Over the past fifty years, the Internet has reached the hands of nearly everyone in the developed world — moving from academic arcana to consumer communications. As consumers today, we interact with the Internet like we do lions in a zoo: feeling safe, and from behind glass. Desiring to provide more immersive an experience, the keepers of our zoos are beginning to remove that very glass entirely. Zoogoers who know how to tame lions will survive the experience, while those who do not may have their last. The Internet is diffusing into the tangible world, and everyone must learn to be their own zookeeper.

Auto­adjusting thermostats, wristbands that track heart­rate, and refrigerators that monitor their stored food are a few examples of the Internet’s nascent physical presence. This is the beginning of the Internet of Things: the Internet’s Things. If we continue to remain digitally illiterate, it is also the beginning of the end of ours.

Serious privacy concerns exist because of the Internet today, and only become more Orwellian the more we, as users, learn to what extent our privacy is violated. The more we learn, the less we like, and the more we know we really have no idea. What we do know is that we have no idea how much we have left to learn. Now, more than ever before, is the time to declare war on our collective ignorance. We cannot wait for, or depend upon, others to blow whistles of truth — we must learn to discover the many falsehoods around us ourselves.

The proprietors of our data have capitalistically rational interests in preventing us from this knowing. If we remember Facebook’s “emotional contagion” in 2014, for example, they used our data to manipulate our emotions to push us into a state of vulnerability hoping to increase the likelihood that a presented advertisement would receive our click. The advertisers are Facebook’s customers, and our data their product.

The uproar and surprise that responded to the discovery of Facebook’s emotional contagion indicates that we are naive to the motivations of the companies whose platforms we use. The Internet of Things promises realization of these very same motivations in the physical world, and we cannot wait for other people to tell us how what we use uses us.

We must become better at knowing how to learn what, when, and how our data is used. As a people, it’s simply no longer sustainable to not be technical: to not know about what happens when you load a webpage, to not know how to trace an advertisement back to its publisher, or to not know how to change your Facebook privacy settings.

We must face reality. We must come to terms with the idea that zoos offering a closer and better experience with their animals are thinning their protective glass to do so. We must know how to survive in a different world. When the glass breaks, and the physical separation between animal and patron vanishes, we will wish we had spent time learning how to tame the king of the jungle. We must learn how to use technology lest it continue to use us.

Republished from my site here