Palantir was helpful for people to communicate, until Sauron got hold of it. – Lorenzo Obi Abadinas

A nice man from Birmingham or some such place phoned me up and asked me if I wanted him to arrange a shingles vaccination for me at my GP’s surgery. I said ‘yes thanks, I’ve been trying to figure out how to do that.’

So he made an appointment. When we’d done that, I said, ‘as you seem to be dealing with admin for my GP’s surgery, could you please tell them my mobile is not a Smart phone, and I’m not getting any of the information they send me because it all goes to links that my little phone doesn’t understand.’

He sympathised, and said it’s annoying how these things happen, but couldn’t help. I told him the whole sorry tale about how in and out of all the moves the NHS has made into tech systems and private contracts, I’d lost the ability to talk to my GP surgery, finishing with, ‘so how come my doctor isn’t able to phone my landline, but you are?’

The answer was that he’s working for a private company that has access to my records. Just now he only has instructions to make vax appointments, not to help me with what I need to do.

Enshittification

If you haven’t come across the term ‘enshittification’, check out Cory Doctorow. It was him who named and analysed what happens to us when we (or the services we use) buy into software and systems that belong to big tech companies. In short, they sell appliances and services on the grounds that they’re amazingly useful to us but once we ‘own’ their smart devices (they never really give up control of them), they nudge us further and further into doing things their way until those appliances and services barely do the things we need at all, they simply serve the data-hungry corporation that sold them to you.

As a result, by a long series of twists and turns, this guy…

…. has better access to me and my medical records than ‘my’ doctor does.

This is true across the country – ‘your’ doctor, belongs to men like him, and it’s not just GPs.

Palantir is also involved in maintaining a lot of horrible situations, such as the genocide in Gaza, prolonging misery and destruction for the sake of their own surveillance-and-control systems and products, so we know he’s not joking about their willingness to kill.

Enshittification forecast

When I go to get my vaccination, I will tell whoever does it that I’ve been trying to figure out how to talk to my doctor about another issue but, because they don’t make appointments over the phone any more, and I couldn’t break into their web-based system, and they rarely have a receptionist on duty now, and because they don’t accept letters, I don’t know how.

I’d like to think whoever I talk to will be able to make an appointment for me but I have a feeling they’re going to tell me to go home and pedal my way through some other monetised, Palantir-type, data-gathering system to reach a place where I can make an appointment.

So, Sauron already has my medical records. What else? I don’t know about you, but I’m keeping as much of my life offline as I can these days. I put out the stuff I want everyone to see but there’s no way I can control who has access to what, once it’s sucked into digital data world, and we know we can’t trust the government to regulate what’s safe and what’s not, because ‘our’ politicians clearly already belong to the corporations.

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