The Big Data Soul-Market

A criss-crossing dragnet of corporate mass-surveillance and intelligence agency mass-surveillance perpetually sucks up the essence of you.  Your soul is stolen, filed away in a data warehouse, and held at the mercy of those who may wish to examine it, buy it and sell it, use and abuse it.  The mass-violation is enormous—indescribable.  And you probably do not even realize that it is happening to you.

If you fail to resist this—if you fail to reject it—then you are a slave of the soul subsisting in a global panopticon.  Your life, your personal relationships, and your very thoughts are not your own:  They are property owned by others, stored in databases and managed by robots.  You are soulless anthropoid livestock that exists for the pleasure and profit of your owners—and at their mercy.  A slave-girl seized in war and sold at auction has more inviolable dignity than you.

I am the free, the proud, the inviolable—the untouchable.  My soul belongs to me. ®

The Mass-Rape of Souls

What is best called a “soul”, if we avoid any mystical propositions of immaterial beings that cannot be observed?

Your innermost thoughts, your dreams, your most secret fears and hopes.  Your fantasies—and your most private realities.  Your closest and most intimate connections with other people.  Your own perceptions from the cradle to the grave, looking outwards from inside yourself—and looking into yourself, from within.

Your psyche.

Nowadays, you ask Google Search the secret thoughts and questions that you would never reveal to your spouse, your clergy, or your psychiatrist.  If you lie awake at three in the morning with some hidden preoccupation, and you want to put your mind at ease, you ask Google for the answers.  If you heard of some erotic diversion that you would never admit to intrigue you, and which you perhaps may not ever intend to do, you ask Google to sate your idle curiosity.  Your medical condition, your financial plans, and most all else about you is revealed to Google by your queries.

Google Search is the most powerful psychological interrogation and profiling tool ever invented.  The record of your queries gives Google a record of your thoughts, almost as if by mind-reading.

If you use Gmail, then Google also has a complete record of your intimate communications and your inviolable personal relationships.  And the same principle applies in different degree to any unencrypted, insecure email.  —And the same principle applies to all unencrypted electronic communications.

Imagine someone out there having a transcript of all your discussions with your wife or husband, your parents, your children, your best friends…  Then, realize that someone does have that, more or less.

Now, consider your phone.  You carry it everywhere.  Around 2012, I put on my “evil hat”, imagined being the NSA, and asked myself what the most important ways would be to watch everybody all the time.  One of my top answers:  Location.  My conclusion as such was vindicated by the Snowden revelations in 2013.

I mused that in modern times, a stereotypical psychotic delusion is the belief that the government or space aliens has implanted a person with a tracking chip—in the manner of tracking cattle.  Whereas now, in reality, the anthropoid herds voluntarily carry the tracking devices—and they even pay for the privilege of carrying a device which is not only a location-tracker, but a network-controllable bugging device.  Your phone can unobtrusively capture audio—and nowadays, video; and it can be controlled by hackers, whether those hackers are called “intelligence”, “police“, or “criminals”.  It also hooks you up to a 24/7 propaganda stream via the Facebook app, the Twitter app, and the apps or websites for your favorite sources of “news” and other entertainment.

Without exaggeration, you are choosing to carry with you the v2.0 upgrade of an Orwellian telescreen—with location-tracking.

Now, let me not even get started on the state of privacy on the Web; I must reserve that for future commentary.

I must emphasize that plutocratic corporate mass-surveillance, “surveillance capitalism”, is of even greater concern to me than intelligence agency mass-surveillance.  Of course, I am worried about the NSA, et al.  But what is worse, much worse in practice, is the unbounded hunger of surveillance capitalists to tap, track, trace, data-mine, and manipulate Big Data for commercial gain.  The tyrants of corrupt governments are primarily interested in preventing threats to the state—and to that end, they have at their disposal raw power beyond the wildest fantasies of Stalin’s NKVD.  The Big Data surveillance capitalists have an insatiate lust to steal the soul of each and every individual on Earth, because “data is [sic] the new oil”.  And the latter feed the former, too.  Every which way, for those who seek privacy on ideological (or even religious) grounds, or for a simple desire for human dignity, corporations are the primary threat.

The Hidden War

Against the thieves of souls, who rob you of your privacy and violate every intimate detail of your life, there is a hidden war, a Crypto-War, in which the free and the proud must use every tool at their disposal.  And it is not a war of “left” versus “right”.

Those who duly appreciated Philip Giraldi’s recent article on Julian Assange will be unsurprised to find me going full cypherpunk here.  By historical analogy hereto:  Assange and Timothy C. May were basically on “the same side” about privacy and encryption, even though May was an elitist and Assange is an egalitarian believer in democracy.  Although I will assuredly beat good old T. C. May hands down for political incorrectness, the same principle hereby applies.

To Touch the Untouchable

I believe in praxis.  Ideology must be lived.  The political is personal.

Thus, synthesizing the thoughts that I have expressed, plus my dream of establishing an intellectual aristocracy, I reach the following conclusions:

1. If I represent hereby any truth, I must be hard to get.  (That blog post on “Truth Wisdom” was originally the beginning of this post.)

2. My private communications must be kept private, as always they are:  My soul is inviolable.

This is consistent with my general policy in life.  I always want to make new friends—but quality is more important than quantity; and I am not desperate for fan mail.  I always encrypt all of my electronic communications, absolutely without exception, to the maximal extent that is feasible.  I dearly appreciate eloquent epistolary exchanges with people who are not stupid and not lazy.

Wherefore to reach me, you must at least minimally qualify.  My criteria:  A modicum of knowledge, or a modicum of effort to attain new knowledge.  Also, as another selection filter, my contact information is buried at the bottom of an essay where only my regular readers will find it, unless I “deep link” to it from elsewhere.

(Note that this policy may change.  Depending how my blog goes, for practical reasons, I may need to put out an email address someday.  If so, I will edit this paragraph, and the relevant sections below; but I will leave the rest hereof for historical reference.  Of course, I will always minimize or refuse unencrypted personal contact.)

Raches versus Email

Being so selective cuts spam, and makes email tolerable to me.  Whereas email is so disruptive that some people altogether eschew it.  Most famously, Professor Knuth, the scholar of computer science, has an essay on his site titled “Knuth versus Email”:

I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address.  I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things.  But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.  What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.

[…]

`I don’t even have an e-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.' --- Umberto Eco, quoted in the New Yorker

A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education provocatively entitled, “Is Email Making Professors Stupid?” (February 12, 2019) is inspired by Knuth; and it opines:  “Email has become a kind of digital water torture for the scholar struggling to think without interruption.”

If I did not so treasure the secret exchange of encrypted letters, I may agree with Knuth.  I do mean letters.  Outside quick memoranda, I treat writing an email in the same manner as I treat writing an old-fashioned letter.  It is a good mental model for enjoying all the good characteristics of email, without its disruptive effects.

The Rules of Secure Communication

In brief hereby—to be elaborated in future Proems:

1. Never send anything in unencrypted email that you would not snailmail on a postcard.  This is a very old rule on the Internet.  The fact that so many people have not learned it makes me pessimistic for the future of the world.

2. All nonpublic communications should be encrypted all the time—no exceptions.  If you distinguish between “really private stuff” and “eh, I’m not encrypting this”, that has three problems:  You flag to any observer the particular messages that may be “interesting”.  You misjudge between the two categories—inevitably; you cannot always predict what may be “interesting” in the future.  And you develop bad habits.  You need to set yourself up so that encryption is convenient, so you can use it for everything.

3. First contact is oft the most important to secure.

I do mean that I encrypt everything all the time.  If I want to send one of my friends a cute cat photo, I encrypt it.  If I want to discuss recipes for chocolate-chip cookies, I encrypt it.  This takes no effort.  I am properly set up so that encryption is automatic; once I have a correspondent’s key in my system, all that I need to do is to keep out a vigilant eye to make sure that the system continues doing what it is supposed to do.

Contact

For the above-stated reasons, this is how to contact me:

1. Use the below PGP key, which does not include an email address, to encrypt a message to me.  If you do not know how to use PGP/GPG, this is your opportunity to learn.  Do some research—or just wait for me to blog an introduction to PGP, as I intend sometime to do.  Don’t avoid it; if you don’t invest the modest effort to get up and running with PGP, then you may later suffer from what I call Greenwald’s Regret.
2. Leave the encrypted message in a comment on this thread, with no other text.  Comments that contain any unencrypted text may be published.  Just slap in a blob of ASCII-armored PGP-encrypted gibberish—that’s it!
3. I will receive your message in my moderation queue.  It should not be published—but if it is by accident, the damage is limited:  It is encrypted.  You should always assume that anything entered in the comment form is not private.
4. Inside your encrypted message, be sure to include your email address and your own PGP key, so that I can reply.  I will not reply without encryption.  As an exception to the above rules, you may include your PGP key separately from your message if you find it too inconvenient to put inside; however, this is not preferable.  (Those who use Protonmail may omit their keys, which I can easily obtain myself; but Protonmail is not preferred with me, although it is acceptable.  I can also fetch keys via WKD; but if I have any difficulty finding your key, I will not reply.  I will not search keyservers.)
5. Be sure to check your spam folder.  If I reply, I may reply from an anonymous throwaway address that tends to get messages eaten by a robot.  Spies who solicit contact here to discover my email address will be sad to discover:  I use no-value throwaway addresses, and I change them more often than most people change their socks.
6. If you fail to encrypt your message properly (so I can’t decrypt it), or my reply is lost in the mail, then unfortunately, I cannot do anything about that.
7. Unencrypted comments may be published, even if they express a request not to publish.  To contact me privately, you MUST use encryption.  DO NOT say anything unencrypted here that you would be upset to see published to the whole world!

PGP Key

Last modified:  2021-10-11.  Subject to change; always check back here for the current key, unless or until I declare a key stable.  For usage, read the above instructions.

pub   ed25519/0xA93EEAE36F060709 2021-10-11 [SC] [expires: 2022-10-11]
      Key fingerprint = 4BFE 86C5 2A9C AB1D 93D7  CD2E A93E EAE3 6F06 0709
uid                   [ultimate] Raches (https://www.unz.com/proems/untouchable/#contact)
sub   cv25519/0x708430F2EB7B8585 2021-10-11 [E] [expires: 2022-10-11]

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