“ Rest assured, Personal Data Exchanges will face plenty of resistance — real progress always happens outside our comfort zone….” — Michael Haupt

I don’t consider privacy to be a matter of comfort zones. I consider it a God-given inalienable human right. Yes, the internet — and especially players like Facebook — have destroyed our privacy rights and have seduced us into giving up our privacy rights for their own profit. But that doesn’t mean that I should just shrug my shoulders and give up, thinking, “Oh well, the internet is stealing my privacy so I should just give up and sell it and make some money from it.”

Authoritarian governments have been conning humans into giving up their basic human rights for millennia and now that corporations are doing it doesn’t make it okay. And now PDEs are doing it and justifying it by offering monetary incentive. Sure, they claim to keep our private data private if we so choose but it really isn’t private because the PDEs have our private data.

“ Imagine if every Google search included and Amazon-type recommendation along the lines of “People who searched for X typically search for Y next on their journey towards enlightenment.” — Michael Haupt

I don’t give a damn what other people search for. That is herd mentality. Enlightenment will never be found until we go BEYOND mass consciousness , not by simply moving around within mass consciousness from one “color” to another. An algorithm based on our private personal data can never lead us to enlightenment because enlightenment involves going beyond mass consciousness and all the algorithms mass consciousness comes up with. Enlightenment is the ultimate privacy because it can only be realized on our own by seeing through mass consciousness and divorcing ourselves from the control mass consciousness (and all the algorithms of mass consciousness) has over us.

We can let the algorithms of mass consciousness discover content for us or we can empty our minds of all the excessive thinking that is tied to mass consciousness and in that state allow the greater consciousness that we are a part of to lead us to what we need to learn next in our path to enlightenment and freedom from the herd mind.

You are right in that it is a matter of choice. We can give up our basic human privacy rights to Facebook and let them make a profit from it or we can give up (or sell) our basic human privacy rights to a PDE and let their algorithm direct our choices and do our thinking for us based solely on data (very left-brained). I choose neither.

And even if I did sell my personal data to a PDE I’m still giving away my privacy if I interact in any way on Facebook or any of the other big internet companies. The only way to stop that is to never use social media or buy anything on the internet or interact in any way with big internet companies.

No, algorithms are NOT where the magic happens. Magic happens when we free ourselves from the control algorithms have over us; when we start using our own minds and our own higher spiritual guidance to explore and make choices with rather than handing that over to a left-brained algorithm based solely on data and left-brained rationality.

Amazon has collected a lot of data on me. Their algorithm is always making recommendations for me. 90% of those recommendations I have no interest in whatsoever. But in today’s world this is how we are being trained to find our next read. We are being trained to read what our “friends” are reading (herd mind) or what our personal data might indicate we should read. But we are not being trained to find our next read on our own. We are not being trained to think for ourselves. Let the algorithm think for you.

You know how I like to find my next read? I like to go into an actual physical bookstore (or library) and just wander around until a book jumps off a shelf and hits me in the noggin. That has happened numerous times in my life and every time it happened that book turned out to be the perfect book that I needed to read at that juncture in my life.

Now that is magic! And it’s not a kind of magic that comes from a left-brained algorithm based solely on data and artificial rationality. In fact that kind of true magic requires a suspension of rationality and thinking. But today’s internet world is pushing us away from that kind of true magic into a dependence on algorithms for every decision and action we ever make.

PDEs are essentially saying that this is the way it is so we may as well just give up our basic God-given inalienable human right to privacy in exchange for some cash and a minute fraction of control over what private data gets fed into what algorithm. Now that is a comfort zone! And it’s a comfort zone in which true magic ain’t gonna happen.