Total Rekall - Le Alternative -

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The articles of Cassandra Crossing I'm under license CC BY-SA 4.0 | Cassandra Crossing is a column created by Marco Calamari with the "nom de plume" of Cassandra, born in 2005.

More than a reasonable doubt from Cassandra.

This article was written on May 23, 2024 from Cassandra

Cassandra Crossing 583/ Total Rekall

Are individuals still capable of drawing a red line not to be crossed, in order to resist the rising tide of technocontrol?

The most intriguing among the 24 readers will have thought that today's article could refer to the announcement, made the day before yesterday by a well-known manufacturer of window operating systems, regarding a new service designed to "help" its customers" to live a more brilliant, simpler and less tiring life.

The service described in the advert very frequently stores the computer screen on the hard disk, and processes what is obtained with false Artificial Intelligence techniques to allow the lucky user to retrace back what has been done on the computer, in order to remember forgotten things, find deleted data and also obtain "better" answers to searches carried out on your computer.

Handsome!

And obviously all this with the broadest assurances that the information is exclusively stored and analyzed locally, and that no information will ever leave the very private and highly protected computer of the very lucky future user of the new and magnificent service from the well-known manufacturer of window operating systems.

Of course, of course… (© DataKnightmare)

And the moon is made of green cheese! (© Cassandra)

The fact that the operating system of the well-known manufacturer, not from today but for a long time, sends “At home” a continuous flow of “telemetry data” whose content cannot be verified by the user, certainly does not affect anyone's trust in the new services offered by the well-known manufacturer.

Indeed, some of the most naive will drop the "load of 11” pointing out that in any case, the “call home“All operating systems and applications do it…

… commercial – adds Cassandra sternly – given that free and open source operating systems and applications in general do not do this, and when they send information “home”, what it is and for what reason it is done is totally verifiable.

Let's go back to the cryptic title of this statement from your favorite prophetess. Yes, in fact the title is mischievously inspired by the film "Total recall” — Act of strength, and the related story by Philiph K. Dick “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” — We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.

In Dick's imagination there operates a company, Rekall, that handles memories wholesale, extracting them from the minds, or producing them themselves, mixing them and reimplanting them in the minds of their customers.

In this way, those who want to give up part of the memories, perhaps bad ones, of their life can replace them with others of their choice, more beautiful, interesting and happy. This at the price that no one, NO ONE, can any longer be sure that their memories are authentic, because obviously even the memory of having been Rekall customers is removed.

Of course, a careful examination of the expenses in the bank account would reveal that there is something wrong, such as a strange and large payment to a company you have never heard of before; however, in the novel, Rekall also encounters technical problems that produce effects that are as striking as they are unexpected, and which the 24 well-informed readers certainly remember well.

The parallel, which is actually a bit askew, ends here.

Where is the parable, where is the fact that Cassandra wants to highlight?

All in all, in the case in question it is a question of preserving a part of one's life on the computer, helping one's memories and not erasing or replacing them.

But the crux of the matter is precisely putting one's "memories" into the hands of others, whatever the justification and however legitimate and reassuring the reasons seem. Even if there is no talk of deletions or transplants, making a part of one's life and mind available to "third" entities is only a first step along the road to total perdition.

So the problem is that it is preferable to avoid news that is too good to be true? Or the need not to trust what companies say about their intentions and their concerns about satisfying our needs, needs that we don't even know we have?

No, absolutely. The real problem is the acceptance of a new technology just to have a service that we suddenly feel needed, because we are now conditioned to desire new things just for the fact that they are new.

The real problem is taking the declarations of intent of a global multinational at face value, humanizing it and placing a trust in it that can only be given to another person, not to a non-human entity, devoted by rule and law only to the profit of its shareholders.

It is unreasonable and unnatural to expect such an entity to act ethically, giving up part of the profits it could obtain. Ethics is, only sometimes, a category that concerns people, not nonhuman legal entities.

The real problem is living, even from the point of view of technologies, in an eternal present, an ever-open toyland in which one is fed and pampered by continuous novelties, and in which no one cares or worries about what these novelties imply for the future of people, of society, of democracy, of the planet.

The real problem, in the end, is as always individual; never drawing a red line, a personal limit that we are not willing to cross. A limit decided by us in many fields of life, such as in the case of adoption "on impulse” of new technologies and new services.

And that's why our ears are sprouting; like in Collodi's fairy tale someone says they want to take us to Toyland, when in reality they want to make drums out of us.

And unlike Pinocchio, for us there will be no blue fairy to fix our mistakes.

Marco Calamari