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First of all it’s clear that after 70 years without war in the West, we are no longer aware of the danger posed by the government’s file cabinets. The censuses, the raids, and the killing of communists, homosexuals, the mentally ill, gypsies and Jews would today be facilitated by a tool a thousand times more tragically effective and finely tuned than those available back in 1940. But very few people truly realize this because they did not live through the war. What are the Chinese or Korean dictatorships doing on this subject, the Russian crypto-dictatorship, the Israeli police state so prodigiously equipped to track any Arab dissent? We turn our heads away so as not to see. OK. There are two possible reactions (ignorance, detachment), but both undoubtedly miss the essential point of our acceptance of the worst.

Here I’d like to venture a hypothesis; actually a thesis. This thesis would be the following: the delicate web of surveillance on citizen-customers by those who govern us “vertically” (State powers as well as the liberal powers held by multinationals on the internet) is so amazingly tolerated because it is anchored, “horizontally” in the social practices of mutual checks that occur daily, are familiar, and have become natural. In other words, the NSA sprouts from a social soil that has made self control, control of others and control of the world through technology, proof of a bond, an ethos, a way of life. The stem grows from the rhizomes.

I control myself, you control me, we control ourselves, they control us. Surveillance, management and control become fractalized so that between the mother who sneaks onto the Facebook account of her daughter, the employer who scans the flaws of a job applicant on the web, the husband who reads his wife’s SMS messages and looks at her credit card bills, the retiree who monitors his vacation home with a webcam connected to a motion detector, and the NSA, all the way on top, which runs surveillance on Alcatel, Merkel, J. Schmoe, and Strauss-Kahn. Between all these there is one recurring theme, the same sordid twist, the same economy of desire focused on prevention, fear, and the total control over anything that can surprise, can divert, and can live.

This morning, January 8, 2014, a Palestinian was killed by an Israeli drone, at distance, “cleanly”. Cameras are put in Teddy Bears to reassure parents. Babysitters and our empty houses are filmed. Our cell phones are triangulated, our travels are synchronized, our breathing space is restricted. We put tracking devices in our shoes, toll passes in our pockets because we are in flux, and microchips in the ears of our cats, our dogs and our sheep. The trees in Paris are barcoded. They can remotely hack into the braking system of a car, into a pacemaker in a beating heart. They can disrupt a GPS so that you get lost, activate the webcam on your computer, listen in around you with your smartphone. They manufacture the Xbox One which can constantly monitor your game room, can know which movies you watch, can know which games you play, can know how many people are on your couch, and can measure the volume and the light that enters. These features were quickly removed after facing an outcry that Microsoft never anticipated given that the logic of control has become so natural.

The truth is that we are being mithridatized. We are becoming dangerously acclimated to this subtle poison ingested daily, to this new form of an intimate grip of control and the extensive power that Deleuze diagnosed back in 1990 as our entry into the Societies of Control; and under this yoke we are being gently twisted. The truth is that this control is no longer simply placed and received. It is no longer simply imposed contemptuously, in the form of a pyramid of discipline, which falls upon us, the sad victims of the panoptic powers of the State, of Capital and of Mafias – inciting by its alienating grip strength, resistance, and revolts. No, it’s much better than that.

This desire to control, this impulse towards surveillance and frantic security now runs through each of every one of us. It takes shape and wires itself into our nerves. Everyone becomes the relay, the peddler, the exchanges are made with joy and fear. Everyone gets off on playing their roles as cops, all-powerful bosses, or low-life voyeurs. You control your house, your car, your purchases. He scans his wife’s emails, tracks his daughter with geolocation, and limits the duration of his son’s internet connection. She checks her pulse, controls her blood pressure, counts her calories, and her steps. You filter your calls, track down your ex on Facebook, Google the chick you met at the bar yesterday rather than letting her reveal as much as she wants you to know. And you are offered all the personal and idle tools for that; all the apps; all the flashy hardware for geeks with just a click of a mouse and a beep.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/01/alain-damasio-nsa-701000-hours-custody.html
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Yeon-mi Park: The hopes of North Korea’s ‘Black Market Generation’

The second characteristic: Our Black Market Generation has had wide access to outside media and information. The private market has provided more than food and clothing — it has also provided TVs, bootleg South Korean movies and K-pop videos, USBs and DVDs. As a girl in North Korea, I saw “Titanic,” “Cinderella,” “Pretty Woman” and “Snow White” — not to mention WWE wrestling.

As American philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote: “It is not actual suffering but a taste of better things which excites people to revolt.”

Yeon-mi Park: The hopes of North Korea’s ‘Black Market Generation’

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Watch Dogs takes a great idea and bludgeons it with normality · Game Review · The A.V. Club

An all-seeing Internet is a potent specter because it threatens to enforce normality. Risk, weirdness, lawbreaking—all the mutations that fitfully evolve society’s DNA—are more dangerous in a world where every choice you make is watched and therefore has the potential to define you. Yet the residents of the ctOS-blanketed Chicago don’t care. Most of the time, when you eavesdrop on someone, you find them breaking the law, or engaging in some low-level sexual perversion, or mistreating a woman somehow. (Once again, developers fill in the cracks with misogyny, the game industry’s storytelling spackle.) The people you observe also say “fuck” and “shit” a lot; the latter profanity seems to have replaced the comma in the English parlance of Watch Dogs’s future. In essence, the Chicagoans of the game embody a 12-year-old boy’s idea of what people do behind closed doors. They don’t behave like the subjects of an ominous technological overseer.

Watch Dogs takes a great idea and bludgeons it with normality · Game Review · The A.V. Club

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Grinders: Tomorrow’s Cyberpunks are Here Today [NSFW: Gore] — The Airship

“
m1k3y, who has no lack of speculation about possible societal collapses, admits he considers the neoreactionaries’ goals and “can’t imagine anything more terrible.”

As for his own vision, beyond magnets and garage science, the sky’s the limit:
“Saving the world as penance for the sins our fathers, building a life worth being near immortal in, then exploring the galaxy. It’s a plan.”
”

Interview we did late last year finally went live. I said a few things.

Grinders: Tomorrow’s Cyberpunks are Here Today [NSFW: Gore] — The Airship

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Nearly twice as tall as Mount Everest, Arsia Mons is the third tallest volcano on Mars and one of the largest mountains in the solar system. This new analysis of the landforms surrounding Arsia Mons shows that eruptions along the volcano’s northwest flank happened at the same time that a glacier covered the region around 210 million years ago. The heat from those eruptions would have melted massive amounts of ice to form englacial lakes — bodies of water that form within glaciers like liquid bubbles in a half-frozen ice cube.

The ice-covered lakes of Arsia Mons would have held hundreds of cubic kilometers of meltwater, according to calculations by Kat Scanlon, a graduate student at Brown who led the work. And where there’s water, there’s the possibility of a habitable environment.

“This is interesting because it’s a way to get a lot of liquid water very recently on Mars,” Scanlon said.

While 210 million years ago might not sound terribly recent, the Arsia Mons site is much younger than the habitable environments turned up by Curiosity and other Mars rovers. Those sites are all likely older than 2.5 billion years. The fact that the Arsia Mons site is relatively young makes it an interesting target for possible future exploration.

“If signs of past life are ever found at those older sites, then Arsia Mons would be the next place I would want to go,” Scanlon said

Based on the sizes of the formations, Scanlon could estimate how much lava would have interacted with the glacier. Using basic thermodynamics, she could then calculate how much meltwater that lava would produce. She found that two of the deposits would have created lakes containing around 40 cubic kilometers of water each. That’s almost a third of the volume of Lake Tahoe in each lake. Another of the formations would have created around 20 cubic kilometers of water.

Even in the frigid conditions of Mars, that much ice-covered water would have remained liquid for a substantial period of time. Scanlon’s back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests the lakes could have persisted or hundreds or even a few thousand years.

That may have been long enough for the lakes to be colonized by microbial life forms, if in fact such creatures ever inhabited Mars.

“There’s been a lot of work on Earth — though not as much as we would like — on the types of microbes that live in these englacial lakes,” Scanlon said. “They’ve been studied mainly as an analog to [Saturn’s moon] Europa, where you’ve got an entire planet that’s an ice covered lake.”

In light of this research, it seems possible that those same kinds of environs existed on Mars at this site in the relatively recent past.

There’s also possibility, Head points out, that some of that glacial ice may still be there. “Remnant craters and ridges strongly suggest that some of the glacial ice remains buried below rock and soil debris,” he said. “That’s interesting from a scientific point of view because it likely preserves in tiny bubbles a record of the atmosphere of Mars hundreds of millions of years ago. But an existing ice deposit might also be an exploitable water source for future human exploration.”

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Are ‘Super-Earths’ and ‘Habitable Zones’ Misleading Terms?

The “burdensome” problem for the scientific community in describing a habitable zone is that scientists know little about where life forms, Marcy said.

“There’s a split brain that we scientists have right now. Half of our brain says there’s a habitable zone and it lies between a region inward of where the Earth is and a region outside the Earth’s orbit [for stars our size],” he said. “The other half of our brain knows perfectly well that excellent destinations for our search for life lie elsewhere in the Solar System.”

Are ‘Super-Earths’ and ‘Habitable Zones’ Misleading Terms?

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Earlier this week, the ISEE-3 Reboot project reached an official agreement with NASA, the first time the agency has approved an outside team attempting to resurrect a spacecraft that it never planned to use again. Now, Cowing, Mingo, and their team have until mid-June to fire the thrusters, diverting it into an orbit close to Earth. If they fail, ISEE-3 will swing around the Moon instead, continuing its solar orbit. It will not near Earth again for decades.

Before ISEE-3 Reboot, the pair operated the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project, a highly successful effort to recover lost photographs from 1960s lunar satellites. This experience, as well as their NASA connections, served them well: they were able to collect reference material from some of the original mission team. “Typically, after 30 or 40 years, your wife says, ‘Why don’t you throw that crap out?’ And you keep saying ‘It’ll be important someday!’ Well, it was,” Cowing says. “They kept many of the documents that were required to tell the spacecraft what to do, because a lot of them knew that it was coming back to Earth in 2014.” Software-defined radio could compensate for hardware that no longer existed, making it possible to speak to ISEE-3 once again.

NASA couldn’t fund a recovery mission, though it provided advice and documents to Winger and Cowing. But the public, it turned out, could. A crowdfunding campaign reached its goal of $125,000 after a month, ultimately getting over $150,000. With that money and direct equipment donations, the team got two power amplifiers and set up ground stations at Morehead State University and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, which houses the world’s largest and most powerful radio telescope. So far, they’ve detected a signal from ISEE-3, and Cowing believes they stand a very good chance of communicating with it in days or even hours.

If they can take control of ISEE-3, then what? It’s possible that it could start a new mission. As of 1999, 12 of the 13 instruments were known to be still working, and almost three-quarters of the original fuel supply remained. Though its battery is dead, the solar panels must be functioning at least enough for it to transmit a signal. Maintaining such a mission, however, would take money that the team doesn’t have right now. Instead, one of the project’s greatest findings could simply be that it’s possible to bring an abandoned spacecraft back under control, and that NASA will give its blessing to these unofficial projects.

Citizen scientists of the future, for example, might want to resurrect the Spitzer space telescope, an exoplanet probe that’s facing shutdown as part of NASA budget cuts. “People said, ‘Why don’t you take control of that?’ Well, one lost spacecraft at a time,” says Cowing, noting that Spitzer is a more complex craft that would take more work to capture. “But it’s only a couple million dollars a year to run these things, so all it takes is somebody with a little philanthropic intent to either write a big check or — look, we’ve raised more than a tenth of a million dollars. We’re like 10 percent of the way there to running a far more sophisticated spacecraft. So if we can do it, others can.”

As NASA pursues an ambitious Mars mission in the face of constant budget crunch, Cowing hopes that everyday citizens will be able to build new spacecraft, not just commandeer old ones.

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