progression of technologies

[Steve Kinney]

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>> The age of privacy, and everything with it, including the
>> freedom of association and separation of public and private
>> life, is ending. The public is smiling merrily along the
>> road. 1984 is coming, but the public is not scared or
>> suppressed. They are smiling happy people, obedient and 
>> cheerful, and they take the best of care of their keepers.

The end of "privacy as we know it" is only a dystopian scenario if
the institutions of authoritarian governance survive in the
post-privacy world.  I don't believe they can survive, because the
same network infrastructure that has already made so much formerly
"private" information public also shifts the balance of power away
from established institutions in fundamental ways.

Keeping State and Corporate secrets out of public view is becoming
progressively more difficult, while the mechanism of ad-hoc self
organizing "smart mob" actions arising from the public at large is
an emergent challenge to established power centers.  If and as
these trends continue to accelerate, the nature of political power
will eventually be transformed.

The opposition takes this prospect very seriously, and is fighting
back through automation of intelligence analysis, adaptive enemies
lists, strategic deployment of reputation management,
astroturfing, censorship, adaptive signal boosting and
degradation, spoofing and disinformation, coordination of
conventional propaganda across formerly isolated domains, etc. etc.

The future I envision is not a dystopia per Orwell or Huxley,
because these models presume the survival of large States and
continued concentration of power in the hands of a ruling elite.
I think that one way or another, large scale authoritarian rule is
on the way out.  One way is the continued development of
established trends in information technology's impact on large
scale social behavior.  The other way is the pending collapse of
the global material economy and substantial re-localization of
production and commerce.  Together, these environmental pressures
drive adaptive responses that are /very/ unfavorable to the
interests of our present rulers.

:o)



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