4 ms·
Eh, I'm amazed at the ignorance of the obvious by authors like this. This is chickenlittleism on full throttle. The tone is vaguely ellegaic, harkening back to
by b1daly 12y ago
Eh, I'm amazed at the ignorance of the obvious by authors like this. This is chickenlittleism on full throttle.
The tone is vaguely ellegaic, harkening back to that time when freedom and democracy was the law of the land. Let's see, looking at the 20th century: totalitarianism, the industrialization of genocide, nonstop global warfare (hot and cold), institutionalized tacism and other forms of oppression, CIA trained death squads, pitiful consumer protection stsnfatds , union busting, riots, high profile political assasinstions, colonialisms of all types.
It's hard to see a some kind of serious decline in the progress of civilization ushered in by pervasive surveillance technology.
Furthermore, to the extent that the author is persuasive that technologically advanced and ubiquitous surveillance will be used to maintain the social order, he highlights a weakness in his thesis.
The coming challenges he enumerates, climate disasters, energy problems, migration pressure are not the result of insecure communications. They will come anyway.
IMO he rightly guesses that selling increased surveillance to the public will be easy, as very few people in the developed world want society to fall apart.
Electronic communication infrastructure cannot be ignored by the power structure. Suppose these horrible changes were stopped by our idealistic hackers from being easily used for social control. What would take their place? I shudder to think.
Somehow a world where power can be consolidated by unaffiliated creation of dark networks doesn't sound like much of an improvement.
The quality of a society will be progressed through cultural means. Technology is just part of the fabric of this human world.
- anon4 12y agoThis is exactly what a social damage control drone paid by the government would say. As is my post.
- hughw 12y agoYou could substitute for "paid by the government", "deeply invested in the current system." People who are well off, have good engineering jobs at corporations, drive $50,000 cars, have jumbo mortgages, think the current system is working pretty well.
- el_zorro 12y agoI am sorry you were downvoted (particularly because you were called a shill for daring to voice your reasonable opinion). There is a doom-and-gloom mentality on this site; people seem like they want the end-of-days. I noted, as you did, that almost all of the problems listed were independent of communications protocol. This entire argument is one of "exaggerate the bad and completely ignore the good". We have companies working on cheap space travel, which opens up asteroid mining (mitigating resource crunches) and allows us to use space-based resources to alleviate problems on Earth (solar shades to reduce warming, etc). Asimov made a great point at the end of I, Robot, where he notes that the intractable problems of one age are rendered moot by the technology of the next. People feared that NYC would be uninhabitable by the year 1950 because there wouldn't be enough place to put all the horse manure - which became a non-issue with the advent of automobile. People feared mass starvation in the 1970's because we couldn't produce enough food - made irrelevant by the green revolution. People fear global warming and totalitarianism today, and it will be made irrelevant by the tech of tomorrow. We already see birth rates falling globally, to the point where we will soon be shrinking in population. This will reduce stresses from unemployment, and paired with a burgeoning space economy we will have more to share with fewer people. There is no reason to cower from the ills of today; they are only a call to keep moving forward.
- ionwake 12y agoGood comment
- happyscrappy 12y agoExcellent comment and I too am very bullish on the future. >There is a doom-and-gloom mentality on this site; people seem like they want the end-of-days. Everyone feels like their struggles are epic because they are the ones fighting. Everyone has struggles, just at different levels, so some minor career setback feels crushing even though you are not in any real jeopardy. People also tend to romanticize about the past, when in reality if they went back they would be horrified. >There is no reason to cower from the ills of today; they are only a call to keep moving forward. True but I do think that there is the problem that technology is moving so much faster than society. The curve of tech is steepening, and though I never thought I would hear myself say this, I think we could pull back on the throttle a little.