Do new information and communication technologies (ICTs) empower repressive regimes at the expense of civil society, or vice versa? For example, does access to the Internet and mobile phones alter the balance of power between repressive regimes and civil society? These questions are especially pertinent today given the role that ICTs played during this year’s uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and beyond. Indeed, as one Egyptian activist stated, “We use Facebook to schedule our protests, Twitter to coordinate and YouTube to tell the world.” But do these new ICTs—so called “liberation technologies”—really threaten repressive rule? The purpose of this dissertation is to use mixed-methods research to answer these questions.
Within human social and economic systems, pathogenic behavior is spreading. This is particularly true among powerful, successful, and wealthy people (finance, economics, politics, etc.) in the developed world. What specifically do I mean by pathogenic? An ever greater number of these people are adopting behaviors that are actively hostile to the human systems we rely upon. They actually think it is OK to put these systems at risk for personal benefit. This is very dangerous. Given the massive amounts of network, technological, and financial leverage that's currently available to these people, even a single bad actor can wreak global havoc like never before (as in, they could cause an economic collapse that's so severe that it could kill more people than every war we've ever had to date, combined).
So, why is this happening and how can we prevent it? This has been a tough section of the book I'm currently writing. Fortunately, I think I'm starting to unravel it. Here we go. In order to understand why some bad actors are willing to do grievous harm to the complex systems they rely upon, we need to visit the cutting edge of microbiology. Let's start that exploration with a look at an amazing article by Brett Finlay in the Scientific American called, “Stopping Infections: The Art of Bacteriological Warfare.”
We live in the Information Age. But I’ve never heard — nor would any sane person suggest — that we live in the Useful Information Age. The modern downpour of data is largely worthless distraction, and the sheer amount is drowning us. Of all of the ways in which the contemporary environment is mismatched with our genes and harms our emotional health, I believe the revolution in information delivery is the one most responsible for epidemic depression. Research so far is sparse but indicative: a 2005 Swedish study, for example, found associations between heavy communications technology use and “prolonged stress,” sleep disturbances and depressive symptoms in young adults.
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When the amount of low-quality information coming at people exceeds certain real but difficult-to-quantify limits, they suffer. They are likely to ignore or forget information they need and to be less in control of their lives as a result. Neuroscientist Torkel Klingberg’s excellent 2008 book, The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory, cites research showing that “there is a fixed capacity for human beings to receive information, and that this limit lies at around seven items,” a number routinely exceeded in the modern workplace, leading to forgetfulness, distractability and disorganization. In the long term, bad-information overload increases stress, with many negative consequences for physical and emotional health.
That's a question you hear a lot. “Was it worth it?”
Not certain what either “it” refers to, but generally we're saying, “was the destination worth the journey? Was the effort worth the reward?”
The thing about effort is that effort is its own reward if you allow it to be.
So the answer can always be “yes” if you let it.
Phi Beta Iota: Those on journeys generally know they are on a journey – and the pain is part of the deal. Those not on a journey – those who settle for being drones and gerbils repeating the same motions, the same experience, year after year without question – may not realize that the fastest way to experience conversion and start a journey is to reconnect with one word: INTEGRITY. Is all that you do consistent with the Constitution, with service to the public, with honor toward the Republic? If it is not, start your journey today.
The rise of the web and Google means that spies in the UK need to work really hard to produce genuinely secret intelligence, former director of the country's intelligence agency has said.
Former chief of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) Sir David Pepper pointed out that “the Google effect” of so much information being readily available online had “very substantially” raised the “threshold for producing intelligence” for MI5, MI6 and GCHQ.
“Nobody wants the easy stuff anymore and there is no point spending effort and money collecting it,” the Telegraph quoted Sir David, as saying.
“Many of the sort of things for which (officials) once would have turned to the intelligence agencies are now readily available to them online,” he added.
Sir David said that with the help of technologies like Google Maps and Streeview anyone could now see photographic detail of far away countries, which hitherto would have been available only through secret and highly sophisticated national satellites.
“Intelligence producers have had to become very sensitive to this phenomenon and very careful not to put effort into producing intelligence that purports to be secret which is in fact not secret at all,” he added.
Phi Beta Iota: Evidently the British have not yet realized that intelligence is about decision-support outputs rather than secret inputs, but at least they have a clue with respect to open sources. In another related article, AFIO points to Congress asking the US secret intelligence community to focus on domestic targets–marijuana growing on federal lands is evidently a major threat to national security, along with the majority of the US population that supports its legalization. Evidently corruption and idiocy in Congress complement each other. Meanwhile, CIA–with the explicit abdication of moral or intellectual leadership from the DNI– fights the Open Source Agency with every dirty trick it can muster including outright lies to Congress and the media. All this means is that the US Government will remain very expensively stupid, while other countries advance the M4IS aspect of the craft of intelligence.
Jameson Quinn has been interested in election theory for over ten years. He has worked as a programmer and as a Guatemalan public school principal and teacher. He has served as statistical analyst for an independent survey of the quality of Guatemalan voter rolls, and initiated the creation of the consensus Declaration of Electoral Reform Advocates. He grew up in California, studied applied math and cognitive science in Massachusetts and Ohio, and lives in Guatemala.
