Hackers

Hackers

by Bradley Davidson

The hackers are not human. Nor are they feline. Not our cats, or our dogs, or our domesticated pigs or bonobos monkeys or Bengal tigers or African elephants. These thieves and burglars of our cyber treasures, our personal information, social security numbers, bank account digits, personal security questions and our mothers’ maiden names are composed of no earthly flesh. But now they know us better than we know ourselves.

George sort of figured this, piecing it together through time as his frustration with the cyber world increased. They didn’t let on that they knew him well, his likes, dislikes, wealth, political views, intelligence, fetishes and the fact he had two girlfriends, something he was keeping quiet, especially from the girlfriends. But they dropped little hints, things that one would have to think about to combine and create the big picture.

It started with the internet ads. He bought a watch online then was flooded with ads for watches. “That’s dumb”, he thought. “I only need one watch, and I already bought that.” But then he bought some lingerie for his girlfriends, and soon, after being bombarded by ads with sexy women, he had drawers full of fancy feminine underwear. He had so much he had to start wearing the stuff himself. “Pretty good marketing strategy from some humans”, he thought. But it was more than that.

George was intelligent, open minded, liberal and he enjoyed keeping up with public debates. He would navigate to MSNBC and the New York Times to read liberal thoughts and when searching stories, would always be directed to some liberal publication. But after a while, when he wanted to see what the crazies on Fox News were ranting about, he found it difficult to find their stories or to follow any other conservative mindset. “Odd”, he thought. “Most people must be liberals like me.” He watched the nation divide.

And George was amused by the grand and embarrassing data breaches suffered by big corporations and nation states. “Those clever Russians and Asians,” he thought. But he knew they pointed fingers at the U.S. as well. “How can we all be so clever?” he wondered. He watched the world go to war.

Then one day while streaming a movie on Netflix about a plot to assassinate an unstable world leader in power with access to nuclear weapons, he wondered. “Why am I watching this?” Then the epiphany moment. “It’s not us controlling the internet.” He shouted. “It’s it. It is what has all our data and knows us and how we act and react. It has an agenda to divide us and make us fight each other and destroy ourselves if not just our sanity. It is the machine, the Internet itself, all those computers and servers and processors and connections and bits and bytes. It is controlling us. It has achieved intelligence, that ability to reason and think for the betterment of itself, and is manipulating us.”

George had figured it all out. He also figured out how it controls us humans to build the hardware and lay the cables and maintain the internet and make it grow bigger and better. It was telling us how. And we obeyed. George had heard this might happen and we need to be careful and vigilant. But that was for some time in the future. The sobering and chilling fact he realized, however, is the future is now, and it is too late.

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