If spying and snooping are not crime, how is censorship an offense?

Are we mere Social Media Goods? USAID think so!

First Story: 

iStrategyLabs, a digital consulting company has recently published the study that 'Facebook' is getting older and that 3 million teens leave Facebook in three years. This revelation had become instant sensation in the world of internet. As we read about the history of Facebook as the social networking pioneer, we see that it become a runaway hit in campuses in the early days of its inception. Hence this analysis may look harmless and just a routine fantasy study from those hundred odd social media analytics projects. However, teens being the most vulnerable section in a vulnerable society, Facebook, social media marketers and lastly USAID is interested in this trend. 

Second Story:

Flicker: Terry Robinson

USAID is one of the clients of iStategyLabs as we see in their web portal. In the Social Media week, USAID has briefed about the importance of social media for spreading the strategy and that video games are pivotal to extending the strategy in those societies with censorship. As Wikipedia says, Gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics in non-game contexts to engage users in solving problems.Thus video games and gamification of ideas has been an identified as an area through which USAID can reach out to the dissidents in those nations. There are two clever reasons for this. Video analytics technology world over is in the nascent phase and that online video games can quickly bring together people and initiate networking among them.

Third Story:

There is another interesting link showing a possible USAID grant for developing a technology to identify atrocity related information. As we read further, we can see that USAID together with Humanity United has launched a program called tech challenge to find the best technical solutions for this requirement. As USAID is making huge investment in African, Asian nations with regional, ethnic, racial and all sort of instabilities and thenceforth to topple the soveriegn governments, this is hailed as a great achievement. As we read in the book, Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, US State Department has spend $50 million in a range of internet freedom programs since 2008 and congress has allocated another $20 million for the department in 2012. USAID has been mentioned as a strategic arm in flexing US interests in social media space. 

Social media has become the great market place of robbing citizens of their sovereignty in life and expressions. When identity theft and information spy craft are becoming the most effective tools in the intelligent warfare, we have to understand that the problem does not originate or end it in the surveillance tools and technologies, rather it stems from the age old imperial interests and their treacherous strategies for anti-sovereign interventions. The world must unite against these veiled designs in social networks.

The nature of digital consciousness and the role of market economy

Do we need to praise this digital consciousness of our times? Why do we feel that digital experiences are overwhelming and seamless? Digital images and devices seems so intimate that we started them wearing them in all possible fashion and fervor.Is it purely a technical marvel that we tend to get hooked on to the new generation social networks and communication systems? 

Of course not. Digital consciousness and the associated wealth of information is not something purely created by the technical advancement and sophistication in signal processing and encoding. The process of digitization enforces precision of information, condensation of messages and coherence of delivery channels, optimization of transmission frequency and so forth. These are qualitative changes in the technological dimension. When these qualitative changes gets associated with the social modes of production, technology absorbs the nature of market and capital accumulation. 

Digital communication and Capitalist Production

With digitization of information and experience, it became easy to monetize the related human labor and the social relationships. As digitization has increased the options to circulate capital more agile than the labor, labor and the laborer can be dynamically fixed to the production line where profit and circulation are the most. When the channels of exchange and transaction becomes more precise and efficiently condensed, it will benefit money and capital as well. As we know, money at the heart is the medium of exchange of value with respect to the circulation in time. 

In addition, digitization creates fragmentation of experiences into discrete emotions and natural responses. When human labor and exchange of labor gets associated with digital production and circulation systems, it is able to compress more labor in lesser time. When it reaches the threshold of recognition and perception, human beings begin to deviate from their normal behavior. 

Digitization and Human Mind

When the digital media bombards a normal consumer, their mind reaches the same cognitive and perceptive limits.The discrete sampling of the digital signals are fundamental to the cognitive dissonance in the consumer. Digitization increases the number of discrete samples while we measure an experience or store information. With the right choice of technology and data mining, this can become commodity faster and efficiently. 

Is digitization of experience hindering the possibility of unifying the experiences between different layers of experience? This is another challenge posited by digitization of experience and the emergence of digital consciousness. To arrive at a rational and meaningful decision on life situation, mind should be able to unify the sequence of emotions and experiences. 

What is required for mind to unify fragmented experiences? It should be able to infer assumptions, associate with the history, memory, knowledge and apply them on the experience set. This requires a balance of our relationships with society and the commodities. It becomes increasingly complex when society itself is prone to commodity relationships.

What lies beneath the virtual reality in social media!

Technocracy and the hidden orders of randomness

Technology has become one of the dominant modes of market expansion in our days. As this intimate relation between technology and market is becoming more intense, technology is gradually endorsing many ideologies of market capitalism. One of the popular topics among the think tanks and ideologues of technology is the belief that technology is the means and end of life. This belief system happen to become an age old determinism in the material world which now takes the shape of technocracy. They believe that people are spending most of their time in the information spaces of virtual reality. This technocracy and the hypes of virtual reality has become the alter ego of the contemporary market determinism. 

What is the role of social media in developing a structure of virtual reality? Social media networks like Facebook and twitter prey on the human life by throwing fragments of social life into the personal lives of people. Out of sheer curiosity and instinct for gratifying their alienated social ego, people glue into the social media networks for hours. This momentary gratification for social living is exploited by social networks. Instead of social experience these virtual platforms convert information fragments from social space into breadcrumbs to amplify their personal ego. 

This is an interesting context. People become preys of alienation as they get integrated into the social modes of capitalist production. After the office hours when people connect to the social media, their urge for communication is exploited by social networks which create a virtual market space. Here people themselves become commoditized when fragments from life are extracted and distributed along with the market information.

Hence social media networks are nothing but markets where information fragments become the medium for exchanging market products and services. Same technocrats who propagate the absolute power of market now speak about the world of randomness and they are positing it as universal as relativity, quantum mechanics and evolution. On one side absolute belief in the fathomless wonders and abundant powers of market prevails and on the other the consience that the material world around us is random and non-linear gains momentum. They happen to be the digital edges of the same money chain. 

If we take a scan of the recent books and publications surrounding technology, we can see that randomness and chaos are gaining popularity among practitioners of science. Randomness is definitely can be seen in nature, its events and phases. Are they truly random? It is the key question. In every event that exhibit randomness, it is necessary part of an order, either within its boundaries or encircling it. 

If we consider the weather patterns as chaotic and random, they are evidently part of wider pattern of climate systems, seasons and the wind currents and so on. Insider every weather pattern such as rains, tidal fronts as so on, we can find elements of predictable models such as the shapes of rain drops, the fractal nature of tides etc. Hence every event of randomness and non linearity are part of the wider circles of orderliness and they themselves are constituted by orders events and natural laws. 

Now the question is why is someone so much concerned with the occurrences of randomness, if at all? Latent capitalism posits a culture where technology can make human conscience as subjective as possible. Technology and the portal of technology will determine what humans will think, how they behave and what they consume in the market. This technological determinism is not propagated by some crazy lunatic scientist, but by the forces who would like to see a world were human will decides how to live their life. When the role of human will is nullified by the constructs that deconstructs humaneness, people will shrink to fragments of social capital that produce, consume and reproduce mere chunks of data. 

Hence when technology fragments people in their thoughts, workplace and the market shops, their thoughts and desires become as subjective as it can be. When people see the world around with the fragmented conscience and self, the world becomes an ensemble of chaos and randomness. Observing world closely is never a crime. It becomes a futile exercise when we theorize it without connecting with the microcosmic entities and macro cosmic narratives.  We can welcome the experiments and mathematical constructs that help to extract randomness and non-linearity from previously static processes and phenomena. Those findings should be used for further systemic studies not for half baked theories and postulates which get instant popularity in the academic market place. It requires to connect mathematical methods with domain specific scientific frameworks.

Thus when social media becomes the medium for propagating the ideology of technocracy, non-linear physics become a popular construct to impose this belief system on the scientific community. 

Spy Craft and the High Technology Capitalism

Over the ears we are seeing a lot of reports on the privacy intrusion schemes devised by US intelligence agencies, mainly CIA, working in conjunction with the high profile tech companies like Google, Facebook, Apple and so on. Data sources are becoming the drivers of spy craft these days. The news about the internet espionage lead by CIA, code named PRISM, is a dirty bit now. The intentions and the plot behind the 'Edward Snowden' drama need to be analyzed. This seems to be a honeypot for attracting many surrogate drives. Honeypot is the terminology used in computer jargon to mention the servers used to attract and track the hackers. 

However as internet espionage has become an open secret, we need to see how the surrogate intelligence schemes will work forward. As data is becoming less and less personal, we may see more and more people seeking refuge in social information production methods. This includes a new approach to engage with the social media as well.