The “Data Industrial Complex”

Fear is the greatest motivator of mass expenditures of nations. Ancient leaders a feared lonely barren existence in the afterlife. Roughly three centuries BC,  “Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China, built a [massive coterie of terracotta figures] whose purpose was to protect the emperor in his afterlife… [It] included warriors, chariots and horses… Estimates from 2007 were that the three pits containing the Terracotta Army held more than 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots with 520 horses and 150 cavalry horses, the majority of which remained buried in the pits nearby Qin Shi Huang's mausoleum. Other terracotta non-military figures were found in other pits, including officials, acrobats, strongmen, and musicians.” Wikipedia. Thousands of years earlier, powerful Egyptian pharos entombed their entire households in massive pyramids to protect them in the afterlife. Fear. Think of the cost of these efforts!

Sparta and Rome spent fortunes building, equipping and recruiting technologically superior armies to conquer or protect, at expenditures that parallel the contemporary commitment of major powers to their militaries… and beyond. Taxes necessary to support these systems, even with the loot and booty of conquest, often collapsed empires under the weight and burdens imposed on the citizenry.  Fear and vanity moved nations to engage in such ultimately failed efforts.

From the Soong and Ming dynasties in China, the Persian fall to Muslim conquests to the weight of unending “sacrifice for the motherland” in the Soviet Union, these social structures collapsed either from unexpected and brazen attacks by undisciplined primitives and/or zealots from the outside or were pulled down from within as the structures that benefitted from the government military expenditures eroded the country with corruption. A wink-wink relationship between government and military suppliers, even if out-and-out bribes are not involved (and often they are!).

In 1961, after the United States used its manufacturing might to tilt World War II in favor of the Allies, the general who led the final battles and then became President of the United States, Dwight David Eisenhower, felt the ugly shudder of history moving to create a permanent and massive industrial manufacturing nexus behemoth. It was being designed to convince the government and the people that the United States needed a vastly larger and more consistent military manufacturing infrastructure to ramp up the building of the mightiest nation on earth.

On January 20, 1961, noting this trend in his farewell speech to the nation, Ike warned: “Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

His worst fears are now reality. We spend more on our military than the next ten big-spender nations combined, over 40% of the world’s total military expenditures. Making sure to ensnare congressional approval for “anything military,” military vendors are strategically spread out across as many voting districts as they have been able. Local politicians know that to vote down a military expenditure, in the world of quid pro quo politics, reducing military expenditures anywhere, will ultimately reduce the relevant jobs in the local voting district. Hmmmm. So “fear marketing” is how politicians convince the electorate to keep authorizing huge financial commitments, even to continue obsolete combat systems, to keep local manufacturing and the concomitant political contributions rolling.

But the world is rapidly shifting to an entirely new combat zone, one that is extraterritorial and possibly more powerful than any one nation’s military. It involves new ultra-sophisticated technologies that are designed to mislead, misdirect, manipulate, massively disrupt, take over control, shut down vital infrastructure and financial systems and steal the most sensitive information imaginable… from governments, companies right down to the most intimate personal details of most people on earth. Cyberwars… An invasion of every nook and cranny of our lives.

Noting that data collection even in much less-advanced times allowed Adolf Hitler to accumulate personal information on Jews within the Third Reich to allow them to be rounded up and slaughtered, the European Union has affirmed that privacy is an unwaivable “fundamental right.” Including the right to erase and control personal data. Their General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) reflects a growing concern on the misuse of personal data, moving in the opposite direction of the Trump administration’s anti-regulatory efforts here in the United States. While some states – not surprisingly, for example, California with its Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 – are adopting European principles, ask most American Millennials and younger if they have any privacy expectations and they will laugh at you. Regulations interfere with business… that is the real evil in Trumpland.

This is serious stuff. Like it or not, the world is reconfiguring… but this time the BIG BROTHER is extraterritorial. Squirming to avoid high national taxes with clever legal structures. And growing their collective and highly intrusive database!!! Europe is in full assault mode against Facebook (which recently admitted that the very marketing statistics upon which they predicate their ad pricing were materially and substantially exaggerated) and particularly Google.

Data behemoths fear not keeping up their data mining will collapse their long-term values; many people equally and justifiably fear that their personal data is being used to manipulate them, and Europe is terrified that such corporate entities, perhaps funded by an uncontrolled non-governmental bitcoin parallel currency universe, will continue their step up to an unacceptable level of transnational power.

Even powerful members of our own technological superpowers see the danger. “Apple’s Tim Cook was the first CEO of a private company to give the keynote speech at the annual International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners (ICDPPC) in Brussels. Cook touched on a lot of topics, from AI to GDPR to privacy. But his most stark remarks were about what he sees as the growing threat from the ‘data industrial complex’—that is, the trading of our digital data between a few major players in the tech industry, whose business models are increasingly hostile to privacy, TechCrunch reports. Cook said:

“‘Our own information — from the everyday to the deeply personal — is being weaponized against us with military efficiency. These scraps of data, each one harmless enough on its own, are carefully assembled, synthesized, traded and sold. Taken to the extreme this process creates an enduring digital profile and lets companies know you better than you may know yourself. Your profile is a bunch of algorithms that serve up increasingly extreme content, pounding our harmless preferences into harm. We shouldn’t sugarcoat the consequences. This is surveillance.’” FastCompany.com, October 24^th.

There is a power shift going on. Authoritarians are rising, happy to generate data on their constituents. Data = control. Companies seek global domination in their spheres of influence. Some governments are deeply concerned. The United States, under Donald Trump, is not. “Alexa, was that good for you?”

I’m Peter Dekom, and are we condemned to repeat another mistake by ignoring historical lessons?