Thursday, July 27, 2017

The Circle

The Circle Poster
WOW, impressive movie with a myriad of ways to interpret the underlying meaning.


Although it is almost impossible to take the movie as an entertainment face value given today's advances in technology.  Contrary to past "futuristic" environments this movie almost documents the current environment we live in.

Not to spoil or give away the plot line, here are some thoughts you might ponder after the movie.

Back in the 1960’s after the erecting of the Berlin wall it took an army of secret police, in this case the STASI (Staatssicherheit or State Security), to spy on the East Berlin population. 
In tandem, today for example there are 500,00 cameras in London, one camera for every 16 people. Greenwich  Village and SoHo have about 1 camera per 84 residents. None of the counts include private security cameras, police body cams or police cruisers equipped with license plate scanners and dash cams. Dash cams are becoming more and more affordable for private cars and being used on a regular basis, not to mention the obsession of the smart phone cameras and other surveillance cams such as baby or nanny cams, and last not least the fear of FOMO. The latter is simply footage voluntary provided by the public to the public which could in some cases back fire. Granted of course is the fact that it is not all about spying on the population but sorting out the bad, the good, and the ugly.

Along the same theme line there were some movies which appeared a while ago, such as “Enemy of the State”, featuring the intrusion of private lives. Edward Snowden showed the world that this was not so far fetched with his revelations. Perhaps it would take a scenario as depicted in the movie “Transcendence” to change the entire world the way it is.

To take it a step further, entire behaviors are being recorded in the name of “deep machine learning”, providing corporations with brilliant statistical evidence about certain behaviors. To single out some algorithms, being accident prone for insurance companies, or a person relying on credit cards because of their spending habits, for the medical field the makeup of the DNA, shopping habits, targeted advertising, predicting sales, the stock market, and many more - benefiting entire industries . All part of using an objective, neutral, and cold entity analyzing a person and drawing conclusions as a general blanket for all. This data is taken mostly from payment methods and/or reports.

Now imagine live video footage of every single moment of your life with anybody watching.


... and there are people (perhaps me included) who try to sort through family pictures and events - forget that -  just ask Google or Facebook, either one can give you a slideshow of your life - free of charge. Search yourself and find all the foot prints in the virtual sand...


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