February 10
GUEST: Thom Hartmann, top rated progressive syndicated talk show host, and New York Times bestselling author of over 30 books, talks about his latest work, The Hidden History of Big Brother In America: How the death of privacy and the rise of surveillance threaten Us And Our Democracy.
The Hidden History of Big Brother In America
Activist Radio has been lucky enought to have Thom Hartmann on the program for a number of times over the last three years. This time we talked about the emerging surveillance state and how our democracy is withering under the assault of Big Tech.
Hartmann shows us the roots of Big Brother in the early history of our nation, from the whipping of Quakers, through the horrors of the slave trade. This background helps readers understand why search engines and other internet sources of personal data have become commodified and weaponized. Big Brother is a seeker of power, and in the internet age that means spying on all of us.
In fact, Orwell's novel 1984 employs a similar form of domestic spying, a two way TV screen in every room that is almost impossible to avoid. The internet goes about its spying in a much less obvious way. Simply by collecting every keystroke we do day after day, large corporations and our government can collect the minute by minute thought processes of almost everyone. Then comes AI (artificial intelligence) to make the data for each person into a whole, so that each of us can be studied and in the end manipulated. Some of the best thinkers of our time describe the power of AI as an existential threat to our species, in addition to being a tool to destroy our democracy.
So instead of coming up with crazy ideas about vaccines putting computer chips in people's arms, we ought to be focusing on how to keep our internet lives out of the hands of corporations. It would make sense for AI to create these crazy conspiracies so that we don't hold corporations and our government accountable. For every battle about wearing masks, there is less attention being focused on the collection and manipulation of our data trails. But conspiracy theories have long been a tool of the state. Create enough crazy ideas and no one will be able to organize around anything.
Read Thom Harmann's Hidden History to understand how we should be protecting our democracy in 2022.
