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  1. in itself i don't think that electronic transactions come from the motivation to eliminate privacy (that is a consequence of that, it coincides with that, but not the reason for it- because eliminating privacy in itself doesn't earn a profit, you can have a situation where everyone is poor and no one has privacy) it's just the matter that life itself is deterministic, it can be described like a script. if you look at actuarial science, they are figuring out that a human population behaves like any system, it can be described with statistical accuracy using formulas, statistics, demographics, and this sort of thing- you can make reasonable predictions about how the system behaves, and the more information you feed into the calculations, the more it starts to look like everything behaves like a giant machine (principles of evolution, law of supply and demand, economics and so on). we think as individuals we are more special than the components of a figure or a part of a curve or whatever, we think that as a species we have humanity, which alone separates us from the rest of the world we presume to describe with our models- that is actually the most egotistical viewpoint of all, the notion that human beings are somehow apart and aloof from the rest of everything else rather than part of it and evolving with it, shaping and it in turn shapes us (life itself is a transaction between the individual and the world). that is where the cognitive dissonance occurs- principles of evolution and natural selection are as about as accurate as any theory can be, we generally accept it in the modern world, but it is taboo in a sense to really apply that to us, that we don't really want to admit we compete and evolve under the same principles. as individuals we have the illusion of 'free will,' but on macroscopic scales it doesn't look like that- broad observable trends emerge and you can bet on that- and make money off that. electronic transactions are too juicy to be ignored- on an industrial scale there is too much money to be made when fees or taxes can be applied on them because electronic transactions can be tracked by their very nature- multiply that millions and millions of times every day, then you can see why you would have to have some kind of 'artificial' moral reason not to do that- because if you had access to all this data, the only thing stopping you from becoming rich beyond your wildest dreams is some kind of personal or social pressure not to do what would be your natural inclination to do to secure more resources for yourself and your organization, the same way primitive tribes would want to secure more resources for their own tribes to stay a head of other tribes, harsh winters, lean times and so on; if on the other hand you behaved under the assumption that life itself is antagonistic and transactional even if appearing to be cooperative (not necessarily with direct physical force but competition comes by many ways, such as accumulation of resources; in the case of cooperation, there is a transaction with the exchange and sharing of resources), then you see this is all part of that, it's just practiced on a scale that makes it look 'civilized' and 'acceptable', like how money lenders advertise on television with phoney conceits of all, they tend to show couples walking on the beach with the sun setting holding hands finally realizing their life goals, and the kids go off to college making it look disney-like. of course that is not the reason why they would lend money to you, but it's these kinds of movie images that we are programmed with that we make everything look like that, when what is going on under the hood are transactional, antagonistic relationships where buyer and seller aren't natural allies per se but whether they are aware of it or not, each are attempting to maximize their gains and minimize their losses, leverage their advantage against the other guy. this is all disguised to look like something different, part of a normal functional orderly society. the world learns how to nickel and dime you and skim, every small transaction where you lose slightly may not look like much to you, but multiply that millions of times for every other person behaving the same way- you see there is all this money on large scales that starts to appear. i despise gift cards much more than credit cards, though i understand why they work the way they do and why companies love to sell those- they make money off them. you get a gift card on your birthday, when you go to redeem it, the odds are that the price of the item you want will not be exactly the amount redeemable on the gift card. the cost of the item will either be more or less than the item, it may come close, but the difference, even if small is the key. if the difference were say one dollar/euro/ it means more money for the company, since you will either have to pay for the difference if the item costs more than the amount on the card (the 'gift' card actually costs the recipient of the gift money to use it), or the item costs less, in which case you have a small balance remaining on the card you may never get around to using because it is so low (the retailer made money off the original purchaser who gave you the card since the full amount wasn't redeemed). Multiply this over and over and over again on societal levels, and you see the money pile up not possible with cash. that is what all this represents, not just per se to eliminate your privacy for the sake of doing that (although they will do that to make money off of tracking spending habits and generate strategies in response, which is not eliminating privacy for its own sake but because it is too profitable not too), but because if you think of everything-everything as functioning like a machine, then you see how all of this is evolution and natural selection, it was eventually bound to happen- in other words to evolve that way, it had no other 'choice' much as life has no choice but to evolve up to the present moment. what else would it be but not the present, and how else would it have got here if not evolving to do it?
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