Re: <nettime> Suzanne Moore: When states monitored their citizens we used to

[Molly Hankwitz <mollyhankwitz@gmail.com>]

Thank you for posting this article.

Truly, deplorably, many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of American
citizens go to sleep at night believing that it is perfectly 'ok' for their
email and phone calls to be 'read' and 'monitored' because its an issue of
national security. Since 911, supposedly the "new ages of security" they
have willfully agreed to this in order for agents to rout out possible
attacks on the US. Since history is a sieve here, not too many may remember
eras when spying was normalized through land telephones, satellite dishes,
and covert operations too analogue to seem pervasive. These folks willingly
give themselves over to such "transparency" because they feel they dont'
have anything to hide. They love their country, are happy to fight its
wars, and don't mind being seamlessly connected to that idea and all it
stands for. Their liberty is the liberty of the US government, to protect
itself from intrusion and criticism; to rout out evildoers, and generate
lies. These  are the Teflon strategies with which the US government has
protected its innocence before as 'democratic leader' and 'superpower'.

What the author gets at regarding blurring of boundaries between market
research associations and spying and government information gathering
points to what has sneaked up upon us. It was a ferocious
anti-globalization movement that challenged borders and   corporate power
vis a vis use of the Internet  for its ability to equalize power relations.
Now we are coming to grips with the  new "virtual" geographies that
corporate power has managed to congloberate through its development and use
of the Internet. I wondered in an interview on David Cox's blog about why
it was that Facebook - and we have all wondered about this from time to
time - what was it about that domesticating set of practices, "poking" and
"linking" and uploading photos and videos so easily, that made us
suspicious. All that for free? There had to be a catch. It felt almost
decadent to get so much comfort from so little. The
military-industrial-advertising-entertainment-surveillance complex
 manufacturing ads on Facebook to Googles, and Twitter's and LInked in
 involvement as  widespread, dispersed, decentralized "entities" on the
networks providing information to PRISM.

These companies are as large as the small European countries they help to
spy on and their populations are multicultural and boundary-less.
It's a new era of globalizing economy. Unfortunately "universal" like those
weird dudes from World on Wings ? at end of Things to Come - flying around
and trying to dominate. Lev Manovich's tiny moving camera concept - applied
to Google Earth as the empowering tool of a miniaturized total domination.
eek


On Thu, Jul 4, 2013 at 8:57 PM, Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl> wrote:

> original to:
>
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/03/when-states-monitored-citizens-call-them-authoritarian
>
>
> When states monitored their citizens we used to call them authoritarian.
> Now we think this is what keeps us safe
 <...>

-- 

molly hankwitz, phd:::artist:::curator:::writer

training coordinator:::community technology network:::btop project

www.ctnbayarea.org

www.sfbtop.org


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