Quick Links 5-14-07
May 14, 2007
* Big Brothers, Big Facebook: Your Orwellian Community
The Information Awareness Office seems to have survived some of its original purposes in a mutated form, found in today’s Facebook. In fact, one of IAO’s original example technologies included “human network analysis and behavior model building engines,” [10] a surprising echo of the social networking mapping that Facebook does using SVG visualizations. [11] Add that to the information that Facebook collects and compare it to the startlingly similar goal of the IAO. It appears at first glance that DoD, along with the CIA, has managed to circumvent its previous Congressionally established limitations and find corporate sponsorship for its programs, under the thin veil of a useful social network for unwitting college students.
* Introduction to Anarchism (YouTube video clip)
* India Looks to Produce World’s First $10 Laptop
The Times of India on Friday reported that the efforts thus far have yielded designs for a laptop that would cost about $47, while a $10 system remains the ultimate goal.
* Mini DNA Replicator Could Benefit the World’s Poor
…The system could enable DNA-based tests to be carried out in the field or in developing countries, where large, expensive laboratory equipment is neither practical nor affordable.
* Is Religion Built Upon Lies? (Debate between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan)
This lengthy “blogalogue” between atheist Sam Harris (author of the End of Faith) and gay Catholic blogger Andrew Sullivan goes quite a bit further than most such debates on religion go (though Harris demolishes Sullivan in the end).
* Public Satellite Images May Need Censorship, Satellite Spy Chief Says
Without sounding too much like a technology triumphalist, I’m doubtful the government can win this information war. Perhaps the Pentagon can buy itself a few years or a decade of continued overhead monopoly of omniscience but information wants to be free and the resolution wants to be high.
In a few years … you will be able to download three-dimensional plans online, then push Print. Hours later, a solid object will be ready to remove from your printer.
Time and again, people struggling not for some token reform but for complete liberation — the reclamation of control over our own lives and the power to negotiate our own relationships with the people and the world around us — will find that nonviolence does not work, that we face a self-perpetuating power structure that is immune to appeals to conscience and strong enough to plow over the disobedient and uncooperative.
* Two Ways of Looking at Fascism
Matthew Lyons is one of the sharpest writers out there when it comes to evaluating the nature and revolutionary potential of fascism. Well worth the read.
Fascism is a revolutionary form of right-wing populism, inspired by a totalitarian vision of collective rebirth, that challenges capitalist control of the state while defending class exploitation.
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This essay is intended to challenge the conventional leftist view that fascism equals a tool of capitalist repression — because that view not only distorts history but also hides major political threats in today’s world. Fascism is better understood as an autonomous right-wing force that has a contradictory relationship with capital and that draws mass support largely by advocating a revolution against established values and institutions.
