Re: <nettime> Beyond Oil, Lybia and the MIT

[John Young <jya {AT} pipeline.com>]

Cheap computers lure more eyeballs for ads for more expensive
computers, peripherals, I-Pods, dull jobs operating computers, 
increasing avenues for spying on users under guise of empowerment. 

Qaddafi surely bought, or was given without cost, the surveillance 
programs that accompany employers' and governments' and
"voices of the people" trojan horses placed in the public domain, 
in the schools, in the nurseries, hospitals, coffee houses, air terminals, 
planes, trains and ships.

Bauhaus furniture for the masses intended the same effect -- missionaries 
always prepare the ground for invaders -- until Hitler closed the door on 
sneaky good-heartedness in favor of open aggression, a brand-driven
Wall Streeter writ large, underwritten by Wall Street then as now favoring
mass market distribution.

Cigarettes, liquor, religion, education, opium dispensed by coldhearts.

Negroponte has been missionarying for cyber invasiveness ever
since the cute tools were defanged from warmaking, supposedly,
and converted to self-assisted door-openers to inner sanctums 
for spying and addiction to desire for more speed, more promises
of privacy, more inane notions of defying authority while it chuckled 
at the rubes, then hiring the best of the vainglrious hackers to fuck 
users under cover of unctous higher education unable to confess
its national security dependency. 

And like all janus-faced evangelists, the Open Source Negroponte
swears the gadgets will be great for humanity. Get the oligarchs and 
governments to fund the shacklings in the name of education and 
freedom from tyranny and ignorance -- MIT dissidents have been
howling about this since the birth of public access to computers.

BIM, Linux is far from secure, despite the disinfo fingerpointing at 
MS. Evangelicalism in the subversive OS.


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