Wednesday 18 April 2018

ico or vires in numeris

Not content with having nudged public sentiment sufficiently for a pivot towards isolationism and fascism, reportedly the data-analyst company that scrapped data from untold millions of social-media users to spin those attitudes into a concerted, targeted campaigns that appealed to our insecurities and vanities did so with the ulterior motive of wading into the crypto-currency market, arguably a murkier place due to the slapdash competition than their initial, creepy harvest of personal information, with plans to launch an initial coin offering, eminent until a whistleblower came forward.
The blockchain architecture that frees electronic currency of traditional financial institutions was to be touted as a means of safeguarding one’s personal data, though it was unsurprisingly unclear how that would have exactly worked or whether the firm would disclose the fact that it had built dossiers on us all already. As chilling as this abuse of trust and opaqueness is and each of us should take action to signal that this sort of behaviour is not acceptable, it also strikes me as ultimately comforting and hopefully to know that society, both polite and impolite, does not quite descend into tribalism without a lot of help and manipulation—still easily duped are we.