Humans As Chattels

The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/16/technology/facebook-amends-privacy-policies.html?_r=1&

... Facebook pressed forward on Friday with official changes to its privacy policies, first proposed in August, that make the terms of using Facebook more clear than ever: By having an account on the service, its 1.2 billion global users are allowing the company to use their postings and other personal data for advertising...

It is a wonder that a society can create such an entity, such as the Internet, which in its beginnings was hailed as a new liberator of the mind, and turn it into surveillance, repression, and exploitation.

There must be a different business model for a social website, and there must be a form of government which does not automatically infringe the rights of its people in as gross a manner as has the NSA and the CIA of the US government.

That is what the future is: new tools that resist being forced into the old dies of oppression and exploitation.

As long as human beings are fungible beings, mutually interchangeable beings within an economic system, there will exist this economic oppression and political oppression.

The great religions of the world are nothing if not the constant affirmation that each human being is individual and free, where the great politics and economics of the world are constant reminders that human beings are but chattel goods.

We will soon be called upon to leave it all behind. Some will depart, some will stay behind. They will look at the clouds and check which way the wind is blowing, just like the friends of Noah did.

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