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Big Brotherhood vs Open Model Utopy

February 9th, 2007

Technology is as always a tool and just a tool.

What is impressive with it, is the cultural influence it has on us.
It is a leverage that has a strong and radical impact on the way we live, the way we think as well as the way we apprehend reality, interactions with people, business and so on.

Communication age has already changed our everyday world in a so intence and deep maneer. When we are looking at what is coming shortly, it is obvious that this trend is only a small and soft begining, what Moore states it for computers is also valid for any fields impacted by technology: EVERYTHING!

Internet and digital tools are clearly opposing two visions:

The Big Brother vision: Datas are collected everywhere, every action on internet, in your car, with your phone, is localised, recorded, and analyzed. Each of these technology Giants like Microsoft, Google or Yahoo have a huge amont of information concerning people, their uses, their actions…
Their is of course no waranty at all that one day a malicious goverment access these datas and decide to compile them, intersect them and finally use them to maintain power, manipulate the masses and to finally impose a servitude and dominating regime so well discribed in novels such as 1984 and the Brave New World (in a communist form as even for those visionars the threat was supposed to come from the outside).

The anarchical and utopian vision: Internet is a decentralized place, with initiatives living mainly under the condition that there are people having interest to develop them. Fluidity, ubiquity and now concepts such as UGC (user generated content), wikis, crowsourcing…) are proposing an amazing and thrilling concept, where the community is feeding itself and is able to sort huge amounts of information. A world full of utopic projects, community being central and where people will finally be forced to rethink entirely their way of living and interacting.

So then, what will impose one option or the other? How this will be evolve? Finally what are the parameters influencing a way or another?

My personnal opinion would logically align with what I believe for models in general. If two models are opposing themselves, the open one will always win. In business, the close model is frequently a short term winner, and this can be sufficient for creating empires, but at then end open model always drive the change and impose itself.

So in theory yes the open anarchic & utopian model is unavodaible.
But there are so many other factors like climate changes, petrol remaining stocks and fossile energies dependancy, can also create an unseen massive crissis. This could be unfortunately a strong leverage for the closed model theory.

We’ll see…

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Entry Filed under: technology, philosophy