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Derryl Hermanutz's avatar

In his 1998 book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, James C Scott explains how "managers" need to homogenize everything to make it countable, make it "measurable", and thereby make it predictable and controllable. He uses the example of a forest which the state cannot see as a complex dynamic ecosystem but must rather see as "board feet of lumber grown per year". The most efficient way to maximize board feet is to bulldoze the forest and plant a monocrop of a single species of trees. The forest has now been "managed". But it's no longer a forest. It's now a plantation. It is no longer a complex living organism. It is now a lumber production facility. The managerial state materially transforms living systems into economic units.

Big data is doing the same thing to humans, reducing people to "consumers" whose desires, opinions and behavior can be categorized, measured, predicted and "managed". We are livestock, managed by Big Data ranchers who have decided there are too many cattle so the herd must be culled.

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Mr. Lucky's avatar

The Mark of the Beast was never possible until the internet /digital age. Now it is being rolled out quickly. A choice will be made by everyone.

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