Strip-Mining Humanity.

A friend whom I've never met, we're connected on LinkedIn and we exchange notes, sent me this quotation the other day. That's one of the weird things about life today. If you have a big social footprint like I do, you have "relationships" with people you're almost sure you'd like to know IRL, but you never will.

There's nothing wrong with that. Just the way of the world, like an old movie with Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan falling in love in old Budapest, from Lubitsch's "Shop Around the Corner."

My friend Kathy, my ersatz Margaret Sullavan, sent me this on Saturday. Admittedly, if you know me even vaguely, you'd know that the modus operandi described below is the kind of thing that sets me off. 

Actually, it's probably the kind of thing that sets everybody off. At least everybody awake enough to realize what's happening in our world and our industry.

What's happening in the world is simple.

You are no longer a human with human rights.

You are a passel of data.

The cow below could be slaughtered and butchered into eighteen constituent parts. But you could sell each of those parts only once.

You, as a passel of pixels can be sliced and diced, sold and resold in-perpetuity. Mr. Potter screamed at George Bailey in Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life," "George Bailey, you're worth more dead than alive." Well, dear reader, you're worth more as binary code than you are as a biped. And you are being sold over and over again.

I removed myself from two of the world's leading child-trafficking sites two months ago (Facebook and Instagram) yet still get almost daily emails from them telling me someone posted something. Which is news in the same way "wave crashes on shore," is news. They have me email. They think they own me. 

Or, as The Wall Street Journal noted:

As advertising people, of course, we are complicit in all this. We work for and we therefore support the giant octopus of surveillance capitalism, where at least one tentacle is gripping your genitals, one your privacy and six or eight more (they are countless) your bank-accounts.

I was always amused by the agency people talking about saving the world with fake ads for fake clients to win fake awards, while what 99.7-percent of most advertising has so stolen our independence and souls and while we're flapping our gums about changing the world, we are sullying it with yet another BOGO banner ad, devoid of wit, craft, kindness or any trace of humanity. 

Treating the world as an extractive industry is everywhere today. The giant oligopolies come in. They strip mine away everything of value. They leave economic and environmental despoilation in their wake. 

They grow richer, more powerful, more evil.

There's little avoiding this.

Some years ago when my best friend Fred was still alive we used to watch old boxing matches on YouTube. I was always a Joe Louis man. Fred's tastes ran to Muhammad Ali.

I watched a video of the fight and reported back to Fred.

"Was it horribly brutal," he asked. "I can't really take these fights anymore."

"The most brutal thing about the fight was the announcer referring to both fighters as 'boys,'" I answered.

That's what I mean about the prevalence of evil. It's in our bloodstream and veins. It's so infiltrated we no longer notice it. Like calling men boys. Or treating the world like a victim.

I don't have an answer. I don't know a way out. Except to redouble your own humanity. Except to say daily, "etiam si omnes, ego non." Even if all others, not I.

Get off social. Stop passing things on and spreading muskism or zuckerism or bezosism, or their active-ingredient, trumpism.

Remind yourself that everything they say is a lie. 

They're not coming for you. They already have you.

All this from an email from an unknown friend.