Dystopias

it's the re-packaging and transfer of this data to the U.S. Government -- combined with the ability to link it not only to your online identity (IP address), but also your offline identity (name) -- that has made this industry particularly pernicious.  There are serious obstacles that impede the Government's ability to create these electronic dossiers themselves.  It requires both huge resources and expertise.  Various statutes enacted in the mid-1970s -- such as the Privacy Act of 1974 -- impose transparency requirements and other forms of accountability on programs whereby the Government collects data on citizens.  And the fact that much of the data about you ends up in the hands of private corporations can create further obstacles, because the tools which the Government has to compel private companies to turn over this information is limited (the fact that the FBI is sometimes unable to obtain your "transactional" Internet data without a court order -- i.e., whom you email, who emails you, what Google searches you enter, and what websites you visit --is what has caused the Obama administration to demand that Congress amend the Patriot Act to vest them with the power to obtain all of that with no judicial supervision). But the emergence of a private market that sells this data to the Government (or, in the case of Project Vigilance, is funded in order to hand it over voluntarily) has eliminated those obstacles.

a wide array of government agencies have created countless programs to encourage and formally train various private workers (such as cable installers, utilities workers and others who enter people's homes) to act as government informants and report any "suspicious" activity; see one example here.  Meanwhile, TIA has been replicated, and even surpassed, as a result of private industries' willingness to do the snooping work on American citizens which the Government cannot do.

this arrangement provides the best of all worlds for the Government and the worst for citizens: The use of private-sector data aggregators allows the government to insulate surveillance and information-handling practices from privacy laws or public scrutiny. That is sometimes an important motivation in outsourced surveillance.  Private companies are free not only from complying with the Privacy Act, but from other checks and balances, such as the Freedom of Information Act.  They are also insulated from oversight by Congress and are not subject to civil-service laws designed to ensure that government policymakers are not influenced by partisan politics. . . .

underground shelters, almost-forgotten relics of the Cold War era, are making a comeback

a $41 million facility Radius built and installed underground that is suitable for 750 people, McCarthy says. He declined to disclose the client or location of the shelter.

Vicino, whose terravivos.com website lists 11 global catastrophes ranging from nuclear war to solar flares to comets, bristles at the notion he's profiting from people's fears. "You don't think of the person who sells you a fire extinguisher as taking advantage of your fear," he says. "The fact that you may never use that fire extinguisher doesn't make it a waste or bad. "We're not creating the fear; the fear is already out there. We're creating a solution."

for a great many people, the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances — no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst thing you’ve done is often the first thing everyone knows about you.

a collective identity crisis. For most of human history, the idea of reinventing yourself or freely shaping your identity — of presenting different selves in different contexts (at home, at work, at play) — was hard to fathom, because people’s identities were fixed by their roles in a rigid social hierarchy. With little geographic or social mobility, you were defined not as an individual but by your village, your class, your job or your guild. But that started to change in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, with a growing individualism that came to redefine human identity. As people perceived themselves increasingly as individuals, their status became a function not of inherited categories but of their own efforts and achievements. This new conception of malleable and fluid identity found its fullest and purest expression in the American ideal of the self-made man, a term popularized by Henry Clay in 1832.

the dawning of the Internet age promised to resurrect the ideal of what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has called the “protean self.” If you couldn’t flee to Texas, you could always seek out a new chat room and create a new screen name. For some technology enthusiasts, the Web was supposed to be the second flowering of the open frontier, and the ability to segment our identities with an endless supply of pseudonyms, avatars and categories of friendship was supposed to let people present different sides of their personalities in different contexts. What seemed within our grasp was a power that only Proteus possessed: namely, perfect control over our shifting identities. But the hope that we could carefully control how others view us in different contexts has proved to be another myth. As social-networking sites expanded, it was no longer quite so easy to have segmented identities: now that so many people use a single platform to post constant status updates and photos about their private and public activities, the idea of a home self, a work self, a family self and a high-school-friends self has become increasingly untenable. In fact, the attempt to maintain different selves often arouses suspicion.

Art Deco is the new Steampunk

here’s the “fun game” element: Moderators and Tier 1 commenters can “promote” Tier 2 commenters to Tier 1 if the Tier 2 posters are bringing good game. “However!,” Hortense writes, “We can also ‘unstar’ people, knocking them back down to Tier 2, which is typically a warning that the commenter has been breaking the rules and abusing their Tier 1 powers. ... Unstarring is rare and causes more drama than it’s worth, so I try to avoid it if possible.”

adding a few obstacles for those seeking to leave their mark on a web page can actually lead to more comments. And better ones, too.

The human capability for information processing is limited, yet there is an accelerating change in the development and deployment of new technology. This relentless wave upon wave of new information and technology causes an overload on the human mind by eventually flooding it. The resulting acopia -- inability to cope -- has to be solved by the use of ever more sophisticated information intelligence. Extrapolating these capabilities suggests the near-term emergence and visibility of self-improving neural networks, "artificial" intelligence, quantum algorithms, quantum computing and super-intelligence. This metamorphosis is so much beyond present human capabilities that it becomes impossible to understand it with the pre-conceptions and conditioning of the present mindset, societal make-up and existing technology

The Bio-Info-Nano Singularity is a transcendence to a wholly new regime of mind, society and technology, in which we have to learn to think in a new way in order to survive as a species.

What is globalized human society going to do with the mass of unemployed human beings that are rendered obsolete by the approaching super-intelligence of the Bio-Info-Nano Singularity?