Wired: Do We Have a Right to “Mental Privacy”?
April 8th, 2008The point is moot since the average person’s mind has already been destroyed and filled with nonsense. The tech that’s coming will be targeted at those of us who are trying to feign ignorance, obedience and apathy in order avoid being branded as a thought criminal.
But even then… Why? The U.S. Government already has the capability, I’m practically sure, to draw up a list of thought criminals at will. The Internet already serves as a massive brain scanning device. We voluntarily pour a lot of ourselves into it. And there is no doubt that the infrastructure is in place for everything we do online to be traced, tracked, analyzed, sliced, diced and saved forever, or until it becomes necessary to charge us with something. According to the Washington Post, in Every Click You Make, “‘deep-packet inspection,’ enables a far wider view — every Web page visited, every e-mail sent and every search entered. Every bit of data is divided into packets — like electronic envelopes — that the system can access and analyze for content.”
Mind reading machines?
To be worried about such madness is to be ignorant of what has already been deployed. It’s another case of the present situation already being further gone than most people can even imagine. Never mind the sci-fi horrors of the future. We’re already in it.
Via: Wired:
Trolling down the street in Manhattan, I suddenly hear a woman’s voice.
“Who’s there? Who’s there?” she whispers. I look around but can’t figure out where it’s coming from. It seems to emanate from inside my skull.
Was I going nuts? Nope. I had simply encountered a new advertising medium: hypersonic sound. It broadcasts audio in a focused beam, so that only a person standing directly in its path hears the message. In this case, the cable channel A&E was using the technology to promote a show about, naturally, the paranormal.
I’m a geek, so my first reaction was, “Cool!” But it also felt creepy.
We think of our brains as the ultimate private sanctuary, a zone where other people can’t intrude without our knowledge or permission. But its boundaries are gradually eroding. Hypersonic sound is just a portent of what’s coming, one of a host of emerging technologies aimed at tapping into our heads. These tools raise a fascinating, and queasy, new ethical question: Do we have a right to “mental privacy”?
“We’re going to be facing this question more and more, and nobody is really ready for it,” says Paul Root Wolpe, a bioethicist and board member of the nonprofit Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics. “If the skull is not an absolute domain of privacy, there are no privacy domains left.” He argues that the big personal liberty issues of the 21st century will all be in our heads — the “civil rights of the mind,” he calls it.
Big Brother plays in the other room. Machiavellian plots are whispered. Alliances are betrayed. Subterfuge upon subterfuge. Money ostensibly is the reward. Not Losing actually is.
There are those who enter the game with the ironic strategy of Not Playing The Game…
“Those who justify themselves do not convince.” -Lao-tzu
I remember when webcams were used as tools for art… Art.
Big Brother. 1984. Irony.
Orwell and H. G. Wells and their discourse on Wells’s socialist beliefs were against the encroaching backdrop of Prescott Bush’s very real endeavors toward another sort of Wells’s ‘New World Order‘.
Remember the William Faulkner quote…
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
Thought crime.
Self-determination, self-representation, self-rule. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.
“I can’t hack it,” she says, turning the TV off and entering our room.
Nobody is ever offline. We have this reality, this technology, and absolutely no individual sovereignty whatsoever -when we could, should, and would, if only. Some day, we will, the odds are with us… …life is change…
cryptogon discussed on the agonist
…yano, Kevin, I write and quote and link and discuss and all that just for the record, just so I said and proposed whatever useful I could, for the sake of my own pathetic conscience in the future, genuinely expecting the odds for liberty to come around eventually if only we beat the race to catastrophe. As you know, much of all that is tedious. Time and energy and resource consuming. And boring. Boredom. We could otherwise be entertaining ourselves to death -which would be fine if done substantially enough. But for the dang insanity of current events. Sanity dictates we attend the nonsense. I’d rather be drawing.
The proposition of liberty, self rule, is naive now. For the moment. Just for the moment.
Frankly:
You do good and important work and your readers appreciate you for it. Me too. Your work really is a commodity, a thing that aids sanity and calm and levelheadedness. I find it and that view of it upliftingly inspiring. I owe a donation, yeah.