962 karma · joined August 5, 2019
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass-Observation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Camelot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_warfare
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Abandoned_military_pr...
The first time I saw a large cheque waved in front of me, I fell for it hook line and sinker :) Having lived through the dotcom bust/2008 financial crash and all kinds of other events, all I know is Learning takes time.
I had to fall and be miserable to learn. The second time around I didn't take the cheque. I had to also learn financial independence gave me choices. And lots of people don't have choices. All that creates conditions for the contradictions we see. But things change. The world is not static. I also learnt the hard way, naming/shaming/comparing/judging etc is not the most effective in speeding up that Learning process. It creates more defensiveness and counter reactions that drain energy further. There are better routes to create understanding. Search for them and redirect that passion in your comment into those routes.
Snowden is pointing out an issue. And he has done it with courage that I massively respect. You hardly see it these days. And that makes it anxiety and fear inducing, as the solutions are unknown.
But think of it this way - tomorrow someone might hand you a diagnosis of cancer. You can freak out about it or you can find a Cancer specialist to see what options are available. Asking the technician who gave you the report what the odds are, doesn't make any sense. He knows only how to create the report.
In this case just look to history, to understand how these things play out. History is the Oncologist.
Intelligence agencies have hard problems to deal with. On top of it, they are giant bureaucracies which means cockups, incompetence, turf wars, hiding issues are the norm. All that amplifies the problems, causes defensiveness, over-reactions and reactions to reactions.
If you read the history (and these days there are tons of resources) this sequence of events (of overreach) has unfolded a thousand times. There are a whole bunch programmes that have been shutdown because one group or the other got carried away or did damage. That history (in out current environment of over information/disinformation/misinformation) is what will always be a source of hope and faith.
https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/5914/is-it-pos...
https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/44910/how-...
Compare it with India and you will see the same number of stations/trains/bus routes all subsidized and dirt cheap (compared to Europe), but far below in any other standard (naturally because they are poorer).
That said, ofcourse there are things that can be learnt and applied to similar sized towns, cities, states etc that want these features.
Found and supported Kiwix there.
They got a bit carried away thanks to Moores law making lavatory building cheap, especially if you buy a million at a time and so now we have town sized constructs of just lavatories. And all those lavatories need infinite quantities of piss and shit to justify their existence. Conduct hackathons. Fund incubators. Hire the best and brightest and it's possible to get populations to ramp up piss and shit generation. It then takes armies of sales and marketing drones zigzagging the planet day and night incentivizing orgs and people to ditch their own loos.
The stagnating transport industry (Big Telco) woke up when they noticed people taking shuttles to Mega Loo Plaza and started competing with each other to upgrade their own transport infra all over the world. A confluence of all these factory take us right back to where we started. A lavatory excess. But don't worry the Corporate Robot class is on the case. The goal is to get people to piss and shit 24x7 to utilize that excess (you will notice people who produce a lot piss and shit are encouraged). And things seem to be going well.
And ofcourse you can use your own loo at home. They are very cheap these days.
He will continue to cling to his creation well after the power goes out, the kids are missing and the Raptors and T-Rex are loose. Only problem is he hasn't been running this experiment on an island but on 2 billion lab rats. Whether they are Generals, Janitors, Journalists or Teenagers everyone is effected in ways no one fully understands yet.
So now we wait for more and more unintended consequences to mount. Because it's not like a Zuckerberg replacement is going to do any better. This is a problem that has only one solution.
Eventually the park will be shut down and be rebuilt after we understand the psychological and sociological dynamics such networks produces at scale. Right now his answer to Harari is incoherent because no one knows what the answer is. And it's impossible to figure it out while watching the current experiment gone of the rails.
Micheal Crichton however, did provide a possible answer to Harari's question 20 years ago - "I think cyberspace means the end of our species. It means the end of innovation. This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity"
"I think cyberspace means the end of our species. It means the end of innovation. This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity"
Zuckerberg will go down in history as the guy who helped that process along the way.
Why do you think the international wholesale market for cosplay is located there?
Can they be reprogrammed is the question.
They strip out all kinds of the things from the captured page.
"I think cyberspace means the end of our species. It means the end of innovation. This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity" - Ian Malcolm
They can be targeted to diffuse fear and inject purpose, hope etc. Which is the thesis of the book Nudge (by Nobel winner Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein who tried doing this during the Obama Administration)
But having different tools in the toolkit and awareness of what's available makes a big difference.
So I look at NVC in that context, as one tool that falls under the 'communication strategy' category. There are many tools under many categories to build trust, respect and connection with others. At the end of the day what outcomes you produce are what matters. And many times it requires a combo of tools.