The War on Information

You heard it here first #3: The War on Information.

Non sequitur prediction: Oil prices will recover before the economy does.

Why are their multiple Kleenex boxes on my bed?

script:
1. Sometime next year, the Obama administration will realize that direct threats to national security are posed by emerging technologies. They will note how biotech and nanotech might eventually yield dangerous weapons, and they will recognize that more and more of society's infrastructure is tied to the Internet, where hackers can wreak havok.

2. In about 5 years or so more or less - certainly no more than 10 years - the ruling elite will come to the realization that they can only prevent [knowledge of how to dangerously use these new technologies] from proliferating (,) by implementing a broad censorship regime. Actually, they won't realize for the most part, but rather what will really happen is that a new euphemism framework will evolve that allows the elite to rationalize censorship by calling it something else that makes it seem not to conflict with the First Amendment. This semantic evolution will convince the ruling elite that they're doing the right thing, and it will probably convince you too, because talking heads and blogs will tell you it's necessary and right..

3. But, the Internet, being what it is, will grow routes to bypass the censorship, and you start to see a virtual war emerge between censors and anti-censors the War on Information. It's at this point that some paths temporarily diverge. Some countries will succeed for a time at censoring the Internet, but only through a combination of an obedient culture and stifling virtual police state. The inflexibility of such a state would render it unable to adapt to a changing world, and it would become irrelevant to broader society's development in a decade or so, much like North Korea is today.

4. Countries that fail to crystallize themselves into totalitarian states will play host to the escalation of the War on Information. This ongoing conflict between those who favor and those who oppose censorship will fuel an evolutionary process that results in the emergence of a more multi-layered, diverse, robust, and complex set of Internets in which evolving viral memes and software will become more intelligent through virtual selection.

It's easy to spot the seeds of this in the present-day Internet. Botnets and spam both rely on outsmarting people, and sometimes competitors, and they're just for advertising and petty identity theft. Attempted enforcement of the intellectual property construct has spurred the widespread adoption of decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing, encryption, streaming media, and so on.

But intellectual property enforcement is a relatively weak social force, because it is the interest of only a few economic producers, is subject to their cost-benefit analysis, and is ultimately less profitable than adapting to the changed economic environment. On the other hand, when the increasing technological development of society means that knowledge equals power more and more, it is a matter of fact that information proliferation poses a clear and soon-to-be-present danger by enabling more people to commit more egregious acts of terrorism, whether it be true terrorism or terrorism as a euphemism for another offensive act. When people begin to realize this a few years from now, the censorship calls will begin, and gradually pick up steam, driving the Internet into its adolescence.

Then at some point will come the next generation of human-computer interface, and we'll have a whole other host of intractable problems. You heard it here first.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Internet
• future
• prediction
• censorship
• artificial
• intelligence
• War
• on
• Information

[FeelFreeToArgue]

I love this series. Have you ever thought of writing science fiction? A lot of people with ideas like yours find that a good way of conveying those ideas to a wider population. You seem to have a gift for imagining plausible near futures, that and a bit of narrative sense can make for a cool and gripping story.

[funkalunatic]

Thanks. I've started writing some. Recent reading of poorly written science fiction with high sales has made me think I should get back at it.

[oliverscott2007]

What were you drinking?

I liked the ending growl.

[funkalunatic]

I was drinking the salt-rich blood of my freshly slain enemies. Actually no, it was cranberry-raspberry-banana juice or something like that.

[kspencerg]

I concur

[greenhell666]

I see a movie script, LOL!

Sharing is caring.

[Americaisgreat123]

You remind me of a young Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels witting "The Communist Manifesto." Two young men that have never worked a day in their life construing false theories that screwed up the world for hundreds of years to come. What website are you reading all this brilliant knowledge from?

"The best way to convert a liberal is to force them to move out of their parents home, get a job and pay taxes." - Coulter

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

[trevorgodchild]

nice delivary

[sinschild07]

Also, I believe pretty much everything you said. I've always questioned if history actually happened the way they say it did in our "Government Approved" History books. I honestly believe they dont cover the whole truth and only the partial truth. Like maybe in the case of Civil War. Maybe the Union did something worse than the confederacy did, but we would never know.

[zeitgeisthero]

That looks like some good mushroom tea !lol