Surveillance culture
by Vinay Gupta • September 15, 2008 • The Global Picture • 0 Comments
Theres gotta be a record of you some place
You gotta be on somebodys books
The lowdown – a picture of your face
Your injured looksThe sacred and profane
The pleasure and the pain
Somewhere your fingerprints remain concrete
And its your face Im looking for on every streetA ladykiller – regulation tattoo
Silver spurs on his heels
Says – what can I tell you as I’m standing next to you
She threw herself under my wheels
Oh its a dangerous road
And a hazardous load
And the fireworks over liberty expode in the heat
And its your face I’m looking for on every streetA three-chord symphony crashes into space
The moon is hanging upside down
I dont know why it is I’m still on the case
Its a ravenous town
And you still refuse to be traced
Seems to me such a waste
And every victory has a taste that’s bittersweet
And it’s your face Im looking for on every street
Facebook, you know… who was that person at your party… big spiders that scrape it all into secret biometrics databases… how could it be otherwise, really, if the people who run that stuff are remotely rational.
Solution: humane control of those capabilities. They’re too powerful to allow knuckle draggers to run the show any more. We totally screwed up the nuclear weapon, and wound up putting the whole world at risk, and the same kind of thinking is going into combat robotics, nano-bio technology, and biometrics. That has to stop – we need productive, better alternatives, not this current vector towards destruction.