Re: <nettime> Autonomy and Control in the Era of Post-Privacy

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@yahoo.com>]

There are two premises which appear to be ignored:

1. ownership of the wire.

While most people do actually own their synapses, very few own the physical
links that support assisted communication.

It's easy to forget this, but if you've ever sat at the other side of log
acquisition and content filtering whether in corporate or government
sector, you'll never think of the Networked World as of anything else as an
experimental ant colony where you get to define the ground rules.

This is important in a purely entropy (or originality) creation sense:
today there are orders of magnitude fewer creators of the mental landscape,
compared to the times when one could sit processing a small amount of data
gathered during the day with own wetware. Think of this as braincycles/bit
of data ratio. It has changed. Society is going back to mainframe
computing.

2. Number of data sources.

With increased connectivity, ratio of cumulative braincycles/data source
has dramatically increased for those who get to publish. As number of
braincycles is limited, this necessarily depletes processing services for
other. less popular data sources. Sort of DoS attack (not even DDoS).

This in turn, results in increased homogenization of the thinking and
monoculture that everyone bitches about.

Why are these two points important? Because affecting one or both is the
only way to introduce a change. 


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