Data is gathered all the time. Just take your mobile phone. Geo-location data collected by your (mobile phone service) provider is not just about your movements. It's about who you are with and what you will do next.

Sexual reproduction exists solely as a means to defeat parasites. By mixing male and female genes, sex produces offspring not exactly like either the male or female - making each generation different from the last, and presenting a moving target to intruders intent on compromising this system. ... Even with this variation, parasites continue to pose a threat... and parasitism evolves and moves through any system - not just living things. The less variation there is in a system, the more readily parasites will evolve to infest it.

We need to take a leaf out of natures book. Any species that clones itself will eventually be attacked by a parasite, leading to an inevitable population crash.

I suspect that democracy is not viable in a technologically advanced society. Free people wield too much ability to destroy.

Wealth aggregates and becomes political power. Simple as that. ‘Corporation’ is just the most recent name for it.

But if they're so successful, why haven't parasites taken over the world? The answer is simple: they have. We just haven't noticed. That's because successful parasites don't kill us; they become part of us, making us perform all the work to keep them alive and help them reproduce.

Perfect replication is the enemy of any robust system... Lacking a central nervous system much less a brain the parasite is a simple system designed to compromise a very specific target host. The more uniform the host, the more effective the infestation.