MIND CONTROL: THE LUNACY INDEX, SURVEILLANCE STATE, AND QUACKADEMIA ...
As regular readers here may have noted, in the past few days I've been following a variety of topics, mostly to do with education, but a few concerning the Lunacy Index (which is my little measure of the insanity of the political left in this country, which is to be distinguished from the Hysteria Index, which is my measure of the pathology of the political right in this country. You'll note that because our two party system is really a one party system of the hard left, and the soft left, that oftentimes these indices overlap.) This article was shared by Mr. V.T., and I am blogging about it simple because it uniquely ties together all the themes I've been blogging about the past few days - quackademia, the surveillance state, the Lunacy Index - in one tidy Gorgon's knot of insanity:
Now I have no difficulty believing that MIT (or anyone else) would be developing technologies for the remote sensing of an individual's emotional state. In fact, if anything, my problem with this article is the implication that this technology is so underdeveloped as to be a kind of "remote polygraph", a way of reading physiological changes remotely that goes little behind simply noting them, and guessing what the individual's state of mind might be. I would argue (a task for another day, alas) that the technologies have already far exceeded these rudimentary capabilities, and have indeed blogged in the past about them. They exist. They are real.
And they are unbelievably frightening in their potential.
It's that mention of potential that intrigued me, more than any specific technological claims, about this article, for they see some of the potential. This first paragraph here says it all:
Imagine a world where you no longer need to communicate directly with an individual to understand their emotions. Instead, you would just consult with your personal wireless EQ-Radio to get a readout of their emotions, measured by their heartbeat and breathing patterns. Or imagine a world where the government, corporations, Facebook, Google, and other conglomerations can all know your emotions because you own a smartphone equipped with an EQ radio device.
But now note some other interesting things, specifically, the "corporation-academia" link, and the potentials to which this new technology can be (ab)used:
Interestingly enough there is plenty of Big Business involved. Dina Katabi envisions the system being used in entertainment, consumer behavior, and health care. Film studios and advertisers could test viewers’ reactions in real-time, while smart homes could use information about your mood to adjust the heating or suggest that you get some fresh air.
Advertisement companies can creep on a whole new level. Imagine shopping at your local grocery store, and that grocery store has an EQ radio equipped in every aisle. Say you frequent this particular grocery store once a week. Now, the grocery store houses ads within each aisle for sales that are ongoing throughout the store. If those ads are digital, and the EQ device read your emotions, based on your emotional state; the grocery store could fill that advertisement space with products in which you are most likely to buy based on your previous purchasing habits while in that particular emotional state.
Tracking, recording, targeting, and triggering all of which advertisement companies use to infiltrate your mind and influence a decision which would “make” you buy their products. This is one example of how advertisers could use this technology to better their marketing and targeting.
However, if the government were to get their hands on such technology, here comes the thought police. Based on your previously recorded actions, within a particular emotional state; the EQ device could read your emotions and tell when you are likely to ‘strike’ next. Meaning that the government could unlawfully act on the grounds of thought policing.
The issue of privacy and "thought policing" is at the core here, and I am bold to suggest that it is at the core of the dangers of Common Core. Manifestly, most western universities, especially those of technological focus like MIT, can hardly be considered to be bastions of academic freedom and inquiry if in turn they are pursuing technological development to expand the surveillance state. Couple such technologies - and again, I maintain the position that they are much more fully developed than simply the ability to read generalized emotional states, but actual specific ones and even specific thoughts, or, alternatively, to inject them remotely - with an agenda like Common Core and its individually adaptive computerized tests, and you get the idea: the technology will be used to map an individual's emotional and mental state, and could be used to inject and manipulate those states and thoughts.
Corporations are banking on the fact that entering such a "store" or marketplace with such technologies is a kind of "adhesion contract", with the individual consenting, by entering the store, to have her thoughts and emotions tracked and monitored. The solution to such invasiveness? States need to enact legislation - and enact them now - that entry or purchase at a store does not constitute adherence to any contract, implied or otherwise, to allow a corporation to monitor that individual's emotional or mental state. In other words, we need to update the maxim "no taxation without representation" to the maxim "No personal data mining without explicit, written, personal, authorized consent." In this respect, I repeatedly refuse, at my local supermarket, offers to have their "rewards" card. Monitoring purchases for the sake of inventory control and planning is one thing; monitoring an individual's thoughts and emotions, quite another. Of course we can assume what the reaction of the national levels of the Dummycrook and Republithug National Soviets will be to this proposal: silence.
The other alternative, and I suspect that it is one coming, if not soon then at least eventually, will be when smart businessmen and businesswomen capitalize on the growing unease against the invasion of their privacy by quackademia and megacorporations. Imagine your local supermarket or favorite restaurant advertizing "No data mining here, cash welcome," and you get the idea. Would you eat or shop at such a business?
...Precisely. It's your answer that has them worried.
See you on the flip side...
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“No personal data mining without explicit, written, personal, authorized consent.”
This will be the new “Respect My Privacy” slogan in 2020..
This will be regulated by the same political watchdogs who allow Monsanto to claim crop-yields (from farmers who didnt buy their seed) because they were polluted by GMO crops
This is going to go along the lines of..
I think, therefore … I’m monitored, recorded, examined and my personal details are sold onto the corporate partners, and or governmental agencies because my thought patterns hit this week’s buzzword (the buzzword being decided upon by an unelected, faceless bureaucrat)
forgot to add the adjective ‘unaccountable’ to the bureaucrat.. musnt forget that bit..
The “NO PERSONAL DATA MINING etc.” slogan would be great on a Giza-Wear T-shirt…
There may be a way to protect privacy by way of a personal wireless EQ-Radio and/or perhaps some app downloaded to a smart device that could emit a barrage of emotional signals that would either obfuscate or mask ones true emotions.
or one could be a little bit zen – be aware, focused and open?
why am i reminded of the scene in three days of the condor where condor first meets joubert in the elevator, and then the second and last time he meets joubert?
open as in being alright with others being able to read us?
Sorry, zdb, but for this one surveillance, mechanical,electronic or spiritual, is theft and the forerunner of theft.
One of my last employment interviews was by phone with upper management in a helicopter company. I had heard of devices to be used in phone conversations where hesitations, changes in voice pitch, etc., were to be used in ‘synthesizing’ another’s emotional state. And, their likelihood of lying; a low-tech lie-detector. I wondered whether that was part of this ‘interview’…
Fast-forward twenty years. I could easily see computer-component-miniaturization and software-programming advancing to where each mobile device was a ‘DNA laboratory’ of your emotional state. Accelerometers used to check physical nervousness. Software subroutines to pick-out changes in breathing patterns and even heart rate. Similar routines to monitor voice pitch and hesitations. All of this to pick out our ‘tells’. And, all of this with contemporary technology… (We even pay for the opportunity to use it!)
As Joseph said, this is not the ‘big gun’ stuff. However, it is good-enough to ‘cue’ monitoring-people that something is going on. From there, the ‘big guns’ (probably limited in numbers and personnel) can be brought in. This corresponds to medium-resolution private satellites being used to ‘cue’ the limited-number of high-resolution spy satellites…
doesn’t it all just seem like mr global is a coward? it’s a whole lot of effort at getting to know us while carefully maintaining a much more than safe distance.
jeeze what if e.t. were this much of a jerk?
makes one wonder if mr global (e.t. or more locally powered) has good reason for such anti-human attitude – aka fear based logic?
Makes me wonder if ‘Mr Global’ has a face at all. This ‘safe distance’ aspect could be indicative of an AI. If Mr. AI has a plug, it is vulnerable. It might be vulnerable to literal ‘killer aps’ even if it is only software-based at this point. This might account for the deeply-hidden approach to data-gathering…
I am assuming any AI would have access to most of the world’s accumulated knowledge. This includes psychology. Love can control. Fear can control. One is a lot ‘slippier’ than the other. I bet the choice went for fear-based control…
In 1934, Mr. Global was the head of Dupont, Hines, Standard Oil, GM, Chase National Bank, Goodyear, US Steel and Prescott Bush. I don’t think it takes much of a stretch to put an expanded list together to represent a 2016 Mr. Global based on this list… there might just be a few more German names and (definitely) Microsoft… (original list from Fabled Enemies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5CleTSDkq8)
There must a tipping point in all of this. Surely there will be an event in the analog universe that will right this anti-human agenda. Maybe Mother Earth will stretch and sneeze a little, and throw humanity back to a more humbling level – paleo perhaps would be far enough.
The last time this happened:
“The Toba supereruption was a supervolcanic eruption that occurred about 75,000 years ago at the site of present-day Lake Toba (Sumatra, Indonesia). It is one of the Earth’s largest known eruptions. The Toba catastrophe theory holds that this event caused a global volcanic winter of 6–10 years and possibly a 1,000-year-long cooling episode. …today’s humans are descended from a very small population of between 1,000 and 10,000 breeding pairs that existed about 70,000 years ago.” ~Wiki
Yep, that’s paleo…
10,000 breeding pairs of humans that had enough knowledge to kickstart the next civilisation, ours. You’d think we’d have learnt a thing or two from the previous high civilisation(s).
I’m happy enough to continue to live in the bush, grow our own potatoes, beans, pumpkins, corn and fruit, build small wooden cabins for shelter, and spin wool for clothing, etc. We would actually do this now if we didn’t have to pay a mortgage and land rates, and I’m sure our rare neighbours would too.
Maybe the future society will consist of small woodland collective naturals like us, plus city dwelling automaton transhuman homo sapien electricus as Dr Farrell put it recently.
The scary thing is that the latter lot will NOT be satisfied until all humanity has been enslaved, which may indicate that there is something about being a natural human that really frightens TPTB.
I think I know what it is … it has to do with Morphic Resonance and this field’s ability to teach.
“…there is something about being a natural human that really frightens TPTB.”
You might want to read E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s “Lensman” series (or even the “Skylark” series). Human potential goes way beyond what self-limited bad-guys or an AI can attain. As long as we regard ourselves as only meat-bags (taught as such by TPTB), they have the edge. Beyond that, THEY are easy meat…
makes ya wonder about those 1,000 or so pairs right?
how does one (or two) survive global winter for years?
given what predictive skills we might gain by understanding the electric nature of earth, sun, universe,… is it possible that periodic catastrophic events are well understood, anticipated and survived by a select few?
what exactly does one gain by learning vital truths? what can one gain? is that what tesla and leedskalnin and…. whovever else were wondering?
do we have to learn the secret handshakes and whatever else mr global’s banksters and royalists and religulousities and enslavedbricklayers who serve these periodic catastrophe survivors?
is that what separates the social sheep from the sheepdogs?
If one submits and joins at the bottom of the pyramid, one becomes a ‘useful idiot’ and is thrown under the bus when no longer needed or for their gain. History tells us that…
One cannot beat the system from within the system. Fortunately, the system (as Joseph implies from its deepest metaphors) is based on the zero-sum game. A closed system. I win, you lose. One pie, slice it as you wish. No win-win.
Since the real universe is open, infinite possibilities exist for end-running their game. One has only to allow for that possibility to be true, and suitable avenues open up.
(Like the ancient phrase, “When the pupil is ready, the master appears.” This is based on the longing for more. One does not need to know ‘what’ more is; only that there is the possibility/probability of more. The floodgates gradually open…)
Just as in many aspects of discovery; they are varied uses of technology for good or evil. Given the track record of those who have engineered the discoveries of man toward weaponization, it’s pretty much a given that these tools are heading towards the dark side.
As money could become the servant of man, or his master; we all know how that’s turned out.
Sensing occurs across things and people, through the environment and within infrastructure. People to people communication[p to p] is becoming a smaller portion of internet and networked traffic in the complex array of machine-to-machine[M2K]and machine to people[M2P].
When Weber made the case that computing should recede into the background, he signaled toward the way in which environments would become the experimental envelope through which computing could unfolded[an automated pervasive surround]. A ubiquitous computing world would enhance reality by creating new versions of the real.
machine to machine[M2M]
Blame it on the botsa nova.
the process of becoming individual is always incomplete and continues to provoke new modes of becoming and individuation. The term concresce[to capture ways in which actual entities and actual occasions are realized and joined up as distinct and immanent creatures. Environments concresce through computational and distributed sensors; where processes of operationalizing environments put dynamics into play, rather than simply writing a script against which a workflow is executed.
The reason I/m so keenly interested in this is the relationship of the spirit to it’s[bad word use] surrounding environment; which can either free it, or imprison it[in degrees]. Couple this idea with there’s an interface that is spiritual/ living[more non-local in entanglement/nature]; where the other more programmable and subject to hierarchical order.
One sense spiritual; the other…
sensors are exchangers between earthly processes, modified electric cosmos, human and nonhuman individuals. The environmental computation that materializes here cou7ld be described as individual-milieu dyads that become as they communicate, subject-superjects that concrease as entities, and thereby enable particular environments to materialize and sediment.
Under moderation.
All Stop!
5:42 Pm
6 lines to wrap it all up.
But the bot’s trigger got too itchy.
actually, maybe the bot was a good thing.
I was just getting warmed-up.
I predicted this particular environmental moderated response…
Simply put, to understand the dangers of this Transhumanism agenda, read the book by Joseph and Dr. de Hart.
I have to admit it took me 4 full reads to get my head around it.
There is also a “way be when” aspect to this, which is definitely DNA based.
way back when…..ie think Mesopotamia here.
In a Western society where 5 year old kids are triggered in premature puberty thru twoddle like transgenderism and all else destabelizing, I wouldn’t want to be on the recieving end of studying that collected data.
Now imagine if that surveillance technology is AI. Personally I am banking on the non-western world to get us back to “reason” if at all posible.
Early puberty is triggered by “transgenderism”? That’s a big reach, and ignores all sorts of obvious chemicals.
Margo Adler read a science Fiction story on her radio show in the 80s. On WBAI-FM that dealt with turning people into consumer junkies if you can get in contact with her she may give the title and author of that story. As always science fiction writers are always exploring these ideas long before the rest of are. The privacy issues bring issues from Philip K. Dick Minority Report pre-crime scenario and 1984 thought police.
Remember back in the days of yore when businesses still had to actually sell things to us? It was predatory, even back then, sure. But there was still an element of sport to it. The buyer at least had a chance in the old trial and error sales system. Now there’s no sport, no fair play, no rules of engagement, and thus no humanity. The big guys have all the data and all the advantages; and the big guys run it all. To use a hunting analogy: where they used to go into the wild and hunt with rifles… now, they simply walk into a zoo and pick off trapped animals using laser-sighted automatics. It’s an efficient system, no doubt. The number crunchers must really love it; and so must the control freaks who want a static, predictable world with guaranteed outcomes. But I can’t help thinking they’re violating some fundamental ‘law’ in the process–some universal principle of justice. And I can’t help thinking they’re due some pretty hefty cosmic comeuppance as a result.
Ah consider the website that was posted on too…”tyrannical gun control”, etc.
But of course consciousness control would be done by vastly different means.
Couple this with that Nano mesh you will, no doubt, receive in one of those “vaccines” they are pushing, without your consent being required,
and you have the ultimate in mind control and surveillance all wrapped up in one neat package. Of course, it will all be pushed on us “for our benefit and security”; however, you can bet that there will be those who are exempt from such treatment. Someone, after all, has to run the Matrix; there has to be a queen bee, and her court, over the Borg collective.
Those “robots” of the future may well be the sheeple. They already have “concentration camps” in place for those of us who refuse to participate so that we can be “reeducated”, or simply made to vanish, should we resist “assimilation”; there are already plenty of those “four person” coffins stockpiled throughout the states to accommodate such individuals. Sound a bit paranoid? Maybe it’s time to become a bit paranoid because they are most certainly out to get us.
It would appear that our civilization is on a similar path as Atlantis’s, we will destroy ourselves with our own technology. Of course, the elite will survive in their prepared “continuity of government” bunkers to begin the process all over again.
The police state marches onward:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-26/congress-wants-the-tsa-to-help-secure-amtrak-and-buses
Several scenarios propose themselves…
Police, etc. will know straight away when you are in distress/attacked and can send police to you straight away.. (and know who is near you if they are also ‘linked in’, which will lead to cyber crime finding ways to bypass that..) But that means they will know when you getting freaky with the partner of your choice.. and they’ll also know who you’re with if everyone is linked up.
Facebook will know know what products excite you so they can sell the BIG DATA to their corporate masters. (So be careful walking through the red light district if y’know what I mean..wink wink..) And then expect that data to be made public (and then sold to the deep net) when their unhackable servers get ‘hacked’.
Job interviews will no longer ask you if you’re pregnant, or gay or communist or a member of the nazi party.. they’ll just scan your ..
emoji-ouiji board. and lo and behold all your innermost secrets and fears downloaded and available to their corporate partners. (dont forgot to tick the box saying you dont want any commercial sollicitation.)