Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke - Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry Unto the Limits of the Possible
We are magicians. We work in computer science. It's an arcane discipline full of seemly magical formulas to folks who don't do maths. Even the most junior desktop support technician will seem like they do magic when they fix someone's PC.
We learned programming to create magic of our own. To make computers solve problems for us. I access a non physical world through glass and electricity. I communicate with bursts of light carried through glass cables. Our language is full of magical references like daemons: small programs that do our bidding.
But what happens when we stop understanding our fields? What happens when we wander into the dark forest and collect mana without considering what we give in return for that mana? What happens when we go into strange walled gardens rather than the open web we knew?
We didn't realise that rather than a market garden, we have wandered into a different bounded realm. We were asked to pay a price. We gave our real names to Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and Google. We made the mistake that our ancestors knew not to do. You never give your real name to the Fae, for Knowing of a true name gives them power over you.
We gave more than our names; we gave our emotions, our connections. All in the name of using a "free social network", that is neither social nor free.
“Good folk, I have no coin;
To take were to purloin:
I have no copper in my purse,
I have no silver either,
And all my gold is on the furze
That shakes in windy weather
Above the rusty heather.”
“You have much gold upon your head,”
They answer’d all together:
“Buy from us with a golden curl.”
She clipp’d a precious golden lock,
She dropp’d a tear more rare than pearl [..]Christina Rossetti - Goblin Market
We have a comprehension and consent issue when it comes to our online life. If you cannot comprehend the consequences of these services you use and do not know what is gathered from you — you cannot consent to what is done with that data.
We entered this realm with no idea of the price. We thought the price we paid was merely our digital footprints, the tiny pieces of us created from our browser metadata and the conversations we had with our friends.
We ate the fruit of a news-feed, the sharing of information, of community built in these locked realms. We set up shop in these realms as big tech drained us of our energy and our ability to find information. The walls became solid; the path out obscured. The fruit seemed delicious, but we discovered the fruit to be poisonous, as disinformation floods our feeds and radicalises us. The walled gardens of Web 2.0 choose what to show you; the gardens starve you of information. The Fae show you the posts that they want to get a reaction from you to feed the poppet they created from the tiny parts of you that were discarded as you walked along their paths.
We thought the price we paid was merely the creepy annoyance of advertising following us around the Internet. We knew the NSA tracked us — after all they track everyone and what you post on the Internet is for everyone to see.
If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.
In the meantime, the goblin markets keep you in place. With the shades of your friends and family to hold you there. The social networks steal mana from you. They take your metadata, yes — they also collect your emotions. The Fae created information out of your reactions and they turned that information into power.
How does mere information become power? The idiom is knowledge is power after all?
What has happened to our friends and family as they become more divided? What caused so many folks that we know to become so radicalised? We can argue that we didn't see the signs before, or that now they have permission to voice their thoughts.
The path to radicalisation doesn't appear with huge signposts. It's small. It looks cosy with folks who share your fears and darkest ideas. They camouflage it in hope and a false community. Folks followed the path laid out by networks created by the Fae who allied with the Koch Networks and Vote Leave. Cambridge Analytica managed to lead people deeper into the dark realm.
None of us understood the real price we paid. The payment was taken gradually from us binding us to these realms. Until we saw we were trapped and so were our friends.
It is hard to define what the price we paid was. Until we can understand how these networks of tech and fascism managed to do so, we will never understand. It's too big. It's too much to see the bigger picture in all it's detail. Pieces of us defined as personal data, or in the case of Facebook, having a shadow profile: your account and all the weird bits of metadata they hold on you, created as you tasted their fruits.
At times our Internet doesn't feel tangible, so we must turn to other ways to explain what is happening. We need to understand what is really being built here. This isn't just a bunch of databases filled with your connection information. This is an influence engine.
Shadow profiles are too weak a term for what is being built and what the intentions of the builders are.
We need to turn to ancestral memory, to the time of sympathetic magic. When folks knew something was wrong, but it was hard to understand what was going on.
In witchcraft, folks often created small effigies to which they added small pieces of a person. It acted as a representation of that person, this could be used to protect or harm that person. In more modern folklore we call these poppets.
The poppet could be made of anything, and anything could be added to it to tie it closer to a person. Hair, nails, teeth, the dust where you walked. Once a magic user had constructed the poppet they could influence you. It could be used to protect you, or give you good fortune. It could also be used for evil doings against you; to cause bad things to happen to you.
Our digital realms have similar dangers. Your virtual footprints can be tracked, yes, but the Fae in this realm are our modern corporations. They grew their power by gathering all your virtual footprints. They created more digital pieces of you. They took the virtual dust of where you wandered online. They created your digital poppet and sold duplicates of your virtual dust with others. They traded what they gathered about you to each other. At first to influence you, they wanted to sell you their wares in their markets — but the Fae in this realm also gave you poisonous fruit to eat. The more you ate of the fruit, the more you gave them.
In time as your poppets grew in number as the fae in this realm discovered that they could not only track you, but they could influence you further. They could use the poppets to find the most persuadable among us. Then they crafted their power so they could persuade the most powerful among us. To allow them to collect more virtual pieces of us. In time even the physical traces of us, our DNA, our medical records were added to these poppets.
Digital poppets can be used to deny us healthcare. Digital poppets can be used to target us, so that we persuade other people on behalf of the Fae to undermine our democracies. The goblin markets and the fruit they give us, and the poppets they make of us can be used not just to track our past, but also to change our futures. These poppets are used to undermine democratic processes and to enable fascism for the Fae to hold on to power.
My witch and sorceress is sitting in the shadow behind a brick pile.
She is sitting there, practising witchcraft
against me, fashioning figurines of me
I am going to dispatch against you thyme and sesame,
I will scatter your sourceries, will stuff your words
back into your mouth!May the witchcraft you performed be aimed at yourself,
May the figurines you made represent yourself,
May the water you drew be that of your own body!
May your spell not close in on me, may your words not overcome me.Maqlu - The short version.
Akkadian anti magic incantation
The Occult Witchcraft and Magic, an Illustrated History. Christopher Dell
In Akkadia thousands of years ago the MAQLÛ (burning) was performed to free a victim from witchcraft and evil intentions. It was performed in July. As time went on it changed from a short ritual to an overnight effort. When the ritual was discovered it covered nine tablets of cuniform. Eight of the tablets were the rather repetitive incantations. One tablet contained the how to.
Whoever you are, O witch, who has taken out clay (for a figurine) of me from the river,
Buried my figurines in a dark house,
Buried my (funerary) water in a grave,
Collected my leavings from a garbage pit,
Cut off my hem in the house of a launderer,
Collected the dust from my feet at the threshold.
I have sent to the gate of the quay—they have bought me tallow for your figurine,
I have sent to the city ditch—they have pinched off for me the clay for your figurine.
I am sending against you a burning oven, flaring Girra, [...]Whoever you are, O witch, who keeps on seeking me,
Who keeps on searching for me with evil intent,
Who keeps on looking for me to no good purpose.
Whoever you are, O witch, who has made a figurine of me—
Who has looked at my form and created my image,
Who has seen my bearing and given rich detail to my physical build,
Who has comprehended my appearance
And reproduced my features,
Who has bound my body,
Who has tied my limbs together, who has twisted my sinews.
They faced an unseen enemy causing their misfortune. They knew that someone got something of them, dust from their path, a hair, etc. Yes it was superstition. But we have modern superstitions and conspiracy theories. Our hardware hasn't recently changed. We still have a complex landscape to navigate, as did our ancestors. When you free yourself from being under someone's influence, it takes time, it takes effort. It takes deliberate intention.
This was a way of restoring peace of mind to an individual. The witch would be punished. There is a lesson for us to learn in modern times. Ancient folks believed that sympathetic magic could cause misfortune and a physical representation of the person, with a physical item that the victim had touched could make it possible. The unseen world affecting the physical world. The ancient world believed in magic and it had political implications, courts had magicians. Courts after all have always been places of power.
Magic and the fear of a witch getting a piece of you to have power over you remained as folk knowledge long after empires crumbled.
We have advanced but we access more of this world that we can only access through our devices. Pieces of glass that run on electricity. Showing us information through light. It doesn't seem like reality to many of us. What we do in this realm doesn't seem real. To many what happens online has no consequences - but we have real consequences happening in our physical world from our devices, our looking glasses. It's a dark mirror, but this dark reflection has power over us.
Our walled gardens did not spring up overnight, nor did we necessarily walk into them. Sometimes the walls sprung up around us with the tools we used already with our word processors and email. We were invited, in a reversal of not inviting eldritch powers into our homes, we accepted their invitation and their realm spread into our homes and communities. We were encouraged to send invites out, sweet fruit to entice our friends and family to frolic and explore these new realms.
Before we knew it we were bound to these networks as the Fae kept us close, building poppets and using our poppets to keep us there. To serve us information, to help us organise. Before we knew it, we were trapped in this dark realm being tricked and plundered for our mana.
We had no idea about what data they would collect. We had no idea about what that data could be used for. We had a vague idea about adverts funding the fun we had on the internet.
There is no limit to the amount and variety of data - and, ultimately, knowledge - that may be produced from an object, event, or interaction, given enough time, distance and computational power.
Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert Chapter 1: Data about Data (about Data) The Secret Life of Data: Navigating Hype and Uncertainty in the Age of Algorithmic Surveillance
We had no idea that our metadata told so much about us. We had no idea that what we fed into these services would help our Tech barons, the modern Fae to move fast and break our democracies.
People still find it hard to comprehend how much is collected or what that data can be used for. They find it hard to see just where it is copied, shared and collated. We think it is just for advertising. Or for surveillance by the authorities. We think of the data being more like footprints left on the digital landscape. We have no idea about the propaganda potential. The same psychology that is used to sell us product can be used to persuade us to campaign and vote against our own interests. It can twist our emotions and point us towards new alliances so we support the thieves of our time and our attention. Who aim to have us distracted and compliant in their realms, rather than exploring and creating the open web.
Due to Snowden we discovered that the NSA were collating our information to build social profiles of us and our contacts. We had no idea that the authorities could just purchase data and add to those profiles. None of us realised social networks asking us to upload our address book so we could send an invite was effectively snitching on our contacts.
As adverts follow us around the internet on news sites and shopping sites, we accept cookies to access information. We give our digital fingerprints over. It's only tiny bits of metadata after all. What's the danger in that?
What traces do we leave as we surf the web? We leave a treasure trove of evidence for digital forensics for one thing.
Locard's exchange principle: "Every Contact Leaves a trace". Locord was the father of Forensic science, he postulated that two objects that came in contact with one another would leave traces of each other. This applies even with our metadata. We leave forensic traces when we visit websites. If anything we are encouraged to do so. We are forced to do so. It's great for web analytics to know their audience. It's even better for law enforcement and the NSA to gather evidence of where you've been as well. While corporates build digital poppets out of what we give them. Agencies like the NSA construct their own digital poppets of us. To influence and track us, to apply leverage or just get rid of their targets.
Metadata was the key to the NSA’s plan to “identify, track, store, manipulate and update relationships” across all forms of intercepted content. An integrated map, presented graphically, would eventually allow the NSA to display nearly anyone’s movements and communications on a global scale. In their first mission statement, planners gave the project the unironic name “the Big Awesome Graph.” Inevitably it acquired a breezy acronym, “the BAG.”
Barton Gellmon Inside the NSA’s Secret Tool for Mapping Your Social Network
Although the urge for law enforcement and the security services to construct their own poppets is not limited to the USA. Europol is currently sitting on a mass of illegally collected data from it's citizens and residents. It asked the EU to retroactively allow them to keep that data, rather than delete that data.
The only reason that Data is the new Oil, is because Oil is political power. The more of your past that can be gathered, the easier it is for bad actors to try to dictate your future. To influence you, to blackmail you, to lock you up in the future. This potential is enabled by the information that they gather about you. To assemble into a poppet of you. They have your real name, because they encouraged you to give them this, which enabled them to attach it to your poppet.
As Gilbert and Sinnreich write in the Secret Life of Data: Every virtual contact leaves a trace.
How did our poppets get constructed, how did our Fae get all of that data? How is it being added to now?
We were sold an idea that the internet was built on data purely for advertising. We're told our eyeballs and attention are what pays for the internet. Meanwhile publishers struggle with their business models as folks share their wares on Zuckerberg and Musk's goblin markets.
We learned to protect ourselves, to limit the virtual footprints we left. We tried not to leave dust for the Fae to add to our poppets. We have ad-blockers after all, we can wipe our google IDs and get a fresh one. We can mess up our virtual traces. But there's more than one source for traces of us. Throughout our lives we create data from the moment our births are recorded. As we get older, our parents create data about us, then as we form our own households we create more bits of us.
We are now several decades into the idea of storecards and loyalty points. In themselves supermarket points weren't contentious. We had stores like the local cooperatives and you would build up your local dividend. My father remembers his mother in the fifties and sixties using her dividends to get things. People would save up labels from marmalade and sugar packets to get a recipe book or a racist badge.
After all, stores already have purchasing data from what you buy. Why not enable them to sell more stuff to you that you like?
Supermarkets and products, like most advertisers want to know what products people will buy. So keeping a track of what people buy and rewarding them for their loyalty seems like a logical thing to do. It's even reciprocal, folks can use their points and coupons to save money. For many poor people this is a lifeline.
Protecting your privacy becomes a luxury. People may sneer at folks using the loyalty schemes, but this is the price many of us pay for being poor. Sometimes it's the difference between you and your kids being fed.
More data builds up. It's an asset now. It's valuable and when an organisation want's to make more money here's a ready made database of customers and buying habits. You can sell other stuff to them. Insurance, Funeral services, you can point them at other shops if they pay you for recommending them. They can also then add the customer to their own databases. The Fae can trick you with gold. "We will pay for your data", they say. It's a fair price, look what we are offering. So the poppet grows and more of the Fae create their own poppets with duplicates of your data.
As the Sinnreich and Gilber write in their book the secret life of data say: Data multiplies, and generates more metadata.
Databrokers are collectors of our virtual traces. They hoard it and they have more data than they know what to do with that data. Databrokers buy more storage and add to it. They knew this data would be useful to someone. With our virtual poppets, every piece of data, represents you a little bit more. So the knowledge they have over you grows the power they can sell to others to use on you, to influence you grows.
There are new goblin markets that spring up in this ecosystem, some mobile games exist purely to collect peoples data. So that down the line the developers can make money from the sale of that data to databrokers. Our lack of privacy on our devices is a money-maker as more data is generated. The Fae and their allies power grows as our poppets are added to.
Real-Time Bidding (RTB) allows foreign states and non-state actors to obtain compromising sensitive personal data about key European personnel and leaders. [...]
Our examination of RTB data reveals Cambridge Analytica style psychological profiling of target individuals’ movements, financial problems, mental health problems and vulnerabilities, including if they are likely survivors of sexual abuse.
Europes Hidden Security Crisis - Dr Johnny Ryan FRHistS and Wolfie Christl
While digital poppets seem restricted to the digital realm, more of our physical realm merges with the digital realm. As our medical records are digitised and made available online, this is a rich source of information and therefore power that can and will be added to your poppet.
Governments and health authorities around the world are allowing access to medical records to companies like Palantir, ICE uses medical records to find their targets. Health Startups are encouraging us to use their online services. This data will leak, because that's what data wants to do. It wants to flow. It will be leaked, the information can and will be hacked. It is only a matter of time.
“So many of our worst secrets – I mean worst of worst, things we might really, really not want to share with the entire world – they exist online. They’ll exist in the database of some company you used,”
Aleksanteri Kivimäki - Accused and convicted of Vastaamo hack and Ransom
Our Governments and societal infrastructure have not thought about the consequences, they trust startups and our information companies to secure our data from dark forces that would harm us. But those ever so helpful, so convenient companies are not qualified to safeguard your data. Sometimes they are naive; sometimes they are just incompetent. It doesn't matter though. Because once that information gets out anyone can construct their own poppet with a copy of your virtual footsteps, your data that was uploaded to the dark realm and use it against you.
The consequences of unsecured data were brought into the light in Finland with a mental health startup Vastaamo.
While startups may claim that patient data will be anonymized, Privacy advocates have found over the years that data can be deanonymized.
The general public don't have the knowledge to understand how modern propaganda is micro targeted, much like advertising. Well, I mean it is all advertising really.
Because to our tech barons, the modern Fae, regimes are just another customer. As long as they pay with money, or tax breaks that's just fine. The ecosystem of smaller tech companies also think nothing of allowing despots to commit human right violations with their products as long as the shareholder value is good. The line must go up.
We had no idea that by sharing our address books and friending each other online we were building shadow profiles of folks who didn't use those services. We helped to create poppets of folks who never signed up to the digital realms. By friending each other and creating communities to co-ordinate online we gave valuable information about how we were connected socially. We gave the possibility of a dragnet through our connections and our communications. Even through our phone'sand the apps we use and the games we play
While we were made aware in 2013 about the Five Eyes by Edward Snowden, we didn't comprehend the danger we were truly in.
One way of working out if the data you’re gathering is particularly sensitive is to do a thought experiment: what would happen if this data got into the hands of a malicious actor? Who would be keen to get their hands on it? What are the worst things that they could do with this data?
Zara Rahman - Dangerous Data the role of data collection in genocides 2nd November 2016
Some of us now understand the petri-dish that information brokers have created to enable modern propaganda. We are in an information war, with democracies persecuting their own citizens aiming to use digital poppets to influence a populace to vote for surveillance and worse. As citizens we must understand that some of our legislatures are actively engaging in propaganda and disinformation to help them to enable repressive laws to be voted in.
We had no idea that we were in effect snitching on our friends. We enabled the creation of their poppets. So that any bad actor could infer the existence of your connections, the folks who are a part of your community. Now they were targets, and the NSA built up their poppets from the pieces of metadata we gave the Fae and their allies in power to enable them to manipulate your friends and contacts later.
In 2023 NOYB complained to the EU ombudsman about the European Commissions use of targeted advertising in twitter to attempt to ram through chat control. They targeted a specific demographic of the population in EU countries that were unlikely to vote for this legislation. The EU sought to get the people targeted to kick up a fuss and put pressure on their European Parliament Political Representatives, their MEPs.
So you know now, that Digital poppets are being created by various organisations. They can add to these poppets by purchasing consumer data from companies. We also feed data in. It's not just that you can be tracked by the information collected about you. Propaganda can be targeted at you, or the folks you listen to. No one is immune from propaganda. Anyone can be turned onto the dark paths.
This data is the dust from our path, our hair, our clothes. We gave them the tools to build their own clay figurines of us. It's past time for us to turn against organisations utilising that power. We need to keep bringing in that misuse of our data into the light. We will need to keep prosecuting those who construct and use our digital poppets against us. We need to be prepared to enforce the laws and actually punish them. We need to be prepared to pressure our legislatures to fine them larger amounts and ensure the money is paid.
Mass data collection and central registries are a very useful tool for authoritarian regimes which can facilitate genocide. It can also whip up and radicalise a populace against minorities, against refugees.
As Facebook decided to provide free internet to places like Myanmar, it locked in the populace on it's social network. Which fanned the flames against the Rohingya contributing to the Rohingya genocide. Facebook gave a ready made audience to hate preachers, it disseminated disinformation, targeted to the very folks who would believe it.
And into all the phones held in all the hands of all these people who are absolutely delighted to connect and learn and better understand the world around them, Facebook is distributing and accelerating professional-grade hatred and disinformation whipped up in part by the extremist wing of Myanmar’s widely beloved Buddhist religious establishment.
It’s a very bad setup.
Erin Kissane - Meta in Myanmar, Part II: The Crisis
During that blood-soaked period from 2016 to 2018, website’s attention-hunting algorithms pumped vast amounts of ferocious anti-Rohingya content into the feeds of millions of Myanmar Facebook users, and the site failed over and over to counter dangerous hate speech, ignoring pleas from local activists, including some people I knew.
Faine Greenwood - Facebook Destroys Everything - Part 1
Facebook may have re-branded to Meta. But the social networks it owns facilitate hate through our poppets. The networks feed outrage and microtarget the manipulation at you. This isn't limited to the Global South, it's happening in Europe. Our populations are being radicalised as our corporate networks allow misinformation to flourish. No one is immune to disinformation. You actively have to mitigate against it all of the time. Yet the networks use your poppets and the poppets of folks in your communities to keep feeding it to you.
“The British far right is now digitally led and reflective of online culture – traditional structures have given way to social media platforms, influencers and ‘citizen journalists’ creating peer-to-peer radicalisation and a global community willing to crowd source ‘micro-donations’ of time and effort.
Nick Lowles - CEO Hope not Hate March 2021
The danger to us from these digital poppets are not just to our psyche though. We can be actively targeted and that information can be used for mass murder. As Israel did in its massive bombing spree in Gaza in 2024 to enable it's genocide of the Palestinians. That technology is being used to profile Palestinians in the West Bank as well.
“The more information, and the more variety, the better,” the commander writes. “Visual information, cellular information, social media connections, battlefield information, phone contacts, photos.” While humans select these features at first, the commander continues, over time the machine will come to identify features on its own. This, he says, can enable militaries to create “tens of thousands of targets,” while the actual decision as to whether or not to attack them will remain a human one.
Yuval Abraham ‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza 972 Mag - April 3, 2024
As I noted earlier Palantir happily sells it's services to ICE, including facilitating access to healthcare data. Github which is as much a social network as it is a centralised code forge provides it's services to ICE. The technology that is sold around the world to profile journalists via their digital poppets will be used on you when the worst of humanity gets their hands on that power.
What power the modern Fae can provide to regimes to aid in Genocide, they will happily provide those services to terrorise US citizens on US soil.
When you use Microsoft Products like office 365, Github and post your humble brag on LinkedIn you are aiding authoritarians and genocide. When you post and organising on Facebook, you aren't only aiding in that, you are giving those authoritarians valuable information on yourself. When you buy your iPhone and use Apple you are putting more money in Apple and Tim Cooks pocket which he can use to bribe Trump. In the meantime the heads of those companies can attend the Unseelie court, paying for access to more power. To court Trump.
So how do we break the power of the poppet makers? We meed to mitigate against this harm.
It takes the fire of public scrutiny. It's hard to keep track of data violations, but follow some digital rights bodies and if you can, donate to them.
Would talk about the haunted glen,
The wicked, quaint fruit-merchant men,
Their fruits like honey to the throat
But poison in the blood;
(Men sell not such in any town):
Would tell them how her sister stood
In deadly peril to do her good,
And win the fiery antidote:Christina Rossetti - Goblin Market
You may already be using privacy tools and mitigating data collection already. You need to share that information with your friends, family, those in your networks. Find a way to have a gentle conversation about this. Be prepared for the long haul. You will be their technical support and you need to be approachable. You might even be fortunate to have someone who want's to learn to do this for themselves. If so, this is great! You have an ally.
If you kick up a fuss, or make fun of their choices, they won't come to you to sort out their devices. They will go elsewhere. You will want to check in often and gently keep educating them, helping them to find solutions so they can do what they want to. If folks don't know what GitHub has done, lead them to the information. Lead them to campaigns like give up GitHub.
This is as much for your defence as theirs. After all, you are in their physical network. Their devices are already snitching on you. So you need to reduce the opportunities for data collection, you need to reduce the size of your poppets.
Remember:
"Every virtual contact leaves a trace" - secret life of data.
You must remove yourself and your communities from these networks. They are domiciled in the US, while the NSA may scrape, collect, and steal our metadata, surveillance capitalism means that our metadata is a hot commodity. Any organisation can create its own poppet of you with it. As more information gets added to your poppets your connections and those communications give more knowledge, more power over you. When someone uploads their addressbook to these networks to send out invites, remember this is a dark pattern. This is how new poppets are created.
It's not just the collection and collation of information, it's how those firms and their clients can manipulate you and others. It's how those clients including hate groups can radicalise us. No one is immune to propaganda, anyone can be turned with the right pressure points.
It starts with you.
The technology we build is political. It can help or harm humanity. Big Tech built their goblin market and we have had surfeit of their fruit. It's time to break the addiction to these toxic networks.
There will be struggle, there will be pain. But our Human Rights are being eroded. The very rights our ancestors struggled for are being taken from us. Our values demand sacrifice.
One of the hardest things you will do is leave those networks. The next hard thing to do is to free your communities from those networks. We cannot destroy what poppets have been created of us. But we can give them less of our virtual traces. We can choose to not live our digital lives in their goblin markets, eating their rotten fruit.
“Good folk,” said Lizzie,
Mindful of Jeanie:
“Give me much and many: —
Held out her apron,
Toss’d them her penny. [...]
“Thank you,” said Lizzie: “But one waits
At home alone for me:
So without further parleying,
If you will not sell me any
Of your fruits though much and many,
Give me back my silver penny
I toss’d you for a fee.”—
They began to scratch their pates,
No longer wagging, purring,
But visibly demurring,
Grunting and snarling.
One call’d her proud,
Cross-grain’d, uncivil;
Their tones wax’d loud,Christina Rossetti - Goblin Market
The owners of the goblin markets wish to sell your information to the highest bidder. Your data that they gathered to make your digital poppet is valuable, and the buyers can make their own poppet of you with it, to ultimately cause us harm. Think of your metadata like our ancestors thought of their discarded fingernails and hair. Guard them from powerful and malevolent forces.
Data is power. Privacy Advocates know it, Hackers know it, Law Enforcement know it. Some politicians don't want the general public to understand this.
They have your digital poppets. So it's time to reduce the power they have over you.
We need to unbind ourselves from these networks.
Withhold our attention and pitch those networks into the fire.
Here are a few organisations that you can follow. There are also many digital rights organisations across the Fediverse.
European Digital Rights (EDRi) The EDRi network is a collective of NGOs, experts, advocates and academics working to defend and advance digital rights across the continent.
NOYB noyb is a donation-funded NGO based in Vienna, Austria working to enforce data protection laws, in particular the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive. At the present, a team of more than 20 legal and IT experts from all over Europe is working to ensure that the fundamental right to privacy is respected by the private sector. More than 5,000 supporting members support our work.
Open Rights Group Open Rights Group is the UK's largest grassroots digital rights campaigning organisation, working to protect everyone's rights to privacy and free speech online. They also have a separate affiliate group in Scotland.
Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is a charity that empowers users to control technology. FSFE are a part of the NGI Zero Consortium that funds Librecast and other Free Software Projects that build or are based on the Fediverse.
Inside the NSA, Barton Gellman, Wired, 24th May 2020 archive link
The 200 Sites and ice surveillance contractor is monitoring - 404 Media - 12 March 2025
shadowdragon list of customers uploaded by 404 media
Complaint to the Ombudsman by noyb about DGIT using microtargeting to foster support for chatcontrol on twitter. https://noyb.eu/sites/default/files/2023-11/13112023%20-%20Complaint%20EC%20microtargeting_Final%20Version%20-%20REDACTED.pdf
Meta in Myanmar - Erin Kissane https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-full-series
Facebook Ruins everything - Faine Greenwood https://faineg.com/facebook-destroys-everything-part-1/
Neo-Nazi groups use Instagram to recruit young people, warns Hope Not Hate https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/22/neo-nazi-groups-use-instagram-to-recruit-young-people-warns-hope-not-hate
Hope Not Hate (2021.03) State of Hate 2021: Backlash, conspiracies & confrontation publish March 2021 https://archive.org/details/hope_not_hate_2021.03_state_of_hate/page/80/mode/2up
Europes Hidden Security Crisis - Dr Johnny Ryan FRHistS and Wolfie Christl https://www.iccl.ie/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Europes-hidden-security-crisis.pdf
Microsoft facilitating Genocide in Palestine https://www.972mag.com/microsoft-8200-intelligence-surveillance-cloud-azure/
Lavender AI https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
Researching Influence Operations: 'Dark Arts' Mercenaries and the Digital Influence Industry - Emma L. Briant The Oxford Handbook of Digital Diplomacy ISBN-13 978-0-19-285919-8
The Witchcraft Series of Maglu - Tzvi Abusch ISBN-13 978-1-62837-081-2
The Occult, Witchcraft and Magic An Illustrated History - Christopher Dell ISBN-13 978-0-500-51888-5
The Secret Life of Data: Navigating Hype and Uncertainty in the Age of Algorithmic Surveillance - Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert ISBN-13 978-0-262-04881-1
Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the heart of the Internet - Tim Hwang ISBN-13 978-0-374-53865-1