Modulator

Memories of the Information Age

Are you in a hurry to get back to your blog; your email, your latest music download and is it time to upgrade your PC again? Do you feel pangs of withdrawal when you are away too long?

Richard Formo suggests we have become as hooked as a back alley heroin addict:

In some cases, particularly in mainstream operating systems, software, and Internet-based services, it's one step short of blackmail. We all certainly can't go cold turkey very easily, although some modern Luddites may succeed.

To make things worse, government practically has outsourced the oversight and definition of technology-based expression and community interaction to for-profit corporations and secretive industry-specific cartels

We feel like we are flying free but that is not the goal of Microsoft, the RIAA, the MPAA or, for that matter, any level of our government.

Join the fight or slack.

You decide if you want your memories of the information age to include, according to Formo:

The profit goals of high-tech vendors determine how client businesses and people are organized and interact.

• Everyone is presumed a potential criminal until proven otherwise, according to oppressive industry-defined criteria.

• A once-awesome revolution in global communications became converted into a cesspool of unsolicited and offensive marketing messages.

• Knowing how to do something that's illegal is just as illegal as actually doing something that's illegal.

• The legal protections over freedom of speech are trumped to preserve corporate secrets or market share while hiding vulnerabilities that endanger the public.

• Our lives are monitored and dissected by marketing firms looking for the best way to sell us things we don't need or want.

• Technology's promise and alluring capabilities are used to surreptitiously entrap and willingly imprison members of the information-age society instead of truly empowering them.

Posted by Steve on October 11, 2003