Recently in Philosophy Category
The nation is afire with talk of NSA wiretapping. This is a good thing. Not the blanket info and wiretapping (though I'll get to that later), but the talk. The ability to intercept communication and the actuality thereof has always been an issue within community. That being said, there has been a huge shift in what is considered private in the past few decades. Telecommunications provides for a sense of removal, an illusion of privacy never before felt. The feeling is akin to whispering in an empty room. But there are ghosts listening. The notion brings to mind legends of the spirit, hidden ethereal bodies ever present but untouchable. Perhaps we need new legends to update the old, to teach our children how to communicate effectively and take into account the oubliete of the ghost. This carries over through wiretapping, to extend to internet stalkers, a pan-all paradigm shift in the presence of transparent ubiquitous communication.
Now, the wiretapping. The government. Super-secret mega-scary ghosts sitting on your shoulder waiting for you to say "bomb", "heroin", "rape", "dissent"... The actual wiretapping doesn't scare me so much as the unchecked nature of it all, and the overall paranoid and/or uninformed response. Gathering information is great. I'm heavily biased towards grabbing everything, as might be gleaned from my previous ramblings. But the filtering is the kicker. How to filter out all the droves of information without infringing on privacy (albeit a privacy which really doesn't exist). Lawrence Lessig stresses the importance of transparency—the removal of the content to the subject—the human. I somewhat agree.
But how do the ghosts decide? Software? Is the impartial judge only reached through artificial intelligence and algorithmic filters? No, there will always be a human trainer. A man behind every byte. Scary?
An article off Digg states that a single penny (one cent) actually costs 1.3 cents to make. This brings a dumb smile to my face—anachronism. Physical currency is becoming irrelevant, already archaic. The parallels drawn to other tech relevant matter. Think media publishing. Is there a place for vulgar physically manifestations of abstraction? Bring on the RFID.
Or selling beads.
During the weekend I got through most of Lawrence Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. The text is out-dated, naive, a fossil—but still somehow stimulating/thought-provoking. The subject of encription and trusted systems is pretty interesting. I still need to develop a more informed opinion on the risks and benefits of publishing intellectual property in digital form. Lessig brings up his token idea of the commons—Creative Commons. Still, I'm just not convinced by the arguments of a simple code-based architecture structuring the passage through the net. Many project ideas are coming out of reading the book, though, so look forward to more on this.
UPDATE: Link - maybe the book isn't so obsolete.
