Human Data

I'll preface this by saying that at some point it turns into a rant about 3/4 through.



As an avid Google user, I recently stumbled across a section of the settings that summarizes all the data accumulated by the given account. The sum of my college life boiled down into accounts, facts and figures.
1900 chat conversations, 1800 emails I felt it necessary to keep, contacts, phone calls, voicemails, videos, pictures. I am becoming a profile, a collection of data. Is this the future or was it always the goal? The government keeps records on all of us so this seems to merely be an achievement of long-standing goals. We as a society have striven to reduce the individual to a collection of data. We celebrate conformity, branding, shared taste but individuality is all too quickly fading.

You can find out most any adult's place of residence, income, and marital status easily. I wonder how much longer until people are rated by the total value of their life... I imagine it would be a numerical representation in the thousands. 1632 - a middle class man married with two children working a job he detests to support his family. (I'll let the reader guess which of those details is entirely unimportant to a system)

Oh how quickly we become sheep with numbers spray painted onto our fur. Our sense of unity has run amok; what was once a sense of belonging has become a dependence. We cling to our systems and services as if we need them to live. Our services enslave us and we are all too willing. Historically, unity and nationalism have been tools of empires- tools of war. Here we live in a nation pacified and contented by shiny baubles and ready to go to war to fight for our gluttony against the supposed threats. We are the cancer and we fight to survive. We drain the resources of the world- a cancer destined to kill our host .

Well that was an interesting rant about nothing.