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Truth is Gone, Now Trust is Going...

On the day "alternative facts" were offered to provide an alternative reality, truth went out the door. Later this fascinating statement was reinforced with another that "truth is not truth". Talk of careless talk.

Now consider this, computing is leading the way in offering alternative realities. AI offers ways to alter reality. With so much reliance on apps and social media, a good percentage of our reality comes down via apps and the Internet on our LCD screens. Its all digital. Digital is fairly easy to manipulate.

But that's not my concern today. My concern is a trend in which the individual is slowly and surely losing sovereignty over their digital assets and identity. 

Consider this: Email used to sit on desktop PCs downloaded via POP3. Now its all in the cloud. And its so massive, the thought of downloading it all to a local drive is insane. And anyway, how do you secure it? How to you search it? 

So we yielded sovereignty to Google. Google is the king of email. The emperor of mail. They know everything about you because you have never bothered to encrypt your mail assuming it is even possible to do so. And even if it is, who says So & So can not decrypt everything you encrypt with our kindergarten "secure" algorithms.

Now consider your phone. Do you remember what happened after it crashed and lost a whole lot of photos and messages? You implemented an online photo site. Now your pictures are safe and sound on this cloud-ed site: Flickr, Picasa, OneDrive, Photobucket, Instagram...name it. So now you have ceded ground to the *net. They have all your pictures. Even the ones you would rather they didn't have. Its too laborious to go through one by one and select what to upload. In fact, the app automatically uploads every picture and video you shoot. How simple, how very subservient to the cloud. 

It goes even further, last time your computer crashed, you decided to activate Drive or OneDrive and save everything up in the sky because you just can't TRUST your laptop. You lost so much in that last digital disaster, you can't afford to have that happen. But now all your content is within easy grasp of the ​Bytèmon. Are you not scared?

Even our money is going up. Its M.O.B.I.L.E. Now that you are fully M-PESA compliant, its so much easier to chart out you financial life. 

The Chinese are even more innovative. They have come up with a 'Social Credit Score' to measure how trustworthy each citizen is. Who knows whether the score may be exported. After all, digital has no hard border and no back-stop. It reaches to the sky and its many clouds.

Happy computing in these trustless times. 

The Messiah is coming. Prepare.

Comments

  1. A decentralized internet is the answer. If we could do it, we could build a completely decentralized version of our current internet, with no firewalls, no tolls, no government regulation, no spying. Information would be totally free in every sense of the word. This would be existential threat to the powers that be!

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