Independent No More

In the old days Colonists would go to a country looking for its natural resources. They scrambled for the minerals, native plants or pre-historic artifacts from far corners of the Earth. Some made peace with the local people and came in as advisors to the local chiefs while some used force and carted away anything they could get from the conquered land. Under the pretext of bringing the word of God and civilizing the barbarians, they justified their exploitations. Over centuries, they extracted the minerals and use them to industrialise their country, develop sophisticated weapons and gadgets and sell them back to us. This is easy to see and sadly it is still happening in some parts of the world.

While this kind of crude physical colonization is on the way out, a new form of control is on the rise. We are all willing participants of this new colonization and we don’t even know it. The threat now is less obvious although the impact on less developed world and the majority of the people is still the same. What is being promoted as democracy and free access to information can also be seen from the dark side.

A wise man once said that “knowledge is power”. It is more relevant now than ever. All the data that we create and upload about ourselves is information. This information can be converted into knowledge and knowledge thus brings power. So it’s not hard to imagine that all the data – text, photos, videos - we’re giving away for free to Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Google, WhatsApp or what not is like giving away our power to those who receive, collect, analyse and use it for their own good.

We are living in the age of Big Data where companies offer free services so that they could collect our data, analyse and use it to sell things to us. On a more ominous side, they collect our data so they could spy on us. They know our location every day, they know what we buy, what we say and they even know what we think. The unfortunate thing is these companies with terabytes of data collected from us are based in foreign countries. Their servers are physically located in their own country and they are subjected to their own law which empowers their intelligence agency to have access to these data and monitor anybody they wish. The current drama revealed by the Snowden leak case about the existence of government funded online spying program Prism shows that the countries with heaviest surveillance on their own people and foreigners are not the ex-Soviet so-called Iron Curtain countries but the self-proclaimed champions of democracy like the US and the UK.

We need to realize that the power of the future is not measured in barrels but in bits and bytes. And we’re giving our data to large corporations based in foreign countries without realizing that every byte of data they store is like drops of oil running their engine. These data may be used against us if they think that we’re not following their wishes. Remember, these corporations are based in the same countries which used to exploit our natural resources and our people to enrich and empower their own citizens in previous centuries. This is just colonization in a new cloak. It is an excuse to spy and control people under the pretext of freedom and democratization of information.

When Big Brother is watching it is not necessarily a good thing, especially when you know that the Brother has a stated objective of making everybody eat, sleep, talk, buy and think like them. So think about it when you press “Agree” button the next time you sign up for a free service online. It may look free now, but you are paying it with your own freedom. We are all sometimes too willing a participant in this wholly connected world. You may think you are free now, but with every byte of data about yourself that you give away you slowly inch forward into an online prison. This is the world we’re living now, a world where independence has no real meaning but surrendering yourself to watchful eyes from the opposite side of the world.



Selamat Hari Merdeka!