nettime aclu: IoT
http://tinyurl.com/l5vcnp7 and http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175822/ Finally somebody makes a public argument against the breathless Red Herring Utopian hype around IoT and its purported deep and beneficent innocence. Back in the 90s, there was the same level of hype around the Web in general, and we got the NSA. Imagine what IoT will bring us. The ACLU makes a powerful argument to where we *don't* want to end up, given the level of technological sophistication and data agglomeration we, under this globalized techno-social regime, are converging on... Cheers. jh -- ++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD photographer, media artist, http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++ # 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
nettime The Brutal Ageism of Tech
Pretty thorough story on ageism in tech, which usually gets no more than a bit of lip service here and there: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117088/silicons-valleys-brutal-ageism A cynic might say this is the thin edge of the wedge (actually not all that thin, given the visibility and size of the tech industry). --Dave. -- Dave Mandl dma...@panix.com da...@wfmu.org Web: http://dmandl.tumblr.com/ Twitter: @dmandl App.net: @dmandl Instagram: dmandl # 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
Re: nettime aclu: IoT
Was recently reading Matteo Pasquinelli's impressive 2014 article on society of meta-data -and how italian (post)workerists have identified the trend and grasped where it was leading; http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/02/02/0263276413514117 At the end Matteo links the argument to the IoT, Industrial Internet and IoE. Somehow one can undestand the absence of public critique by Californians, yet it seems to me like a bigger failure that we were misig radical critics goign viral and targeting this projects that were around for decades. while they have been openly declaring that they aim is the objectivisation of entire living labour into the interlinked networks of machines that are embedded in the city; they call it 'putting people at work on the move', proceting sort of an 'absolute general intellect'. As well as a global collective worker, neworked global production cains desiging ad erdesigning transnational division of labour intelligently according to the needs and functions of capital. How would you and other nettimers would explain the lack of wider radical criticque of this? An counter IoT project came from Telekommunisten; OCTO which gives nice and fun vision for how should a beer to peer communal-IoT be designed: http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/project-of-the-day-octo/2014/03/25 Orsan On 26 mrt. 2014, at 03:58, John Hopkins jhopk...@neoscenes.net wrote: http://tinyurl.com/l5vcnp7 and http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175822/ Finally somebody makes a public argument against the breathless Red Herring Utopian hype around IoT and its purported deep and beneficent innocence. ... # 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
Re: nettime aclu: IoT
ACLU is not what it once was. The national office is now almost exclusively mercenary, corporatized as a fund-raising foundation, high-salaried leaders deployed to hustle concentrated wealth holders. Genuine public interest board members departed some time ago. The branches remain reputable but subject to funds being yanked if too obstreperous. The national org is a part of the pattern to deeply fund a few NGOs to dominate public interest issues in a way which affirms global markets in distressed territories. All the giant foundations are doing this, have been doing this, will be doing this, in concert with the corporations gushing funds into well to do NGOs, safely within comfortable ideologies of WMD supremacy. Non-profit journalism is the darling at the moment, ProPublica, First Look, The Marshall Project, Knight, Pew, PBD, NPR. Snowden Inc. is a pointed reminder of how a hot topic like American civil liberties violating NSA can be monetized instantly by use of the Internet so long as it does not actually interfere with global national security arrangements, assure by sustained consultation by journalists with governments about what to release. ACLU has accomplished its mission to be the go to org for not challenging USG authority, and is providing legal services to Snowden, Inc. as well as running a fancy ad campaign to lure donors. IoT is among a panoply of initiatives overflowing the coffers. At 10:58 PM 3/25/2014, you wrote: http://tinyurl.com/l5vcnp7 and http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175822/ Finally somebody makes a public argument against the breathless Red Herring Utopian hype around IoT and its purported deep and beneficent innocence. ... # 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
nettime Survey
Just doing a survey on a startup idea: Would you use a free condom with BT IPV6 address ? Totally free. On 3/25/14 19:58 , John Hopkins wrote: http://tinyurl.com/l5vcnp7 and http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175822/ Finally somebody makes a public argument against the breathless Red Herring Utopian hype around IoT and its purported deep and beneficent innocence. Back in the 90s, there was the same level of hype around the Web in general, and we got the NSA. Imagine what IoT will bring us. The ACLU makes a powerful argument to where we *don't* want to end up, given the level of technological sophistication and data agglomeration we, under this globalized techno-social regime, are converging on... Cheers. jh # 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
nettime Ippolita Collective, In the Facebook Aquarium Part One, section #9,
In the Facebook Aquarium Part One, section #9, 2 (end) (...) Paradoxically, the webization of the social by way of mass profiling results in anti-social outcomes, since we all can become guilty by association - and innocent by dissociation. And as human decision makers are increasingly delegating their power to algorithms, one can only expect an increasing number of evaluation errors, and also ever larger ones, of a kind that would be easily avoidable in real life, or within decentralised systems. To bear the same name as someone with a less than clean criminal record, or as a terrorist on the books with the Feds becomes a crime by association: machines turn us into defendants because they are unable to distinguish us from someone who bears the same name. And if we have been victim of identity theft, and someone uses our credit card for an illegal activity, we are not only being swindled, but become culprits also, insofar as our digital alter ego makes this manifest beyond any doubt. We are then no longer in a regime of 'innocent till proven guilty', but of 'guilty till proven innocent'. The generalised criminalisation of society is the logical outcome of profiling procedures - which themselves are anyway derived from criminal profiling. In the end, their only beneficiaries are the ill-intended, who are always conscious of the need to always have an alibi at hand. Newbie internauts therefore lay themselves open to all kinds of abuse because of profiling which turn them into potential culprits. A Facebook account, or for that matter, on Google+ or Twitter, is not owned by the account holder. It is a space that has been provided to the user for free, in exchange letting her/himself be cut up in commercially interesting bits and pieces. Strangely enough, the user her/himself carries as such zero value, since sHe must, not only prove sHe actually is who sHe pretends to be, but also that sHe is innocent. In Facebook's case, there are a number of reasons for which one can get kicked out. The most common one is use of a fake name. Some fakes are easy to notice, but not all are. 'Superman' is most likely an alias, but which algorithm is smart enough to make out whether 'Ondatje Malimbi' is truly a Kenyan user with a Swedish mother? To do so it would require access to civil registries, tax-office files and social security data bases. A scenario actually not that far of (##*). And by the way, we may notice that authoritarian governments appear to have far less reservations about implementing 'radical transparency'. Maintainers of social networks play a decisive role when it comes to what is, or is not, legit. Hence they do help shape the rules of the society in which we live. They do not have the power to send somebody to prison - yet - but they actively cooperate with governments to enforce the laws of the land, written and unwritten. Google has specifically, since the beginning, partnered with the American intelligence community. What we know to-day as 'Google Earth' started as military cartography software developed by In-Q-Tel, and sold to Google in 2004. In-Q-Tel is a venture capital firm with CIA connections [42]. Ever since the USA Patriot Act was voted, with its harsh penalties for any actor found out to help 'the enemy', on-line services providers have become extremely cautious. They'll rather go for pro-active censorship than to run the risk to host potential terrorists on their servers, or even people not looked upon kindly by the US government. Paradoxically, in countries under US embargo, dissidents' profiles are (also ? - transl.) often closed while the regime's supporters are able to propagate their views without hindrance on the government's controlled servers. While eulogizing Iran's 'Twitter Revolution', nobody, not even the people in the Administration - who waxed eloquent about its democratic properties - seems to have noticed that Twitter was in effect infringing the US embargo by offering its services to iranian citizens ... Censorship is at the order of the day on Facebook, which often projects itself as guarantor of the net's neutrality - a concept we have already criticised. Facebook's very peculiar idea of democracy is based on its moralism, as we have seen it at work before. Any user raising the suspicion of engaging into hate speech may be expelled at once. Here's a characteristic example: My Facebook account has been cancelled, and also 's because we were the administrators of the 'Against Daniela Santanchè' group (A.S. is a extreme right wing Italian politician), or rather, I was administrator and the developer. I tried to log in, but I only got a message that my account had been de-activated. I then send a message to the address I had found in the FAQ. I got no answer. I got the following response two weeks later, after I had send yet another message: Here is Facebook's automated response message: [NB This is a translation from the text of the book, itself a
nettime Blogpost: The Multistakeholder Model, Neo-liberalism and Global (Internet) Governance
(with links) http://gurstein.wordpress.com/2014/03/26/the-multistakeholder-model-neo-libe ralism-and-global-internet-governance/ http://t.co/EU8F1LgUn6 The Multistakeholder Model, Neo-liberalism and Global (Internet) Governance Michael Gurstein I've commented elsewhere on the sudden emergence and insertion of the multistakeholder model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multistakeholder_governance_model (referred to here also as multistakeholderism or MSism) in Internet Governance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_governance discussions some 2 or 3 years ago http://gurstein.wordpress.com/2012/12/09/whose-hand-off-what-internet-some- reflections-on-wcit-2012/ . The term of course, has been around a lot longer and even has been used within the Internet sphere to describe (more or less appropriately) the decision-making processes of various of the Internet's technical bodies (the IETF http://www.ietf.org/ , the IAB https://www.iab.org/ , ICANN https://www.icann.org/ ). What is new and somewhat startling is the full court press http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-court_press by the US government (USG) and its allies and acolytes among the corporate, technical and civil society participants in Internet Governance discussions to extend the use of the highly locally adapted versions of the MS model from the quite narrow and technical areas where it has achieved a considerable degree of success towards becoming the fundamental and effectively, only, basis on which such Internet Governance discussions are to be allowed (as per the USG's statement concerning the transfer of the DNS management function http://www.ntia.doc.gov/press-release/2014/ntia-announces-intent-transition -key-internet-domain-name-functions ) to go forward. Notably as well multistakeholderism seems to have replaced Internet Freedom as the mobilizing Internet meme of choice ( http://gurstein.wordpress.com/2013/09/24/internet-freedom-and-post-snowden- global-internet-governance/ Internet Freedom having been somewhat discredited by post-Snowden associations of Internet Freedom with the freedom of the USG -to surveille, sabotage, and subvert via the Internet). In the midst of these developments there has been a subtle shift in presenting MSism as a framework for Internet Governance consultation processes to now presenting it as the necessary model for Internet Governance decision-making. Moreover it is understood that this decision-making would be taking place not only within the fairly narrow areas of the technical management of Internet functions but also into the broader areas of Internet impact and the associated Internet related public policy where the Internet's significance is both global and expanding rapidly. Most importantly the MS model is being presented as the model which would replace the outmoded processes of democratic decision-making in these spheres-in the terminology of some proponents, providing an enhanced post-democratic model for global (Internet) policy making. So what exactly is the multistakeholder model? Well that isn't quite clear and no one (least of all the US State Department which invoked the model 12 times in its one page presentation http://www.state.gov/e/eb/rls/prsrl/2014/221946.htm to the NetMundial meeting in Brazil) has yet provided anything more than headline references to the MS model or examples of what it might (but probably wouldn't) look like given the likelihood of the need to contextualize individual instances and practices. But whatever it is, a key element is that policy (and other) decisions will be made by and including all relevant stakeholders. This will of course include for example the major Internet corporations who get to promote their stakes and make Internet policy through some sort of consensus process where all the participants have an equal say and where rules governing things like operational procedures, conflict of interest, modes and structures of internal governance, rules of participation etc. etc. all seem to be made up as they go along. Clearly the major Internet corporations, the US government and their allies in the technical and civil society communities are quite enthusiastic - jointly working out things like Internet linked frameworks, principles and rules (or not) for privacy and security, taxation, copyright etc. - is pretty heady stuff. Whether the outcome in any sense is supportive of the broad public interest or an Internet for the Common Good http://ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/article/view/1099 , or anything beyond a set of rules and practices to promote the interests of and benefits for those who are already showing the most returns from their current stake in the Internet, well that isn't so clear. What I think is clear though is that the MS model which is being presented, is in fact the transformation of the neo-liberal economic model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism which has resulted in such devastation and human tragedy throughout
