Technofascism blog

“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.

In a recent Wall Street Journal interview, Eric Schmidt Google’s CEO gave us a peak into the future plans for the ubiquitous search engine:

“We’re trying to figure out what the future of search is,” Mr. Schmidt acknowledges. “I mean that in a positive way. We’re still happy to be in search, believe me. But one idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type.”

“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” he elaborates. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

Let’s say you’re walking down the street. Because of the info Google has collected about you, “we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are.” Google also knows, to within a foot, where you are. Mr. Schmidt leaves it to a listener to imagine the possibilities: If you need milk and there’s a place nearby to get milk, Google will remind you to get milk. It will tell you a store ahead has a collection of horse-racing posters, that a 19th-century murder you’ve been reading about took place on the next block.

via WSJ.com.

The parallels to the Lord of the Rings is almost surreal.  Seven magic keys were given to seven techno-lords across the world.  They were given these keys to control the internet in the case of a cyberattack.  During an attack, the internet will be shut down.  When it’s safe again, the seven key lords must travel to the US to meet in a secret underground chamber to reactivate the internet.  But who has the master key?  Maybe someone in the future will go on a quest to throw these magic keys into a volcano?

via BBC:

A Bath entrepreneur has been selected to safeguard the future of internet security across the world.

Paul Kane – who lives in the Bradford-on-Avon area – has been chosen to look after one of seven keys, which will ‘restart the world wide web’ in the event of a catastrophic event.

Mr Kane, based at the University of Bath’s SETsquared Innovation Centre, will be the key holder for Western Europe.

Six other people from across the globe have also been asked to look after a key.

In the event of a security breach – such as a terrorist attack – Mr Kane may be required to travel to a secure location in the US.

Here he will meet five other key holders, to recover the master signing key.

Mr Kane said: “I’m honoured and excited to be recognised for past achievements and current contributions to global internet security.

“We are very pleased to be part of stimulating innovation in the Bath area and see the University of Bath becoming a global centre of excellence for enabling internet technologies.”

Mr Kane and his team at CommunityDNS were brought in as internet specialists to work in partnership with the university.

Simon Bond from SETsquared Innovation Centre said: “We’re delighted to provide an environment where leading British entrepreneurs like Paul Kane can develop globally significant businesses.

“It’s an honour for Bath to be one of the locations for the ‘keys to the internet’ and it is an acknowledgement of the strength of our region and the individuals who live here in global internet security.”

From this month, the internet will become more secure through a new international agreement and process which verifies web sites and helps protect email accounts from fraud, using high tech cryptographic keys.

DNSSEC (domain name system security) is a new online security system that ensures people reach a genuine website, rather than a look-alike pirate site.

It is estimated that up to 8% of internet traffic is fraudulent, and it is hoped that this agreement is a ‘major advance’ in increasing internet security.

You can find out more about the ‘keys’ via a short video on the CommunityDNS website.

via mysanantonio.com.

by T.R. Fehrenbach

I was in school when I first read or heard the idea that my late-1930s society showed resemblances to the Hellenistic era (ca. 336-1 B.C.). It somehow it resonated. I was studying classical languages, then required for acceptance at my chosen university, and into historical fiction, pulp writers such as F. Van Wyck Mason and H. Bedford-Jones, who marvelously evoked a heroic Greco-Roman world. The idea made sense.

Hellenistic civilization was wracked with bloody internecine wars; the old religions were mocked; society became looser and class-hostile; homosexuality, though then very illegal, suffused literature and poetry. Also, many people in the 1940s believed our own wars would only end when one power became world-dominant, provided we didn’t exterminate ourselves meanwhile.

I am not alone in this view. Now, in the 21st century, we have become more like Greeks and Romans than we like to think, less Greek than Roman — not Greeks and Romans of the Classical Age but Greeks and Romans of faded glory and decaying grandeur, Greeks and Romans in the social sense, in decline.

The English author Ferdinand Mount’s “Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back to Us” suggests an “astonishing” similarity between current Western life-styles and those of the Romans of the late republic and early empire. He thinks we “have been on a round trip … and are back at the jetty we embarked from.” I don’t go this far — but I agree that Western society today is more like the Roman than that of the Victorian or even the 1950s.

Like Greco-Romans, we obsess over bodily things: bathing, fitness, gymnastic training. Not since the Romans have so many people been employed as providers of such.

Our attitudes toward sex and food are very like those of pagan aesthetes. In short we obsess over sex and eating. We have a tolerance for sexual practices avoided for 1,500 years. We exalt celebrities; the Romans gladiators and charioteers, we athletes, actors and rock stars. (However, we lack the world-famous courtesans of the ancients; perhaps actresses and Paris Hilton fill the role.) Romans were desperate for entertainment, so are we, with TV and bloodless arenas. Religion as in Rome is in definite decline.

Historians agree that ancient literature after its great classical age rarely rose above things of the moment. So does ours. Greco-Roman culture became increasingly repetitive, coarser and banal. Of course, most Romans thought they were “with it,” following however barbaric fashion. In the time of Nero, however, the average Roman enjoyed a standard of living not again reached in Europe until about 1850. Political tyranny, as Tacitus wrote, did not bother a people hooked on “bread and circuses” so long as they were fed and entertained. Only hired hands (soldiers) and a (paid) political elite served the state, a vast change from the days of Greek democracy and the early republic.

Certainly, they had major differences such as slavery, technological stultification, and child abuse (of slaves). But the question, trivia aside, is this: If history hardwires us into cultural regressions, will we do a new Dark Age?

News Flash!  Human beings (mistakenly referred to as “slum children” in the article) can actually learn new tasks.  Over-educated, over-funded, over-exuberant academic propeller-heads announced this startling discovery at a recent TEDTalk.  Preliminary results were promising but further experiments confirmed that, as unbelievable as it sounds,  “children can learn complex tasks without supervision.”   Professor Mitra, head of this new breathtaking discovery, was perplexed by this strange new economically-challenged creature that exhibits intelligence.  “I think we have stumbled across a self-organising system with learning as an emergent behaviour,” he announced to disbelieving wealthy colleagues. Now, of course, the big question: How do we target them with the right advertising?

via BBC News.

A 10-year experiment that started with Indian slum children being given access to computers has produced a new concept for education, a conference has heard.

Professor Sugata Mitra first introduced children in a Delhi slum to computers in 1999.

He has watched the children teach themselves – and others – how to use the machines and gather information.

Follow up experiments suggest children around the world can learn complex tasks quickly with little supervision.

“I think we have stumbled across a self-organising system with learning as an emergent behaviour,” he told the TED Global (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference.

Learning curve

Professor Mitra’s work began when he was working for a software company and decided to embed a computer in the wall of his office in Delhi that was facing a slum.

“The children barely went to school, they didn’t know any English, they had never seen a computer before and they didn’t know what the internet was.”

To his surprise, the children quickly figured out how to use the computers and access the internet.

“I repeated the experiment across India and noticed that children will learn to do what they want to learn to do.”

He saw children teaching each other how to use the computer and picking up new skills.

One group in Rajasthan, he said, learnt how to record and play music on the computer within four hours of it arriving in their village.

“At the end of it we concluded that groups of children can lean to use computers on their own irrespective of who or where they are,” he said.

His experiments then become more ambitious and more global.

In Cambodia, for example, he left a simple maths game for children to play with.

“No child would play with it inside the classroom. If you leave it on the pavement and all the adults go away then they will show off to one another about what they can do,” said Prof Mitra, who now works at Newcastle University in the UK.

He has continued his work in India.

Stress test

“I wanted to test the limits of this system,” he said. “I set myself an impossible target: can Tamil speaking 12-year-olds in south India teach themselves biotechnology in English on their own?”

The researcher gathered 26 children and gave them computers preloaded with information in English.

“I told them: ‘there is some very difficult stuff on this computer, I won’t be surprised if you don’t understand anything’.”

Two months later, he returned.

Initially the children said they had not learnt anything, despite the fact that they used the computers everyday.

“Then a 12-year-old girl raised her hand and said ‘apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA contributes to genetic disease – we’ve understood nothing else’.”

Further experiment showed that having a person – known as “the granny figure” – stand behind the children and encourage them raised standards even higher.

Returning to the UK, he fine-tuned his method even further.

He gave groups of four children a computer each and set them a series of GCSE questions.

The groups were allowed to exchange information and swap members.

“The best group solved everything in 20 minutes, the worst in 45 minutes.”

To prove that the children were learning, and not just skimming information off the web, he returned two months later and set the same questions. Crucially, this time the children had to answer them on their own with no computer aids.

“The average score when I did it with computers was 76%. When I did it without computers, the average score was 76% – they had near photographic recall.”

Professor Mitra has now formalised the lessons from his experiments and has come up with a new concept for schools called SOLE (Self Organised Learning Environments).

These spaces consist of a computer with a bench big enough to let four children sit around the screen.

“It doesn’t work if you give them each a computer individually,” he said.

For his experiments he has also created a “granny cloud” – 200 volunteer grandmothers who can be called upon to video chat with the kids and provide encouragement.

He has tested the spaces in the UK and Italy, with similar results, and now believes it should be tested more widely.

“We could change everything,” he said.

TED Global runs form the 13 to the 16 July in Oxford, UK.

Jesse Schell, Professor at Carnegie Mellon University and CEO of a computer gaming company, presents his “vision” for the future of computer games at DICE 2010, a popular gaming conference.

Schell’s presentation is slow going at first and seems like a typical boring conference but stick around for his “vision” for future games and how they will impact our lives. For those that want to skip ahead, the fun begins at 17:30 into the talk, where Schell decribes how gaming techniques are creeping into the real world and points/perks are used to reward desirable behavior.

Of course, Schell, true to the techno-optimist agenda, is confident this point-based invasive control technology will usher in a golden age of entrepreneurial opportunity for making the world a better place. He even proposes that a toothpaste company could create a toothbrush that detects when you’re brushing your teeth and award you points in your global life-game account based on the fact that you’re not only practicing good hygene, you’re also helping the company’s bottom line.

In fact, with the ubiquitous sensor system Schell proposes, eventually any behavior could be detected and rewarded such as riding the bus, eating the right food, or even thinking the right thoughts — anything our programmer-masters view as desirable behavior.

It seems Schell’s best idea for our future is to turn us into point-chasing, gamebot automatons that are manipulated into performing whatever actions are desired by the controllers of the global game system. The scariest part of this presentation for me is not the Orwellian world Schell conjures up but the fact that he seems to think this is all desirable and wonderful.

As I sat dumbfounded watching him gleefully describe a world where someone gets ads inserted into their dreams, and gets points for tatooing electronic ads on their body, I wondered what kind of a man is Schell? Is he such a believer in the technocracy’s version of progress that he is completely blinded to it’s negative consequences? Or is he just resigned to that fact that the locked down world he envisions is just an inevitability so he might as well be happy about it. I guess I’ll never know. I just chalk up his one-sided optimism to the tunnel-vision and short-sightedness of academia and the techno-industrial complex in general. Still, it’s always amazing to me when someone so enthusiastically praises the bars of their own prison.

As for his vision of the future: No thanks! I think I’ll just keep playing the game called Nature. At least, that one is neutral toward it’s players and not just another trick used to the line the pockets of an wealthy few. And besides I trust the Programmer of that game.

via LifeAfterTheOilCrash.

This is exactly what you will not find in the pages of The New York Times or the political corridors of power.  Oh, by the way, the Obama administration contacted one of the leading lights of the New Urbanism in the weeks after the inauguration.  He never heard back from them.  I guess they’re not interested.

This is slightly off-topic but I just had to post it.  When someone so honestly tells it like it is, I just can’t resist:  Goldmans Sachs execs should all do some hard time in a prison labor camp cracking rocks so they learn what money means to the rest of us.

via NYTimes.com.

Are your Facebook friends more interesting than those you have in real life?

Has high-speed Internet made you impatient with slow-speed children?

Do you sometimes think about reaching for the fast-forward button, only to realize that life does not come with a remote control?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, exposure to technology may be slowly reshaping your personality. Some experts believe excessive use of the Internet, cellphones and other technologies can cause us to become more impatient, impulsive, forgetful and even more narcissistic.

“More and more, life is resembling the chat room,” says Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, director of the Impulse Control Disorders Clinic at Stanford. “We’re paying a price in terms of our cognitive life because of this virtual lifestyle.”

We do spend a lot of time with our devices, and some studies have suggested that excessive dependence on cellphones and the Internet is akin to an addiction. Web sites like NetAddiction.com offer self-assessment tests to determine if technology has become a drug. Among the questions used to identify those at risk: Do you neglect housework to spend more time online? Are you frequently checking your e-mail? Do you often lose sleep because you log in late at night? If you answered “often” or “always,” technology may be taking a toll on you.

In a study to be published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, researchers from the University of Melbourne in Australia subjected 173 college students to tests measuring risk for problematic Internet and gambling behaviors. About 5 percent of the students showed signs of gambling problems, but 10 percent of the students posted scores high enough to put them in the at-risk category for Internet “addiction.”

Technology use was clearly interfering with the students’ daily lives, but it may be going too far to call it an addiction, says Nicki Dowling, a clinical psychologist who led the study. Ms. Dowling prefers to call it “Internet dependence.”

Typically, the concern about our dependence on technology is that it detracts from our time with family and friends in the real world. But psychologists have become intrigued by a more subtle and insidious effect of our online interactions. It may be that the immediacy of the Internet, the efficiency of the iPhone and the anonymity of the chat room change the core of who we are, issues that Dr. Aboujaoude explores in a book, “Virtually You: The Internet and the Fracturing of the Self,” to be released next year.

Dr. Aboujaoude also asks whether the vast storage available in e-mail and on the Internet is preventing many of us from letting go, causing us to retain many old and unnecessary memories at the expense of making new ones. Everything is saved these days, he notes, from the meaningless e-mail sent after a work lunch to the angry online exchange with a spouse.

“If you can’t forget because all this stuff is staring at you, what does that do to your ability to lay down new memories and remember things that you should be remembering?” Dr. Aboujaoude said. “When you have 500 pictures from your vacation in your Flickr account, as opposed to five pictures that are really meaningful, does that change your ability to recall the moments that you really want to recall?”

There is also no easy way to conquer a dependence on technology. Nicholas Carr, author of the new book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” says that social and family responsibilities, work and other pressures influence our use of technology. “The deeper a technology is woven into the patterns of everyday life, the less choice we have about whether and how we use that technology,” Mr. Carr wrote in a recent blog post on the topic.

Some experts suggest simply trying to curtail the amount of time you spend online. Set limits for how often you check e-mail or force yourself to leave your cellphone at home occasionally.

The problem is similar to an eating disorder, says Dr. Kimberly Young, a professor at St. Bonaventure University in New York who has led research on the addictive nature of online technology. Technology, like food, is an essential part of daily life, and those suffering from disordered online behavior cannot give it up entirely and instead have to learn moderation and controlled use. She suggests therapy to determine the underlying issues that set off a person’s need to use the Internet “as a way of escape.”

The International Center for Media and the Public Agenda at the University of Maryland asked 200 students to refrain from using electronic media for a day. The reports from students after the study suggest that giving up technology cold turkey not only makes life logistically difficult, but also changes our ability to connect with others.

“Texting and I.M.’ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort,” wrote one student. “When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life. Although I go to a school with thousands of students, the fact that I was not able to communicate with anyone via technology was almost unbearable.”