You are being tracked (The Inevitable)

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“This list, instead, tallies the kind of tracking an average person might encounter on an ordinary day in the United States. Each example has been sourced officially or from a major publication.” [The 24 ways we’re tracked on a regular basis.]

  • Car movements — Every car since 2006 contains a chip that records your speed, braking, turns, mileage, accidents whenever you start your car.
  • Highway traffic — Cameras on poles and sensors buried in highway record the location of cars by license plates and fast-track badges. Sev enty million plates are recorded each month.
  • Ride-share taxis — Uber, Lyft, and other decentralized rides record your trips.
  • Long-distance travel — Your travel itinerary for air flights and trains is recorded.
  • Drone surveillance — Along U.S. borders, Predator drones monitor and record outdoor activities.
  • Postal mail — The exterior of every piece of paper mail you send or receive is scanned and digitized.
  • Utilities — Your power and water usage patterns are kept by utilities. (Garbage is not cataloged, yet.)
  • Cell phone location and call logs — Where, when, and who you call (meta- data) is stored for months. Some phone carriers routinely store the contents of calls and messages for days to years.
  • Civic cameras — Cameras record your activities 24/7 in most city down towns in the U.S.
  • Commercial and private spaces — Today 68 percent of public employers, 59 percent of private employers, 98 percent of banks, 64 percent of public schools, and 16 percent of homeowners live or work under cameras.
  • Smart home — Smart thermostats (like Nest) detect your presence and behavior patterns and transmit these to the cloud. Smart electrical outlets (like Belkin) monitor power consumption and usage times shared to the cloud.
  • Home surveillance — Installed video cameras document your activity inside and outside the home, stored on cloud servers.
  • Interactive devices — Your voice commands and messages from phones (Siri, Now, Cortana), consoles (Kinect), smart TVs, and ambient micro phones (Amazon Echo) are recorded and processed on the cloud.
  • Grocery loyalty cards — Supermarkets track which items you purchase and when.
    E- retailers — Retailers like Amazon track not only what you purchase, but what you look at and even think about buying.
  • IRS — Tracks your financial situation all your life.
  • Credit cards — Of course, every purchase is tracked. Also mined deeply with sophisticated AI for patterns that reveal your personality, ethnic ity, idiosyncrasies, politics, and preferences.
  • E-wallets and e-banks — Aggregators like Mint track your entire financial situation from loans, mortgages, and investments. Wallets like Square and PayPal track all purchases.
  • Photo face recognition — Facebook and Google can identify (tag) you in pictures taken by others posted on the web. The location of pictures can identify your location history.
  • Web activities — Web advertising cookies track your movements across the web. More than 80% of the top thousand sites employ web cookies that follow you wherever you go on the web. Through agree ments with ad networks, even sites you did not visit can get informa tion about your viewing history.
  • Social media — Can identify family members, friends, and friends of friends. Can identify and track your former employers and your cur rent work mates. And how you spend your free time.
  • Search browsers — By default Google saves every question you’ve ever asked forever.
  • Streaming services — What movies (Netflix), music (Spotify), video (You Tube) you consume and when, and what you rate them. This includes cable companies; your watching history is recorded.
  • Book reading — Public libraries record your borrowings for about a month. Amazon records book purchases forever. Kindle monitors your reading patterns on ebooks — where you are in the book, how long you take to read each page, where you stop.

“It is shockingly easy to imagine what power would accrue to any agency that could integrate all these streams. The fear of Big Brother stems directly from how technically easy it would be to stitch these together. At the moment, however, most of these streams are independent. Their bits are not integrated and correlated.”

The Inevitable (Kevin Kelly) (PDF)

The Mind-Body Problem

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“The scientific and philosophical consensus is that there is no nonphysical soul or ego, or at least no evidence for that.” — Philosopher David Chalmers

From Consciousness: The Mind Messing With the Mind (NYT)

“Michael Graziano, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, suggested to the audience that consciousness is a kind of con game the brain plays with itself. The brain is a computer that evolved to simulate the outside world. Among its internal models is a simulation of itself — a crude approximation of its own neurological processes. The result is an illusion. Instead of neurons and synapses, we sense a ghostly presence — a self — inside the head. But it’s all just data processing. “The machine mistakenly thinks it has magic inside it,” Dr. Graziano said. And it calls the magic consciousness.”

I think this is what is commonly referred to as “the hard problem.” How minds are generated by brains.

“Some philosophers and scientists have been driven back to the centuries-old doctrine of panpsychism — the idea that consciousness is universal, existing as some kind of mind stuff inside molecules and atoms. Consciousness doesn’t have to emerge. It’s built into matter, perhaps as some kind of quantum mechanical effect.”

I like the idea of universal consciousness. Until there’s solid, scientific consensus on how the brain creates consciousness… this is as good an explanation as any.

Lexicon by Max Barry

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“At an exclusive school somewhere outside of Arlington, Virginia, students aren’t taught history, geography, or mathematics–at least not in the usual ways. Instead, they are taught to persuade. Here the art of coercion has been raised to a science. Students harness the hidden power of language to manipulate the mind and learn to break down individuals by psychographic markers in order to take control of their thoughts. The very best will graduate as “poets”, adept wielders of language who belong to a nameless organization that is as influential as it is secretive.” (Amazon)

I can’t say I thought Lexicon was a great read but the neurolinguistics thing was interesting. I kept hearing echoes from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash:

“As Stephenson describes it, one goddess/semi-historical figure, Asherah, took it upon herself to create a dangerous biolinguistic virus and infect humanity with it; this virus was stopped by Enki, who used his skills as a “neurolinguistic hacker” to create an inoculating “nam-shub” that would protect humanity by making it impossible to use and respond to the Sumerian tongue. This forced the creation of “acquired languages” and gave rise to the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel.”

If I read Wikipedia correctly, there’s a difference between Neurolinguistics and Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). The notion of someone using words and language to “program” my thinking is disturbing. This came up again for me last year when Scott Adams begin writing a long series of posts about Donald Trump using Master Persuader techniques. I was skeptical at first now I’m not so sure.

Jim Jones talks his followers into drinking poison Kool Aide? Tony Robbins convinces folks to pay him for the privilege of walking on hot coals? David Koresh, Scientology, etc etc. Are we just “moist robots” (Scott Adam’s term) that can be programmed with a few well chosen words?

And while we’re on the subject of words… I don’t remember the last time I saw an NBC newscast that didn’t include repeated references to “devastation,” “tragedy,” “terror,” and similar fear words. I’m trying to stop watching and listening to network and cable news programs because I feel (physically) bad after watching/listening. Which I’ve concluded is the point.

The Night Of

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If the first episode is any indication, HBO has another hit with The Night Of. No shortage of good reviews out there but I’ll make a couple of personal observations.

Never has a innocent guy had such a mountain of incriminating evidence piled on him. And I think I might actually like John Turturro in this series. His usual bug-eyed, crazy guy intensity is a turn-off for me. A more laid back character, at least in this first episode. Richard Price (The Wire, Clockers, The Color of Money) is a producer and writer.

Thriller

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I just finished a book (Lexicon by Max Barry) described by Amazon as a “thriller.” The more I thought about it the more I realized I wasn’t sure what that designation meant. What makes a book a “thriller?” And now I know.

Thriller is a broad genre of literature, film and television, having numerous subgenres. Thrillers are characterized and defined by the moods they elicit, giving viewers heightened feelings of suspense, excitement, surprise, anticipation and anxiety. Successful examples of thrillers are the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Thrillers generally keep the audience on the “edge of their seats” as the plot builds towards a climax. The cover-up of important information from the viewer is a common element. Literary devices such as red herrings, plot twists, and cliffhangers are used extensively. A thriller is usually a villain-driven plot, whereby he or she presents obstacles that the protagonist must overcome.

And don’t miss the sub-genres. Whenever Wikipedia asks for some financial support, I kick in.

The worst thing Donald Trump could do

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I suspect even the staunchest Trump supporter gets a little twinge in his bowels at the thought of The Donald’s tiny finger on the nuke trigger, but I wonder if he could do almost as much damage to the U.S. by sitting in his bathtub and blowing his brains out. That seems less likely than a Trident missile launch but it would fuck this country up for fifty years. Nobody would ever believe the man wasn’t assassinated. Once this thought popped into my head, I tried to think of any way the man might die that wouldn’t be suspicious (to someone). The best I could come up with was meteor strike (earthquake?) I think the world might survive a Trump presidency but if he jumped from the Trump Tower penthouse, I think he might take our country with him.

Live-streaming body cam video

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bodycam“Taser plans to roll out live-streaming capabilities in 2017, and he expects facial recognition to become a reality someday so agencies can query police records or social networks in real time. An officer could patrol the Las Vegas Strip with a camera streaming to the cloud, “and there is real-time analysis, and then in my earpiece there is, ‘Hey, that guy you just passed 20 feet ago has an outstanding warrant.’”

Or that the guy you pulled over because he has “a wide nose” has NO outstanding warrants.

“The basic Axon camera must be activated manually, but departments can buy Axon Signal, which activates the device automatically in certain situations, such as when an officer flicks on the light bar on his car. For $10 per officer per month, another Taser service links Evidence.com files with existing dispatch and records software, so officers no longer need to individually tag files for retention or risk having an untagged file automatically deleted.”