Two Wrongs

As is usual for the Guardianista, the evil big tech (they do have a point here) behaving badly means it is okay for the state to do it.

The government will need to intrude into people’s lives more than ever to cope with spiralling demands on the state’s finances. In the transition to greener technologies, the need to track who is emitting carbon and where they are doing it will only intensify.

Fuck off. My life is my business. The less the government knows about it, the better and I fully intend to keep it that way. The government is my enemy and I treat it and its tentacles accordingly.

When electric cars dominate…

Bwahahahahaha. Clearly this cretin hasn’t been paying attention. The market for these abominations is falling apart. No one wants the damned things.

Health secretary Wes Streeting needs everyone to have a smartphone and the NHS app to streamline services that are costly when provided in the analogue world.

Again, fuck off. I use a smartphone because it is convenient for me, not for the convenience of Wes Streeting and his cult members.

What would help would be a government that made more of an attempt to both promote the state as a worthy and safe recipient of individuals’ digital information, and mounted a defence against data intrusion by the private sector.

This lunatic actually believes this shit despite decades of state incompetence – of whatever political variety. The state cannot be trusted with our information. Therefore, the less you let it have, the less it can lose, leave on a train, abuse or misuse.

As my colleague Martha Gill wrote last week, the main aim of companies, from the newest startups to major multinationals, is to get us all addicted to their products. It is the private sector that wants to use and manipulate digital information much more than the state could ever conceive of doing.

So? No one is forced to buy. The state, however is nothing more than a criminal gang that has legislated itself a veneer of respectability and legality. I trust the worst of the private sector before I trust the state.

They are developing the most sophisticated ways to entice us and keep us buying again and again, soaking up our disposable income and all too often making us either physically or mentally ill.

Bollocks.

Dr Chris van Tulleken, the author of the bestselling book Ultra-Processed People, is among an increasing number of experts with lots of evidence to show that a growing number of sophisticated marketers, using all the digital leverage available, can to get us hooked in a way that is bad for the individual and the economy.

Bollocks

At the moment we are drifting into an era when we allow private sector control while shunning government attempts to navigate a digital future.

Yes, absolutely. I don’t like Google and I am doing what I can to deGoogle wherever I can. I have limited options when it comes to ridding myself of an overarching, greedy, avaricious, malignant state. The state is the last entity that should be anywhere near managing a digital future. It simply cannot be trusted to be benevolent or competent.

Sadiq Khan’s Ulez experiment is a halfway house. The government should sell the idea of going all the way. It’s all coming down the track – cybercurrencies and artificial intelligence. We need to allow governments, and not Google, to control it.

Fuck off. I despise Google, but I’d trust them more than I trust Wes Streeting or any of the other narcissistic arseholes in government. I will do whatever I can to foil any attempts to drag me into their net. I, not they, am the owner of myself and my data. At every turn I will put down obstacles and refuse to comply. We’ve been here before – twenty years ago, in fact. Nothing changes. Different faces, but the same lurking evil.