Freedom is one of our most treasured rights—one that’s tightly allied to privacy. And while many of us rejoice at living in societies that supposedly respect both these rights, we would do well to ponder just how free and private our lives really are.
Focus especially on what relates to our freedom and privacy when using the internet and the rapidly expanding “internet of things”—all the interconnected devices being incorporated into our daily lives that share digital information and guide us in our actions, portending a future of driverless cars and “smart cities.”
All well and good if you like that kind of thing, but not if the information is filtered, biased or distorted, so when we link ourselves to the ‘net, we see a view of the world that is nonrepresentative—selected for us based on our past search histories, assumed interests, locality, gender, age, socio-economic status, perhaps even our ethnicity.
It’s also a big concern if the view we’re given is one that’s not really intended for our benefit, but rather one that’s designed to line the pockets of specific business interests that lie behind the internet.
This isn’t the stuff of conspiracy theory. This is just plain old conspiracy, supported by facts. Of course, it’s no big secret who the corporate players are. They include the likes of Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and Amazon, and social media giants like YouTube (owned by Google), Facebook and its subsidiary, Instagram.
They do their darndest to track your every move on the internet, they watch what shopping you might do, they see where you live and look at any information they can amass about your personal profile, family and friends.
They use artificial intelligence to make decisions about what content you should find in your searches and, just as importantly, what content should be hidden from your view.
This is where it hits really close to home, because there is a definite anti-natural health bias being metered out through these conspirators.
One common form of bias is called “downgrading,” and it’s done with algorithms that can change search results from one second to the next.
You may look up a topic one day and find a particularly useful link near the top of your search. The next day, after the algorithm has been tweaked, the same link has fallen off the first page—and may be hard to find at all.
This causes a huge loss in traffic for affected sites.Take one community with which we work closely, ‘biohackers’ and ‘health optimizers’— a rapidly growing group, often young and well educated, who are keen to manage their health themselves.
They don’t like the idea of eating the way governments advise and waiting for a chronic degenerative disease to catch up with them, only to have no option but to ask their doctor for a pill or two when the time comes.
Biohackers know that this kind of reactive healthcare is too little, too late, and that prescription medicines are the third biggest killer in society. Instead, they prefer to engage proactively with their health.
They’re more likely to eat nutrient-dense foods, take state-of-the-art dietary supplements and engage in regular physical activity.
But, equally important to them is connecting with nature and keeping their minds clear through meditation, mindfulness practice or even some “forest bathing” (known as shinrin-yoku in Japan).
Oh, and let’s not forget, this community is highly reliant on digital technologies and uses many strategies to minimize its negative effects, such as blue light-blocking glasses, bioenergetic devices, radiation-proof cases for portable devices and so on.
But as Dave Asprey— biohacking guru and founder of the Bulletproof brand— announced last September at the Health Optimisation Summit in London, where I was also honored to be a speaker, the terms “biohacker,” “biohacking” and related phrases have just been downgraded by Google.
Think about that. A community that is trying very hard to minimize its burden on the healthcare system—to engage proactively with concepts that the mainstream has long called “prevention” but paid little more than lip service to—is now being massively disadvantaged.
Add to that the same treatment for the most popular natural health website in the world, www.mercola.com (as well as this magazine’s website), or the permanent ban on our ability, at the Alliance for Natural Health International, to use Facebook ads to extend our reach, with no reasons given.
Well, here’s the revelation that I’ve been enjoying for the last few weeks. It’s called Google detox. I’m using DuckDuckGo for my internet searches, and it’s wonderful—privacy, no tracking, no biases, and I’m once again finding things that are of much greater interest to me.
The world appears more balanced. The voices that run contrary to the establishment’s can be heard more clearly.
Try it—life free from the manipulation of the dark forces behind the internet seems potentially addictive, but at least it’s one of those few addictions that are actually good for us.
For more information on this topic, see “The Last Word” in our October 2019 issue.
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