Party Party!

On the occasion of the municipal elections (once every four years) a few observations on the political ecosystem of Eindhoven.

When the only political party on the election roll in Eindhoven – and beyond – respecting the privacy and mental health of their prospective and current constituents is The Party Party (De FeestPartij) you know something is up.

In an analysis of the 17 registered parties in the 2022 election for the municipal council of Eindhoven, 16 of them invite you to follow, visit or join them at their ‘social media’ accounts. 15 set/leave cookies on your computer/mobile device, 2 without asking. This sometimes – often actually – in clear violation of their self-professed respect for the privacy and well-being of their audience. Just the fact that they engage with commercial enterprise, mostly based outside the national and international jurisdictions and legal privacy protections they nominally subscribe to, that have been proven to be toxic to both the individual mental health and the collective political process they are supposed to defend, should set off all your alarm bells and disqualify them as a legitimate candidate to represent your interest in the decision making process on the disposition of the annual budget of the Municipality of Eindhoven: € 1,005,000,000. Not to mention your agency as a free citizen, your mental, social and physical health, well-being and self-determination.

The only one not engaging with these toxic communication platforms & technologies is… De FeestPartij of Johan Vlemmix, a one-man party. A party with a political platform based on personal grudges, frustrations and delusions. At least they are up front with it. Their programme lays bare all that is wrong with competitive politics and the rule of the few over the many. Once you’ve seen it, you cannot unsee it and you recognise it clearly in the programmes and practices of the other parties, nominally representing you. You may well ask if this really is you or just them.

Now you may well wonder whether this is an oversight on the part of De FeestPartij‘s one and only candidate, or whether the other parties willfully and deliberately bought into the business model of their surveillance marketing intelligence suppliers. Most likely they at least bought advertising with micro-targeting from Meta, Google and Twitter. Why don’t you ask them?

Given the steady stream of anecdotes swirling around, the almost weekly breaking news stories about the violations of individual and collective rights to privacy and self-determination in the diverse commercial news media – who are without exception complicit in (if not the root cause of) the surveillance industry game – and the growing body of scientific research publications on the matter since the early dawn of the commercial attention-industry somewhere in the 1800’s ( 3 September 1833, according to some) and especially since the Internet .com boom & bust of the 1980’s, our representatives in government really should know that the use of social media and behaviour tracking is totally unacceptable in responsible political discourse. They aren’t simply aware of this fact. They feel it is opportune, perhaps even unavoidable, to use these tools as a means to achieve the power of governance they crave. Reducing you, the voter, from a person to represent to a brick in the road to their glory.

All, except De FeestPartij.

Go figure 😉 And good luck with that. We will all need it.