loan from Big Business.

The Russians loved the Lada Motor car. They could fix it with a hammer.

After the great collapse of the Soviet Union.

They sent out teams of guys scouring the world, looking to to buy up, what for westerner was a crappy car.

And shipped them all back to Mother Russia.

But to the average underpaid Russian, this was a miracle of engineering.

They could keep it running forever on spare parts and a good bang of a hammer & sickle.

I have grown up in an age where we could fix things and get them moving again.

But now we are in the middle of a growing throw away society.

Despite what the tree huggers and the Green Party believes.

And what we do not throw away, we get replaced with updated models of software,
we will never own on hardware we can never hope to repair.

Apple has a profit margin of around 50% on it's new throw away iPhones.

So no room there, for the hobbyist fixer upper.

From the the highly touted Digital Native we have as the article below states, sunk to become,

The Piss Poor Digital Peasants.

Getting more stupid for everyday that goes by.

Nobody knows where the hell they are going with out a SatNav.

Smart Watches made to tell you, you are healthy, or start your car.

We will end up owning nothing. Not even the cloths on our backs.

Content Junkies, we will be locked out of society at the flip of a switch.

Either by Hackers or Big Gov.

Cold Turkey for a Digital Blue Veiner.

The Future is not bright my friends.

Maybe it's time to rebel and start getting rid of our Digital Methadone Chains.

I got rid of my watch.

As a start.

And laughed at a guy who was showing me all the smart moves his shiny Smart watch could do.

His claim that, "The Network will never go down," sounded like a badly written line from the Titanic.

I felt free after losing the watch.

It can take a while to claim back our freedom. But as the Chinese philosopher Laozi put it:

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step"

And nary a mention of Fibit!

Read on:

The ‘internet of things’ is sending us back to the Middle Ages: by Joshua A. T. Fairfield

Internet-enabled devices are so common, and so vulnerable, that hackers recently broke into a casino through its fish tank. The tank had internet-connected sensors measuring its temperature and cleanliness. The hackers got into the fish tank’s sensors and then to the computer used to control them, and from there to other parts of the casino’s network. The intruders were able to copy 10 gigabytes of data to somewhere in Finland.

By gazing into this fish tank, we can see the problem with “internet of things” devices: We don’t really control them. And it’s not always clear who does – though often software designers and advertisers are involved.

In my recent book, “Owned: Property, Privacy and the New Digital Serfdom,” I discuss what it means that our environment is seeded with more sensors than ever before. Our fish tanks, smart televisions, internet-enabled home thermostats, Fitbits and smartphones constantly gather information about us and our environment. That information is valuable not just for us but for people who want to sell us things. They ensure that internet-enabled devices are programmed to be quite eager to share information.

Take, for example, Roomba, the adorable robotic vacuum cleaner. Since 2015, the high-end models have created maps of its users’ homes, to more efficiently navigate through them while cleaning. But as Reuters and Gizmodo reported recently, Roomba’s manufacturer, iRobot, may plan to share those maps of the layouts of people’s private homes with its commercial partners.

Read the Whole Article:
http://theconversation.com/the-internet-of-things-is-sending-us-back-to-the-middle-ages-81435

Images Courtesy of eteses