Sabotage

I would like to discuss the subject of innovation and espionage. In particular, the effect that widespread surveillance has on young innovators, and whether it dissuades them from making more of a contribution to society.

As many people know, the Soviet Union never truly achieved parity with the Western World in terms of technology. I would argue that one of the reasons why was that their nation had evolved into a police state that did not in any way reward their citizens for seeing a unique idea through to fruition. They instead repeatedly relied upon threats of imprisonment, public humiliation, death, and other forms of coercion to motivate those they found to be gifted with technologically competent minds. Inevitably, that modus operandi necessitated making harsh examples of uncooperative scientists, doctors, and other technocrats, in order to demonstrate their peers' expendability, which gradually diminished their nation's pace of technological advancement.

Why am I bringing attention to this? Because American society is slowly but steadily achieving the exact same level of surveillance of its citizenry which ran rampant in so many dictatorships throughout history. It's all predicated upon an industry referred to as "Big Data," where information on a customer, client, or even a random stranger, is collected through somewhat unscrupulous means, and then sold to the highest bidder. Corporations purchase that data for targeted advertising, while law enforcement agencies purchase it for threat assessment.

So how does this pertain to innovation? Well, imagine the following scenario: ordinary citizen Joe comes up with a great new idea. Let us for the sake of simplicity pretend he has invented a faster, cheaper coffee maker. He designs the schematics on his Windows 10 computer, prints them on his Hewlett Packard printer, and snaps a picture of his newly built prototype on his Android phone.

What Joe does not know is that when he purchased his computer, printer, and phone, he signed an end-user license agreement with Microsoft, HP, and Google respectively, and that buried in the fine print he authorized their devices to collect and upload to their company servers what is know as "telemetry data." To make a long story short, he gave written consent to the above corporations to spy on everything he uses their products for. He also gave them the right to use that information for whatever purposes they may desire. So essentially, the thousands of dollars he shelled out for the computer, printer, and phone, were ostensibly merely a purchase of the chassis they're encased in, and the hardware itself still belongs to said corporations. This means he essentially owns none of the data he stores on them.

I hope you can see where I'm going with this. Without knowing it, Joe has in theory essentially signed over any and all rights to the inventions he creates using corporate software. So when in a few days, weeks, or months, he tries to patent his coffee maker, he will likely find his idea has long since been stolen from him, with a wealthy thief having paid for his schematic, and claimed his brilliant idea as their own. And Joe finds himself back at square one in life.

Why would anyone innovate under the above conditions? There's no money in it. And without a financial incentive, literally millions of young, bright, creative minds will choose other areas of work, leaving society with no one to advance the technologies of tomorrow.

This is the situation our country increasingly finds itself in. We've been importing millions of starving but brilliant immigrants from the Developing World to prop up our economy, because they're willing to innovate for pennies on the dollar if it means escaping their brutal countries of origin. But that has created so much xenophobic backlash that our leaders have begun to close our borders.

That leaves only one of two options: either the laws become more fair, and ordinary people's Constitutional right to privacy is protected, or America ceases to be the world's technological leader, and a nation that is more deserving takes the reins.