Zuckerberg Was Right

I run a search on Google and the next time I’m online I get ads popping up trying to sell me the stuff I was searching for the day before.

I’m sitting at home and get a call from dial-a-nurse -- who got my name, unlisted number and my ostensibly private medical records from my employer and my insurance company -- who commences to tell me about how she can help “control” a condition that I’m not even sure I have.

I’m standing on the BART train, cameras blinking red at me from all angles, only to emerge onto the street, similarly captured by the camera’s eye on every corner, at every store and from every ATM.

I’m reading about how virtually all of our internet service providers, and our land line providers, and our cell-phone providers have been cooperating with our government to eavesdrop on our emails and texts and calls to make sure we’re not harboring terrorists who hate our way of life, or something.

We have become commodities -- useful only for the time and to the extent that we feed the machine of commerce with blood, money or information. In the relentless march of commerce we are trampled beneath its feet.

And yet the crowds cry out for “privacy” and the right to be left alone. They don’t understand that it is far, far too late for that. Privacy is dead. Zuckerberg was right about that.