For conspiracy theorists it’s all about the Free Masons and the Illuminati; essentially secret organisations and governments that control the global infrastructure of business, trade, manufacturing, politics and entertainment. It’s a dead horse that has been flogged for as long as human beings have had the capacity for overwrought paranoia and suspicion in their hearts and minds.
But let’s talk about something far more provocative and provable than that. Let’s talk about the Online Society, as opposed to a “secret” society. The Online Society is very much real, in fact, it doesn’t even attempt to hide itself from public view. Everyone is aware of it and interacts with it on a daily basis around the world. It’s a powerful leviathan that dominates our lives. It is a society that is made-up of some of the most powerful brands and businesses on the planet from Google to Apple to Facebook to Amazon and so on.
Tom Spring, blogger for PC Advisor, recently wrote that the algorithms produced by these major companies make it hard to determine whether or not we are being turned into “geniuses or puppets.” The algorithms these big companies use have an unarguable impact of our digital lives.
The most basic way to describe algorithms is to say that they free people from sorting through irrelevant results independent of human input. Take for instance the news feed on your Facebook account – technically you are not seeing everything that is being updated and published. You are only seeing what the Facebook algorithms “think” is of the most relevance or interest to you. Likewise when you browse through Amazon these days, you have recommendation lists that you did not create, yet somehow, eerily, the selections Amazon has chosen are rather accurate to your own tastes. This is because your digital footsteps are followed closely and your browsing habits imprinted so that algorithms can predict what you will want and not want to see and do.
So what’s the big deal?
There isn’t one… yet. The concern is that as this Online society blooms and evolves over the next ten or so years, so too will technology and the algorithms themselves. Eventually, or pessimists could even argue inevitably, algorithms will provide advertisers and government agencies with behavioural data that has been streamlined via a computer formula predicting all your online movements from what sites you visit to what you buy – every digital move you make.
Government sectors are trying to effectively monitor online behaviour and algorithms to help them to understand, predict and track cybercrime. At least that’s what they say they are looking for, but as with previous blogs the questions of privacy and freedom of the online space come into focus again. Where does this end?
Facebook has come under fire recently for harvesting personal data, which potentially is shared with any number of other organisations. In the digital world – data is gold dust. Private companies know this all too well. Think of Glengarry Glen Ross and how all the salesmen in that story desperately want to get their hands on the new real estate “leads.” The “leads” are what drive business and make money for them. The same rules apply to this Online Society and our personal data as well as our browsing habits are the “leads.”
Almost everything you look at on the Internet from Google News to song recommendations on Spotify run off complex algorithms designed to monitor and pre-empt your decisions before you even think of making them.
It’s a creepy part of the Internet that is only now beginning to become more sophisticated and talked about. So forget about secret societies and start thinking about the very public, global ones that dominate our online lives so that we may be easily tagged, catalogued and referenced by larger entities from big business to big brother.
