The Banality of Surveillance
bostonreview.net
bostonreview.net
If even the Boston Review's subeditors don't know the difference between "diffuse" and "defuse"... well, English is going to change a lot in the next couple of decades. It will get a lot more ambiguous.
This is a long tail, but it's not like we've only just started down it.
I actually find misspelling and bad phraseology to judge how seriously I should take a person's opinion, though factored in amongst other things (if it's obvious that English is their second language, or if their field of expertise may be one that eschews language skills, for example).
People have been complaining and worrying about this since, literally, the beginning of recorded history. Our language is much "devolved" specifically in the ways many of them were worried about, and yet we are still having this conversation in it. You might not like how it tastes in your mouth but it'll still work fine for the needs we have of it, as all languages always have.
The way you say "spelling/meaning" implies you think they're the same thing but they just absolutely are not, as much as that pains pedants sometimes.
If you think otherwise you're mistaken about very basic and long-confirmed foundations of linguistics, like whether meaning derives from the spoken form or the writing system.
I hope that's not what they meant, though!
I am far from perfect, and I'm not educated. Let me make that disclaimer first. With that out of the way, I've been online for some time and in the last 10 years, it is common to see a few common errors that I'd say we are in danger of introducing into the lexicon via dictionary-squatting:
- it's and its. If you can't substitute it's for "it is/was/has", then you need its, the possessive form of the word.
- there/their/they're
- your/you're
- are/our
- to/two/too - This is the most common, by far.
- definitely - not definately, just say def or something.
I could go on, but it's starting to feel petty or like my standards are too high for personal correspondence. "Elder shakes fist at terminal"
who/whom
that gets me.
To whom does this belong? Who climbed up that tree?
But as I get older, the impermanence of, well, everything sits at the front of my mind a lot more often than it used to. Add to that the fact that English has always been in a perpetual state of change, and I just kinda shrug my shoulders at the idea of it changing further.
I'm just about at this point. I'm too old to bother to yell "get off my lawn!" anymore.
But I thought a discussion about change in English over time might teach me something. Thanks, all!
I here that their everywear,
those people who don't know
there their from they're.
It were's me down,
they're choice of word;
there grammar shoud not be scene
but herd.
Fundamentally, the phenomena occurs in cycles in areas where communities lack mutual respect, income inequality is high, and regulatory capture of information is monetized/weaponized.
The networks simply made it cheaper to squeeze the vulnerable, and extend the cycle by a few decades.
While unsustainable sociologically or economically, every individual must make a conscious decision at some point... to serve a king... or walk to a better life someplace less foolish.
I mean, the US has surveillance, had surveillance in the 1960s when income inequality was relatively low and it had surveillance in the 1920s, when income inequality was more similar to today.
This stuff isn't a recipe for some future dictatorship, it's part and parcel of the way power works right now and has worked for a while.
One can't take it personally, as the price of admission is high for that show.
I find it amusing that you thought I was alluding to the USA, as the work was based on another historical democratic republic.
I see a lot of parallels to inner-city life, and the despotism of local tyrants and their co-defendants doing clandestine business under micro-mob rule.
That said, the US is still one example of how surveillance doesn't have to lead overt despotism. Really, I think surveillance is essentially the reflex of every modern today, even those which now have a better reputation than the States - Canada or Northern Europe say.
Generally, as policy it has detrimental consequences to a culture, as corruption is meaningless when honor and respect are already absent from legal due process.
Have a gloriously wonderful day, =)
Tom Waits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAkZT_4vL_Y
Sorry to continue the cynicism but what's a modern state that doesn't engage in surveillance? Here in the US, phones have been bugged by the cops at times since phones existed.
And I remember in the Art of War, Sun Tzu advised his reader to essentially surveil the enemy as much as possible. Which is to say states have employed secret agents against the enemy and employed them against their own once the state grew large enough to view the people as yet another potential enemy.
The one way your statement pans out is states whose surveillance becomes obvious tend to be weakened to some degree.
And I'm personally against surveillance, I'm not trying to justify it.
Another theory points out that democratic republics are fundamentally vulnerable to regime changes, and inevitably develops an achilles' heel that manifests as its citizens can no longer distinguish basic facts from their own fictional narratives or media.
I doubt Sun Tzu fully recognized that perpetually testing fate by harassing random people was a poor strategy for survival. =)
Everything is lucrative for those on the right end of information asymmetry. It's really the fundamental theory of capitalism.
This goes against common knowledge (that the FET was first invented by Lilienfeld in the 1920s, and that the germanium transistor was invented by Bardeen and Brattain at Bell Labs in the 1940s). Points to anyone that can produce evidence to support this claim that it was invented during WWII.
Friendly reminder that nothing sent over public internet infrastructure without additional security measures is truly private. Also, pardon Snowden.
I think it's more banal than that - Google, M$, Facebook etc probably allow direct access to whatever agencies, no tinkering required. Let's not forget Google was funded by inqtel, and Facebook started the same day Darpa's Lifelog ended.
While there is no direct evidence that Google et al, allows for the type of access you describe, I find it less and less unlikely these days.
https://www.wired.com/2013/10/nsa-hacked-yahoo-google-cables...
It seems implausible that nobody in these companies, especially in their information security departments, had known or at least suspected that such activities were taking place before the Snowden leaks.
That said, overt collusion with the US government behind the scenes is a different matter. It's been public knowledge for at least a decade that they can access the data of non-US citizens stored on the cloud servers of US tech companies, but in Google's case specifically, I couldn't find any credible claim online that US intelligence has secret backdoors on Android or Chrome OS devices that grant access to locally stored data. Given that Android and Chrome OS are opensource, I don't see this as a likely possibility.
On the other hand, the security of Google software depends on the trustworthiness of Google itself and the integrity of its OTA software updates. It's theoretically possible that companies like Google may have secret backroom deals with the NSA that enable the latter to push malicious code onto the devices of targeted individuals and groups via OTA updates, but I don't think Google is likely to have agreed to such a flagrant violation of consumer trust as to jeopardize their entire business model.
> Tenet is also on the boards of directors of L-1 Identity Solutions, a biometric identification software manufacturer.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303636404579397...
It's reasonable to say that surveillance channels are power and by that token, everyone wants a channel that's as much under their sole control as possible. And no one wants another Snowden, even if Snowden probably didn't change things fundamentally, he gave the NSA a big black eye and I'd suspect image is important to these agencies as well.
It is not in your best interest to assume good faith on the part of potentially bad actors.
I'd agree we shouldn't glamorize spies, certainly. And actual sociopaths in the cause of order are some of the nastiest people.