U.S. Out of Vermont! Christopher Ketcham, The American Prospect, March 19, 2013 [EDITOR’S NOTE: This captivating article/essay about the relatively thriving secession movement in Vermont features a cameo appearance from Teeming Brain favorite Morris Berman, who delivered the keynote address at a secession-oriented conference held in September 2012 in the chambers of the house of…
Category: Internet & Media
A surveillance state beyond Orwell’s wildest dreams
Bruce Schneier is the unofficial dean of security experts in the digital age: an “internationally renowned security technologist,” a TED speaker, and the author of a popular newsletter plus 2012’s Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive and a huge library of additional books, blogs, and essays. “The closest thing the…
Recommended Reading 36
This week: How entire U.S. towns now rely on food stamps. The regrets of the Iraqi “sledgehammer man,” whose image became famous in Western media when Saddam’s statue fell. The Obama administration’s epic (and hypocritical) focus on secrecy. The demise of Google Reader and what it portends for Net-i-fied life and culture. The sinister rise…
TED meets The Wicker Man for “the worst TEDx in history”
So, like, what if you mashed up TEDx with The Wicker Man and topped it all with a heaping helping of The Blair Witch Project? Forget the fact that this sounds like an utterly bizarre hypothetical scenario, perhaps one that makes you expect someone to start singing “One of these things is not like the others,”…
Recommended Reading 35
This week, a more America-centric set of recommendations than usual, covering: the gargantuan crisis of America’s “health-care-industrial” complex, which is literally killing the nation with galactically inflated prices and substandard healthcare; the Alice-in-Wonderland nature of America’s “sequestration” debacle; how the “personalized” Internet experience created by user profiling and content filtering actually delivers up two different…
Facebook, ‘Fahrenheit 451,’ and the crossing of a cultural threshold
One of the most subtle and subversive pieces of social criticism in Fahrenheit 451comes early in the book when Montag, a fireman (i.e., book burner) who eventually wakes up to a recognition of his society’s essential character as a fascist-totalitarian dark age, chats with a teenaged girl named Clarisse. Or rather, it’s she who chats…
Hacked and surveilled: Warnings from our digital dystopia
If you’re at all involved in the world of online identities and interactions — as you obviously are, since you’re reading this blog post — then an article/essay published yesterday by a tech journalist for Wired may prove to be one of the most frightening things you’ll read this year. And its impact is augmented…
Obama quietly gives gov’t control of US communications. Foreign press spooked while American press snoozes.
“President Obama has quietly issued an executive order that, in a state of emergency, prioritizes government communication over civilian.” So states CNN Newsroom (“Government re-prioritizing US communication,” July 9, 2012) in a sentence whose single adverb, “quietly,” resounds with unsettling connotations to complement its already unsettling informational content. Dana Kerr elaborates for CNET: President Barack…
The Internet’s corrosive mental effects: A growing problem requiring a deliberate defensive response
For those of you who, like me, have been interested to hear the background drumbeat of warnings about the mental and neurological effects of the Internet revolution over the past several years — think Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and The Shallows, just for starters — a recent, in-depth article about this very subject…
Technology and schools: Update on a techno-utopian delusion
Throughout the 1990s the Clinton administration pushed hard for the universal integration of computers and information technology throughout America’s public education system, culminating in Bill Clinton’s official presidential call for “A computer in every classroom,” since, in his words, technology is “the great equalizer” for schools. No matter that it was an idea (and ideology)…