BIT Off More Than They Can Chew

“Big (Internet) Tech” (from here on out, “BIT” companies) has been on a steep decline for the last 18 months. It hit the stock market officially between July-November of 2021. BIT companies saw nothing but growth for an unnatural amount of time. Quarter after quarter, more subscribers joining everything. Year after year, revenues were going up. Stock prices were going up. Everybody was behaving bullishly on everything. Even stupid ideas for businesses designed to fail got investment money. If you attended any pitch contest in the last 10 years you know it didn’t take much to build a little unicorn.

But something very odd occurs in the rhetoric of these companies. They are regarded on one hand as more powerful than God, with more money than any kingdom in history. On the other hand, they are supposedly democratic landscapes. People universally say things like, “Google knows you better than you know yourself.” If that is true, perhaps you never really knew yourself to begin with. Better yet, if you never knew yourselves to begin with, all the data you ever gave Google about yourself was wrong and that would make a vast amount of their products ineffective at what they promise.

This exposes the underlying flaw in the premise that BIT has the goods on you: you think you actually know yourself! Ironic, because most of Google’s data is on Search.

Life’s A BIT And Then They Die

Social media companies are decaying BIT by BIT. Twitter being led off the exchange was part of that correction. Pinterest, Meta, and Snap have all been broken in half or greater. I think some of those companies have reached a point where their stock valuation is lower today than it was at their IPO. That should be a clear signal that the original thesis of these platforms was wrong especially given that all of these companies collectively failed, it should tell you that their theses were wrong.

Human beings want to spend less time online, not more. That is why BIT went all in on fabricating the illusion that COVID-19 was a life-ending catastrophe. Without it, there would have been no way to dramatically increase the average time spent online and increased valuation for other BIT related services. Just look at nearly any public company’s stock value. Why on Earth should they have skyrocketed during the armageddon event all the “experts” were predicting?

Because BIT controlled the flow of information to convince people that was wanted.

If big tech were actually powerful enough to place a key-logger on your computer, hack your camera so they can watch your eye movements, with computers and human beings monitoring 24/7…they still wouldn’t necessarily know you at all. Also, the purpose of all of these operations is to increase stock valuation, revenue/profit, etc. It isn’t mystical or confusing. There is no distinct political motivation. No belief system exactly. It’s about those very simple goals, with a lot of window dressing. If your behavior is not driving online purchases, they stop caring about you – they do not generally stalk you. If you are being attacked online it’s more likely a family member, friend, or colleague of yours. Think of that as Little (People) Tech (aka LPT) I guess.

Big Tech Is Run By Little Boys

M of their power is bluster, not reality. You think you would face torture if you oppose big tech companies. As a person who has faced off with the richest man in the world, and all of these software bros, I can tell you they are not scary at all. They are the softest people in the world and their spirits are more brittle than peppermint bark.

The data you should be most afraid of being in the hands of BIT is your email address, password, name, IP address, and things of that nature. These are much more valuable to hackers than your Facebook likes which you can control. The things that you post are almost irrelevant to the BIT. As I’ve written about before, Twitter was regulated by the FTC for illegally phishing for 150,000,000 email addresses/passwords which belonged to their users. They majorly abused this and Elon Musk will continue to do so.

Elon Musk still has that phished list. The media is having a field day complaining about fake hate speech and beefs nobody cares about on a platform that nobody uses by celebrities and journalists. That is what people are discovering now. The general public is nauseated by watching news coverage of “serious” people like Anderson Cooper or Tucker Carlson, using the word tweet and focusing on a child’s play thing while discussing real news like wars. It is embarrassing.

Where are the adults in the room?

They’re bitching at each other on Twitter like a bunch of herbs.

So yeah, BIT has a lot of data on the 1,000,005 times you liked posts reaffirming your political bias. I think it’s a little bit beating a dead donkey or elephant though. Your political party registration is enough these days to know exactly what you are willing to publicly admit to thinking, and that is how you’re going to vote. Not to mention that voting systems in most places in America are a bidding bribery system now. But election meddling happens a lot more at the polling level than it does on Twitter.

All The Data You Have Is Corrupted Anyway

People have become more concerned with producing, collecting, analyzing, and reporting on data than they are concerned with the thing they are reporting on and what we can actually do about it. Big tech doesn’t even have enough data to bail themselves out of the tailspin they are facing right now. The philosophy that more data equals better decisions is so false it’s actually scary. It isn’t the opposite either. If you are figuring out what to eat for dinner, you need to select from available restaurants. You do not need to collect data on every single menu item from all the restaurants that have ever been in business anywhere on the planet. You’d starve to death before you ate any food and the data would have killed you.

That is kind of what’s happening now. Data is starving us while we search for food.

Stop Outthinking Yourselves

Advertisers don’t need nearly as much data as they think they do, either. Remember, consumers don’t exactly know who they are either. Most people are crushingly not self aware. So collecting data on them isn’t really necessary. They are easily swayed. Also, a lot of consumer buying decisions aren’t theirs. It is up to the distributors the consumer goes to. Don’t believe me? Think about a product like Coca Cola.

A consumer can purchase a Coca Cola now almost anywhere you can think of. Amazon, Rite Aid, AMC movie theaters, Costco, you name it they got it. However, a consumer goes to those other places with other buying intent in mind. Coca Cola is generally not the center of a person’s thought process. Even when they go get a Coke every lunch break, they are enjoying their lunch break – with their favorite beverage. Coca Cola therefore, in that one example, is in the lunch break enjoyment business.

Coca Cola spent tens of billions of dollars over decades on Facebook, Twitter, et al but they never left the lunch break enjoyment (and other moments in a person’s day) business. Also, Coca Cola (and every advertiser) handed over their strategy to these platforms. Instead of building their own distribution platform, they told Amazon, Facebook, etc. how they talk to their customers. Now those platforms can manipulate brand awareness and in some cases sales for these companies trusting them to advertise. In other words, Amazon is responsible for the unproductive bidding for advertising dollars between competitors like Pepsi & Coke all while penultimately stealing the advertising & sales strategy from both companies all at once. Amazon eventually started their “Basics” line to white label products based on all of this effectively co-opted strategic marketing data. Provided at will, by advertisers. 

With that data, big tech can certainly bend a brand over its knee.

If this all happens silently, or without an open discussion (as it happens) that means it will go unnoticed. Unacknowledged. Unchanged. With that system in place, what bit tech has in terms of data, is everything. Yet they provide nothing. There has never been a demonstrable benefit to all of the analytics provided by companies like META for advertisers. Twitter is even worse, because a lot of brands experienced negative consequences from suffering the brunt of activist groups or competitors staging opposition to devalue each others’ brands.

Deactivate. Delete. Delist.

Do not live in fear of Big Tech. BIT has a few of your email addresses, a password or two, some of your online buying habits, your political affiliation, old posts, some DM’s, pictures, video, your voice, a few IP addresses, maybe your contacts, and possibly some secrets that would destroy you if anybody found out. Their persona is that of a mafia, but they’re a bunch of lames. Bean counters and computer programmers should not strike fear into your heart. Besides, they are not nearly as powerful as perceived. It’s a lot easier, and healthier to live without them. That part is definitely your choice.

The simplest way to destroy these companies is to do one or more of these things:

• Deactivate your account with a company who you fear abused your data.
• Delete the application for companies who you know abused your data.
• Lobby to have those companies’ stocks delisted from stock exchanges.

The one thing you have to do is stop complaining about this stuff on the very platforms that you’re complaining about. That is about the stupidest thing I can imagine. Look back at Elon Musk using his Twitter account to trash the company while he was bidding on it, but not trying to lower the price. It was just a billionaire beating off with words to distract people from what he was doing in the background. All of these companies are rackets. Fronts that pretended to be in service of connecting people, but that only divided to conquer us. The data they have is no longer working for them, though.

That data is not working for big tech because the people who produced it didn’t know themselves, the people analyzing didn’t understand people, and the people using it didn’t realize they never needed so much of it in the first place. It has become a common idea that “data is the most valuable commodity on the planet.” That is pathetic. It isn’t true, and even those companies know it isn’t true. If that data genuinely reflected actual human activity, it might be useful. But it doesn’t.

So what data does big tech really have?

I don’t even care and you shouldn’t either.