Did You Know This Barn Burned 20 Years Ago?
December 30, 2019
Now let’s be positive. One can play games any time, any place. One can broadcast one’s thoughts any time, any place. One can find objective information any time, any place. What’s not to like?
Quite a bit, according to a newspaper which has tried for years to embrace zeros and ones. No, not embrace, love those zeros and ones. Navigate to “We’ve Spent the Decade Letting Our Tech Define Us. It’s Out of Control” and relive the old news: Barn burned. Horses killed or rustled. Amazon warehouse built on the site.
Yep, old news.
The write up states:
What this decade’s critiques miss is that over the past 10 years, our tech has grown from some devices and platforms we use to an entire environment in which we function. We don’t “go online” by turning on a computer and dialing up through a modem; we live online 24/7, creating data as we move through our lives, accessible to everyone and everything.
Obviously the newspaper continues to write about what happened quite a while ago. The history of online was set when online databases crushed traditional print indexes. Online outfits like Dialog, SDC, and even Dialcom for goodness sakes changed research and journal publishing. Did anyone notice? Sure, those disintermediated. But the nature of online information was evident by 1980. Let’s see, wasn’t that about 40 years ago.
But now we have a decade to consider.
The newspaper notes, almost with a little surprise:
We’ve spent the last 10 years as participants in a feedback loop between surveillance technology, predictive algorithms, behavioral manipulation and human activity. And it has spun out of anyone’s control.
The datasphere surprises, it seems. The basic law of online is that a monopoly structure is the basic protein structure of the digital world. It’s a surprise that once data flow through a system, those data must be logged. Logged data have to be analyzed. More data begets additional data. And there are other “laws” of online.
The venerable newspaper, with its begging for dollars please rendered in #ffff00 is reporting the news.
One problem: The news is really old. The new year is almost upon us. Maybe old news is just safer, easier, and more clickworthy than what is actually scrolling and swiping to the future.
Keep in mind that that Amazon delivery will arrive today.
Stephen E Arnold, December 30, 2019
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