• 19 MAR 16

    A Brave New World Part III: Google’s Surveillance Capitalism

    Excerpy
    The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism

    Governmental control is nothing compared to what Google is up to. The company is creating a wholly new genus of capitalism, a systemic coherent new logic of accumulation we should call surveillance capitalism. Is there nothing we can do?
    Google surpassed Apple as the world’s most highly valued company in January for the first time since 2010. (Back then each company was worth less than 200 billion. Now each is valued at well over 500 billion.) WhileGoogle’s new lead lasted only a few days, the company’s success has implications for everyone who lives within the reach of the Internet. Why? Because Google is ground zero for a wholly new subspecies of capitalism in which profits derive from the unilateral surveillance and modification of human behavior. This is a new surveillance capitalism that is unimaginable outside the inscrutable high velocity circuits of Google’s digital universe, whose signature feature is the Internet and its successors. While the world is riveted by the showdown between Apple and the FBI, the real truth is that the surveillance capabilities being developed by surveillance capitalists are the envy of every state security agency. What are the secrets of this new capitalism, how do they produce such staggering wealth, and how can we protect ourselves from its invasive power?
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    • 18 MAR 16

    A Brave New World Part II: Wi-Fi Aware

    Excerpt

    WI-Fi Aware, sounds like an activist group but far from it. It is essentially a concept of social engineering where the corporations designing and building the Internet of Things (IoT) are creating a social order where humans will be totally immersed in a microwave saturated virtual IoT matrix, unable to function outside of it and perhaps with everyone implanted with a RFID chip to always stay connected, even without a smart phone. As Google has said, people who attempt to opt-out will be viewed with suspicion and will need “special attention”.

    But at least we will have all these wonderful toys to play with, at least to the IoT becomes self aware…. Interesting reading here is from the IT tech online magazine: Information Age: Insight and analysis for IT leaders The autonomous Internet of Things: how the IoT will become context-aware and self-sufficient….. Wi-Fi Aware, sometimes shortened to just Aware, is the culmination of a lot of research and development by some of the biggest companies around the world. We’re talking Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, Cisco, and all the other participating members of the Wi-Fi Alliance….. It’s a refined example of the Internet of Things, an idea that describes a network of interconnected devices where all the devices are constantly sending information back and forth without any human involvement.
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