The Gilded Age (redux)
Welcome to the future
Is history repeating itself and are we back in a Gilded Age, much like the one depicted in the HBO series? I like period pieces and I enjoyed the series. Inspired by these thoughts, I have asked Google Bard to write a more contemporary script and, while this is certainly not going to win an Emmy(1), it captures the spirit of what is going on.
[SCENE START] INT. SARAH'S APARTMENT - DAY
SARAH, a mid-30s woman, wakes up to the buzz of her phone. She unlocks it, oblivious to the data collected from her facial recognition scan, the apps she opens, and the search terms she enters.
She heads to the kitchen, her smart home devices recording her every move, from the temperature she sets to the coffee she orders. She puts on her fitness tracker, unaware that it's relaying her heart rate, sleep patterns, and exercise data to a data broker.
As she heads out the door, Sarah's voice assistant responds to her request for the weather. The assistant logs her voice command, adding to the vast trove of data about her life.
EXT. STREET - DAY
Sarah walks down the street, her every interaction with others being tracked by social media apps and digital billboards. She makes a purchase at a store, unwittingly providing her credit card information and location data.
Sarah's digital footprint is growing exponentially, a rich tapestry of her personal information being woven into the fabric of the digital world. Unbeknownst to her, she's the target of invisible predators, data brokers who are monetizing her life without her consent.
[SCENE END]
Substitute me for Sarah and I can see myself in this movie, blissfully enjoying the convenience of digital connectedness. Like many, I have decided that this trade-off is to my benefit. Or is it?
In the United States, the raw data that we create is not considered personal property, and privacy is not a Human Right. Have we, therefore, created conditions for exploitation like what we had in the early days of the Industrial Revolution?
It is up to us to decide.
No Hollywood writers have been hurt while I was writing this.