Comments on: Contemplating Big Sister

By: sean

sean — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 22:48:53 +0000

Remember the hive mind can be one hell of a destructive and dimwitted dominator.

“The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?” – Jaron Lanier

Please read this:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06_index.html

By: ::HorsePigCow:: marketing uncommon » The Future is Feminine

::HorsePigCow:: marketing uncommon » The Future is Feminine — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 07:31:02 +0000

[...] in actuality, I hadn’t really thought of it that way…yet. Then my amazing PiC writes this bit on Big Sister, basically, saying the same thing: The thing is, Big Sister is already upon us. Read about Nick [...]

By: Tara Hunt

Tara Hunt — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 05:03:57 +0000

Heh. After my presentation at e.day, a man walked up to me and said, “You know, if your vision of whuffie for the future is to be true, and I believe strongly that you are right, women own the future.” All of the things we hold dear in this dawning era (whatever we want to call it, but for now, it’s web 2.0) are these feminine traits: empathy, openness, etc. I don’t think only women have these traits, but I do think, like you specify, they are feminine traits.

This is an awesome post, hon. Thanks for it.

By: Ryan Price

Ryan Price — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 03:13:52 +0000

For the first few paragraphs of this, I couldn’t tell if it was for or against open society, but it started making sense. I totally agree. Despite my conservative upbringing, I’ve always considered myself “Socialist”..? I don’t know what to call it. Most of my family doesn’t understand why open source, coworking and other concepts are right up my alley.

By: hillary hartley

hillary hartley — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 13:56:42 +0000

Well-penned – glad you gave it another shot.

I can’t help but wonder though, if Big Brother won’t adapt. Surely living life in the open has its pitfalls. I imagine Google, if prompted, could narrate a lengthy “This is Your Life” (or at least, “This is Your Life – over the last few of years…”) episode starring your’s truly. Does the interconnectedness of our networks and the social graph end up feeding the aggregators?

I love your vision of Big Sister as compassionate empath, and agree that information in the hands of many instead of the few is a major step in the right direction. Here’s to dismantling the dominators — whichever “-archy” they may be.

By: John Allsopp

John Allsopp — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 11:10:14 +0000

Chris,

not sure whether it is relevant to your far more thoughtful and in depth post, but I recently wrote this

http://westciv.typepad.com/dog_or_higher/2007/08/quis-custodiet-.html

in which I argue that I don’t care about wiretapping, intercepting my emails, photographing my every move – provided that it applies equally to everyone – police, politicians, security agencies, you name it. In a radically transparent world, we have nothing to hide – our sexuality, our predilections, our beliefs, what we did when we were 21, so no one has something to hold against us – no skeletons in closets, no fake piety about family values (all the while cottaging, or visiting prostitutes, or whatever so many leader type folks seem to be up to these days, which is cool, except all the while demonizing for their own benefit anyone else who does that).

From a technological point of view, I think radical transparency is close to inevitable, probably within our lifetimes, certainly within our childrens’. Ironically, those who seem to want it most, will live to rue the expression “be careful what you wish for”. We’d know then what certain presidents did for the first 40 years of their lives, and much much more.