Empowerment for Profit

One of the last entries I made on my Twitter channel before going to bed last night was: “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” – Henry Kissinger.

It got me to thinking, an aphrodisiac for whom; the wielder, the target, or both? In my own mostly uninspiring travels in this life, I have experienced and observed interpersonal power in flux to various degrees. From the big power brokers making headlines, to Mom & Dad’s squabbles at the kitchen table, personal power is an intangible reality governing everything from how electric current arrives in hundreds of millions of homes every day to designating who does the grocery shopping in a family.

We’ve all heard the idiom that knowledge is power, and in this age of information, nothing could be further from the truth – at least when one looks at the bigger picture...

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Imagine discovering a small community of people on a remote island going about their day-to-day affairs with nothing more than an equivalency of 19th century technology: a means to generate electromotive power, a few mills, basic sanitation, refrigeration, and medicine.  

One fateful day, under the guise of benevolence, a missionary group decides these people would benefit extraordinarily from having access to modern microcomputers with the Internet at their disposal, so at great expense, they put everything in place to empower the community through information technology by installing some satellite transmission equipment, a few internet servers, and some desktop computers.

Having set everything up and having trained the populace to adequately use their new information systems, the missionaries return to whence they came after ensuring the community leaders are convinced the technology is stable and infallible. Before long, every man, woman, and child in this isolated region are on the internet, exploring the outside world from behind a keyboard and monitor.

Within a couple of years our pretended populace have mastered social media and their curious little community has attracted so much attention from the online world that they are considered an anthropological sensation by researchers. Then, just as the stubborn and skeptical elders of our fictional oasis are beginning to finally embrace the newfangled technology themselves, the main server to their island gives-up the ghost unexpectedly. No more internet!

In the meantime, while everyone on our remote island was busy being enthralled by their own narcissism and empowerment, the missionaries were fastidiously collecting advertising revenue generated from their exclusive rights to all internet traffic between the island and their own network of servers. Unbeknownst to the highly distracted island dwellers, the money was being used to finance the construction of a diamond mine right under their noses. Now, in their current state of perceived dis-empowerment from the sudden failing of their now beloved online computing ability, the community is in an uproar! Fix it! Fix it!

[…to be continued]