NSFW: The unofficial "dhilsabeck posts a random pic" thread

[rozling]

On that last point some of the things that have led me along that train of thought are:
The future of jobs: the onrushing wave
Wealth of 85 richest people equal to that of poorest 3.5bn
and the viewing of a play recently with its central focus being the Dublin 1913 Strike and Lockout. Funnily enough the audience the night I saw it were the wealthiest looking bunch I've rubbed elbows with in a long while...

[stringtapper]

[TomViolenz]

You only adressed the Huxley side of the coin. And I do admit that my view on it in this regard is quite slanted!
But re-defining the concept of friendship, constant distractions and the 140 character conversation, speak pretty clearly in my opinion.

But the Orwellian nature of these services, and the internet as a whole, (unless we revolutionize it as a distributed cloud peer network, with TOR like privacy and Bitcoin payment), is a whole other thing.
The internet is not a tool for freedom as we used to (naively!) assume, but a tool of oppression!
For decades we were too trusting and exposed everything about us on the web and grew acustomed to doing so as a way to live. Now we find out that the Internet was not just an invention of the US military (DARPA net), but that they in fact never ceased to own it. They installed surveilance tools in every home, even made us carry them around with us wherever we go, and we even gleefully payed for these devices and the infrastructure out of our own pocket!

I'm not much of a conspiracy nut (even though most of those probably think so ), but I'm sure that this did not just happen out of individual greed and real fear of terror. It's just to damn useful for the powers that be, and too many regimes before this relied on methods just like this. Albeit not nearly as pervasive and powerful!

Coming back to Facebook: Just think how nice it would be for them to have a dossier on every citizen of the world, with information of their social interactions, habits, pictures, locations, weaknesses, etc....
And now think of the people even doing all of this dossier writing voluntarily themselves for you, handing you a nice profit in the process. That's Facebook
Now think of the people telling you everthing they are interested in, all their personal correspondence and all the places they go. That's Google. Shall I go on?!

[regretfullySaid]

Please no.

The internet is not a tool for freedom as we used to (naively!) assume, but a tool of oppression!

That's pretty shortsighted. Please continue in a another thread. All it makes me think of is all the oppressed people who came together to protest and fight back against their governments thanks to how the internet has made the world a smaller place and opened up their eyes to how limited their human rights are for example.
Besides, life is duality, were you not reminded of that from the Orwell/Huxley cartoon?

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