April 12 – Privacy declines

Privacy declines
Change is price of survival
High priced future

Based on the Churchill quote of “Change is the price of survival.”

While I will attribute that saying to him, I have been searching the WWW and I am not finding anything but the quote and not a source that puts the quote in context.

I am not sure that Mr. Churchill is not referring to changing into warm clothes when exploring Antarctica.

Churchill is also reported to have said, or at least quoted someone else, that “To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often.”

To both of these I respond “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” or, “the more you change, the more you stay the same”.

Life is all one step forward, two steps back, lessons of history are ignored and history is repeated and all writing is autobiographical.

But the recent change in privacy and the lack of privacy has a different feel. Cameras watching everywhere. Microphones listening everywhere. Drones, phones and smart watches fill our existence.

It is 1984 come to life and we are happily spending the big bucks to enable and empower the monolithic steam roller of being ‘connected’ that is flattening every bulwark we have to protect our private lives.

When I first read 1984 and the passage where Winston Smith has to get up and exercise in front of his view screen, along with everyone else in the world, and the on-screen instructor yells at Smith to pick up the pace, what I thought was, “OH SUREEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.”

Today, this very scene is including in commercials for work out equipment and it is billed as a must-have-plus to owning and using the equipment.

Mr. Lenin said something like, “When the time comes to hang the western world, a capitalist will sell me the rope.”

If told that their privacy would be taken from them, most people in this Country would follow tradition and raise the ‘DON’T TREAD ON ME’ flags and gather with rifles on the village green.

But offer to buy the phone, watch, camera or audio assistant that will manage the problems of your life for you, and we pay to give our privacy away.

Have we gone nuts?