I am not in Facebook or Myspace, and I do not Twitter, but I am constantly being bombarded with messages from people in LinkedIn and Mylife and other cyber life forms demanding I interact with them. It's not just advertising, they're talking to me personally as if I were already enrolled. In a society so obsessed with privacy concerns, why is this so appealing to people? Why is it OK for companies to do things and learn things about us we would not tolerate if they were done by government? And of course, there's the spam, the junk mail, the robocalls. It's not just annoying. They know my name, my hobbies, they monitor my google and email traffic, they speak or write to me in Spanish because they assume I'm Hispanic, they have my email address. Can't these people figure out a way to earn an honest living? I really can't see any fundamental difference between them and Nigerian scammers or Russian porn merchants. They are all in the same racket

Somehow, the idea this unprecedented intrusion into our private lives is merely to provide a marketing methodology for the Corporate Overmind is supposed to be more reassuring than the fact the government wants to know what I'm doing every minute of the day. I guess that their just using this data for advertising and sales purposes is supposed to make it all right. As if advertising and marketing were respectable activities for decent human beings.

At least, government violation of privacy is something we can understand, we have historical examples, literary speculations. We can guess at their motives. A tyrannical government is something you can vote out of office, or even join an insurrection against. This, you're not even allowed to criticize without risking being called a Communist.These people are trying to figure out ways to screw us we can't even conceive of yet. Not even they are sure how they're going to screw us, but they're still busily erecting the infrastructure to do so. Business doesn't want to take any man's liberty, it just wants to take every man's money.

But I guess its OK. No one is putting a gun to our heads, right? We can always "set the privacy settings". Sheeeeit. I guess it's just private enterprise wanting to "serve you better", "fill your needs", "bring us all together". What magnificent horseshit.