ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Why is this Important?
I'd like to continue discussing human rights as super powers. It's the idea of marrying trends and progress in sync with Western values and globalization with where how we evolved from 1776 in terms of how we perceive ourselves and our rights as individuals in contemporary times. I realized we needed, not only the language to describe our individual rights in light of how we live and behave now, but also discussing what it means for the future to avoid a potential catastrophe in what it means to protect individual rights and sovereignty.
To come up with an exhaustive list of why our rights are of the utmost importance in contemporary times and how they are threatened would be extensive. The society we live in has created, for lack of a better illustration, a room. In the office building that is Western society, we've discovered a black hole of an empty room. It's vastness is unknown, but we know that there's a nugget of gold and that we need to find it. We're continually facing vast uncertainty and risk regarding how to protect our current ourselves from our future selves. The gold nugget of protection is the constitution with the Bill of Rights and its critical components of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Health care has increasingly become part of this equation by protecting your individual sovereignty and not allowing harm to come upon you. But who provides that protection? Even if a governmental entity promised it, how could they fulfill the obligation? Let's not think too deeply about that one in particular. We're striving toward our rights around health care, but in delivering it as a promise, it's not a necessary component yet.
What is an Individual?
If we're going to accept any of the premises of freedom, we have to define an individual as one who consciously controls himself/herself. Existence in a society means the ability to choose and every choice factors into the evolution of your life.
Choice is your individual sovereignty because it defines the being, which will continue to exist and go through the world.
The Sum of Our Choices
We all know companies and governments can track your actions with behavioral tracking software or surveillance that produces data about you to create a profile, which becomes an extension of you. Suppose you bought a house, business, and government entities track the fact that you made a purchase, and based on all the data that went into that purchase, they make predictions about your future behavior. Remember, without you; they cannot make those specific predictions.
Some individuals realize we are losing control of personal data and have applied protections as a reaction to behavior surveillance. The more your virtual and global data footprint expands, the more surveillance of your life grows prevalent, and predictions about your life will proliferate.
One of the key foundational pieces of any new society or future society is to remember that there is no society without the individual. If we don't protect ourselves as individuals, we lose autonomy and our ability to choose whether we lose that autonomy will be quickly lost as well.
Solutions
We need to have a Bill of Rights that makes it so hard for any government, even outside of our own governments, for any big businesses, any hackers or thieves, to be able to access or surveil individuals without their knowledge. If so, it would be severely punishable. You should be able to have a value structure for being able to accept the price that you would be exchanging your data for, and each data point created based on you must be reported into a central repository for all entities.
