Originally posted by: Man is Truth
I dont think I know many people who can leave their front door and travel in any direction for more than a mile before they are on record.
Facebook uses facial scanning software to pin individual's by their features. I'm sure the DMV feeds into shit that does this also. The cameras of the increasingly centralized municipalities (Camden County POLice motherfuckers!) will inevitably one day use this data, if they do not already.
There are computers already that are so advanced that they are essentially alive, and these computers just eat up all of this data, fed to them by the Pentagon and related agencies all over the world. They can, and probably already do, have a literal matrix, with a real-time planet grid filled with moving dots, all of which are loaded with data collected about the individuals whose real-time placement they represent; personality profiles, spending habits, pornography, memberships in organizations, electoral status, debt, health conditions, everything. And the knowledge of the space these individuals are in is developed and sophisticated too- combine this with their areial scans and satellite photography and RFID product-tracker chips and Google street camera cars. Thats already where we are at today.
Dude think about how these computers will and must already (someone built them as an investment) make economic models for resource exploitation, models that invested Ruling parties follow as policy.
I'm not even worried about top-down control coming in the form of political repression or 'enhanced' marketing, nearly as much as I am about cavalier person-to-person violations becoming commonplace, and the more insidious decomposition of what we are, coming from the ground up as we willingly give it away.
The willingness of people following 9/11 to accept the Patriot Act's warrentless wiretaps may have just been the first notes of the score. If people put such a low value on privacy - and some don't even view it as necessarily a positive thing for themselves - or for the people they lurk, stalk, 'research', etc., how will this influence their interpretation of law when they're in their 40's? I think we are already looking at a generation that has grown up without it: 9/11 was 10 years ago. What will their conception of civil liberties be when they are given the choice between holding on to them or getting the next new shiny whateverthefuck? What does this make them?
As for the tracking question, yeah, there are already parents who have used nanny cams on their children from birth, and the children have become accustomed to it. They go straight from this environment to posting pictures of themselves on myspace and facebook and giving a running commentary of their bowel movements on twitter. So the transition from the nanny cam to the nanny state is pretty seamless, except that there will be no nanny, just a cashier and gluttenous, consumerist, adult children responding to whatever fads and mores of their time captures their attention, i.e. less Big Brother and more Idiocracy.
But that's just one aspect to it, and in my opinion a minor one. What does all this do to the human character? For two and a half thousand years here in the West, humans have struggled with the notion of personal boundaries. Slaves had no boundaries from their owners, and kings had castles. Everyone else fell somewhere in between. From Solon to Charlemagne to Nat Turner to the U.N. charter's definition of basic human rights, progress, however slow, was made to the point where everyone, regardless of income, color, or gender, is at least supposed to be able to have the expectation of basic rights, including the right to privacy. Now, a significant piece of that progression may be slipping back in retrograde in the dark of night and the dull sleep of gluttony, vanity, and the other usual suspects.