"The internet is destroying your life" this slogan says.
Internet monopolies German manager Marie-Luise Wolff sees the brave new world of the super power from data clouds as a dark threat - and this not because of the new wave of censorship in social media.
They are everywhere, giant corporations that know everything about everyone. They suck data from smartphones, during online shopping and Internet searches, they analyze TV viewing behavior and store whereabouts. Marie-Luise Wolff has investigated the creeping conquest of society by the digital superpowers and analyzed its effects on how people live together. Her verdict is a wake-up call: The euphoria with which the transformation of the usual life into its electronic version is celebrated is like the worship of an religious icon.
Super ideology of digitization
The 62-year-old calls the infiltration of life by Google, Amazon, Facebook and the like a "super ideology." Although the platforms signal "abundance and freedom," in reality their business strategies undermined society. "Today, young people prefer texting on their smartphones to having real conversations," she writes in her book "Worship." And there is a noticeable tendency among adults too, she says, to get lost in the endless stream of often meaningless messages that comes in via cell phone, tablet and PC without ever taking a break.
Wolff, who spent her professional life as a manager in the old fashioned energy industry, is concerned about the impact of digital evolution on the human psyche and but even more so about the market power of FAANG corporations. She sees them as monopolies with a reputation for building new things, but destroying much more in the process. The head of the Darmstadt-based energy supplier Entesa reports on desolate pedestrian zones, sprawling data collections and far lowered social standards. She also notes that Europe is not making any contribution to the new age of the platform economy: All the leading companies come from the U.S. or China, and not a single one of the largest 20 companies is from Europe.
The boat is missed
Missed the boat, no longer able to catch up, is the expert's verdict. But isn't this perhaps the way out of a surveillance society that regards data as a commodity and sets up companies solely to make profits as quickly as possible instead of creating sustainable value, as used to be the case in the past?
Wolff's view of Europe, the continent that is hopelessly disconnected from the Internet, is characterized by the belief that the digital turbo-capitalism of the U.S. and China is a malformation that will be fade away one day. Users, whose daily surfing and clicking behavior determines how fabulously successful the seductive arts of Google, Amazon and the like are, appear in Wolff's portrayal only as helpless victims, subjects of sophisticated efforts to exploit them as automatically as possible.
A dark future
It is the picture of a dark future that Wolff paints. While Europe fights with blunt weapons like the General Data Protection Regulation against the superior power of the American giants, a new generation of high-tech companies is already poised to raise the level of algorithmic data espionage to an even more extreme level. Palantir Technologies, an analytics software provider founded by German venture capitalist Peter Thiel with financial help from the CIA intelligence agency, is networking disparate data sources even more thoroughly to identify security threats early. According to Wolff, the Palantir software, named "Gotham" after the setting in the Batman comics, can compare 500 million license plates in just five seconds. Palantir, relationally named after the "seeing stones" from "Lord of the Rings," also taps into motion data and content from social networks.
It sounds like something out of a science fiction movie, but it's already being used to feed databases that are supposed to predict crimes based on artificial intelligence. The german bundesland Hessen bought "Gotham" from Palantir last year to have the software installed in the police IT network under the name "Hessendata." "If you consider the conditions under which people can end up on a suspect list, you will no longer be able to believe in a completely free country," Wolff writes.
In the realm of the digital giants, people are merely commodities or risk factors. Or victims.. They cannot participate in technical progress on their own terms, but only by unconditionally agreeing to the small print from corporate headquarters.
The manager sees the state as the savior from this self-inflicted immaturity. The Government. Yes, she does. It should be up to the state to break up the monopolies before they become even more powerful, she said. Google, Facebook and the other mega-corporations should not be allowed to continue destroying societies by manipulating people's behavior. Wolff: "The power of the digital religion must be broken, if only by smashing the giants."