We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Here’s an article by Tom DeWeese of NewsWithViews.com, entitled Total Surveillance Equals Total Tyranny.
First three paragraphs:
In the name of fighting terrorism a new kind of government is being implemented in Washington, D.C. We are witnessing the birth of a powerful multi-billion dollar surveillance lobby consisting of an army of special interest groups, Washington lawyers, lobbyists, and high-tech firms with wares to sell.
The personal rights of American citizens, protected until now by the Bill of Rights, are the farthest thing from their minds as they seek to fill their pockets while enabling government to monitor and control our lives to a degree unheard of prior to September 11, 2001. This army seeks riches as it pushes for laws and regulations to spy on and control the lives of law-abiding Americans.
The Government Electronics and Information Technology Association (GEIA) reports that there are more than 100 federal entities involved in forging the largest conglomeration of government-private contractor interests since the creation of the Pentagon. GEIA represents hundreds of corporate members seeking to cash in on the Homeland Security-citizen-surveillance-spending spree.
The counter-terrorist-industrial complex?
This, linked to by the ever caring and concerned Dave Barry, gives a whole new meaning to the word freedom:
sacfree makes your sac free! In former times there were boxershorts or slips. Today there is sacfree, the first boxerslip of the world. sacfree brings you pleasant liberty (“bringt dir angenehme Freiheit”) and defines your necessity.
Briefly: A new dimension of comfort and liberty for your balls. And … sacfree is sexy.
Any ladies or gay gentlemen care to comment on that last claim?
Foreigners mishandling their private parts and the English language. Samizdata never lets you down.
But, watch out when some Germans want to define your necessity.
Here’s a description of a helpful and amusing mapping system that they’ve developed in Amsterdam, linked to by David Sucher.
For the exhibition Maps of Amsterdam 1866-2000 at the Amsterdam City Archive Waag Society together with Esther Polak have set up the Amsterdam RealTime project.
Every inhabitant of Amsterdam has an invisble map of the city in his head. The way he moves about the city and the choices made in this process are determined by this mental map. Amsterdam RealTime attampts to visualize these mental maps through examining the mobile behaviour of the city’s users.
During two months (3 Oct to 1 Dec 2002) all of Amsterdam’s residents are invited to be equipped with a tracer-unit. This is a portable device developed by Waag Society which is equipped with GPS: Global Positioning System. Using satellite data the tracer calculates its geographical position. Therse tracers’ data are sent in realtime to a central point. By visualizing this data against a black background traces, lines, appear. From these lines a (partial) map of Amsterdam constructs itself. This map does not register streets or blocks of houses, but consists of the sheer movements of real pepole.
When the different types of users draw their lines, it becomes clear to the viewer just how individual the map of amsterdam can be. A cyclist will produce completley different favourite routes than someone driving a car. The means of transport, the location of home, work or other activities together with the mental map of the particular person determine the traces he leaves. This way an everchanging, very recent, and very subjective map of Amsterdam will come about. If you spend (or should we say move) a good amount of time within the ‘ring’ of the Amsterdam A10 Highway, you can apply here
for becoming a testperson during rhe testing and development-stage or for becoming a participant during the time of the exhibition. Participants receive a print of their personal routes through the city, their diary in traces.
As Sucher says, this could be
…the first step to charging for street use. Or more.
My attitude to charging for street use is: if it’s your street? … But: “Or more.” Exactly. The whole point of the Internet is that we don’t each of us, separately, any longer have to do our own personal filing. The great Giant Filing Cabinet in the Sky can do our filing for us, and we can share each other’s files. There are huge advantages to this process. Huge.
But what are the disadvantages? Who else gets to look at your “personal” files, and what use to they make of what they learn? The White Rose agenda is, among things: the disadvantages of the Internet. What if they price we pay for this thing ends up being a whole lot more than just the price of getting connected to it?
White Rose: Depress yourself about the future of technology.
If only to have something of interest up here today, here’s a New York Times article from yesterday about a TV show which specialises in harrassing celebs.
It seems to me that what viewers of this show are likely to witness is techniques of harrassment and privacy violation applied to somewhat secondary and somewhat unpopular “fair game” type celebrities, which will thereby be established as reputable, or at least excusable, or okay, or done before so what are you fussing about? – for later use by anyone, against anyone.
Television is an efficient biosphere where the perfect predator evolves for every species in the food chain. If reality shows are the coral reef of prime time, then the television-oriented Web site, the Smoking Gun, is its crown-of-thorns starfish.
It was the Smoking Gun (thesmokinggun.com) that revealed in 2000 that Rick Rockwell, the beau ideal of the hit FOX show “Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire,” had once been under a restraining order from a former girlfriend. The Smoking Gun, which digs up arrrest records, mug shots, show business contracts and divorce papers, became a tip sheet for journalists and a cult Web site for reality show aficionados. It managed to embarrass seemingly squeaky-clean contestants on reality shows from CBS’s “Survivor” to Fox’s “Joe Millionaire.” (Most memorably, it uncovered the early bondage films of a bachelorette, Sarah Kozer.)
Whoever she is. Which is my exact point. Next in line: non-celebs. Yes, these people are probably fair game. If they can’t take the heat they shouldn’t be prancing about in the kitchen. But who’s next?
I’m not saying shut the damn show down. I’m just, you know, saying.
Blogging is unpredictable. It began as innocent posting by me about the Segway, which is a sort of mobile Zimmer frame, on Transport Blog.
Then Patrick Crozier, presiding boss of Transport Blog, made this rather more profound comment.
I have no idea whether the Segway is a good idea or not. But it strikes me as one in a long list of good ideas eg. bikes, roller skates, the C5, which might have been the answer to all sorts of our problems had it only been possible to give them the right sort of road space.
Take roller skates. Small, fast, relatively easy to learn. They should be fantastic. Lots of people should be using them. Why aren’t they? Because if you skate on the pavement you are constantly bumping into people and if you skate on the road you get run over (if not arrested).
But what if you had dedicated roller skate lanes or even dedicated roller skate highways? Different story – perhaps.
Incidentally, this is one of the most compelling reasons (I think) to want a free market in transport – because if entrepreneurs could do their own thing we might actually find out what forms of transport were actually (given all the factors) the best. We certainly aren’t going to find out so long as the state runs the show.
From the ridiculous to the sublime. → Continue reading: David Sucher on the necessity of states to contrive and maintain “infrastructure”
If you are one of those who favours privacy laws, to protect people against being snooped on, you might want to make sure you aren’t asking the government to make operations like this one illegal.
That link was in David Carr’s Samizdata piece yesterday, and there’s more comment from him and from the Samizdata comment pack.
Yesterday I bought the paper version of the Daily Telegraph, to read about how England defeated South Africa at cricket (basically by winning the toss – never mind), and in the City Diary I read this.
Madsen Pirie, the president of the Adam Smith Institute, is feeling pretty smug. Three years ago he wagered £100 at 25-1 on Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming the next governor of California.
The best price you can get now is even money and Pirie is already dreaming of spending his winnings. “I’m going to have an absolutely great party,” he says, before adding, “and I’m going to ask Sir Clive Sinclair to host it.”
Pirie and Sinclair have been mates since they ran Mensa together and our gambler is particularly impressed by his friend’s pad in Trafalgar Square. “Nelson’s his nearest neighbour,” he gushes. “Clive has lots of gadgets so we will be able to show clips of The Terminator.”
So will Arnie make a good governor? “Maybe California needs someone with an economics degree,” Pirie replies. Arnie has one, by the way.
And then, I actually managed to track this story down in its electronic manifestation.
I think Madsen Pirie’s foresight deserves to get around and be celebrated.
Thanks to Elegance Against Ignorance for the tip off about this, which is truly beautiful:
The burglar shot by Tony Martin has been filmed cycling and climbing steps with little apparent difficulty.
Brendon Fearon, who was shot in the legs at Martin’s Norfolk farmhouse, was filmed walking briskly and cycling near his home.
The footage, taken over the past week by The Sun newspaper, shows that the 33-year-old cannot be trusted and is a conman, Martin’s friend and supporter Malcolm Starr said.
And there was me thinking he was an upright citizen.
News of a new ID card scheme, in China:
BEIJING, Aug. 18 – For almost two decades, Chinese citizens have been defined, judged and, in some cases, constrained by their all-purpose national identification card, a laminated document the size of a driver’s license.
But starting next year, they will face something new and breathtaking in scale: an electronic card that will store that vital information for all 960 million eligible citizens on chips that the authorities anywhere can access.
Surprise, surprise.
Instapundit hates Microsoft Word, because it can reveal more about you than you want revealed. It violates your privacy, you might say.
Here’s a Washington Post story which shows that merely passing a law which makes privacy compulsory is not the whole answer to the problem of maintaining privacy:
The transplant patient was recovering well when doctors discovered that his new heart might have been infected with bacteria before the operation. When the doctors sought more information so they could give the man the right antibiotics, the hospital where the donor had died refused, citing new federal patient privacy rules.
“It was ridiculous. The only live part of the donor was in our patient,” said Deeb Salem, chief medical officer at the Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston.
As it turned out, Salem’s patient was in no danger from the infection. But because the donor’s hospital refused to release any information, doctors were forced, as a precaution, to put the man on multiple antibiotics, potentially exposing him to dangerous side effects.
“It cost our patient the risk of being on multiple antibiotics for 12 to 15 hours, not to mention a lot of money,” Salem said.
Thanks to privacy.org for the link.
Here’s an interesting titbit of news, which I just got from following a trackback to something else to this guy (and his blog).
The Guardian is starting a blog devoted to the single issue of abolishing agricultural subsidies.
Today (Monday, August 18, 2003) with only a few weeks to go before the World Trade Organisation meets in Cancun the Guardian is launching a new website with a single aim:
Help the poorest countries by kicking into oblivion All Agricultural Subsidies
(kickAAS)
This is, you might say, lefties giving leftism a libertarian hook, to refashion one of Perry de Havilland’s most favoured memes. I say, good for them.
I’ve always felt that in the long run (okay, the very long run), if libertarianism (okay, the Samizdata meta-context) were ever to triumph in the UK, it would be via the Guardian and by outflanking the traditional right, which has always had a lively sense of the revolutionary and hence to them regrettable nature of the free market. Guardianistas are trouble-makers first and only socialist centralists second and because this makes trouble for smug establishmentarians. If there’s libertarian (Samizdata meta … etc.) trouble to be made, they’ll make that too.
The message is bound to get spread around in some very unlikely places, many of them very angry and hostile places for such a message, that state spending doesn’t work at achieving its publicly stated goals and most especially doesn’t work at making poor people richer.
I expect a lot of regular Guardian readers to be angry about this. Good.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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