Invasion of the Data Snatchers: The Net Draws Tighter

Thaddeus Howze

Guest Blogger: Thaddeus Howze
Crossposted from 'The Good Men Project'



If you started with the video, you might have had the impression you’d heard (or read) this somewhere before. You have. It was part of a famous 1930 radio broadcast that began like this:

"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment."

This is the introduction to H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds. In his book, he theorized about a vast and cool intelligence that watched Mankind’s every move before making the decision to come to Earth to conquer and destroy Humanity. Sounds grim. This radio broadcast actually put fear in the hearts of people everywhere. It is one of the 20th century’s greatest hoaxes. How prophetic a hoax Wells would never know.

Why begin a video about the loss of privacy to future technology using language very similar to that broadcast? Mostly because today’s skeptical mindset dismisses the loss of privacy as little more than a hoax, something to be talked about on the news and then forgotten.

But before you decide to forget, let me enlighten you on a few things:

Click here to read the rest of this Good Men Project article.