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Been awhile again since I've cleared my cookies, this time all the ads on YouTube are offering me a criminal pardon.
For what I wonder? Clearly my browsing habits are suspect, or my musical tastes put me in a dodgy demographic, and I wonder what specifically I've been accused of...Bank Robber? Drug Dealing? Sexual Predator? The ads aren't that specific, only that I should apply now and get a full pardon...
It makes you think of the larger picture, the society we live in, where we share so much, on facebook, twitter, tumbler, you name it, we're voluntarily baring an artificial staged version of our lives to the world. And behind the scenes, Big Data, as revealed by Snowdon, is assembling an even more thorough picture of us than we can imagine. Even George Orwell never imagined anything like this.
Our every search and click on the web is tracked and saved by our ISP's, our every online purchase, our every email, photo, posted online, is copied and stored in mass data facilities, even when we're not online (and that is rarer than we think), the EULA (End User License Agreements) often bind us to ridiculous agreements we'd never consent to if we took the time to read them. Few of us do, look through your Windows 10 EULA (you didn't upgrade, did you? Well, you read the EULA first, I'm sure...) and find that even your offline activities are tracked and shared...
Cell phones, every photo, text, tweet, phone call, download, is stored and archived, along with geophysical and temporal data - where and when you made the call, and to whom, even when turned off they track our location, and all of this data is warehoused in giant banks of servers, offshore, Utah, Edward Snowdon tried to wake us up, the government arbitrarily declared him a criminal.
GPS data, collected even when you've turned your phone off, triangulated via cell towers, leave your phone at home and your vehicle will now report back your location, the continuing integration of technology in our lives makes it increasingly impossible to escape it's pitfalls...
Algorithms sort, collate the data, developing a picture - precisely - of who we are. Better than many of us know ourselves. And while the data is vast it only awaits the right person (or wrong) to ask the question, and all the answers are at their fingertips...
This information, distilled and made available to corporations in abstract, aggregate forms, helps them to decipher and predict our behaviors, target us better, prey upon our needs and wants, to direct, extort, exploit us, the data, the product...
And the police, already, bill C-51, wanting access to it, the government's far too compliant, it's an easy leap to imagine this information being used to implicate people in thought-crimes, - wait - it already has, think terrorism, Minority Report, the web, internet, not only serving us but engaging us, leading us further in wrong directions, this constant, targeting of us, assisting, predictive texting, and ultimately betraying...
...And now I begin thinking of crimes to commit...
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Consensual Reality, the idea that reality is somehow the aggregate of individual opinions, where we agree we define reality. If an individual goes against the collective agreement they are generally presumed to be either enlightened, or insane/mad. Psychology and Psychiatry implicitly depend upon this model. Where cultures and nations differ in Consensual Reality we often reach "agreement" through such means as war, or cultural imperialism, having triumphed and persuaded our new subjects we've expanded our "Consensual Reality" and use our victory as proof of the validity of our system...
An interesting idea, in that it implies that there is no one objective reality, rather reality is fluid and changing with the agreed perceptions of the viewers.
And, like any conclusion arrived at through mass experience or opinion or perception, it's entirely likely / probably / Certainly even wrong. Consider all the beliefs humanity has had in the past, and consider how few hold up today, we feel free to mock them, deride them, yet in our shared belief system or agreement as to what constitutes reality we are making the exact same errors...
Curious, too, how fluidly we bring others on board our reality - whether it be liquor or drugs, those who don't partake are never part of the shared experience of those who do ... for this they are labelled as "Sticks in the mud" or "Party Poopers", because they are not sharing in the same state of mind. Even when, for example the midst of a coke/ether/LSD binge the shared reality is entirely questionable if not obviously wrong. For those groups not imbibing there exists a very discernible line between the shared reality of one group and the shared reality of another.
And note how well media, news, advertising and corporations shape and define our reality, their perpetually broadcast messages creating hidden agreements and alternate realities that go unquestioned...
A gold mine of thought there. A link to a better explanation of the notion of Consensual Reality below.
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...Still, always something new to look forward to. Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World might just be the redemption, Werner Herzog's investigation of technology and the connected world.
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"Beautiful. Do you love it?"...
I share his optimism...
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A short list:
- Paleontology - the most primitive, limbic region of our brain, revealed through giant lizards and fish that we imaging to be the gluttons of all basic desires (reproduction, feeding, etc.). Paleontologists excavate our primitive roots and ancestry, explain them away, much as psychology helps us to discern our most primal motivations.
- Spelunking: The exploration of hidden regions beneath the earth (conscious.). Self-explanatory, psychology.
- Archaeology: The evolution of mind, explored through the evolution of societies, cultures, countries world-wide.
All of these, to one degree or another, are excavating and mining as much within the unconscious - exploring desire, fear, the primal emotions as well as the beginnings of the more refined emotions - as they are generally increasing the weal of human consciousness.
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In an article about apes and language (Koko) I come across an interesting statement - that apes (or Koko, and other apes that have been taught to sign) - do not use their language skills to ask questions.
At first this seems curious, especially since they have of late seem given to lecturing us about climate change, but then I reflect upon it further...
Consider the circumstances of the Ape. Raised largely or entirely in captivity, in an environment that it knows instinctively is "wrong", would it even have the awareness to ask questions? Do hostages, prisoners ask questions? From the moment their imprisoned all conditioning is geared towards "learned helplessness", unlikely (despite the hero's of Hollywood that query their captors from the chair where they're tied and being tortured, this is fiction) that an Ape or Chimpanzee would think to question it's captors...
Animals - all animals, are naturally inquisitive, every animal will explore it's surroundings, recognize change, why then do they not voice their questions?
But take if further. How many people ask questions? Real questions, not "how much did that car cost...?", a polite convention, or "What would Jesus Do?", a philosophical idiocy, or "What are you doing tonight?", "How was your week?", polite commonplace rhetoric phrased as questions, but with no real hope of insight or revelation...no self-respecting ape would stoop so low, these are merely unconscious routines of language and manners, ...
---Perhaps the real surprise is not that apes don't ask questions, it's that so few people do...