Before the committee members, volunteers, and organizers begin to hit the doors, we should look at a little bit of what I call “organizing math.” Yes, I know saying the word, “math,” is a trigger alert for many would be activists and organizers, but we’re not talking about anything too complicated, but we are talking about the fact that counting is very important in evaluating and implementing an organizing drive.

A few months ago a Facebook advertisement piqued my interest about how the company was leveraging my user data to target ads in my feed. What began as a passing curiosity about how the company targets advertising, turned into a deep dive at big tech's hidden and unregulated practices. The research led me to construct an experiment that exposed not only a deep level of corporate surveillance into our everyday lives, but also a cross-platform and cross-company effort to integrate our personal data, and use it to manipulate user behavior.

"Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine," Peter Sondergaard of Research at Gartner, Inc, said back in 2011. By 2017 this was true, as data surpassed oil as the world's top commodity. https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/05/06/the-worlds-most-valuable-re...

For a remarkably well-done, thoroughly realistic WWI battle scene, I hope that readers of this column will watch the 6 minute video: https://genius.com/Sabaton-the-price-of-a-mile-lyrics.

The video portrays a scene from World War I, in which German infantrymen defend against a French attack across No Man’s Land, The attack is “successfully” repelled (with French “surrender monkeys” eventually running away to their trenches), only to see the German “Master Race” soldiers foolishly counter-attack - going “over the top” - only to see the attack fail miserably, The final scene shows the Germans “running away” back to their trenches. Powerful imagery revealing the futility of war.

At the end of the video, the following quote appears, from Erich Maria Remarque, the author of “All Quiet on the Western Front”:

One thing that becomes clear to me when I wander into the world, and the minds, of geopolitical professionals—government people—is how limited and linear their thinking seems to be.

When I do so, an internal distress signal starts beeping and won’t stop, especially when the issue under discussion is war and mass destruction, i.e., suicide by nukes, which has a freshly intense relevance these days as Team Trump plays war with Iran.

What doesn’t matter, apparently, is any awareness that we live in one world, connected at the core: that the problems confronting this planet transcend the fragmentary “interests” of single, sovereign entities, even if the primary interest is survival itself.