Refined control (and awareness) of what's on your machine (executing as well as stored -- and "machine" means pretty much anything from your car to your jewelry) is important. But that hasn't changed. When I was a kid, it was important to know what type of carburetor you had, what gauges you had on your dash, what music you had in your boom box, etc.
Nowadays, it's just a little different. It's important to know what hardware comes with your phone and what software is executing on it ... or, for that matter, what h/w is mounted in your car and what software runs on it. (I'm participating in the very evil Progressive Insurance Snapshot program. They log all my trips with a little device plugged into the computer port. With my truck, it's quite obvious because it sticks out under the dash. But with other cars, it might be fun to get one and plug it into your spouse's or your friend's cars just to monitor their trips. Progressive wouldn't know if you used your snapshot in someone else's car. ;-) More importantly, it wouldn't be difficult to build your own little device and hook it to your friend's car's computer to take different/more data.) The moral? Know what's on/in your machines. But this knowledge isn't all that important. As we continue to populate the earth with more humans engaging in more frivolous activity, the more difficult it will be to _manage_ the population's activities. We'll either fall into some speciation pattern where the _hub_ organizations like the FTC or the NSA will be able to manage whole demographics, or the system will crash. As James points out, the unencrypted communication is easy to filter out to some extent. But, as we also see with the rise of the DDoS attack (for political activism as well as nefarious purposes) and co-evolutionary spamming technology, more traffic can be strategically used to debilitate the filters. So, what matters is that we put _everything_ online. If the feds want to know the contents of our urine and whether we ate our peas at dinner, then I say let's tell them! Resistance will eventually take the form of open participation. Openness is the enemy of asymmetry. Now, if you _know_ you're at a high risk of being quarantined or eliminated by the hubs, then this may not be the right strategy for your selfish purposes. Criminals need to be more careful about what they share than your average Joe. But for average Joes, you're likely to be thrown in jail (without due process) whether you're engaging in criminal activity or not. You may happen to be hispanic in Arizona or black in Florida or gay in Texas or Muslim in Oregon. Whatever your attributes, some hub, somewhere will be interested in quarantining or eliminating you. So, your best bet is to admit that you may have to be sacrificed for the good of the collective. You may be taken down by one hub or another, but at least you provided some cover for your colleague Joes who survived another day. Get out there. Participate in Facebook, Pinterest, etc. Play frisbee in the Plaza. Make an ass of yourself arguing with people in your neighborhood association. Occupy everything. Don't make it easy for the hubs to pinpoint whatever demographic they're after. Sarbajit Roy wrote at 04/04/2012 09:38 AM: > Turn off Javascript,.disable Java. > In Firefox, Tools > Options > Content > > On 4/4/12, Nicholas Thompson <[email protected]> wrote: >> So. In short. Has everybody BUT me gone to some toggle in Google and in >> Firefox and in I.E. and done something like “turn off tracking”. Is the >> peril anything worse that when I am trying to show you the “Great New Ap” on >> my lAPtop, google keeps putting up ads for a lotion that will grow hair on a >> billiard ball? Nick -- glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
