George:
Re the article below: This is terrible. It is bad enough on its face, but to realize that MIT's Malone is at the heart of this breaks my heart, devastates my soul and outrages my professional sensibilities. Now I am sorry that we didn't do a paper on pubic wisdom for his conference next year! Talk about the applications of collective intelligence unmonitored by collective wisdom!! This is NOT the power and capacity we sought to free by trying to pull together the field with our Collective Intelligence Convergence conference.
I see much more clearly now the distinction between my sense of “intelligence” and the use of that term by “intelligence” agencies. My sense of intelligence is that it means we are able to assess reality in a learning feedback loop where we've taken an action based on certain assumptions/mental models and seen how it works in real life. The results inform our reinforcement or revision of our assumptions and mental models. Collective intelligence is our ability to do that collectively, as whole communities and societies and humanity. The mere accumulation of data to inform official decision-makers – particularly in hierarchical power systems like ours – is a dangerous bastardization of the generic concept of CI. Notice that they aren't talking about using this system to find out how successful a particular government policy or program is – whether it actually served the public good or not – so that we could have a more evidence-based government. It is being used primarily to predict social unrest so it can be stifled or discharged so that the existing toxic power structures can remain as they are.
I notice it says the system will use “publicly accessible data”. I'm so dubious. They talk about traffic webcams and digital location trails from cell phones. Are these publicly accessible? And that begs the question of the fact that no one except giant institutions (governments, corporations) has the computing power to do those analyses. It's like freedom of the press when you can't afford a press.
They want to predict when the people will revolt. Ok. But where's the people's capacity to predict what the government and specific corporations are going to do? This is so one-sided. It empowers only half of Robert's vision of open source intelligence, and it feels like the same old crap is being given new capacities. This is collective intelligence?!!!? This is panopticism – the ability of the power center at the top to see everything going on the whole system. It has been brilliantly contrasted by Jean-Francois Noubel with holopticism – the ability of the whole and all its parts to view the whole. We don't need more panopticism. We need more holopticism, to help us navigate our collective destiny.
I am disgusted and horrified.
What can be done to reclaim the good name of collective intelligence? I do not feel drawn to or capable of organizing the kind of professional outrage that headed off Operation Camelot and Total Information Awareness (see the article). But I'll be damned if I will lend my good name to this so-called collective intelligence initiative. At the very least, I can blog my protest – and have it picked up at least by IARPA….
Shit! Damn! I want to cry!
Tom
Begin forwarded message:
*GOVERNMENT AIMS TO BUILD A ‘DATA EYE IN THE SKY‘*
By John Markoff
New York Times, October 10, 2011
Safety Copy of Full Article Below the Line.
Continue reading “Tom Atlee: Government Data Eye in Sky – Sickening”
