<unlike-us> Fwd: <nettime> School of red herrings

[John Hopkins]

To accentuate that the problem is not simply about CA or FB nor what may be 
substituted for it in the arena of 'social media', this is reposted from the 
nettime thread the other day -- a far more wholistic view of the problem from 
'Morlock Elloi'... there are certainly wider views as well, based on a systems 
approach to the 'problem', but this one is worth repeating! It does suggest that 
setting oneself pretty much anywhere down on the political spectrum in the US 
means only that ignorance of deep structural issues is complete and there is 
also an ignorance that the endgame of the consumer society is chattel slavery!


JH

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: <nettime> School of red herrings
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2018 22:06:59 -0700
From: Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi at gmail.com>

It's interesting to observe the pace of the official narrative regarding CA/FB 
drama. It reminds of backup strategy of some animals, that are ready to ditch 
tail or leg to save the body.

Initially, CA was the bad guy, and then the fall guy. Some more acute observers 
noticed that it's FB that's the bad guy, and now FB is quickly becoming the 
designated fall guy:

https://www.sltrib.com/pb/opinion/commentary/2018/03/20/leonid-bershidsky-cambridge-analytica-is-a-red-herring-facebook-is-the-real-problem

Neither is true. These are just recently visible emanations of the surveillance 
infrastructure. Notice, as example, that these space surveillance systems are 
currently spared from the public attention:

- AMZN's real time consumer surveillance infrastructure is more advanced that 
anything FB has, because it uses autonomous 24/7 pickups ("Alexa", comically 
paid for by the targets themselves.) In addition, AMZN certification requires 
that all 3rd party devices using Alexa as a command pipeline report their state 
changes in real time - light and other switches, cameras, thermostats, etc., 
and, as of recently, to also have microphones reporting to AMZN.

- APPL Homekit ecosystem is very similar, and they have benefit of correlating 
with handset collections. BTW, they also plan on putting microphones in all 
Homekit devices.

- GOOGL Home not only tracks home events, but correlates both with handsets and 
Internet activity. They know how horny you are, how severe your diarrhea is, and 
when you left the house to join the privacy protest.

- and, just for good measure, to remind that NSA is today, and every day, 
recording the totality of US domestic data flow. On the upside, everyone can now 
be Krapp.

Focussing attention on FB will achieve exactly nothing. FB is actually not so 
bad, as they provide your diarrhea diaries to anyone that pays.

The other ecosystems are more closed and it's much harder to find out the full 
extent of conditioning that they are capable of. Meddling with elections was a 
skin job - ultimately irrelevant. Which is why you heard about it.

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