What Is That Hiding in Plain Sight? Part Two

“More than six hundred years ago, the printing press put the written word into the hands of ordinary people, rescuing the prayers, bypassing the priesthood, and delivering the opportunity for spiritual communion directly into the hands of the prayerful. We have come to take for granted that the internet enables an unparalleled diffusion of information, promising more knowledge for more people: a mighty democratizing force that exponentially realizes Gutenberg’s revolution in the lives of billions of individuals. But this grand achievement has blinded us to a different historical development, one that moves out of range and out of sight, designed to exclude, confuse, and obscure. In this hidden movement the competitive struggle over surveillance revenues reverts to the pre-Gutenberg order as the division of learning in society shades toward the pathological, captured by a narrow priesthood of privately employed computational specialists, their privately owned machines, and the economic interests for whose sake they learn.”

“The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power” by Shoshana Zuboff.

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What does THAT all mean?

Well, I am not here to proselytize Zuboff’s compelling thesis about the overreach of Google, Facebook, machine learning and the danger AI poses to democracy.

Instead, as I wrote in Part I:

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I concluded a long time ago that Alexander’s Discovery is so simple and persuasive that it masters the remarkable ability to hide itself in plain view.

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Then I promised to give you another example of this same phenonomen happening in parallel – something that hides itself in plain view while causing immense damage to our society. Something every individual is part of, without really knowing they are. The answer?

Surveillance Capitalism. 

If your mind goes a little numb reading “Surveillance Capitalism” then you may be feeling - maybe for the first time - how your audience feels when they first hear the words “Alexander Technique”. It means nothing, is even a little misleading.

Your audience is certainly not going to react to hearing “Alexander Technique” as though you just declared the moniker denoting the most urgent health issue facing humanity in our modern times. 

Just as surely, you don’t react to reading “Surveillance Capitalism” as though you just heard the moniker denoting the cause for increasing polisation of personal relationships that is weakening modern democracies. 

Although it also is everywhere, it also can not be seen.

Why is the blind ascendent over the informed? 

If we understand that, maybe we can find a pathway for Alexander's Discovery to inform health priorities in dysfunctional coordination. How is that?

Well, I will write about that next…