Re: <nettime> Pascal Zachary: Rules for the Digital Panopticon (IEEE)

[morlockelloi@yahoo.com]

This realization per se is pretty much useless, as are endless 
ruminations regarding how free we were, once upon time. The old Marxist 
postulate that awareness will save the species is blatantly false - look 
around you.

These technologies came to rule the world because their proponents made 
coherent efforts to make it so. The only way to do something about it is 
to actively develop other technologies which tilt the balance in the 
direction you like better. Countering technology with words, laws and 
general awareness will get you nowhere. See 'bronze age'.

The corollary is that the future belongs to the few, not to the masses, 
because high tech is centralized by nature, as it requires 
understanding, and those capabilities are scarce. The rest are fucked 
... I mean 'users'.

There are only competing elites.


> NSA at all. It is about the dawning realization that we all now live
> inside a "virtual" system that compels us to *control* ourselves,
> since all the details of our lives are being "remembered," in a way
> that no *human* civilization has EVER even imagined it could do!


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