"...I don't know why I run away"

In my last post, I spoke of my activities in response to the undercurrents of distrust I tread in the dark waters of Big Tech. I don't have to pull too many books off the stack of books I've read on the topic to recognize my guard is warranted; despite how the literature might so desperately persuades, it's not all "shiny, happy people holding hands." As Zuboff argues in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, perhaps we're not even the product, but in conjuring to my mind the universe of The Matrix, we are the raw materials. Shiny, happy conduits, indeed!

And while a part of me throws my hands up in the air and longs to wipe my hands clean of the whole thing as I give up electricity entirely to embrace the ways mankind has prospered for all the millennia before—perhaps, I'd thrive in a remote cabin in the far-flung reaches of northwest Alaska—my less adventurous and pragmatic self recognizes that the milieu of cybernetic tinsel, an amalgamation of uncanny valleys shaping thought and fortune, is the context of today's world.

THIS is what the world thinks is good. No wonder the first world is frakked up.

My one-foot-in / one-foot-out approach through encryption, fails for while I can very much make my life a black box, I cannot control the externalities, that is, the inputs/outputs. Take for example, email: YES, this ABSOLUTELY ought to be private and is trivial to do from a technical perspective, away from the advertising agency of Google's goggles and the not-my-kind-of-party 3rd party creepers. But, to whom do I interact with? Folks with Gmail addresses! It's like locking a freestanding door in a field.

...and while sensitive docs and copies thereof can be safeguarded into a Veracrypt volume for cloud storage, it's an impractical solution for media and not applicable for things like Google Sheets, something that can be easily shared to intended recipients, yet remain queued for daily reading by Google's AI to further shape the world's dataset of all things me!

And I'm not naïve to believe deletion policies in thinking I can shove everything back into that Pandora's box—it's out there; there's no going back! I'm pretty sure everything I've ever interacted with in some semblance of tech can reasonably approximate future behavior—or Future Me! There will come a time when I can be replaced with a cleverly crafted piece of code that can serve up me tanning beneath a heat lamp that can be "your way, right away" configured to the recipient's preferences...of course, I might argue that Proper Me can be already be shoved into a fast food carton with respect to Facebook's emotional contagion experiments—OS pre-installed!

What's the big picture, though? Oh you, bullet of butterfly wings, "despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage."

Why do I make things so hard on myself? Instead of distancing from Big Tech, the approaches I take to pull away only sinks me further...Sun Tzu has GOT to have a chapter on this!

Thus with arms wide open, I jump back into the fray, while partitioning my core from prying Cylons.

YouTube Link

In the meantime, lemme at LEAST rip Cortana, Edge and Bing Search out of Windows 10. "Geez, M$, stay in your lane! Google just called and said they want their whiteboard back!"