The film poses many more questions than it answers. Then again, I wonder if we’ll ever have an answer to the privacy and civil rights issues that arise from a range of digital intrusions highlighted in the film. These range from amassing CCTV surveillance data for statistical analysis used to predict undesirable behaviors through the tracking of every indelible impressions left by my digital footprint.

I have to admit to being troubled that my merely mentioning Shaykh Anwar al Awlaki on this blog is enough to trigger a global security apparatus that cannot distinguish between by my citing a source and inciting Jihad.
 

I don’t doubt my past references to the  Baader Meinhoff gang—however deliciously obtuse—or the addition of the Anarchist Cookbook to my library of “Likes” has already raised red [and black] flags somewhere where I have been monitored for quite some time now.

When considering issues of privacy, free speech, and life online, does the end still justify the means? Think about it.


[Can't see it? Watch on YouTube]

RIP, Maggie. RIP.

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• “I never asked for this.”
• “Fake! The World will ends in 2012.”
• “OMG, you left your porn on the fridge again.”
• “I was expecting more than a better touch screen.”
• “Cannot retrieve user data. Data Plan may be exceeded.”
• “How about Microsoft stop daydreaming and create some damn jobs for the working class.”
• “That mom is having affair with that Japanese administrator, while father is forced to stay home with daughter, cooking like a woman.”
• “Where are the fucking robots and flying cars already?”

Do leave a comment of your own, won’t you?

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“AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters’ worst fears.  An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study’s assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.”

While the argument that an elite group of bankers have control over the rest of us may carry some weight, the fact of the matter is that the global economy is controlled by a variety of equally avaricious syndicates who I believe should be scrutinized with the same level of disgust that The Occupy Wall Street Movement are making fashionable in New York and around the world.

A case in point: According to the United Nations — itself a den of thieves I might add — international drug cartels and their narco-terrorist enforcers, traffickers on mules, and mules on aeroplanes, down to the street-level pushers, all buoy up a black market [hopelessly under-]estimated at over $400 billion. Notwithstanding that all that money gets laundered through the banks and their clientele of “legit” businesses — an issue for public outcry in of itself — where is the popular outrage about the human misery and hidden costs associated with this capitalist trade? How about organizing a grass-roots protest on the corner of every dope-dealing intersection, posting video clips of pistol-whipped crack-whores on YouTube and exposing the horror of it all for tea-time consumption on cable news?

Concerned Women for America – hardly feminists but lobbyists all the same — estimated ten years ago that in the United States alone pornography accounts for over $100 billion in revenues.  With the proliferation of the internet and e-commerce one can only guess at it’s current worth.  More so today than a decade ago, the porn industry generates such huge profits that large corporations continue to set moral compunction aside for the thrill that comes with every money-shot they now bankroll and shamelessly distribute.  Oui, oui mesdames et messieurs, it is, indeed, a messy business. Enabled by technology and big bucks, multinational corporations have become the institutionalized pimps, peddling nastiness in the guise of “free speech” and “consumer demand” to any paying voyeur who wants to get an eye full.

So, what to do? Picket hotel chains, close them down; tell the cable companies we won’t do business with them even if it means no TV, broadband or mobile phones? Of course, we might consider protesting on the corner of every dope-dealing intersection and kill two birds with one stone perhaps.  That’s kind of grass rootsy, isn’t it?

Beyond the parochial interests of the Concerned Women for America and their 2002 report, The Porn Ring Around Corporate White Collars: Getting Filthy Rich, there is no mention of other money makers that line the pockets of fat cats many of whom I suspect control substantial banking interests. No guesstimation of the billions of dollars worldwide extracted from the miserable sex slaves who “service” a burgeoning sex tourism trade, for example. No reference to the corporate pimps who profit from Bangladeshi brothels, Bangkok peep-shows, and well-financed global crime syndicates who truly know no borders, no moral boundaries either.

And don’t get me started on the tobacco, alcohol and pharmaceuticals conglomerates, the military-industrial complex, and what Mickey D can do with his hormone laden beefburgers…yada, yada, yada.  All this would require peripatetic picketing that would exhaust even the most passionate primitives, antithetical zeitgeists, and who knows, even sleeper cells.

Rather, I’d like to suggest we keep things in perspective and not get overly excited about a movement protesting the global banking system, multinationals and their nefarious parts. Let’s not read too much into the theses of a triumvirate of complexity theorists waxing hypothetically. If one is serious about affecting change it will take a more thorough analysis of our global inter-dependencies, societal and cultural differences, underhand dealings, and personal motivations than it seems anyone is prepared, or equipped, to undertake.

On a brighter side, what the New Scientist piece does do, if only for it’s readers, is get us Jews off the hook for being the damnable conspirators behind the banks’ centralization of global power.  In a quick once over of the list of 50 top international players in the New Scientist article, Goldman Sachs – now that Lehman is defunct – stands alone among a company of distinguished gentiles, itself a sign of the times.

Yes, at last, the Elders of Zion get a break. Thank you New Scientist, thank you.

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I was surprised that the news created quite a stir in me until I reflected on my own simple being.  After all, I am primitive psycho-neuro-physical mechanism given to emotional outbursts and flights of fancy, not the stuff that tomorrows IBMers will be  made of, or personal computers for that matter.

[No video? Watch it on YouTube]

All this leads me to reflect on where the convergence of man and machine is taking us. In thumbing through things I’ve bookemarked over the years I came across these related nuggets, pulled from my archives–in no particular order– just for you:

• MachineBrain.com
• Mind Uploading Home Page
• Intel Wants Brain Implants in Its Customers’ Heads by 2020
• The Web Could Someday Read Your Thoughts
• Virtual Fly Brain Computer Model 
• Architectures for Cognitive Systems
• DNA cages guide nanoparticle self-assembly 
• Commercial brain computer systems are coming
• Brain chip reads man’s thoughts 
• Robo-quandary
• Commercial brain computer systems are coming
• Surfing the Web with nothing but brainwaves

It is sad to think that we can invest so much time, money, and brilliant ingenuity into technologies that ultimately serve consumerism, militarism and human pride above all else while we have yet to take care of the things that have plagued humanity for eons. Perhaps one day smarter machines and intuitive programing will make things like famine, despotism, genocide, pandemics and economic turmoil things of the past.

I somehow doubt it.

Particularly under circumstances such as these, when old haunts are seen being blitzed again, I take leisurely strolls down memory lane preferring my own sentimental journey to the path of degradation which has led to the present day blighting of Blighty.

But more than that, I have been following the trend where social media plays a role in bricks-and-mortar “social revolutions,” trying to learn something about the doppelganger space that both separates and unifies crowds and mobs alike.

On the one hand, social media like Twitter and Facebook are lauded as technological allies in the “struggle for democracy,” as in the Arab Spring for example, while others ask, as in the case of the UK riots, if Draconian measures are required to curb the use of Blackberry-enabled mayhem.

It is clear that one’s answer to such questions is affected by who is being threatened on and by the streets, be the protest  legitimate, immoral, understandable and/or wholly indefensible.

Of course, these are complicated issues. I have to remind myself that the BBC–my primary source for UK news– is, for all intents and purposes, an establishment organization. Their portrayal of the rioters as an underclass of mindless yobos hell-bent on reversing their disenfranchisement from consumerist entitlements may be in contrast to alternative media outlets–with biases of there own, no doubt–but hard to refute when there is little to suggest that the rioters have any sense of decency, higher purpose or legitimate indignation.

When it comes to the institutionalization of opinions and analysis, the Beeb has few runners-up in giving the appearance of an unbiased agency. They do, however, have a history–at least as I recall–of serving up controversy in the guise of being independent. I was reminded of that when I watched a clip from Newsnight which featured British historian and chauvinist David Starkey. What triggered that thought was Starkey’s reference to Enoch Powell and his infamous “River of Blood” speech. I remember seeing it as a boy on the BBC’s weekly program, Panorama. In essence, Starkey is proposing that Powell was right about his bigoted vision of England being ruined by multiculturalism,  black people and culture.

If you have time, this BBC documentary is well worth watching for context:

[Can't see it? Watch the video on YouTube]

…and here is the clip from Newsnight:

[Problems viewing? Watch the video on YouTube]

Responding to each point that Starkey makes would require more time than it’s worth. Besides, there is no shortage of commentary online that articulates various points of view, better than an uncontested rant of mine I think. Rather, I’ll just share a catchy tune that popped into my head–a favorite from my own rioting days–and a suitable score to accompany Starkey dancing around the issues, asserting for example, that Jamaican patois is “a wholly false language.” As we say down on memory lane, and in a vernacular Mr. Starkey will be very familiar with I’m sure: “What a load of bollocks!”

[Change channels - Watch the video on YouTube]