As we noted in this earlier post on the New Ownership, corporations are transforming our purchases of services and physical objects into mere leases of intellectual property which itself remains in corporate hands.
An object of greatest interest to the corporation is the capability of monitoring and manipulating the customer — whilst simultaneously making her pay for the privilege of being surveilled.
Our earlier post used the example of the Xbox One, a surveillance system in the guise of a video game.
As originally packaged, the game required users to maintain a constant online presence on a technpological platform that tracked user movement, gesture, physiological measures, and even moods. Germany’s data protection commissioner sees it as a surveillance system pure and simple.
Public outrage over yet another massive snooping system, this one corporate-owned and user-financed, led lawmakers to draft up a bill, leading to this headline from Monday’s International Business Times:
Xbox One: Congressmen Introduce ‘We Are Watching You Act’ Bill, Targets Kinect Snooping
And from Tuesday’s IBT [though we suspect Tuesday’s headline reflects a stronger cause than fan pressure, since a law is an easy way for Congress to appear to be doing something about all-pervasive snooping, rather than, say, pressure ot rein in the ever-more-powerful NSA]:
Xbox One No Longer Requires Always-On Internet Connection As Microsoft Bows To Fan Pressure
So everyone can breathe easier, knowing that Congress is reigning in people who want to pry into our lives, while simultaneously being sworn to silence about a far more intrusive regime of snooping into our every digital connection.
Two charts from a new survey by the Pew Center for the People & the Press on the impact of the National Security Agency’s massive domestic spying operations.
First a look at how folks look at the leaks and the leaker:
Next, How they feel about possible snooping on their own lives:
Hart argues that laws, public policy, and much scientific discourse on drugs is misdirected, based on myth rather than science, and used to disguise the real causes of the conditions attributed to illegal drug use.
Hart’s personal story supports his broader argument. If drugs alone caused poverty, crime, and family dysfunction, Hart would have been unlikely to grow up to be a happily married father and tenured Ivy League faculty member.
Here’s his response to Alternet’s Kristen Gwynne’s question, “What is actually responsible for problems often linked to drugs?”
Poverty. And there are policies that have played a role, too. Policies like placing a large percentage of our law enforcement resources in those communities, so that when people get charged with some petty crime, they have a blemish on their record that further decreases their ability to join mainstream, get a job that’s meaningful, and that sort of thing.
The policy decisions that we make play a far bigger role than the drugs themselves. When I turned 14, for example, there was a federal government program that, in order to keep kids like me out of the streets, gave us jobs. Under these federal government programs, we had money for the summer, for clothing—it was great. When we cut these types of programs and kids have nowhere to go what do you expect to happen? It doesn’t take rocket scientists to figure this out.
Now, I have an 18-year-old who, this summer, won’t have anything to do. I’m trying to find him some sort of work. Having a federal government program for underprivileged children, that was great. That let kids know that the society might care about you. We teach them work skills, we teach them something about responsibility, we make sure they have money in their pockets. Now, you take away all of this, and you miss the chance to teach them about responsibility. You miss the opportunity to help them put food on the table, to put clothes on their backs.
EU-US trade talks to start after France wins culture clause
From the London Telegraph, a word of alarm about the rising titan:
Fitch says China credit bubble unprecedented in modern world history
China’s shadow banking system is out of control and under mounting stress as borrowers struggle to roll over short-term debts, Fitch Ratings has warned
‘The worst case of scientific censorship since the Catholic Church banned the works of Galileo’: Scientists call for drugs to be legalised to allow proper study of their properties
NSA spying flap extends to contents of U.S. phone calls
National Security Agency discloses in secret Capitol Hill briefing that thousands of analysts can listen to domestic phone calls. That authorization appears to extend to e-mail and text messages too.
If you farm Monsanto’s genetically modified crops, you don’t own them — as farmers quickly learned when they did what farmers have done since the first furrow was plowed, namely, planted some of last year’s harvest seeds in this year’s fields. Then they discover that they only leased the right to grow and sell one season’s crops.
In other words, farmers no longer owned seeds. Rather, they leased them and were denied the right to replant because the crops contained patented self-reproducing intellectual technology.
What an incredible discovery: You could appear to sell some thing while retaining actual ownership — including the right to lend, lease, or sell the product in question.
In one generation, the farmer had been transformed from an independent producer into a dependent corporate semi-serf.
It was nothing less than a counterrevolution, a return to a sort of feudalism.
But the same thing happens already with recorded music, entertainment, and books — transformed from physical objects like vinyl, CDs, DVD, reels of film, audio- and videotape, and bound volumes into packets of digital data reproducible only as leased rights operating on proprietary platforms. Buyers cease to be owners, and lose the right to freely sell or trade what they think they’ve bought.
The more dependent we become, the more restrictive the rights.
Media customers, like farmers, have been transformed from owners to renters, all because the artificial construct that is the corporation, operating in cahoots with banksters, hopes to claim ownership of quite simply everything.
Once in a while people catch on. . .
Here’s an example, from Chris Suellentrop of the New York Times:
Microsoft has proposed limiting players’ ability to resell games that will be made for the Xbox One, due in stores in November. Companies that create games for Xbox One, Microsoft said, will be able effectively to prevent consumers from reselling the games by ensuring that the resold games no longer function on the console. No companies that create games have yet indicated that they will exercise this right.
This controversy led to the odd spectacle on Monday: At an industry event devoted to new games, there was raucous enthusiasm for the untrammeled right to sell and purchase old games.
Microsoft is promising new experiences with the Xbox One, which will require a constant Internet connection, because hundreds of thousands of machines in the cloud will enhance an individual console’s computational power. But players seem to be hearing only what is being taken away by Microsoft’s online monitoring of their gaming: the ability to resell or give away your games to whomever you choose, whenever you choose.
But Microsoft is going Monsanto one better. The product you leased keeps track of your every mood and move.
From Benjy Sarlin of MSNBC:
Edward Snowden told the Washington Post last week that he leaked the National Security Agency’s top secret surveillance programs in part because he feared the Internet becoming “a TV that watches you.”
What to make, then, of an Internet-connected household computer that requires users to install a futuristic microphone and camera able to track their movement—and even heart rate and mood—in pitch black?
The device in question is Microsoft’s Xbox One, the much anticipated gaming console hitting the market this holiday season. And while its features promise an unprecedented level of interactivity for gaming, they’re fueling concerns among gamers that they could be used to spy on the family living room.
While Golden Dawn’s electoral success is no more than what we’ve seen from the far right in other countries (eg France, Hungary, Austria), what distinguishes it is the speed with which it has happened, and the open violence and neo-Nazism.
This is, above all, a problem for the immigrants and ethnic minorities in Greece who are subject to the most vicious attacks – but it also opens a door in European politics that had been closed for 60 years. Far-right parties have until now had to hide their innermost beliefs, and limit their ambitions. This may not be the case in the years to come.
>snip<
What far right parties do is parasitical on mainstream ideology. They exploit the resentments, and the racism, and the political disillusion that circulates among the rest of society. And they do not need to be in power to have an effect: what far-right parties can do is provoke our liberal elites into taking ever-more authoritarian positions. That’s the situation we find in many countries, from Britain, which detains more refugees than any other country but Australia, to Greece, where the Samaras government is pursuing a crackdown on leftists and on independent media and telling people “you have to trust in us otherwise extremists will come to power”. We should oppose fascists, but we should also fight against the pressure to let technocrats take control of our lives.
There may be people out there who actively want to dismantle democracy – the Griffins and Le Pens and Michaloliakoses of this world – but what worries me just as much is that people may be willing to surrender their democratic rights voluntarily.
From The Global Divide on Homosexuality [PDF], a survey by the Pew Research Global Attitudes, a comparative look at national attitudes towards homosexuality:
From a new Gallup Poll, revealing ominously that while public approval of Congress has reached an all-time low, Americans trust the military more than any other institution — followed by the police, small business, and organized religion:
Here’s a clip from NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel’s Today Show interview of Brandon Bryant, who was credited with more than 1,600 kills during his five years former Predator drone operator.
Bryant says his suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result of his experiences:
Bryant recalled his first traumatic experience in a 14 December 2012 interview by Spiegel’s Nicola Abé, describing what happened after he laser-painted a target and a fellow operator fired a Hellfire missile at a mud house in Afghanistan half a world away from his New Mexico video screen:
“These moments are like in slow motion,” he says today. Images taken with an infrared camera attached to the drone appeared on his monitor, transmitted by satellite, with a two-to-five-second time delay.
With seven seconds left to go, there was no one to be seen on the ground. Bryant could still have diverted the missile at that point. Then it was down to three seconds. Bryant felt as if he had to count each individual pixel on the monitor. Suddenly a child walked around the corner, he says.
Second zero was the moment in which Bryant’s digital world collided with the real one in a village between Baghlan and Mazar-e-Sharif.
Bryant saw a flash on the screen: the explosion. Parts of the building collapsed. The child had disappeared. Bryant had a sick feeling in his stomach.
“Did we just kill a kid?” he asked the man sitting next to him.
“Yeah, I guess that was a kid,” the pilot replied.
“Was that a kid?” they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.
Then, someone they didn’t know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. “No. That was a dog,” the person wrote.
While the election of Barack Obama in 2008 seemed to hail a new era in relations between the United States and China, that’s no longer the case, with citizens of each country viewing the other nation as increasingly unfriendly.
That’s the obvious conclusion from a new survey by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project, expressed here in the form of two charts:
From “The Global Divide on Homosexuality: Greater Acceptance in More Secular and Affluent Countries,” a report just published by the Pew Research Global Attitudes Project:
Trends in suicide rates were examined by sex, age group, race/ethnicity, state and region of residence, and mechanism of suicide. The results of this analysis indicated that the annual, age-adjusted suicide rate among persons aged 35–64 years increased 28.4%, from 13.7 per 100,000 population in 1999 to 17.6 in 2010. Among racial/ethnic populations, the greatest increases were observed among American Indian/Alaska Natives (AI/ANs) (65.2%, from 11.2 to 18.5) and whites (40.4%, from 15.9 to 22.3). By mechanism, the greatest increase was observed for use of suffocation (81.3%, from 2.3 to 4.1), followed by poisoning (24.4%, from 3.0 to 3.8) and firearms (14.4%, from 7.2 to 8.3). The findings underscore the need for suicide preventive measures directed toward middle-aged populations.
Suicide rates were highest in the West [15.8/100,000], followed by the South, [14.8], Midwest [12.7], and Northeast[10.5], with the report noting that “Significant increases were observed across all regions in the United States.”
Washington Post scribe Tara Bahrampour notes that
As youths, boomers had higher suicide rates than earlier generations; the confluence of that with the fact that they are now beginning to grow old, when the risk traditionally goes up, has experts worried. The findings suggest that more suicide research and prevention should “address the needs of middle-aged persons,” a CDC statement said.
>snip<
Exacerbating boomers’ anxiety is a sense that the world is more treacherous than when they were young, he said. Then, the communist threat and the atom bomb loomed large, but they were distant and abstract; attacks like the ones on the World Trade Center and the Boston Marathon have changed this paradigm.
“These events used to happen 6,000 miles away; now they happen here,” Arbore said.
We suspect Bahrampour wasn’t around for the 1950’s and 1960’s, when the threat of nuclear war was anything but “distant and abstract.” Grade school kids had frequent “duck and cover” drills where they hid under their classroom desks, a move designed to shield young bodies from lethal shards of glass as the blast wave shattered their widows. There were ubiquitous fallout shelter signs, and at least once a month warning sirens sounded in every city and town, test of the nuclear attack warning system. And for single young men out of school, there was always the threat of the draft, forced conscription for bodies to throw against folks objecting to our presence in assorted Asian lands.
And now those same folk are watching neocon vultures and a turncoat President pondering the gutting of the social programs and protections they assumed would be theirs.
Suicides also spike among soldiers
By which we mean the young women currently in uniform, as Al Jazeera reports:
The program notes:
US army struggles against high suicide rate
Suicides among US army personnel are on the rise. In the first four months of this year, more than 160 soldiers have taken their own lives. The Pentagon has released a report detailing the depth of the problem. Al Jazeera’s Kimberly Halkett reports.
From London-based Journeyman Pictures, a troubling documentary about the power of Western media to shape images of beauty in China, where young women are buying cosmetics to whiten their skin and undergoing surgeries to alter their faces and lengthen their limbs, all to make themselves look more Western in order to land jobs and wealthy mates:
The program notes:
Modern China is working hard to give itself a new image. And now a frightening new craze for Western-style beauty is driving a nationwide boom in dangerous and drastic cosmetic surgery procedures.
“Until recently, communist ideals valued natural beauty. Today, other things are considered beautiful”, explains fashion photographer Zheng Chen. At just 19, young model Ai Xiao Qi has found success in China’s fashion world. But she isn’t under any illusions about the painful cause of her popularity: “when you’re in front of cameras, your face must have a strong profile”. A strong profile: the new Chinese euphemism for surgically-enhanced Western features. In a bid to be as tall as Westerners, Chinese girls are even undergoing gruesome procedures to break and extend their legs. After a botched surgery, tour guide Qi Lixia ended up horribly disfigured. “The doctors tried to re-assure me. But my nose was completely deformed.” But such is the pressure on young girls that she’s prepared to go under the knife again: “Looking good helps me in my job”. As this mantra becomes more widely accepted, the message to young girls is clear: it’s what’s on the outside that counts.
From Gallup, a dramatic example of how two different statements of the same phenomenon can trigger radically different responses.
The issue at hand is physician-assisted euthanasia, and Americans had strikingly different responses to two different phrasings of the same basic question.
Version one, the suicide option:
Version two, “by some painless means”:
Rather a sobering reminder of how easy it is to get played. . .
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