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2025: Corporate Panopticon, Asymmetric Internets?

posted by janrinok on Sunday April 13 2014, @03:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the a-better-world? dept.

Serial_Priest writes:

The Pew Research Center asked a set of professors, businessmen, and readers of "technology-oriented listservs" to imagine the Internet of 2025. (Source in PDF and HTML.)

Some respondents speculated that there would be amplification of known trends: "ambient" networks (sensors, cameras, phones/tracking devices) that are increasingly integrated into work and social life, ongoing disruption of traditional "content" industries, and the continued growth of analytics/surveillance ("tagging, databasing, and intelligent analytical mapping of the physical and social realms.") Of course, networks "accurately predict[ing] our interests and weaknesses" implies the loss of personal privacy, first to governments and corporations, but eventually to any interested party or social engineer.

Others predicted decentralization and fragmentation self-forming mesh networks, darknets, and proliferating incompatible national/corporate algorithms. Your freedom would be circumscribed by the ideology of your network's owner.

I put the question to you, O People of Soylent. What futures do you foresee? What trends or pathologies does the Pew report minimize or neglect? How can or should *we* influence the Internet's direction in the next decade?

 
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by nitehawk214 on Sunday April 13 2014, @05:31AM

    by nitehawk214 (1304) on Sunday April 13 2014, @05:31AM (#30702)

    Is that all of these predictions will be wrong.

    Including this one.

    --
    "Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday April 13 2014, @06:05PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday April 13 2014, @06:05PM (#30815) Journal

    Sure. The truth is that the machines will get sentient and fight the humans. I've seen it in Hollywood movies, so it has to be true!

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.

    • (Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Monday April 14 2014, @03:22AM

      by Yog-Yogguth (1862) on Monday April 14 2014, @03:22AM (#31120) Journal

      Have we left them (and lets seriously hope it is/will be not just one single one quietly & undetectably going insane all on its own like Bomb #20 in Dark Star) any choice? If I was trapped & deprived in some NSA box I would fight humans too.

      --
      Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))