get used to it

In remarks before Congress, Donald Kerr, principal deputy director of the National Security Agency testified that Americans need to get used to government and businesses "safeguarding" their privacy. There was a reason that big business and big government were done away with under post-Fordist restructuring. Such structures were generally inefficient and even corrupt. As post-Fordism shades into network culture, it seems like—driven by the temptations of data mining—they’re back and bringing a whole raft of disturbing developments with them.

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on privacy

On my way to Limerick, I’ve paused for a minute to read the new issue of the Economist which carries an article on privacy that is, well, less terrifying (although it should be) than symptomatic of Network Culture. It seems hard to believe that only a couple of decades ago, privacy was still important in culture and that giving up all one’s intimate life details to overseers was the stuff of dystopian nightmares like 1984. What is incredible isn’t that such monitoring is so prevalent, it’s that under Network Culture we don’t seem to care.

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