The internet…. ads, yes. Monetize, yes…. now the internet is filled with endless clutter because of attempts to drive revenue and monetize…. booking engines, shopping sites, etc. Think of tripadvisor, ebay, or Amazon. It’s a trainwreck… the UI’s have been updated, and it’s still a clusterfuck. But the broken internet isn’t Google or the monetizing thing… it’s the black hat SEO spammers that create automated content farms and scraper sites. Those are the people to blame. The ads are just the symptom of capitalism.
Also… Stuxnet. It’s epic, and it is the future. People don’t get what’s happening here…. we have the first hypercommunal networked hive mind or global brain. Privacy is going to become something akin to civil rights (what you are allowed to do without inturrution from external forces), and we are all going to know what is going on with everyone else. It’s like we are all big brother, cell phones in hand, ratting out our neighbors, politicians, businesses, etc. If radical transparency is going to scorch the earth and hold corporations or governments accountable, then people will be swept up in that, and our entire culture will change. It’s like real time ESP with no filter. Minority Report Pre-Cogs aren’t really that far fetched, as we will have facial recognition tech scanning society real time that will cross index who people are with and what their past behaviours have been. It will be an algorithm profiling all of us. But the idea of stuxnet as the future battleground isn’t outlandish. It’s already accepted to be as powerful as a *full scale* military strike …..  or this great article about deciphering stuxnet.
But I am still more worried about our government asking security firms to write rootkits. Â What is my government want with a rootkit? I know what it is, but it feels like a 20th century mentality….. every system on earth needs to become a bit more “self-aware” and start processing that transparency isn’t an option… it’s the future.
The longer people like Herman Cain, or companies like Goldman Sachs, or governments like.. well all of them… are stuck in the 20th century mindset (I can lie and get away with it). Lying is ending. It really is. Not white lie stuff… but everyone is watching everyone else, and *NOW* has the power to relay facts and evidence.
But all this is important because….. the future has arrived, and no one is ready for it. Technology isn’t just changing humanity, it’s fundamentally altering the course of culture, governments, economics, and humanity.
I didn’t even get into the singularity stuff, and how most of us have cochlear (or other) implants, or pins and rods, or a pacemaker, or some augmentation of humanity with technology…. and our definition of what “human” is, and what it means to be, is changing. We are at a turning point, and it will never go backwards. It’s just with stuff like the google algorithm, or nuclear tech / stuxnet / malware / anything sufficiently advanced – we are playing with stuff that can likely blow us up or kill us. That whole moment in the book Contact where Ellie says she would ask aliens how they survived their technological immaturity comes to mind. But I am rambling.
Wild rambling.
Anyhoo… times are a’ changing, and it’s an amazing moment to be inside of. Right now, human communication has shifted in the most massive way in human history since the development of language. The printing press doesn’t come close to what’s going on.
Yeah… so… ramble.