Futurecop 2025: the BRAIN Initiative

UPDATED Anti-development of this article now gone « stable », with added links and 9% less suck!

« In the future, corporate cybernetic Neonazi zombies control your brains with photonic guns… » (from back cover of ’80s VHS box)

You can laugh it up for a while, but do not let yourselves be confused by this cheesy self-sarcastic onset. This report is actually about a dead-serious live science-horror show unfolding under our very noses.

Let’s begin with a statement of an implicit sociological consensus: as opposed to what many persist in believing hard, social control is no exact science and has never been; and the State is not almighty, even with all the schizophrenic State borders, property laws, roads, cops and prisons. Any graduate in social sciences will admit it, but we’ll save you from 30 000 – 100 000 $ in tuition fees to understand that. Though, since we live in crazy times where Malthusian determinists still run the show of science and finance and also the corporate governments, some people within the capitalist techno-industrial establishment are about to attempt to change that… Through technology.

Fighting the hopelessness machine: Drones have dead-angles too

From Institute for the Study of Insurgent Warfare

Surveillance // Panopticon // Security Culture // Paranoia

Why hammer out concepts–be it speculative, critical, or pragmatist–if there is a meta-authority overseeing it all? Why conspire in the light?….We need to develop dissident knowledge of how to bring down drones, detect sensors, hack servers, distort GPS signals, and disrupt Google by fooling its algorithms. Forget the next innovation cycle. If the common hacker’s paranoia informs us correctly, we lost the war years ago and are surrounded. Soon we will be called to surrender, one by one.

–Geert Lovink “Hermes on the Hudson: Notes on Media Theory after Snowden.

A culture of security is one which enhances an organization’s capacity to determine its interests and act on them in spite of another organization’s opposed interests. Corporate workforces and law enforcement agencies both cultivate cultures of security, as do management teams, investment rings, smugglers, unions, militia men, and academic researchers. All of these cultures are supposed to control flows of information (trade secrets, exclusive suppliers, price indexes, strategic plans, etc.) and restrict communication in furtherance of an organization’s interests.

Does digital messianism really means « trouble in paradise »?

 But why should I care? Why should we, the lowly proles, care about it?

Most of you have been following the poignant spectacle in the shape of a major clash of the titans taking « place » through the mainstream media. The new hacktivist elite, that gathered wind from the Edward Snowden affair, seems now to be into full recuperation mode, with « good cop » human rights activist-reporter Glenn Greenwald making a world tour with his secret stash of about 50 000 documents acquired from Edward Snowden. From this ongoing global intrigue of spies, hackers, cyber-activists, left-wing journalists and billionaire scum, it isn’t strange to feel somehow dispossessed, clueless, helpless about a battle that is raging high above in the clouds, among the lords the tech industry and the higher caste of the NSA. Or is it.

There’s now a build-up of evidence that this whole charade may be after all just a big stunt -at least from the Greenwald/Poitras side of things- as the thin layer of ice covering muddy waters that reek corporate collaboration with the NSA is starting to crack there and there.

Twitter: where only a few words says it all, and the human minds forced down the digital molds of sheepdom. Idiocracy Now!