Freedom from Information will not be Televised
The equipment and integrated security systems used to detain Olympic protesters will remain long after the Olympics, to be used, many fear, on China’s own population. And some of the biggest beneficiaries of this surveillance boom are US hedge funds and corporations, including Cisco, General Electric and Google. DN
Labels: media, monitoring, privacy, social networking, surveillance
posted by Tom Matrullo at Friday, August 15, 2008
7 Comments:
All the algorithms in the world combined won't eliminate the essential thing at the end of the wire. An intelligence. Processing mind.
Even if it's AI, which is dystopian nightmare for the non-machines, or divine which is nightmare for the non-divinely-affiliated.
All the cameras in the world watching a tree fall in the forest.
The prosthetized, us generally, have less of a complaint when their wheelchairs get commandeered by the InvizubleSekurity Teem than those ragged straggling naturists who foreswore the wheel to begin with, or roll it only reluctantly and with misgiving.
We want the netweb to assist and reflect our needs and desires, but so do the little jackbooted infidels behind the curtain.
It's a contest between niche-specific organisms, the niche being the world in this late gasping hour.
The world as platform maybe, but as it is for sure.
Here we are.
It's inevitable that the minds looking out from those digitalized eyeballs will justify themselves by the scum they sweep off the streets. The heinous acts they stop. The reduction in the rate of Bad Things.
The loss of the immeasurable, like the extinction of species no one found before they left.
What's the argument against that?
Utilitarian rhetoric is useless against fleas, or grizzly bears.
The best way to ensure the elimination of evil people from the world, the surest way, is the elimination of all people, good bad and indifferent. Same logic.
Trade the high end you can't experience anyway for the eradication of the low. People who aren't capable of free acts aren't much upset by freedom's vanishing, especially the already wounded unfree by virtue of the wound.
The awful and sad fact that children never go outside on their own anymore is balanced by the threatening damaging rays of the unfiltered sun
Imagine the early days of surveillance cams and some helpless inexperienced new-hire at the bank of monitors, watching scenes of horribleness. Traumatic justification for all further investigation.A little brainwashing won't hurt either.
If you have nothing to hide, if you're not ashamed of your nakedness, why not walk down Main Street stark? Relatively speaking.
Metered down a little that's what it is. Poisoning the swamp to kill the mosquitoes.
Oh we didn't realize swamps were the living womb of the other lives we depended on for our own well-being.
Oh.
Somewhat less far, less of the final days, somewhere in these times of tweeting, we should ask ourselves whether these modules of sociality linking us each'n'all (is everybody in?) deserve the adulation outside of all critical thought that they are getting. What is the benefit of twit if all we get is one giant multi-mouthed happy innocent? (Not intending anyone, especially the witty Ms. Pistachio, ad homfeminam - it's the thing making the buzz harbored in all).
Okay somewhat less far somewhat less final I see small elect groups of the twitterati in the Far North on special excursions, refuting the cliched image of never-room-leaving, but dressed all in outfits each item got for the one trip and cheeks all whatever from the bite of the cold. As though that was engagement with the real world on its own terms.
Opposed by the architecture driven out of the camera by the act of recording, the rooms just looking makes and furnishes, even in jungles.
The humility of each participant in that hypothetical polar jaunt going to an arrogance no one makes singly and therefore no one is responsible for therefore it doesn't really exist,
Recursive iterations of what am I doing - this.
What are we making - this.
Too big now for us to even name.
And the money's in...talking about that. So people do, more or less on topic such as it is.
The rest is survival, and it has very little to do with what's outside. Or was outside.
It's what the giant pulsating Hello Kitty blimpopticon does with itself all day that matters, and it mostly works on increasing its own chances for survival, like any other well-behaved organism.
The candy-colored majority think it's about mutual self-interest, but then so would the cells of your body, if granted time and leisure and the ability to think about it.
Twitter et uber all us isn't about what the units that make it up think it's about, anymore than what the church is is defined by the congregation.
You mean "what is the benefit to us", whereas the simpler "what benefit" with no prepositional object takes in at the top of its reach the thing in itself that's now stretched out, past the horizon and around again, from pole to pole, and back and forth across the wide blue sea.
Shaking the parasites (what does he mean by that? not what you think probably) should have been the order of the day, instead conciliation and the urge toward symbiosis has left us with cameras literally everywhere and them getting cheaper by the hour to send extrapolating into the real, further into the grid of nodes. I mean the actual lenses.
They have little miniatures now that can be shot like shotgun pellets into wherever, broadcasting back to nexi of in-gathering, fed back down the wire to the sub-basement banks at HQ - same idea really.
We thought we were fighting communism, but we turned out to be protecting the predators who were going to eat our grandkids.
Doing one thing at one level that's oblique at best and most often completely discrete.
All prep for the Great Disembodiment, when souls will amalgamate celestially and peep thru the eyes of the remaining elect.
Closer in and less far and less final the drive the individual responds to isn't necessarily or even likely all that's moving or holding inertial potential there.
From DARPA to blogspot to twitter and back around to DARPA.
Who's on first?
What are you doing right now?
"Doing one thing at one level that's oblique at best and most often completely discrete" at another.
I'm still reading yours and just listing this and this and this for the wreckord.
Meanwhile, back in the jungle of spacetime
The rest is survival, and it has very little to do with what's outside. Or was outside.
Media Monitoring
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