Re: nettime So, What Do We Do Now? Living in a Post-Snowden World
dear michael, dear friends, Am 02.01.14 06:06, schrieb michael gurstein: Whether we will live in a world where one country and its 5 allies have access to all worthwhile information which allows them to control any possibility of dissent (even before it happens), control the inputs into and outputs from elections or any form of political campaign, control financial markets and bank accounts, control the behaviour of individuals and ultimately groups and that's for starters-those are things we can interpolate based on what we know, not as would surely be more realistic, interpolating from what else we can foresee-these guys as we all know, have access to effectively unlimited financial resources and the brainpower that goes with it. i am wondering about the all in your formulation all worthwhile information, the two any-s and the two control-s, and then about the brainpower that goes with unlimited financial resources. - is this really the issue, and is it such a vision of totalitarian surveillance what we should be most, or ultimately concerned about? on the one hand, i am thinking about the many situations in which all this so-called intelligence was useless, or remained unused, or misinterpreted. i don't follow the progressivist drift of your argument. and on the other hand, i believe it is necessary to reflect on the distributed nature of all this data - for even in the data storages of the NSA it is only ever possible to analyse certain sets of information according to certain criteria. i am fully aware that personally i cannot fathom the complexity of what is computationally possible. yet, my commonsense tells me to not get psyched up when people speak of all, any, and unlimited, when either technology or people are involved. michael, this of course does not undermine the general drift of your thoughtful text. what i would argue for is to start the exploration tour into answers to your question as a continuation of critical software studies (remember, for instance, matthew fuller's analysis of MS Word), and to rigorously apply the questioning of what software actually does in the contemporary big data mines, to study the ethnography of the data miners, etc., and to project the legal and political frameworks for a full democratic response. regards, and all the best for 2014, -ab # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime So, What Do We Do Now? Living in a Post-Snowden World
Andreas, Given what we now know (and remember that this evidently is only a tiny fraction of what we still might learn... my reading is that my formulations are at least in outline correct (but I would be delighted to have someone with the technical knowledge prove (or even argue) that I was wrong). Certainly there is much droppage between cup and lip but as I understand it the overall capabilities I pointed to are there. Whether they can be effectively executed, directed in any usefully targeted way (but of course that is one of the problems--cf. the wedding goers/drone victims syndrome), operated by sufficiently intelligent beings (are bots beings?) to actually do what they are intended to do is either a very practical or a deep philosophical question neither of which my post was intended to resolve. Rather my post was a quite personal expression of the dilemma that I see as someone trying to be active/effective (as a civil society person) in the evolving space of global Internet governance. Best to all for the new year, Mike -Original Message- From: Andreas Broeckmann [mailto:broeckm...@leuphana.de] Sent: Thursday, January 02, 2014 9:21 PM To: nettime Cc: michael gurstein Subject: Re: nettime So, What Do We Do Now? Living in a Post-Snowden World dear michael, dear friends, Am 02.01.14 06:06, schrieb michael gurstein: Whether we will live in a world where one country and its 5 allies have access to all worthwhile information which allows them to control any possibility of dissent (even before it happens), control the inputs into and outputs from elections or any form of political campaign, control financial markets and bank accounts, control the behaviour of individuals and ultimately groups and that's for starters-those are things we can interpolate based on what we know, not as would surely be more realistic, interpolating from what else we can foresee-these guys as we all know, have access to effectively unlimited financial resources and the brainpower that goes with it. i am wondering about the all in your formulation all worthwhile information, the two any-s and the two control-s, and then about the brainpower that goes with unlimited financial resources. - is this really the issue, and is it such a vision of totalitarian surveillance what we should be most, or ultimately concerned about? ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
