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posted by
janrinok
on Saturday January 24 2015, @12:03PM
from the your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine dept.
from the your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine dept.
Politico Magazine asked 15 other big thinkers and doers for their ideas of what will change the world the most in the next 15 years. We got back lots of inspiration—from the transformative power of opening up national borders to the commercialization of the human genome—and one dyspeptic dissenter. Read on, for a sense of the possible in the world of 2030.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/15-big-breakthroughs-in-2015-114486.html
Would you agree with their predictions? What would surveillance be like in 2030? Would we have any freedoms at all, any privacy?
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A shapely CATHOLIC SCHOOLGIRL is FIDGETING inside my costume..
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Sunday January 25 2015, @03:24PM
How incredibly important context is and how little of it we, all of us but at least I, have.
I can be wrong about it all except this sentence: there's a lot more [wikipedia.org] to the second quote which sounds as if it might as well have been written by Phillip K. Dick. This is his world(s).
In fact (a terrible expression in this case) if (or when) the following is right then the conclusion is that “the rest of us” (including me) are “always” wrong. It's not as paradoxical as it sounds because since in that case “right” and “wrong” moves about at what seems like it should be but isn't entirely random.
The quote is often/usually attributed to Karl Rove but I think it's a modified version of something he (or someone else) was told and was awed by, and it was used to sound clever and impress in private but whoever it was wouldn't have done it if they had fully grasped what was being told.
So what I'm saying is that Karl Rove (or somebody else) uses something he's been told about as an individual recipient in a conversation and modifies it to tell someone else belonging to a specific group of people (not the general public nor a group Karl Rove belongs to) something about them and the world that group lives in. Both any unknown first quote and the second quote was private, unofficial, and unconfirmed, both could have been told to impress or to inform or both and there's an element of victorious gloating or belittling although not especially hostile and possibly amiable.
However ten years later it just looks far too much like a brief summary of the dynamic “endstate”. After one has enough information one will be able to make manipulation however subtle (or outrageous or seemingly idiotic and stupid or counterproductive) as one wants to and yet also gain efficiency because it's the result of the wave interference of the ripples that is being engineered and not the pebbles hitting the surface.
Customized and optimized and automatic and fast, choose all, that's mathematics for you.
With everyone else being blinded by a growing sea of noise perceived reality will be redefined to be constantly wrong yet uniquely so in different novel ways at intervals fast enough to aim to guarantee unceasing interruption of any kind of adversary's OODA loop [wikipedia.org]. To get ones head around that one can try to imagine “fighting” a constant ‘singularity on demand’ where all instincts will be completely useless because they will all work against you and all knowledge is invalid or wrong expect for in very specific contexts.
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“Solutions” is the topic.
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The sky is not blue and never was blue, the sky has no color, the atmosphere has no color, air has no color, you might as meaningfully talk about the color of the abstraction of the concept circle.
And you might find someone else who agrees with you on the color of the abstraction of circle, and you will be able to communicate it, but the color is inside your heads.
However in sufficient quantities of ‘air’ the sum total of some electromagnetic radiation might be perceived (again inside you) as various shades of blue due to elastic scattering of electromagnetic radiation of specific wavelengths at specific angles in specific contexts of atmospheric water aggregation, particulate concentrations, moisture, temperature, and pressure and so on.
Thus the sky is blue.
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(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Sunday January 25 2015, @04:49PM
You have a really good method of surmise and forensic thought-experiment. It does me good to read, and prompts me further into thinking.
The reference is from a Ron Suskind article in the NYT Magazine, and the attribution is to an unnamed aide in the Bush administration. This can all be found in the Wikipedia article for "Reality-based community." [wikipedia.org]
What I think is more important than understanding it as a desired end-state, that this is the representative statement of those in positions of elite power. It describes the imperial world view of monarchal society, translated for the quasi-democratic and media-saturated current era.
How close we are to this end-state? A matter for argument. But some clue is by the extraordinary persecution of those, in recent years, who have resisted or even given a voice to an alternative narrative account. Most recently there is Barrett Brown sentencing. GCHQ has been classifying "investigative journalists" as a legitimate target for anti-terrorism targeting. Last Friday, Andrew Lack new head for the US Broadcasting Board of Governors, labelled the broadcaster RT as one of the main challenges to his agency, ranked equal to ISIS and Boko Haram.
So I do not believe that there is a conspiracy of a single cabal, with shadowy tentacles, enforcing this in every exec meeting and board room. But there is a defining ethic that is self-reinforcing and has incredible grasp official positions, media messaging and power to sanction with economic, criminal and military methods.
The "Reality-based community" statement neatly gives a form to that defining ethic, and renders sensible the state of a "west" with an incestous power elite - and a fifth estate that treats itself as a client of privilege - where four companies control the 147 others, that own everything". [forbes.com]
You're betting on the pantomime horse...