Shall we embrace the inevitable
loss of privacy and the changes it brings?
Adjusting to Our 'Brave New World' of Liberty (O Globo, Brazil)
"What is new and noteworthy is that this is no longer about
military, political or economic espionage alone, but the type that throws open
a world in which privacy no longer exists. ... Today, a fabulous satellite like
Hubble 3D reveals to us the existence of a blue planet like Earth, HD189733, in
a galaxy incredibly distant from our solar system. In the macro and the micro,
we are condemned to the end of all disguises and mysteries. According to the
great neuroscientist Antonio Damásio, 'Our politics
is part of biological evolution.' If we fail to understand this and build our
democracy based on it, Edward Snowden's personal sacrifice will have been in
vain."
Rather than piling on the United States for doing what nations have always done, shouldn't the rest of the world just adjust to the inevitable revolution that is changing our lives - often for the better?
On
September 29, 2010, French newspaper Libération, founded by Jean-Paul Sartre,
published a claim that would become a major scandal throughout the entire
European press. On its front page, the Libé said that a mysterious virus had invaded Iran's nuclear
program and that President Ahmadinejad blamed Israeli and North American secret
services for the chaos that struck the nuclear centrifuges and computers that
control the country's infrastructure. The virus was immune to any program used
to eliminate it and it was never determined from where it had actually come.
Although
the target of righteous indignation, global espionage by way of sophisticated
cyber processes has long stopped being a novelty among nations. It is merely a
technological breakthrough in the listening systems that nations have forever used
on others. Above all, when those who spy are more powerful and have more
interests outside their own territory than those who are spied upon. Every time
a scandal like this comes up, nothing in the world changes except for sales of Nineteen Eighty Four
by George Orwell, with his Big Brother that sees everything.
Posted By Worldmeets.US
What
is new and noteworthy is that this is no longer about military, political or
economic espionage alone, but the type that throws open a world in which
privacy no longer exists. It has been coming since Tim Berners-Lee invented
the Internet, a digital communications system that could survive the nuclear
apocalypse regarded as inevitable during the Cold War [see video below]. Whatever happened, everyone
and everything would remain forever connected via this network impossible to
undo - which is just the way it turned out.
When
you talk on your iPhone, someone not in contact with
you can find out where you are, what language you are speaking, and who the
caller is. None of your e-mails or social networking posts are exempt from advertising.
They accumulate, along with our personal data, in the infinite memory of the huge
companies in this area, such as Google, G-mail, Firefox, Facebook,
Apple, Microsoft, and by which all of us unwittingly give incentive to a new
way of thinking that has resulted in, along with the end of our privacy, a new
opportunity to develop knowledge and practice human relations in a different
manner.
Today,
a fabulous satellite like Hubble 3D reveals to us the existence of a blue
planet like Earth, HD189733,
in a galaxy incredibly distant from our solar system. In the macro and the
micro, we are condemned to the end of all disguises and mysteries.
This
all brings us to a post-industrial world, in which values are no longer
measured by the physical objects we make, but by something that is organizing through
new ways of learning, thinking and acting. We should reflect on this instead of
simply stigmatizing, with righteous indignation, Uncle Sam's monitoring of our jabuticabas [things that are uniquely Brazilian].
Just as the invention of industry didn't eliminate agriculture or handicraft,
the post-industrial Web will not eliminate what came before. We will always
accumulate experience from how we live and what we make, and build on what we made and how we lived.
Even
being a space vulnerable to irresponsibility, the Internet is a celebration of
individual liberty and a progressive form of relationship and fellowship. One
does not wish to see it suffer from restriction, whether it is under
authoritarian state control or not, or disappear (which is already impossible).
For this, perhaps, we are paying the price of risking exposure of our
communities and private lives. And it is difficult to find ways of avoiding
this anxiety. Perhaps we will have to learn - I don't know how - to just live
with it.
Instead
of complaining about the power of others, we should build our own strength and make
the submission of our identities to large capitalist enterprises a guarantee of
the freedom gained from the Internet. In Brazil, we are still in our cyber infancy,
at that age in which we have barely learned to read. But literacy is not enough
- we need to teach our children to go on YouTube, but also and above all, create
their own YouTube. We can only live in this new world through that which we don't
yet know.
Recently,
my six-year-old grandson suddenly asked his mother if one needed to be married
to have children. Caught by surprise and disconcerted, my daughter-in-law
stammered that she didn't know. To which the boy firmly replied: “So check it
on Google, mom.” According to the great neuroscientist Antonio Damásio,
“Our politics is part of biological evolution.” If we fail to understand this
and build our democracy based on it, Edward Snowden's personal sacrifice will have
been in vain.
