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by negativity 3889 days ago

I've stopped thinking about this in terms of mass surveillance, and re-arranged my perception, to align with a different world view. Namely:

  If we weren't surprised to learn that exploration 
  throughout history was all about conquest, power 
  projection, fortification and exploitation, and we 
  wouldn't be surprised to learn that in the future, 
  deep space exploration proved to hold similar outcomes,
  then why should we be surprised to learn that virtual
  spaces of imagined information across inert transmission
  mediums should experience these sorts of things.

  This is to say, the militarization of hypothetical realms,
  just like the oceans, and just like outer space, was 
  probably always inevitable.

So, with that in mind, that there are people arming themselves to the teeth and enforcing doctrines and demarcations, and patrolling every last iota of territory available to them, is a fact no less ugly than, say, aerial bombardment, but when mortal humans find themselves gifted with potent advantages over their peers, these things happen.

Now comes the time when new virtual territories will likely be carved out. Programming languages that don't use reserved keywords of English origins. Mathematical models for address spaces incompatible with TCP/IP of any version. Other, alternative internets that refuse to be compatible with The Internet as we know it.

The Internet being an American invention, has been dominated by America, and is very obviously patrolled broadly and deeply by American paramilitary entities, in much the same way that American nuclear powered vessels patrol the earth's oceans.

Given the capacity for computation that one can assume must exist, at this point, the only thing that would surprise me, would be if those that had conceived of an internet in general, hadn't actually hypothesized and accounted for this sort of fault and fracture in their models of social behavior and technological progress at the outset of all this, back in the early 1970's.

Part of me wonders if a Snowden-like figure wasn't part of the equation to begin with. Columbus, after all, didn't sail into the Atlantic expecting to fall off the edge of the world.