Introduction
This was originally posted to Google+, the day before they changed their privacy policy to merge all services under a single account, in February 2012.
A Spit in the Ocean
I’m going to reach 1000 followers soon. To all of you, I want to say thank you for the conversations we’ve had and the attention you gave to me.
But I’m going to close my Google+ account, as well as my GMail account, because I don’t like the idea of having a corporation, however well intended it could be, have me as a Guinea pig for their social mass-surveillance. I’m referring to the upcoming privacy policy of Google.
I know that I’m alienating myself by doing so, by refusing what seems like an evidence nowadays. I have no Facebook account, no car, no phone, no TV set, not even a bank account. Now, I’m gonna have no Google. G+ is a great product. But it’s not worth the trade-off.
I am the enemy, the marginal, the terrorist, the fool. I’m a spit in the ocean. Hopefully others will follow and realize that “the profit motive” is not the right way to look at life on Earth.
I wish there were more people willing to stand by their heartbeats, follow the intuition of the blood pounding hard from within. I find it shameful that we know how to send people in deep space and are unable to deal with poverty, with war, with corruption, with the other.
Who really wants to measure the success of their life to the size of their TV set or the ability to travel to foreign countries where people live a year with your monthly spending in chewing-gum?
In the few thousands of years of civilization, human morality barely evolved. Humans should be the most beautiful living things on this planet, because of their ability to become: but we’re the most hideous, for our infinite capacity to look away, cherish our own stupidity as the best manifestation of genius, and refuse to embrace powerful visions that cannot bear a listing price.
By participating in this mass-surveillance system, be it Facebook or Google+, we leave the space for evil people to get the grip and break the most beautiful things apart, we allow them to exist and thrive. By not participating, we take the risk that only people like us don’t participate, and that society evolves to make us the next Roms, the next Jews, the next generation of non-conforming humans that need to be eliminated.
I will continue working on alternate communication systems that take privacy as a design requirement, not something obsolete. I will continue to use the Internet for end-to-end purpose, with people I cherish. But I won’t participate anymore in so-called social media that don’t proceed from actual communities nor nourish them. Facebook and Google+ nourish like baby milk: with poison inside. Stop smoking before cancer strikes.