Trojan Horses

Data: the plural of datum, from the Latin: '...that which is given; a fact...'. Facts. Linguistic or enumerated encapsulations of the real; the concrete. Fact: '... a thing that is known or proved to be true...'. In 2017, Kelly-Anne Conway, a Trump advisor during his first administration, effectively coined the phrase 'alternative facts'; which obviously trades semantic redundancy for political expediency: a non sequitur par excellence: it's akin to saying '...quite unique...'. But there we are; trapped in an Alice Through the Looking Glass quantum world of make believe, where one thing mutates into another and back again almost, but not quite, at random.

And therein lies the rub, mes enfants: The people who fuck around with language and meaning to suit their own political and pecuniary agendas are the very ones who want control over actual facts, not the made-up ones they promulgate to us - the hoi polloi - cloaked under the fog of unknowing that obfuscates the actuality of their various and nefarious endeavours at our ultimate, collective, expense. The actual facts they seek total control over are the very basic facts, the minutiae, of our lives. Total control. It sounds utterly paranoid and dystopian spoken plainly, but we are already data-slaves to a capitalist system that uses our apparently mundane data-sets, culled from credit cards, debit cards, loyalty cards, internet browsing histories, etc: social media activity alone gives up so much personal profiling data; taken as whole, we can be profiled, measured and targeted for commercial gain with absolute, surgical accuracy.

What you see is what they want you to see, and you unknowingly feed them the information they need, in order to tailor your world in an image you think is your own, but in fact is of their confection. I read a piece in the current New Statesman about the Tony Blair Institute's relationship with Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle. Briefly this year, Ellison - now 81 - became the world's richest man, for a short while besting the fortune of his mate, Elon Musk [blog post rants passim]. Ellison's fortune is based on the collection, organisation and utilisation of data: Oracle is simply the largest purveyor of database systems on the planet. Ellison has funded the Tony Blair Institute - a British-based think-tank [as if we need any more of these damned things] plying yet more neoliberal economic tosh, thinly disguised as politically centrist in tone.

This is more dangerous than it would seem, as the aim of those holding the reins of global data acquisition are simple: knowledge is power - always has been - but now, the power resides in the utterly mundane facts - data - that make up your [and my] very ordinary lives: the stuff that seems trivial to us, is money to them. But it's not just shopping and shifting merchandise and product that's at stake: to be frank, that's the tip of the iceberg: small change, in fact, compared with the market that is greedy for your medical data. That's the mother-lode by which these people swear: the one thing we can't ignore: our medical care. Have ultimate commercial control over that and you'll forever be rich: the ultimate Golden Goose. That's what they are ultimately after, and it's no coincidence that the big data corporations like Oracle, and the US government [in particular, but not exclusively] have been making moves towards acquiring exclusive access to it: in our case, the NHS.

Institutions such as the TBI are, in my opinion, just gullible patsies in a very monied game, and which lend a very thin veneer of respectability to the overarching ambitions of stupidly-rich corporations from overseas. If there is one form of immigration we desperately need to stem, it is the incursion of the data-thieving mega-corps; a far more insidious and very much more dangerous threat to us collectively than the few thousand poor souls that arrive here - if they're lucky - on the very few small boats fetching up on our shores each year. Just think on - you could be forking out thousands for your healthcare if these bastards manage to monetise  the health service by the back door, which is what will happen if we let it. Ignore the smoke and mirrors diversion of immigration: the real threat is from our 'Special Relationship'...