There are protests in Brazil. They call for the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. Brazil has been the Next Big Thing literally all of my adult life. One protester interviewed by the BBC spoke to that when he said "I'm 55 years old and I always thought of this as the country of the future. But this future never happens..."
Yesterday, a "technical problem"--That's as specific as they can be--in an air traffic control center near Washington, D.C. caused the cancellation of 476 flights and the delay of 462 others. A precisely measured cost tally for which the Federal Aviation Administration is still "continuing to diagnose the cause."
Yesterday also the New York Times, via the Edward Snowden documents, put a name to the one corporation (That there was one, previously unnamed, in particular has been known for some time.), that has done more than any other to facilitate NSA's spying. The relationship with AT&T was "highly collaborative" one NSA document said, "a partnership, not a contractual relationship," another said. AT&T showed an "extreme willingness to help" said a third.
Are we better off now than before the IT revolution? The answer is no. What was supposed to "free" communication from governmental control has done precisely the opposite. We have no privacy anymore. Every stroke of my keyboard right now, even if I erase it, is logged somewhere. Who knew...who knew, that the "wild wild web" made centralized control of communication so simple that a head of state, like President Obama, can literally just pull a plug and we all go dark? A trillion points of light it has not been, it has been one giant Black Hole.
We're not that good. All of that technology has not enabled us even yet, after seventeen months, to locate the wreckage of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. All of NSA's, and the CIA's, and the FBI's, spying did not enable us to prevent the Boston Marathon bombing. Hidden in plain view and using homemade bombs with all the sophistication of Molotov cocktails, the Brothers Tsarnaev killed three, wounded 264, and frazzled America's already paranoid psyche.
Constant public surveillance, more centralized control over our private lives than ever before existed, than was ever imagined, and no deliverance from physical insecurity. It is the future that never happened.
Yesterday, a "technical problem"--That's as specific as they can be--in an air traffic control center near Washington, D.C. caused the cancellation of 476 flights and the delay of 462 others. A precisely measured cost tally for which the Federal Aviation Administration is still "continuing to diagnose the cause."
Yesterday also the New York Times, via the Edward Snowden documents, put a name to the one corporation (That there was one, previously unnamed, in particular has been known for some time.), that has done more than any other to facilitate NSA's spying. The relationship with AT&T was "highly collaborative" one NSA document said, "a partnership, not a contractual relationship," another said. AT&T showed an "extreme willingness to help" said a third.
Are we better off now than before the IT revolution? The answer is no. What was supposed to "free" communication from governmental control has done precisely the opposite. We have no privacy anymore. Every stroke of my keyboard right now, even if I erase it, is logged somewhere. Who knew...who knew, that the "wild wild web" made centralized control of communication so simple that a head of state, like President Obama, can literally just pull a plug and we all go dark? A trillion points of light it has not been, it has been one giant Black Hole.
We're not that good. All of that technology has not enabled us even yet, after seventeen months, to locate the wreckage of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. All of NSA's, and the CIA's, and the FBI's, spying did not enable us to prevent the Boston Marathon bombing. Hidden in plain view and using homemade bombs with all the sophistication of Molotov cocktails, the Brothers Tsarnaev killed three, wounded 264, and frazzled America's already paranoid psyche.
Constant public surveillance, more centralized control over our private lives than ever before existed, than was ever imagined, and no deliverance from physical insecurity. It is the future that never happened.
