Technofascism blog

In Orwell’s 1984, Winston was ultimately “convinced” that Big Bother was good too.    Now CNN plays the part of Winston’s conditioner, O’Brien, and tries to convince us–minus the rat cage, of course.

via CNN.com.

The opening passage from George Orwell’s “1984″ depicts a guy hustling up a stairwell that’s plastered with giant posters of a man’s face staring at him.

“It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move,” Orwell writes in the classic dystopian novel. “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.”

These days, Big Brother doesn’t need to do much snooping. We just tell him what we’re up to. We tweet, check in on Foursquare, use digital payment systems and generally live so publicly that spying loses at least some degree of utility.

Meanwhile, we’re quickly expanding the systems we’ve built to monitor ourselves and our environments. We connect our power consumption to the internet via “smart meters,” we let Google’s cameras map our streets and we use wireless gadgets to transmit vital signs to doctors.

All of that may sound horrifying. But as old notions of privacy evaporate, some benefits of a shared and monitored life become clearer. All this data has the potential to make our cities more efficient, encourage social connectedness and even aid in response to major disasters, such as earthquakes.

Here’s a look at 10 ways constant monitoring and all-the-time online sharing can improve modern life. If you find this contrarian view to be downright Orwellian, let us know in the comments section.

1. Monitored city systems

In 2009, researchers from MIT’s SENSEable City Lab tacked wireless GPS monitors onto paper coffee cups, aluminum cans and bottles of dish soap. Then they tossed that stuff in the garbage and sat back to watch what happened.

Some of the trash traveled more than 1,000 miles before landing in a final resting place. They hope that kind of info can help cities and trash management companies do their work more efficiently.

2. Health monitors

Chronic heart diseases, Alzheimer’s and diabetes require constant monitoring, but doctor’s visits only come about so often. Cue a new generation of wireless heath monitors that let people transmit data about their blood-sugar levels, weight and heart rate to doctors without leaving home.

Some older people have taken this idea a step further still, installing networks of sensors in their homes so someone will know if they break from the routine. If an older woman hasn’t opened her refrigerator in several hours, for example, an automatic alarm might send text messages to her kids so they can check to make sure she’s eating regularly.

3. Disaster response

In the aftermath of January’s earthquake in Haiti, volunteers all over the world scoured the internet for information about the damage.

Public tweets — some tagged with data about where they were sent — as well as text messages and photos from Haiti were put on a living, updating map. This info was used by emergency responders who were trying to get aid to the places where it was needed most.

4. Bored on Tuesday

Location-based social networks aren’t the most widely used services in the tech world. By the measure of one survey, only about 4 percent of internet users connect with friends on Foursquare, Gowalla, SCVNGR and the like.

But for people who blab their real-world locations on these networks, social connections can emerge. Foursquare users, for example, can look at their smartphones to see where all of their friends have “checked in” most recently. If a friend is at your neighborhood bar on a random weeknight, you might just drop in to say hello.

5. Traffic maps

Once upon a time, people got traffic reports from radio DJs who spewed off the latest car crashes, usually only taking into account the major interstates. Now, a real-time traffic layer on Google Maps shows users a block-by-block view of where the backups are.

Magic? Not quite. Google relies on drivers to share anonymous information about where they are. It then takes that data, in aggregate, and figures out how quickly cars are moving on various roads and then creates a map of the flow.

6. Smart grid

Right now, most of us don’t know much about our home electricity consumption. Bills go up in the summer for air conditioning and down in the winter. That’s about it. But the U.S. government is in the process of deploying a smart electricity grid, which will take information about home energy use and translate it into money-saving energy tips.

One software company, called OPOWER, takes data from the smart grid and spits out home energy use reports that compare one person’s energy use to that of their neighbors, on average. This data helps OPOWER’s users save, on average, 2% to 3% on their energy bills.

7. Free stuff

There’s often a trade-off between privacy and free services. Products such as Gmail are free because they target users with ads. Similarly, people who are willing to “check in” on smartphone apps to their favorite stores can get deals. Foursquare “mayors” — the people who visit one location more times than anyone else — often are eligible for free stuff. And SCVNGR app users complete check-in-based challenges that can earn them free merchandise or food.

8. Monitoring earthquakes

We can’t accurately predict them, but some researchers say we could respond to earthquakes more quickly if we turned huge networks of laptop and desktop computers into seismic monitors.

In a pilot project from Stanford University and the University of California, Riverside, researchers linked up at least 1,400 computers to do just that. Sensors — either inside computer hard drives or attached to office desks — send readings to a central database that processes them in aggregate.

9. Looking for content you’ll “like”

The Web is so big that it can seem infinite and daunting. But by sharing the content you “like” on the internet with Facebook friends, you help them find websites, stories and videos they otherwise would have missed. Increasingly, these public preferences are visible to your Facebook friends both on and off Facebook.com. If you’re logged into Facebook, now, for instance, you can see if any of your Facebook friends have “recommended” this article.

10. Environmental sensors

We’re not the only ones who can be watched. Plenty of environmental scientists are interested in using tiny sensors, sometimes called “smart dust,” to monitor nature and get a better understanding of how it works.

Sensors in California’s redwood forests, for example, have taught scientists at the University of California at Berkeley about how these giant trees take in water through fog. And researchers at Intel Labs have developed a prototype smartphone that, when uploading information to the internet, including a person’s location, could be used to track air quality readings in major metro areas.

“A giant, lidless eye that never sleeps, ever watchful” that is how Sauron’s surveillance system was described in the Lord of the Rings.  And it’s the image that comes to my mind whenever someone advises me to flee the encroaching technofascism in the US.

Time and again people say to me, “Flee the U.S. fascist state before it comes crashing down around you.  Seek safe haven in the Philippines, New Zealand, etc. (insert your favorite paradise of choice)”  I’ll admit that whenever I hear about what’s happening in airports and cities across the country, I’m very tempted to seek greener pastures in some far off promised land but, unfortunately, after I do a bit of research, I always come to the same horrifying conclusion: the days of fleeing to somewhere “outside” the technofascist system are, alas, no more.

I have one friend who insists that the Philippines is the last bastion of freedom on this small, crowded planet: it’s cheap to live, the people speak English and, he asserts, it’s undeveloped enough to remain outside the gaze of over-zealous technocrats.  When I first heard his enthusiastic endorsement for that distant land of sunshine and tropical beaches, I thought, well, maybe he’s right.  Surely, they won’t be setting up a remote CCTV network to monitor people in a small city in the Philippines.  Surely, this was a place that was impervious to Sauron’s gaze.  Unfortunately, it was only a short time later that I discovered that Davao city had already established an Orwellian surveillance command center that looks like something right out of the US or the UK or Mordor for that matter.  Other cities, like Legazpi, were quickly following the sinister path Davao had taken.  So much for the Philippines.

I have another friend who lives in and recommends New Zealand.  Also, a very tempting possibility.  But just recently, I read that “Prime Minister John Key … announced a new Securities Intelligence Service (SIS) Bill to allow the government agency wider surveillance powers.” [ref]  And, the Mayor of Auckland is currently pushing for more CCTV cameras. [ref]  And, of course, New Zealand, unlike the Philippines is part of the “developed” world.  If the busy little beavers in their government want to kick up the Brave New World program a notch, they certainly can proceed faster than the relatively more primitive and “backwards” Philippines.

Considering all of this, I began to think that maybe it was just cities that were under Sauron’s watch.  I’ve met a few people that have hope they can escape the emerging techno-control grid by bugging out to some remote wilderness area and living off the land.  Many so-called “primitivists” advocate this strategy: basically living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle outside the reach of Big Brother.  I thought possibly there might be something to this.  Of course, it’s difficult to find information about anyone that has actually lived this lifestyle–most “primitivists” I’ve run into are more of the armchair variety and spend most of their time convincing other people to adopt a primitivist lifetyle.  However, I did manage to find a few recent cases where someone actually pulled it off… or so they thought.  Here’s how primitivist Brent Ladd describes his attempt:

Modern society [...] always seems to be just over the ridge.  It is impossible to hide from its ever searching eye and I am often humming Greg Brown’s song “Ain’t there no place away….” I can’t put my finger on it exactly, but fear and misinformation has bred a gargantuate monster of regulations, laws and codes that can be aggravating to the would-be primitive. I’ve already spoken of hunting/trapping limitations with DNR officials who are armed to the teeth. I may be a bit paranoid, but after we had built our lodges, it seemed that air traffic directly over our shelters picked up immensely. Maybe just intrigued pilots or maybe some surveillance by government officials? Several times we’ve had groups of F-16 fighter jets storm the tree tops above our lodges.

It is not only being watched and the hunting regulations that aggravate me, but there is also the issue of housing codes and zoning nightmares. Social Services once threatened friends of mine who were residing in a wigwam with their children that the children would be taken away unless they were in a house that met zoning codes. This meant they had to have tar paper on the roof, a wooden floor, no open fire, and a thing called a “rat wall.” [ref.]

When a man can’t put a simple roof over his head, trap and hunt game, grow food, defecate in a hole and raise and educate children without fending off an endless onslaught of permits, fees, licenses and hordes of heavily armed orcs, he is already living in Mordor and there truly is nowhere to hide from Sauron’s ever-watchful gaze.  Others may flee if they must, but as for me, here in Mordor, where the shadows lie, I will make my stand.

via CNN.com.

“We’re dependent on it,” he said at the museum, which holds one of the world’s largest collections of vintage computers and sits about six blocks from Google’s headquarters. “And eventually, we are going to have it doing every task we can in the world, so we can sit back and relax.”

Wozniak’s musings have undertones of science-fiction, drawing parallels between the internet and robots bent on taking over humanity.

“All of a sudden, we’ve lost a lot of control,” he said. “We can’t turn off our internet; we can’t turn off our smartphones; we can’t turn off our computers.”

“You used to ask a smart person a question. Now, who do you ask? It starts with g-o, and it’s not God,” he quipped.

Earlier that day, Wozniak said the biggest obstacle with the growing prevalence of technology is that our personal devices are unreliable.

“Little things that work one day; they don’t work the next day,” he said enthusiastically, waving his hands. “I think it’s much harder today than ever before to basically know that something you have … is going to work tomorrow.”

Reciting an all-too-common living-room frustration, Wozniak told a story about the countless hours he spent trying to troubleshoot his media player, called Slingbox.

“There is no solution,” Wozniak said of tech troubles. “Everything has a computer in it nowadays; everything with a computer is going to fail. The solution is: kill the people who invented these things,” he said with a smile.

If you’ve never heard of Daniel Tammet before, it’s probably because our mainstream press tends to focus on trivialities so much that the truly amazing stories go mostly unnoticed.  Daniel Tammet is a savant that can not only perform mental calculations out to 100 decimal places of accuracy, memorize PI to 22,000 decimal places, and learn human languages in one week, he is also the most functional savant in the world.  Unlike most savants, who are retarded in many other facets of their life, Daniel Tammet can pass as a fairly “normal” person.  In fact, he is so functional that he can actually describe what goes on in his head when he performs these amazing mental feats.  And what he describes seems impossible to most scientists: Daniel apparently doesn’t do any calculations at all.  Instead, he visually sees the answer appear before him as a specific shape, color and texture.  In fact, he describes that he solves math problems by observing the shapes that dance before his eyes and he recites PI by flying over a multi-colored landscape that represents that number stretching into eternity.  To Daniel, the answer to these thorny math problems is obvious and he is often very impressed by the mental effort of “normal” people that solve such problems only by brute-force calculations.

Daniel Tammet’s unique powers of perception effectively demonstrate that the answers to so many of our problems are literally right before our eyes but we simply don’t notice them.  Perhaps a change in perception is what the world needs most, instead of an increase in more brute-force technology.

If you’d like to learn more about Daniel Tammet, and what is possible with the right form of perception, this video is a real eye-opener:

via Wall Street Journal.

David Norris wants to collect the digital equivalent of fingerprints from every computer, cellphone and TV set-top box in the world.

He’s off to a good start. So far, Mr. Norris’s start-up company, BlueCava Inc., has identified 200 million devices. By the end of next year, BlueCava says it expects to have cataloged one billion of the world’s estimated 10 billion devices.

Advertisers no longer want to just buy ads. They want to buy access to specific people. So, Mr. Norris is building a “credit bureau for devices” in which every computer or cellphone will have a “reputation” based on its user’s online behavior, shopping habits and demographics. He plans to sell this information to advertisers willing to pay top dollar for granular data about people’s interests and activities.

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