UPDATE: Last I've seen, the system is going to be called TIA, Total Information Awareness. Don't know if this older acronym will still hold somewhere, but maybe someone tipped the govt dudes off. Miasma.

I can't copy and my subscription hasn't kicked in yet, but AKMA, the mystery dude I'm late discovering who is NOT David Weinberger (s-he says) very helpfully has pointed out that John Poindexter's new DARPA spook spy database from hell will be called IAO.

And... that IAO is also the name of a Gnostic deity roughly based on the God of Israel (although no doubt more dualistic, don't you think? Since duality is a main weird thing in the Gnostic metaphysics).

What does this mean? (as Martin Luther might say)

If this big database of Poindexter's (as opposed to the more organically growing Web/Internet itself, that grassroots Tower of Babel meant to imitate the Akashic, right? And in Pythagorean/Kabbala numerology, WWW=666) symbolized knowledge and power and takes the name of a Gnostic deity (well, the Gnostics really only had one deity, but it was more like the Goddess with No Name than the Judeo-Christian deity--the great force that is ALL, the great mother that proceeds creation), Gnosis meaning knowing...

Well, let's just say Panopticons R Us (or US).

Dunno if you want to go to Canada tho. Unless M-16 doesn't go to the colonies.

I'm still hung up back on the Gnostics and their freaky duality thing. Was a very cool religion, but the duality, and that great WHOLE thing (they had a special word for the WHOLE, but I'm blanking on it. A very peculiar word.)

Hypertextually link to the sequel to William Gibson's "Idoru." I think that's the one where the Lo-Tek idea from "Johnny Memnonic" comes up again with this crazy construction on the Golden Gate Bridge, all earthquake damaged and turned into a Lo-Tek shanty-town, a kind of US version of Kowloon, multiple storied.

Got that visual in your head? OK, now try to visualize Poindexter's Top Down All Knowing Eye of the Dark Lord. (sorta looks like that eye the Walking Dude has in Stephen King's "The Stand," you know?) We know that mainframers, top down people can't create good software to save their souls, and ARPANET be damned, that wonderful accident of distributed system/democratized technology, Poindexter's database will probably suck as bad as the FBI's computer tech, right?

But because that wonderful thing was invented by those ARPA boys, the genie was let out of the bottle and like a good distributed system, we are building a far better bottom up way to monitor and control everyone. It may be loose and anarchic, but don't fool yourself by thinking AI parsing won't be the killer app search engine to make Google look like child's play. If Poindexter is smart (and AKMA says he is), he will syphon data from the bottom up system and feed it into his top down system, maybe with some parsing or weighting of his own to deal with credibility and stuff.

Which brings me back to that odd vision of William Gibson's in "Idoru" of the Entertainment Tonight One World Government, which actually uses the model I've described above as the source of its power.

Huh. Stuff to think about.

Miasma as usual.

1:11:10 AM