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The following is the unedited version of an exposé currently featured
in the 34th revised edition of Malleus
Maleficus, The Moonshine Memorandum. If you wish to report libel or inaccuracies, please email
MalleusMaleficus@aol.com To make a formal complaint under IPSO rules
please contact IPSO directly at ipso.co.uk .
I have never had a
more dire and dreadful premonition against setting foot into the country of the
blind. Indeed, I have to admit to one
terrible, irrational fear. I live in mortal dread of one day having to join the
digital drones. I’m not being a Luddite here. But dear God
in heaven, I do not wish to be taken hostage in my own home - without any real
consciousness of it. Without knowing whether I am the observer or the observed. Did you hear that sound? That’s the cackle of
Amazon’s Alexa - essentially a
surveillance system – subtly ringing
the scale from snigger to titter, via belly laugh into the soundless Utopian sphere
of listening for a wake-word. Listening and learning, it will remember all the
people you ever met and everything you ever said. The sound you will not be
hearing is when it finishes
laughing, but monitoring your activities, providing insights
into your offline habits, your secret desires, and your private life, for data
brokers stalking you with psychopathic persistence.
Remember Winston Smith aka “6079 Smith W” – in
George Orwell’s 1984? “The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously.
Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be
picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision
which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was
of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment
. You had to live in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard
and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinised.”
Yes, it’s all very, very funny. No, really, we can
all laugh at the technological apps and gizmos of today's "6079 Smith Ws," or their impotent fury. As Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower who
worked for Cambridge Analytica, aptly observed: “A computer sees all kinds of
sides of you so we can get better than human level accuracy at predicting your
behaviour.” What he neglected to mention
is that Alexa
can also tell when you’re asleep. So you will never be aware of the
mind-bending directives proceeding from today’s commercial surveillance society
- soon to include cameras that automatically take pictures of things they find “funny.” Well, I’m no longer
laughing. Just try to imagine the data that a fully functional surveillance
system could gather when being hacked, unbeknown to its users, by a web of intrusive
surveillance programmes from a vast voyeuristic dragnet around the world. I just pray they do not get their hands on remotely invasive gene technology, the next step up in the deadly manipulative conspiracy "that currently recommends books for you on Amazon", with special attention to unsought but overriding advice on personal choices and political decisions, essentially
determining what you read, write, or think of, not to mention the build up of abstract mnemonic structures where mutual dependency is digitally guaranteed. You could say it was ingenious. For that’s the Zombie Apocalypse without the laughs of Alexa, Siri and Cortana – and if you
don’t know what Google’s Home Mini[1] is, well, count your lucky stars. For it spies, like it laughs, without ever knowing why. In fact, every single individual is now a
potential human rights casualty. If MEPs have voted to propose granting legal status to robots, categorising them as "electronic persons" and are warning that new legislation is needed to focus on how the machines can be held responsible for their acts (or omissions), well, they yet appear to be judicially unaware that the great majority of "living persons" have long since been harnessed by complex computer algorithms which not only laugh at you, but predict and determine what
you’re likely to do next, or when, to whom and, conceivably also why.
I have never had a
more dire and dreadful premonition against setting foot into the country of the
blind. Indeed, I have to admit to one
terrible, irrational fear. I live in mortal dread of one day having to join the
digital drones. I’m not being a Luddite here. But dear God
in heaven, I do not wish to be taken hostage in my own home - without any real
consciousness of it. Without knowing whether I am the observer or the observed. Did you hear that sound? That’s the cackle of
Amazon’s Alexa - essentially a
surveillance system – subtly ringing
the scale from snigger to titter, via belly laugh into the soundless Utopian sphere
of listening for a wake-word. Listening and learning, it will remember all the
people you ever met and everything you ever said. The sound you will not be
hearing is when it finishes
laughing, but monitoring your activities, providing insights
into your offline habits, your secret desires, and your private life, for data
brokers stalking you with psychopathic persistence. 
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