Your posting on the crisis of the information society struck me as a useful summary of a current state of affairs. There seem to be obvious conclusions to be drawn from this which, apparently, nobody dares to clearly state:
(a) The Internet - i.e. anything traveling over TCP/IP and routed via DNS - cannot be trusted for any form of truly private or classified information. It needs to be seen as one, global, public billboard - yet with varied privileges of access that non-corporate and non-governmental users are in not control of. The fact that all information received through this network is, as you write, potentially tampered, is the second issue on top of the privacy issue. However, these restrictions still imply that the Internet can serve such good purposes as running UbuWeb (to refer to Kenny Goldsmith's article on this list) or Nettime. Crypto activism does not solve these two issues despite its good intentions. Too many core technologies such as OpenSSL, TrueCrypt, PGP-E-Mail (with its lack of meta data encryption), TOR, ... have turned out to be flawed or compromised. They all can do more harm than good for one's privacy if one isn't a highly skilled computer user using non-mainstream operating systems like Tails. Offline communication still remains a simple alternative for dealing with these restrictions. A good example is Henry Warwick's "Radical Tactics of the Offline Library" ( http://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/no-07-radical-tactics-of-the-offline-library-henry-warwick/ ). (b) These two above issues lead to the logical conclusion that no critical infrastructure should ever rely on Internet communication. That includes all mainstream scenarios of the Internet of Things, Smart Cities and most other technologies marketed with a "smart" prefix, drones, robotics and autonomous cars. To give one example: If I correctly interpret information I received from a colleague of mine, a researcher in water management, then it is already possible to flood the Netherlands through computer hacking because its current systems of levees and watergates is controlled via a local sensors in the levees connected to a data center that controls the pumps based on the real time sensor data; all these data connections run over the Internet via a VPN. If technology development blindly proceeds with such "smart technologies", we'll be able to study Philip K. Dick novels and "Terminator" movies as predictive scenarios - and write screenplays for war movies where countries get attacked by someone hacking and crashing all Google cars. (c) The San Francisco billboard likely epitomizes the end of an "information society" and media bubble period roughly between 1998 and 2008. In that time, the classical media and information economy, and their jobs, were still in swing while the industries that were about to replace them first came in as additional players working on venture capital. The temporary coexistence of these two economies created an inflated market. I remember how in the late 1990s, newspapers such as Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung suddenly boomed and expanded (employing some Nettimers as writers, btw.) because dotcoms massively placed their ads in them. In retrospect, this could be described as the media eating itself. The same must have historically happened in other industries, for example in transportation, when railroads where built while coachmen were still in business. In both cases, the economic growth model - and investment stimulus - for the new industry is the prospect of taking over the market with a fraction of the previous costs and resources, basically replacing comparatively inefficient, local and regional players with a few global players. In the media and information sector, the business model for the new players (Google, Apple, Facebook) has not only been centralization, but also the fact that they are media companies that no longer employ "content" creators. This conversely means that thee economic exchange value of media creation, in the classic sense of editorial or artistic/audiovisual/design work, is sinking to unforeseen lows. For regional commercial video producers in Europe, to take an example with which I'm familiar, hourly rates are the same as for repairman only in the best case; in most cases, they are lower, and don't reflect investment into equipment. Another example: according to market research, the average pre-tax income of commercial photographers in the Netherlands is about $20,000/year. If this is indicative of any larger trend in media jobs, then it means that nothing is more obsolete than the notion of the "creative class", but that the bulk of "information society" and media jobs have become working class employment or worse. -F On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 6:20 PM, michael gurstein <gurst...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Pando.com: New San Francisco billboard warns workers they'll be replaced > by iPads > if they demand a fair wage > > > http://tinyurl.com/mn2xzzn > # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
