Posts matching tags 'dystopia'
2007/5/12
Meanwhile, Google has filed a patent for using online games to build up psychological profiles of users, and using these for targetting ads:
The company thinks it can glean information about an individual's preferences and personality type by tracking their online behaviour, which could then be sold to advertisers. Details such as whether a person is more likely to be aggressive, hostile or dishonest could be obtained and stored for future use, it says.
The patent says: "User dialogue (eg from role playing games, simulation games, etc) may be used to characterise the user (eg literate, profane, blunt or polite, quiet etc). Also, user play may be used to characterise the user (eg cautious, risk-taker, aggressive, non-confrontational, stealthy, honest, cooperative, uncooperative, etc)."
Players who spend a lot of time exploring "may be interested in vacations, so the system may show ads for vacations". And those who spend more time talking to other characters will see adverts for mobile phones.
Not all the inferences made by monitoring user activity rely on subtle psychological clues, however. "In a car racing game, after a user crashes his Honda Civic, an announcer could be used to advertise by saying 'if he had a Hummer, he would have gotten the better of that altercation', etc," the patent says. And: "If the user has been playing for over two hours continuously, the system may display ads for Pizza Hut, Coke, coffee."And on a related note, Bruce Schneier on how today's likely surveillance dystopias differ from Orwell's totalitarian vision:
Data collection in 1984 was deliberate; today's is inadvertent. In the information society, we generate data naturally. In Orwell's world, people were naturally anonymous; today, we leave digital footprints everywhere.
1984's Big Brother was run by the state; today's Big Brother is market driven. Data brokers like ChoicePoint and credit bureaus like Experian aren't trying to build a police state; they're just trying to turn a profit. Of course these companies will take advantage of a national ID; they'd be stupid not to. And the correlations, data mining and precise categorizing they can do is why the U.S. government buys commercial data from them.
And finally, the police state of 1984 was deliberately constructed, while today's is naturally emergent. There's no reason to postulate a malicious police force and a government trying to subvert our freedoms. Computerized processes naturally throw off personalized data; companies save it for marketing purposes, and even the most well-intentioned law enforcement agency will make use of it.
2007/2/27
The BBC News Magazine discusses the idea that aspects of Britain in 2007AD are resembling the dystopian comic book 2000AD:
Imagine a society where cities blend into each other to form massive conurbations. Imagine a society where obesity is rife, mass unemployment is a fact of life and downtrodden citizens will do anything to become rich or famous.
Imagine a society in the grip of such chaos and crime that it is necessary to give law enforcers the power to punish offenders on the spot without a trial and where everyone is constantly surveyed by video cameras.
As Britain has toyed with the idea of giving police officers more and more authority, the papers have talked of "an army of Judge Dredds" and "Judge Dredd powers".
2007/2/11
The next big thing after Digital Rights Management could be Attention Rights Management, or technologies to ensure that users of advertising-supported services not only see the ads but pay attention to them. Already, Microsoft have applied for a patent on a technology for enforcing the payment of attention, using CAPTCHA-style tests and face-recognition cameras. Perhaps we can expect to see this as part of the DRM layer in the version of Windows that follows Vista, opening further opportunities for premium content consumption?
(via /.) ¶ [no comments]
2006/9/28
Defense contractors in the US have developed a gun-mounted system for recognising enemies. The system consists of a camera mounted on a rifle, attached to a backpack computer which recognises and keeps a database of faces; it can alert the soldier to the same face showing up in a variety of trouble spots (i.e., a troublemaker), or being on a pre-supplied list of bad guys/terrorists/ornery varmints. Perhaps they could even attach it to the gun's trigger, so then all you'd have to do is sweep the gun over a crowd and it'd automagically shoot the right people.
Now if they combined this technology with the fleets of swarming aerial drones and carnivorous robots, then we'd really be getting somewhere.
(via Engadget, Boing Boing) ¶ [2 comments]
2004/3/13
This looks fascinating; a series of TV programmes made by the BBC and exploring various plausible worst-case scenarios for the near future, from mass electricity shortages to the polarisation of society into the super-rich and the underclass to inter-generational unrest as the baby boomers retire, the marginalisation of men, and explosive obesity. The programmes take existing trends, extrapolate them pessimistically, and use that as a basis of a hypothetical future scenario. I wonder if they'll ever come out on DVD.
2003/7/31
Music/pop-culture guru Simon Reynolds claims that industrial music (in the original Throbbing Gristle/Cabaret Voltaire sense, not the gothic-teen-angst-techno-metal sense seen today) was the second flowering of an authentic psychedelia (authentic as opposed to retro; see also: Dee-Lite, Lenny Kravitz, Sophie Lee and the Freaked-Out Flower Children), and the harsh, Dadaistic aesthetic was in some ways a direct progression from the psychedelic rock and acid happenings of the 1960s. (via FmH)
2003/5/28
WASHINGTON, DC--With the nation safely distracted by the NBA playoffs, Congress passed the terrifying Citizenship Redefinition And Income-Based Relocation Act of 2003 with little opposition Monday.
Andy Guthridge of Savannah, GA, is among the estimated 240 million Americans unaware of the sweeping package of civil-liberties curtailments, voting-privilege re-qualifications, and mandatory relocation of the working poor to the Dakotas. "Man, I was so glad to see the Lakers finally get knocked off," said Guthridge, who was glued to TNT while the bill's passage aired on C-SPAN. "Shaq and Kobe and the rest of those dicks have had it coming for a long time."
Meanwhile, in the same issue of The Onion, Bassist Unaware Rock Band Christian:
"Jack's amazing," Rolen said. "He writes all these super-heavy, Metallica-influenced tunes like 'My Master' and 'Blood Of My Father,' but then he'll turn around and write a killer love song like 'Thank You (For Saving Me).'" "Actually, Jack writes a lot of songs about chicks," Rolen continued. "'Your Love,' 'When You Return,' 'I Confess'... I don't know if they're all about the same girl or lots of different ones, but one thing's for sure: Jack loves the pussy."
"At the audition, [drummer] Greg [Roberts] said Pillar Of Salt was going for a Believer-meets-Living Sacrifice sound," Rolen said. "I didn't know jack about either of those bands, but I knew I could play bass like a motherfucker, and that's what got me the gig. Afterwards, I asked Greg what Living Sacrifice sounded like, and at the first practice, he gave me a tape. It's not Slayer, but it rocks. He's given me some other stuff by Whitecross, Third Day, and Stigmata. I've always prided myself on knowing metal, but these guys put me to shame. They must really have their ears to the ground to know all this music I've never heard before."
2002/7/30
A lot of people have linked to this recently (GJW/Jimbob and Jorn are two), but it's somewhat frightening how much of this Onion article from January 2001 has come true.
2001/5/20
Bad vibes/paranoia/rant: I've been reading K. W. Jeter's Noir recently. It's engrossing; sort of like early William Gibson meets Neal Stephenson, only much darker and more nihilistic. It's quite a good read, though by no means a comfortable one, as the corporate-ruled, monetised dystopia of the book is a little too close to the world we are moving towards, as wealth and power are increasingly concentrated with every multinational corporate merger, bought legislators sign away chunks of sovereignty to multinational treaties, aided by the fact that most people care more about the latest reality TV show than the more boring things happening around them. (Also, the rationales for making copyright violation a capital crime, presented in the book, are a small leap from the arguments of Microsoft and the RIAA. As for reanimating condemned convicts into eternally-suffering trophies: if George W. Bush's America had the technology, how else would they use it?) Sometimes it seems as if the age of liberal democracy (as flawed as it was) is slowly but inexorably coming to an end, to be replaced by a new global feudalism. And while a lot of the technology in the book may be far-fetched, the trends behind it are a bit too ominously familiar.