Wednesday, 6 August 2008

Ubiquitous Computing: welcome to the Matrix

Hat tip: Old Thinker News



"Utopia or nightmarish panopticon?" I'm voting for the latter.

Posted by Trooper Thompson at 23:54
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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

ya see?

That's the internet for you. bloody wi'fi rdf nonsense.

the article you linked too earlier called the web the 'last bastion of free speech blah'

Hang on, it's only been around for fifteen years! And already we got control grid lock coming. So much for 'the last bastion'!

analogue! Man! analogue!


That Quigely page you link appears to be some kind of epitome of Tragedy & Hope -not the full thing.

I compared some bits with my edition of the last half and the epitomizing seems suspect, selective. A better link is on the Quigely Wiki page. although that's only the first half, which suits me.

7 August 2008 at 07:18
Trooper Thompson said...

Re: the Quigley link, thanks for pointing this out, I've changed it to the right one (although with a little bit of looking on that site you could have found it yourself - still now it's on a plate for you!)

As for the internet, calling it 'the last bastion' is over-doing it, but nevertheless it is a very powerful tool, which can either be a force for democracy and truth or a force for oppression, surveillance and propaganda.

Here's a simple question: Do you want the internet controlled by Rupert Murdoch and his ilk? Because that's where it's going.

7 August 2008 at 07:33
Anonymous said...

Dude,
The corporations have controlled the internet from day one –it’s their baby. The wiring of our cities for cable/broadband was one of the largest civil engineering projects in Europe during the late 90s and early 00s.

Do you think that would have happened if it posed a threat to the status quo? After fifteen years, the web is evidently not a threat to the status quo.

So long as you're indoors glued to the screen, what content you digest is immaterial. (I can vouch for that!) It’s whatever draws you in…

OR, to put it another way: When the Bastille is finally stormed, it's unlikely to be due to anything the peasants read on the interweb that day.

The so-called Age of Freedom and the following Age of Disillusionment for the internet happened in quick succession in the mid-to- late 90s. I remember arguing this point back then. It was all a mirage, too.

ultimately, political censorship of the web would be counter-productive in the so-called western democracies. IMO the planners appreciate this and would rather let market mechanisms to a subtler job of filtering information, such as advertising. A tried and tested method. I maybe wrong, but I’d be surprised if it were otherwise. Also: the fact the internet presents a ‘level playing field’ for all information and opinion is a double-edged sword in practice.

(banging on) Quigely does write about the Round Table groups at some length in the second half of T&H. I’m inclined to give him credence because he was an insider, he named names and he appears to understand the groups’ institutional nature and knew their limitations.

Reading Quigley, it strikes me that when the history of NWO conspiracy theory is written, they’ll find the roots of it go back to the 20s and 30s and the old-time conservative/isolationist reaction to the New Deal and to influences such as the internationalist Round Tables and the CFR/Catham House people. The original NWO model was basically anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semite. Today the model has been refined with -for the most part – the anti-Semitism removed. But it’s basically the same suspects and some new ones added: the industrialists, bankers, the CFR/Bilder/TC/ etc. The League of Nations has been replaced by the UN.
.
The trouble is, as Quigley was well aware, these nexus of influence don’t exist forever. For Q, in fact, the Round Tables had lost most of their punch by the mid-sixties, a development he viewed (apparently) with ambivalence, since he thought a civilization suffered somewhat without a compact and ideologically homogenous elite (of whatever stripe) to direct things.

The internet has given the NWO model a new lease of life, but it’s basically old-fashioned and fails to address specifics. The world has moved on.

blimey, thats all for now.

If you want, I can expound on how the NWO (or Old World Order) model acts as a gatekeeper (eek!) with special reference to that Prison-planet article on the StPancras wifi censorship thing. ( don’t feel you have to!)

7 August 2008 at 11:54
Trooper Thompson said...

Firstly, no doubt the corporations have always had a large measure of control. Indeed it was the military which was instrumental in getting it up and running.

That doesn't change the fact that it is an incredible tool for information disimulation. Like most tools, it can be used for good and bad purposes. A Smith & Wesson could be used to kill you, or it might just save your life, depending on who's pointing at who.

You talk of an age of dissillusionment that you predicted long ago - maybe you should revisit the thought - on consideration, you may find you were wrong!

You state:
"Ultimately, political censorship of the web would be counter-productive in the so-called western democracies"

But it's happening already. It is an attack on democracy, clearly, but it supports the status quo.

"IMO the planners appreciate this and would rather let market mechanisms to a subtler job of filtering information, such as advertising. A tried and tested method"

Of course they are doing this also, by heavy duty brain washing, reducing the poor, dumb masses to nothing but gutless, ball-less consumers.

Certainly, sitting in front of a computer is not, in itself, going to cause the Bastille to fall, but people have been starved of the truth for a long time, and the controlled media stranglehold on information has been smashed by the internet, and there is something worth defending in this freedom we currently have.

I'll return to Quigley in a while.

7 August 2008 at 19:25
Trooper Thompson said...

As for Quigley and the Round Table, you need to read the first half of the book! You can't pretend there has been any dying off of power for the Anglo-American elite - the Rockefellers, JPMorgans, Rothschild banking interests etc have grown since then. The society we live in has been shaped by these interests, through the foundations and what they support. Everything the CFR, Chatham House, Trilateral Commission ever wanted to see is happening, national boundaries are dissolving, a global financial structure is in place, the few countries which stand outside that system get bombed back to the stone age.

It's a big subject. We'll have to argue it over a pint some time.

20 August 2008 at 23:43

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