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Total Information Awareness
Cryptogon had a link a couple days ago to a New York Times essay comparing the (illegal) federal wire-tapping which we’re all so enraged about to the perfectly acceptable and totally overlooked tracking of our activities online by corporations.
From that essay:
As Washington huffed and puffed over a new erosion of privacy, untold millions of us clicked just as fast as our little clickers could click through Google ads and Amazon checkout pages, unwittingly updating our “cookie” ID badges at every new screen. We bought our loved ones cellphones with built-in Global Positioning System and flocked to family gatherings in cars loaded with OnStar and EZ Pass. We paid for mostly everything with credit and debit cards. Out of convenience, we embraced technologies meant to track our every move.
For as long as I remember, I’ve been inclined to think of this sort of thing as “bad” - that people have a right to privacy, and all the rest. I guess lately I’ve been realizing more and more that’s going to change whether I like it or not. Me thinking it’s “bad” does nothing to stem the tide of technological change.
From a business stand-point too, it seems like it’s only going to become more and more efficient to be able to track every little damned thing, and then make predictions based on that. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - I have a sneaking suspicion that the governmental efforts to track terrorist activity will ultimately become the prototype for corporate efforts to do the same. Except instead of looking for terrorist patterns, they will look for other marketing segments and demographics. It seems like the logical next step - if it’s not already happening.
RFID chips and all the rest aren’t going to vanish just because a handful of people are protesting them. Even the people who are afraid of the 666/Mark of the Beast stuff are going to be way too late to stop it once they’re mobilized around their collective mythology into action.
So am I saying we ought to just give up and let them track everything we do? I know if I say “yes” to that, I’ll have twenty people jumping down my throat over it for the next few days. But I’m to the point where I’m thinking that people who oppose such developments ought to change their focus somehow. I’m thinking that those of us on the vanguard of these areas ought to begin carving out artistic, literary and spiritual visions of how to get by in a society where every little thing you do or say is on record and accessible to anyone with the right tools.
What does a life look like where there are no secrets? How would - no, will - our identities change when all our sins and indiscretions are on display for all the world to see via a simple MSNYahoogle™ search? What you would do if you knew exactly what everyone you’d ever known had said and thought about you, and vice versa? Will our humanity be washed away once and for all, or will we come up with other coping mechanisms? Perhaps we’ll simply evolve into something else, like the Singularity-fans predict. That reminds me of the comic book series “Elfquest” wherein all the characters are essentially telepathic within their little tribe. Since this meant that their thoughts were never their own, the authors devised the concept of “soul-names” which was sort of a password or authentication key you could give to your friends and lovers, to allow them access to the secret inner sanctum of your mind. Is there anybody in the world that you’d be willing to let in on all the little weird crazy moments of your life, and the strange darkest intricacies of your mind?
- CTRL (random stuff)
- Fuck yeah!
- Notes: Personal Universal
- Google’s Chinese Censorship
- The Scientific Rationale Behind Total Surveillance
- Prev: Ten Things I Hate About the Occult
- Next: Occult Vs. Magick
January 26th, 2006 at 6:22 pm
For any action in the world there’s a counteraction, so all the control measures are likley to provoke a furious resistance. In a modern world, with almost all-permissive culture, there is no wonder that goverment tightens control over everything, personal movements involved. Still, there will be some corners of the world that give you an ultimate freedom to be oneself. On the other hand, it migh be just one more step in constant evolution.
January 26th, 2006 at 6:36 pm
Agreed, I think encryption, scrambling, jamming and allied notions will become extremely popular as a reaction against increased control and surveillance. Specifically though, what do you think such a resistance would look like? What would be their guiding principles? Would you be a member, despite the great benefits that using tracking technology would give you?
January 26th, 2006 at 9:11 pm
Yeah, but I think there are some practical issues that really are issues. For example, go to americablog and look at the posts over the last few weeks about the sale of cell phone records. You might think, “well, who the fuck cares who I’m calling or who’s calling me. I have nothing to hide.” But, the problem is that people who have done nothing wrong really do sometimes have something to hide.
Suppose you are a healthy person who happens to have recently been treated for cancer. Suppose you are also looking for a new job. Do you really want a prospective employer to see that you’ve called such-and-such oncology clinic at least three times a week for the last year? See what I mean?
I really do think that in a just society (if there ever was such a thing) people really to have a right to expect a certain level of privacy.
January 26th, 2006 at 9:16 pm
In Utopia we would all know and all be trustworthy, but this certainly isn’t that. Call me a luddite, but I don’t own a credit card and never use my debit card to buy if I can help it. I’m a cash machine kid. I DO fill in online surveys for (an admittedly tiny) fee, but it’s upfront and I know what I’m saying. I don’t trust current governments and corporations not to use info against me. When they go, I’ll lighten up. If my (UK) government issues ID cards I’ll go down to the town hall and burn it.
January 27th, 2006 at 12:13 am
It’s hard to tell with this. Tim, your comments about gov’t vs. business uses of information make sense, and while typically business just wants to sell us crap, not lock us up, it’s necessary to consider the degree to which business and gov’t are aligned today.
Excellent point. It’s also necessary to consider that so long as we have coercive governments, they will seek to increase their authority by siezing business records. Dammit, I don’t need my IP monitored, and while I don’t care if Bob’s Big Bidness Recording Inc. tracks me, I do when Bob cooperates with gov’t investigators, which he will, as it’s more economical…
It’s also interesting to see how government, which ought to by definition be “the rule of law”, keeps moving away from its own laws… I wonder at what point Thoughtcrime will literally hit the books, when viewing material becomes evidence of intent… after all, if the internet-singularity is like an exteriorized brain, then your brain leaves a paper trail, and the law is all about paper trails…?
Likewise, I hear people rave about Amazon’s suggestion function. Frankly, it sucks–it tries to sell me CDs I already own or stole–so my musical tastes are easy to pin down–but bookwise it usually wants me to buy either “Creative Visualization for Business Success” or “Mein Kampf.”
January 27th, 2006 at 10:08 am
Other technological futures:
One more along the lines of Crypto Anarchy and/or Assassination Politics.
Accelerando, the future of life in the presence of limited liability companies. This is a pretty good techno-singularity book of fiction. It definitely has its moments.
Hierarchy giving way to Rhizome?
January 27th, 2006 at 12:38 pm
That last line made kmee laugh, Null! That’s what it feels like to kmee, too, when eye’m amazoning.
M’eye suspicion at this point is that government and business are at this point so incestuous, there really is not much difference between the two. The revolving door between the two is ludicrous once you read up on it. In fact, with all the privatization of the last decade and a half, in the U.S. at least, one can make a very strong argument that the government we’re supposed to believe in is just an empty shell, a front for a multitude of corporations and private interests in communications and the ol’ military-industrial-media complex.
Eye finally buckled down and got a credit card last year and a cell phone in March and am ambivalent about both, though they’re convenient…
The idea that this shit is inevitable doesn’t feel quite right to kmee…certainly, that is the programming/ meme Big Biz/Gov puts out whenever there is some Brave New cultural engineering to be done. It is highly probable, given their level of funding, etc. that this stuff WILL come to pass, but there’s always a possibility that it won’t, based on the choices we make. It’s just a matter of how important it is to how many individuals to not play along, to give up their online checking/investing/buying, to give up their credit cards and cell phones, etc. And upon what principles?
It ain’t all bad, but it definitely ain’t all rosy. And there are likely to be lots of unforseen consequences ( especially for those uv us who aren’t paid to analyze, forecast and create this stuff and are generally too busy with daily living to devote to it–m’eyeself included). Definitely, there will always be creative ways to reimagine/define/utilize and subvert this stuff, but it’s still sort of playing within the game and giving energy to it.
This is what makes certain mystics (including the big JC) so astounding and admirable to kmee. What they were asking and what they seem to continue to ask uv us as individuals are to do what is simple…which is very difficult for us do to our attachments a lot of the time. (Whu? Leave behind m’eye job? m’eye family? stop sellin’ trinkets in the temple?–another tangent: if the temple also symbolizes the body…what does it mean to kick the money changers out of there?)
To live simply and feel and be simplified–to climb a tree or work on an old fishing boat, to sit in a circle and tell tales– is quite a challenge when there are always so many shiny, flashy new things to play with. But are they really improvements?
Eventually, eye’d like to hope, all uv the technological intergration and connection (including the surveilling) will lead to a greater human and spiritual connection and intergration which will supplant it and survive beyond the point that all this untenable progress leads to structural collapse.
And eye don’t even gno if eye believe that? But here’s to behaving like eye do!
Skidoo!
January 27th, 2006 at 12:47 pm
-Meister Eckhart
I think often of the future, in direct violation of the Christ’s teaching. This has yet to benefit me, I think, beyond the immediate pleasures of imagination.
January 27th, 2006 at 1:09 pm
Slomo, that’s a great example and that definitely hits close to home for me, as somebody close to me has been in a similar situation. I wasn’t saying really that a totally non-private society was acceptable - so much as hoping to inspire people to raise the most meaningful issues around the subject.
January 27th, 2006 at 1:18 pm
Damn, that’s a wild quote. This whole conversation reminds me of some of the issues I raised with that Identity Theft Tarot card.
January 27th, 2006 at 1:48 pm
[…]
My recent post on the “positive” side of goverbizness intrusion into individual privacy generated a pretty interesting discus […]
January 27th, 2006 at 2:20 pm
If you think that’s wild, check out Muslim Saints and Mystics by Farid al-din Attar. The medieval sufi saints’ goal is total abandonment of the self.
Reading The Ascension of al-Bistami gives me vertigo.
There is no conflict between exhortations to self-enquiry and exhortations to self-annihilation. These are ways of speaking.
A quote from the “Muslim Saints”:
January 27th, 2006 at 3:16 pm
[…]
My recent post on the “positive” side of goverbizness intrusion into individual privacy generated a pretty interesting discus […]
January 29th, 2006 at 6:42 am
the trick is to flip it.
USE them. hell yeah i want them to know who the fuck i am !!! lol.
i believe in what i do. so fuck them. matter of fact, track every damn thing i do, try to arrest or harass me for something, and ill become even more popular than ever
one thing though, whatever the govt is doing as far as information gathering, private companies are already doing with alot more efficiancy. there arent the same kind of regulations or expectations with private companies, and all the data is worth WAY more to them than the govt… so id say they are probably quite a bit ahead of the govt at this point….
one
human?
January 29th, 2006 at 2:46 pm
Word, human. It’s like that essay I wrote a while back:
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005...7/19/how-to-fight-the-empire-and-win/
If they want to track me, great. It will take a team of experts to even know what I’m doing or why - because shit, usually I don’t even know myself. If they can figure it out for me, then I’d like to know. But more importantly, every one of them who is exposed to me becomes *like* me through the process of trying to understand. It’s simply how compassion and sympathy work in humans.
May 25th, 2006 at 12:21 pm
[…] Right now, a lot of people have links in their sidebars to books that they are reading, or music they are listening to. Imagine then that the books or CD’s themselves were transmitting this data - along with all other products you use, by way of RFID or similar technology. I think a lot of people in the conspiracy world tend to think of this type of thing in negative terms as surveillance or the creeping police state, but this post makes me re-think those assumptions. At some point, it’s like the government won’t need to upset people over wiretapping - because we will simply WANT products which track our every move and which can be correlated and used in interesting and creative ways both online and off. (Try also these two older posts in a similar vein if you’re interested in this subject…) […]