..it’s not that corporations are somehow a different form of life from us. They’re part of our “posthuman” evolution. And in fact, you could probably make a better case that the evolution and organization of the corporation as a mode of life in conjunction with the development of technology has more to do with our transformation as a species than the incorporation of new technology alone.

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I kept reading this and thinking, “What if the Singularity already happened?” “What if our ideas about what constitutes intelligence render us incapable of recognising it when it appears?” How do bacteria revolt against the rise of humans? They don’t. They just go on, trying to survive in a new environment that’s changed for various reasons that they don’t quite understand. Imagine. Maybe corporations are already in communication with some higher galactic intelligence, first contact has already happened and WE WILL NEVER KNOW. We’ll just wonder why our environment seems to have gotten inexplicably ___er.

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We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals. They have enormous media reach, which they use to distract attention from threats to their own survival. They also have an enormous ability to support litigation against public participation, except in the very limited circumstances where such action is forbidden. Individual atomized humans are thus either co-opted by these entities (you can live very nicely as a CEO or a politician, as long as you don’t bite the feeding hand) or steamrollered if they try to resist.

In short, we are living in the aftermath of an alien invasion.

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At COMPANY _______ we value your privacy a great deal. Almost as much as we value the ability to take the data you give us and slice, dice, julienne, mash, puree and serve it to our business partners, which may include third-party advertising networks, data brokers, networks of affiliate sites, parent companies, subsidiaries, and other entities, none of which we’ll bother to list here because they can change from week to week and, besides, we know you’re not really paying attention.

We’ll also share all of this information with the government. We’re just suckers for guys with crew cuts carrying subpoenas.

Remember, when you visit our Web site, our Web site is also visiting you. And we’ve brought a dozen or more friends with us, depending on how many ad networks and third-party data services we use. We’re not going to tell which ones, though you could probably figure this out by carefully watching the different URLs that flash across the bottom of your browser as each page loads or when you mouse over various bits. It’s not like you’ve got better things to do.

Each of these sites may leave behind a little gift known as a cookie – a text file filled with inscrutable gibberish that allows various computers around the globe to identify you, including your preferences, browser settings, which parts of the site you visited, which ads you clicked on, and whether you actually purchased something.

Those same cookies may let our advertising and data broker partners track you across every other site you visit, then dump all of your information into a huge database attached to a unique ID number, which they may sell ad infinitum without ever notifying you or asking for permission.
Also: We collect your IP address, which might change every time you log on but probably doesn’t. At the very least, your IP address tells us the name of your ISP and the city where you live; with a legal court order, it can also give us your name and billing address (see guys with crew cuts and subpoenas, above).

Besides your IP, we record some specifics about your operating system and browser. Amazingly, this information (known as your user agent string) can be enough to narrow you down to one of a few hundred people on the Webbernets, all by its lonesome. Isn’t technology wonderful?
The data we collect is strictly anonymous, unless you’ve been kind enough to give us your name, email address, or other identifying information. And even if you have been that kind, we promise we won’t sell that information to anyone else, unless of course our impossibly obtuse privacy policy says otherwise and/or we change our minds tomorrow.

We store this information an indefinite amount of time for reasons even we don’t fully understand. And when we do eventually get around to deleting it, you can bet it’s still kicking around on some network backup drives in somebody’s closet. So once we have it, there’s really no getting it back. Hell, we can’t even find our keys half the time – how do you expect us to keep track of this stuff?
Not to worry, though, because we use the very bestest security measures to protect your data against hackers and identity thieves, though no one has actually ever bothered to verify this. You’ll pretty much just have to take our word for it.

So just to recap: Your information is extremely valuable to us. Our business model would totally collapse without it. No IPO, no stock options; all those 80-hour weeks and bupkis to show for it. So we’ll do our very best to use it in as many potentially profitable ways as we can conjure, over and over, while attempting to convince you there’s nothing to worry about.

(Hey, Did somebody hold a gun to your head and force you to visit this site? No, they did not. Did you run into a pay wall on the home page demanding your Visa number? No, you did not. You think we just give all this stuff away because we’re nice guys? Bet you also think every roomful of manure has a pony buried inside.)

This privacy policy may change at any time. In fact, it’s changed three times since we first started typing this. Good luck figuring out how, because we’re sure as hell not going to tell you. But then, you probably stopped reading after paragraph three.

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The planned Chinese space station will be the centerpiece of the country’s manned space program, which has seen three crews — each larger than the next — launch aboard Chinese Shenzhou spacecraft starting in 2003.

China hopes to launch its first unmanned space station module, Tiangong 1 (Chinese for “Heavenly Palace”), in 2011, the state news organization Xinhua has reported. Over time, other modules will be added on and astronauts will eventually take up residence on the station to conduct research.

The new space station will be constructed using China’s Shenzhou capsules and Long March carrier rockets. These spacecraft established China as only the third country, after Russia and the United States, to independently launch people to space.

…

“To the rest of the world, China’s working very eagerly and aggressively,” Johnson-Freese said. “Canada, Europe and Russia are all banging on the door for China to work with them. I certainly have a concern that the U.S. is going to end up the odd man out in terms of the globalization of space.”

While some American lawmakers have expressed wishes to cooperate with China in space, the idea also faces strong resistance. A trip last month by NASA chief Charlie Bolden to China sparked controversy.

“It should go without saying that NASA has no business cooperating with the Chinese regime on human spaceflight,” U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) wrote to Bolden in an Oct. 5 letter before the visit. “China is taking an increasingly aggressive posture globally, and their interests rarely intersect with ours.”

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What’s happening now is reminiscent of the state of censorship in France in the decades leading up to the Revolution, the story of which is admirably told in historian Robert Darnton’s “>The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-revolutionary France. In the eighteenth century, publishers required a royal privilege to legally publish books in the kingdom of France. Morally outrageous works and works critical of the government were of course denied these privileges; the publishing sphere’s response was to set up presses beyond the borders of France. The French appetite for the secret, the sexy, and the outlaw was met by pirate publishers operating beyond the reach of Government critiques could never sell as well as naughty books, of course—but in many cases the two were combined, in stories that told salacious tales of the nobility and their ministers which contained coded criticisms of official policies. Bawdy literature served as a form of encryption by which pre-revolutionary authors could ensure their disruptive messages could survive.

Then as now, such works set off an official frenzy of denunciation. The public executioner actually whipped and burned outlaw books in front of the Parlement of France in Paris. Such absurdities were but a prelude to the bloodshed that followed—and when we hear of Sarah Palin calling for extreme measures to be taken against a “treasonous” Assange (who is not an American citizen), we have to wonder where all this will lead.

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“Excluding the financial system, the real economy is doing well,” Arsaell Valfells, a professor of business and finance at the University of Iceland, said in telephone interview. Retail spending was still shrinking, he said, but the export sector, consisting mainly of fish, aluminum and tourism, was improving.

“We’ve basically gone back to 2003 in terms of the level of standard of living,” he said. The worst has been felt by younger people who borrowed at the height of the bubble and are now having to reduce their debt, he said. “But they’ll come through this,” he added.

Iceland’s experience, he said, offered a lesson for the euro zone as it grappled with its own crisis: “This is the proper process. If you go through a bubble economy and you need to correct it, the answer is not to convert private debt into public debt. Rather it is to restructure the debt to the level of the assets.”

…

The three biggest Icelandic banks, which had expanded aggressively during the credit bubble, all failed and were nationalized in October 2008. Cleaning up the mess left by one of those, the Icesave unit of Landsbanki, has soured relations with Britain and the Netherlands and delayed international aid.

Icelanders have resisted international pressure to make them fully reimburse the two governments for $5.4 billion they spent making whole Dutch and British depositors who lost their savings in the financial collapse. A March referendum in the nation of 300,000 people on whether to support repayment was overwhelmingly rejected by voters.

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The trouble is that Twitter’s authorisation process makes no distinction between small toys like that and big applications like TweetDeck that handle your entire account. Toys only need to read public messages and perhaps tweet once, but usually request, and are being given “read and write” permission, which means they can do every action Twitter can provide an authorised user: the power to change profile pictures, follow and block users, and – crucially – read direct messages. Changing your password doesn’t lock them out either; you need to explicitly revoke their access.

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A few months ago I wrote about how confused I was by Julian Assange’s actions. Why would anyone taking on the state so directly become such a public figure? It made no sense to me. Now I see the plan. And it’s awesome.

You see, this is the first time anything like Wikileaks has been attempted. Yes, there have been leaks prior to this, but never before have hyperdistribution and cryptoanarchism come to the service of the whistleblower. This is a new thing, and as well thought out as Wikileaks might be, it isn’t perfect. How could it be? It’s untried, and untested. Or was. Now that contact with the enemy has been made – the state with all its powers – it has become clear where Wikileaks has been found wanting. Wikileaks needs a distributed network of servers that are too broad and too diffuse to be attacked. Wikileaks needs an alternative to the Domain Name Service. And Wikileaks needs a funding mechanism which can not be choked off by the actions of any other actor.

We’ve been here before. This is 1999, the company is Napster, and the angry party is the recording industry. It took them a while to strangle the beast, but they did finally manage to choke all the life out of it – for all the good it did them. Within days after the death of Napster, Gnutella came around, and righted all the wrongs of Napster: decentralized where Napster was centralized; pervasive and increasingly invisible. Gnutella created the ‘darknet’ for filesharing which has permanently crippled the recording and film industries. The failure of Napster was the blueprint for Gnutella.

In exactly the same way – note for note – the failures of Wikileaks provide the blueprint for the systems which will follow it, and which will permanently leave the state and its actors neutered. Assange must know this – a teenage hacker would understand the lesson of Napster. Assange knows that someone had to get out in front and fail, before others could come along and succeed. We’re learning now, and to learn means to try and fail and try again.

This failure comes with a high cost. It’s likely that the Americans will eventually get their hands on Assange – a compliant Australian government has already made it clear that it will do nothing to thwart or even slow that request – and he’ll be charged with espionage, likely convicted, and sent to a US Federal Prison for many, many years. Assange gets to be the scapegoat, the pinup boy for a new kind of anarchism. But what he’s done can not be undone; this tear in the body politic will never truly heal.

Everything is different now. Everything feels more authentic. We can choose to embrace this authenticity, and use it to construct a new system of relations, one which does not rely on secrets and lies. A week ago that would have sounded utopian, now it’s just facing facts. I’m hopeful. For the first time in my life I see the possibility for change on a scale beyond the personal. Assange has brought out the radical hiding inside me, the one always afraid to show his face. I think I’m not alone.

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In the not-too-distant future, our relations to computers/the internet have grown more intimate. Our machines respond directly to our thoughts, courtesy of implants. Now: it’s very dangerous to be driving your computerized car and have it respond like lightning to every stray death wish that flits across your mental monitor. So our mind-machine links, in this future world, are insulated and buffered in prudent ways. But: Google (or whoever) has figured out that internet searching goes much better if the machine can read you raw at every level and log all that stuff. People go along with it. Of course, privacy is assured. But: Julian Assange (Assange’s envatted brain, or whoever) stages a massive, Wikileaks-style intelligence release: Psycheleaks. Everyone get up one morning and finds, to their horror, that in the night have sprung up public ‘Psykis’, consisting of everyone’s logged-and-now-leaked thoughts – down to every last little Underground Man-style private fantasy. And the New York Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel got to read the dreams earlier than everyone else, etc. Everyone pretty much knew what this stuff would be like, in broad outline. But it’s still embarrassing. And now no one can live without their implants. But Assange has cult followers everywhere, fanatically devoted to transparency …

Also, Twitter has become a meditative religion; syncretic amalgam of Buddhistic and Tantric notions and practices. The goal is to achieve complete mental-spiritual self-discipline. Some practitioners strive to post only the 140 characters of God’s true name, repeatedly – a variant of Amitabha (‘The Buddha of Infinite Tweet’) Buddhism. One guy almost sets the world record but accidentally tweets ‘world record!’ instead, breaking his streak. Twitric Buddhism maintains that the universe itself is the godhead’s twitter feed. The sexual side of Twitric ritual practice requires a Microsoft Kinect. In the wake of the Psycheleaks scandal, Twitter acquires many new devotees.

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