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Watchbirds were those annoying little stick-figure birds who perched in some Munro Leaf children’s stories, always ready to instruct kids in proper protocols when they were misbehaving. Our current flock of watchbirds rarely have to instruct us because we mostly maintain civil decorum knowing they’re there. Talk about the nanny state.
Archive That Novel-in-Progress is Out (soon) 6/2/2024 On September 1, 2024, Guernica World Editions will publish Geoff Dutton’s Her Own Devices: A novel or two. This is the novel I last wrote about here over three years ago. (See next entry) You can find out lots more about it at Perfidy Press, and order it … Continue reading “The Daily (or whenever) Eruption”
We tend to think of electric cars as futuristic but for our great-great grandparents, they were a thing. Who knew so many of the private automobiles sold up until the 1920s were electric-powered or that they and their styles ranged so far and wide? They were easier to start and maintain than cars propelled by … Continue reading “Motoring Becomes Electric, Redux”
Reposted with permission from Mint Press News. Original story here. MintPress News is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License. Through his purchase of influence over the daily flow of information to American media consumers, a dizzying array of connections to the national security state, and a media empire that shields him … Continue reading “Guest Post: How One of America’s Premier Data Monarchs is Funding a Global Information War and Shaping the Media Landscape”
“If big tech companies are going to turn their back on US Department of Defense, this country is going to be in trouble…We are going to continue to support the DOD and I think we should.” ~ Amazon founder and DoD contractor Jeff Bezos at the WIRED25 summit The world’s wealthiest individual went on … Continue reading “Why High Technology’s Double-Edged Sword Is So Hard to Swallow”
Part 3: Dr. (Don’t Be) Evil Meets Dr. Strangelove Continued from If We Only Knew Then Former Google EC Dr. Eric Schmidt has called for intelligence agencies to stop illegally prying into personal information and has been doing his best to convince the government to pay Google to do it legally instead. That said, in … Continue reading “The Net’s Good Old Boys (3)”
Part 1: Hacking the Arpanet It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time before the Internet, a time when computers took up more space than the acolytes who tended to their needs. In the 70s I was one such boffin, a postgrad hacking FORTRAN in a university R&D lab. Computers then were still … Continue reading “The Net’s Good Old Boys (1)”
Part 2: If We Only Knew Then Continued from Hacking the Arpanet Although it seems like it, the Internet just didn’t assemble itself from a kit. Engineers made it. Engineers just want to design and build cool useful things. Generally they like this much more than repairing things they have sent into the world. And, … Continue reading “The Net’s Good Old Boys (2)”
NOTE: This article has been updated to include subsequent events. It is also posted on CounterPunch. One of my correspondents (let’s call her Jinwar), a supporter of autonomous areas in northwestern Kurdistan, notified me that Facebook had deleted her support group’s page plus her personal page as well those of others, requesting that the above … Continue reading “Cutting Cords to Kurds: Facebook’s Foreign Policy”
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” ~ Upton Sinclair A triple-threat epidemic is sweeping the land—not just some deadly virus, water-born disease, or auto-immune reactions to toxins, although those too plague us—but of secrecy, unaccountability, and impunity, bypassing checks and balances, impervious … Continue reading “The Company We Sadly Keep”
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