Government Porn.

...the world outside our borders screams in terror. Duemer.

Tenjiku Ronin stakes out the sub-basements of the human heart, venturing into the darkest realms of the imagination where you can only dream what's in store! Tenjiku Ronin writes and draws about what is not there; what can't be seen. He takes the emotions of lust and passion and turns them into a tangible force...

"panopticon"

Clicking through the PowerPoint, it's certainly easy enough to picture the next generation of Andreesens suiting up and making the Poindexter scene. Each moronic whimsy that pops from their doughboy foreheads has a sacred (and tax-funded) right to life, swaddled in 80 yards of management-blather and trundled off with a roll of hundred-grand bills into the ever colder, crueler world. Davis.

Reason - Not tolerance, but the science of building catapults. Tutor.

[Tom Matrullo's Stuff]
1:55:58 AM    

This was a note I wrote in the Comments board on Jenny (The Shifted Librarian's) site.

The UnGoogleables.

Here's What You Call those Invisible Google People, Pt. 1

"A few days ago, I posted the question: What do you call people who don't show up on a Google search? I.E. what's the name for the category of person who doesn't generate even a single page hit?..." [Collision Detection, via Hippo Dignity]

I vote for the proposed "ungoogleables." More:

"The point being, you have to avoid doing and being an awful lot of things to stay off of Google. Though the number of North Americans who don't appear on Google is probably still quite big, it's diminishing every day.

Here's a fun speculation. I wonder if at some point in the far future, the world of data (the Internet, though by then we'll call it something else, probably) will be so huge and all-encompassing that there will be a final person who is the last one to not crop up in a major search engine? Kinda like a noosphere version of Mary Shelley's The Last Man (or the Left Behind series, heh).

Or, even more fun, will there be people who try as hard as possible not to be Googleable?...

Of course, dig this: The converse is also true. If you don't appear on Google, it can seem a little unnerving to the rest of us! It's like being The Man Who Didn't Exist, one of those bit characters on the X-files who doesn't have fingerprints or a Social Security Number or whatever."

[The Shifted Librarian]

Hey there Jenny,

Google can't erase people like the computer in the Stephen King short story, not yet at least .

But there is a book you should read if you are interested in these ideas, by William Gibson, called Idoru.

In it, Gibson postulates a one-world government, a monolith that just happens to be... Entertainment Tonight, or evolved from it. I love the book for that wonderful conciet alone, but there's more!

The main character in the story is a guy who has a rare gift. He was experimented on in an orphanage (ok, so that is a tired plot convention, but look where it gets us) so that he has this spidey sense about surfing the Internet/Web/Metaverse-like thing that they always have in cyberpunk novels. So eventually this guy is recruited to work for the Entertainment Tonight one world government.

He has a way of sensing vibrations in nodes, as if he can sense the shifting public attention before it shifts. Very cool, eh? And that is the sort of power the Entertainment Tonight government feeds on, since public attention, and the manipulation of public attention, is how it creates its systems of control of the masses.

Basically, anyone who can be found on the web thing can be either created or destroyed. Sometimes the govt rides public opinion and sometimes it herds it. So this dude is very valuable.

There's a guy the govt can't control tho. Guess why? He is invisible on the Nets. And I won't spoil any more of the story to tell you what happens, OK? It is pretty cool.

And after you finish that one, there's a sequel that has a Lo-Tek Kowloon shantytown built on the ruins of a partially earthquaked Golden Gate bridge.

Happy Reading!

Miasma
1:45:28 AM