After the attacks on the Twin Towers, on September 11, 2001, the world entered a “new normality”. On the occasion of these attacks, new practices and technologies of surveillance and repression were installed throughout the spectrum of public and private space, which nullified the civil liberties granted until then. The “war on terror” imposed emergency mobilization for the purposes of managing the “Islamic threat”, which (emergency mobilization / urgent need) was then made permanent. Always in the name of “freedom”…
High tech sharpening
Last Saturday, two systemic media outlets, Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, published a u.s department of state order to electronic chip manufacturers: it is forbidden to sell to chinese …
Total “health protection”: automated incrimination…
If you were planning to travel outside national borders, even within the “Schengen area”, you certainly have various problems, difficulties, obstacles. Everything may be hastily built, but violently on the …
Article 230
Twenty-six words in an article of a 1996 u.s. law allowed the internet to be what we know it to be; and in “content publishing” giants like google, facebook and …
Digital prisons
The (digital) file of everything, through a “digital health-identity”, is not just a dream of mr. Bill – the Lord of the Gates and Windows – and of all those …
A handful more observations
It is likely to be disconcerting that a story presented as a “mass public-health problem” (like covid-19) is in practice far more and far more significant… And that, consequently, the …
Censorship techniques: an apartheid’s example
The israeli apartheid on palestinian land could not, at a time when information “circulates freely”, fail to also include a corresponding digital apartheid, or the control and censorship in information concerning itself and circulating on the world wide web. The practice of censorship or reality distortion was always the basic toolbox of any totalitarian regime. And israel sets the example for even that.
Behavior surveillance and control/shaping: the only real health is the health of the machine!
On April 5th, one could light-heartedly read in the pages of the regime newspaper kathimerini: Kaushik Basu, an economics professor at Cornell university and a former “world bank” chief economist …
Capitalism, the state and epidemics: Event 201
The Event 201 simulates the outbreak of a new coronavirus of animal origin that is transmitted from bats to swine and eventually manages to be transmitted from human to human, …
Fear is the best medicine (of the system)
Hygiene phobias (of all scales and intensities) are a direct expression of fears related to ablebodiedness, youth and death. For a (measured!) century now, (eternal) youth and immortality have been …
Education at the threshold of the 4th industrial revolution
The education system as we know it is only about 200 years old. Before that, formal education was mostly reserved for the elite. But as industrialization changed the way we …
The company knows… What about the state?
The (official) data show that the chinese government has managed to control the spread of the infection and then (as a result) the deaths from the steadily “weak” covid-19. The …