Great doc just screened on BBC called Is business the real Big Brother?

“As we move throughout cities, throughout our jobs and lives, there are technologies and devices everywhere which capture our movements, capture our activities, which are then stored on databases as evidence of what we’ve been doing.”
- Dr Kirstie Ball, Open University

You can download it here. (I just started reading Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID. Excellent, expect a review soon, but definitely read this book).

New Scientist has an article on ‘Mashup Sites’, sites “created by merging data from two or more websites”. It was this interesting observation that caught my eye:

A hacker could feed false data to a crime location mashup, for example, perhaps to help raise property prices in a particular area by making it appear crime-free. A prankster could create bogus traffic jams on a mashup map, diverting traffic in such a way that queues are actually made worse.

This is simply using the content of the digital electric medium to manipulate people in a way similar to how governments and corporations can manipulate entire societies to go to war or to consume. However, the age old terms of propaganda and advertising are inadequate to explain today’s realities of manipulation and the ability of the “masters of the universe” to create other realities because today’s medium combines not only the old ones of TV, radio, and books into one, but also the actual active, participating minds of its users. I’ll explain this a bit more (I hope) but I’ll refer to this type of technique as “social hacking”. A good example of what I’m referring to (with a business twist) would the popular TV series Lost, which is completely viral new media using The Lost Experience, an ARG (Alternate Reality Game) that utilizes fake books and websites to create an immersive world in conjunction with the TV show. It’s no longer just a show, it’s another reality.

As the digital-electric medium as a whole morphs to whatever tomorrow brings, the power to manipulate social groups, cities or countries can belong to sole individuals, which is one reason why governments have such paranoia regarding hackers accessing restricted or sensitive information (or having criminal intent, depending on your outlook or their intent). But tomorrows buzzword will probably be “sockers” and the threat they pose to the civilized world because they will use the content of the medium to manipulate groups of people or societies. A forerunner to what I’m talking about is probably The Yes Men, hacking the business world to expose the WTO for what they are. How is what they do actually possible? Because today’s electronic medium represents the autoamputation of our mind, and tomorrow’s Internet of Things will be the autoamputation of reality. In other words, our minds and reality are becoming the content of the medium itself, and this has profound implications for us.

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I’ve mentioned the Government-Private partnership on snooping before, in particular a speech given by Michael Chertoff who was remarkably candid on how the government and the private sector can work together, whereby the private sector can “create a marketplace for the technology and a marketplace for the systems”. He was talking specifically about screening travellers, but they apply equally well to the current NSA scandal. Business Week recently reported that purchasing “commercially collected data allows the government to dodge certain privacy rules”.

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