'Rather ironically, most of the mechanisms required to observe and control subcultures are being invented by subcultures themselves. External forces are merely stepping in to co-opt them. The subcultural web is now being made legible and governable under the harsh light of Facebook Like actions. Just in time too, since the returns on coarser forms of political and economic exploitation are now rapidly diminishing. Contrary to popular belief, subcultures are not vague constructs. They have a precise, if negative, definition: a subculture is a pattern of social order that is not worth codifying and institutionalizing for the purposes of governance or economic exploitation, under normal circumstances. The Internet though, has changed all this. It has allowed subcultures to scale (by moving their secret-handshake institutions online), and become more valuable in the process. While mass-manufactured celebrity cultures have been weakening, we are not returning to pre-mass-media patterns of local culture. Instead, we’ve evolved to mega-subcultures that scale without developing institutions. And at the same time, the visibility of subcultural behaviors has made governance and exploitation much cheaper and easier. ...once marketers working with Big Data get ahead of the cultural curve, you can expect the balance of power to shift decisively in their favor. From detecting subcultures before future members themselves do, to actively seeding, breeding and shaping desirable subcultures, is not a big leap to imagine. It will be a world of pre-cognitive marketing, run by quants in data vats.'

SELECT email FROM datamine WHERE conformist = TRUE

'While background checks, which mainly look for a criminal record, and even credit checks have become more common, Social Intelligence is the first company that I'm aware of that systematically trolls social networks for evidence of bad character. Using automation software that slogs through Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs, and "thousands of other sources," the company develops a report on the "real you" -- not the carefully crafted you in your resume. The service is called Social Intelligence Hiring. The company promises a 48-hour turn-around. The reports feature a visual snapshot of what kind of person you are, evaluating you in categories like "Poor Judgment," "Gangs," "Drugs and Drug Lingo" and "Demonstrating Potentially Violent Behavior." The company mines for rich nuggets of raw sewage in the form of racy photos, unguarded commentary about drugs and alcohol and much more.'

'On the misuse of information for criminal or anti-social purposes: "The only way to manage this is true transparency and no anonymity. In a world of asynchronous threats, it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you. We need a [verified] name service for people. Governments will demand it."' (We'll work with the anti-social criminals calling themselves "the government" to make sure you can never escape.) -- '"People aren't ready for the technology revolution that's going to happen to them." "...society isn't ready for questions that will be raised as result of user-generated content."' (People won't know how to cope when they realise they've sold themselves into slavery via our 'free' services, so they'll naturally repress the horror and instead look to us as saviours. We shall oblige by talking religious mumbo-jumbo about terabytes and distruptions. And we shall offer servitude in perpetual open vs closed data wars to give people meaning and a reason to live.)

'Remember that torrent yesterday that contained the personal information off of 100 million scraped Facebook profiles? I thought it was strange that the guy didn't sell this information, since many companies would be interested. Turns out they are interested. Here are the major companies that are downloading the torrent.' -- Leaky is as leaky does.

'Crush (Criminal Reduction Utilising Statistical History) evaluates patterns of past and present incidents, then combines the information with a range of data including crime reports, intelligence briefings, offender behaviour profiles and even weather forecasts. This is used to identify potential hot spots and flashpoints, so police forces can allocate resources to areas where particular crimes are most likely to occur. Earlier this year the Ministry of Justice began using predictive analytics to assess the data held within its Offender Assessment System and help predict which prisoners due for release were most likely to reoffend based on circumstances such as accommodation, education, relationships, financial management and income, lifestyle and associates, drug and alcohol misuse, emotional well-being, behaviour and attitudes. "At some point in the future we hope to include analysis of feeds from CCTV cameras and public sources from the internet such as Facebook posts."'

'The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future. The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.” The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.' -- TOMORROW. TERRORIST. WE KNOW. MAKE REPORT. THIS WARN YOU.

'...the Internet is shackling us to everything that we have ever said, or that anyone has said about us, making the possibility of digital self-reinvention seem like an ideal from a distant era. -- In the Web 3.0 world, Fertik predicts, people will be rated, assessed and scored based not on their creditworthiness but on their trustworthiness as good parents, good dates, good employees, good baby sitters or good insurance risks. Zittrain also speculated that, over time, more and more reputation queries will be processed by a handful of de facto reputation brokers – like the existing consumer-reporting agencies Experian and Equifax, for example – which will provide ratings for people based on their sociability, trustworthiness and employability. -- In the Babylonian Talmud, people have an obligation not to remind others of their past misdeeds, on the assumption they may have atoned and grown spiritually from their mistakes.'

'The Wheel of Fortune traces astrological knowledge in ancient Greek manuscripts from Baghdad’s founder, Caliph Al-Mansur, via the Muslim monastery/medical school at Gundeshapur, to the medieval Church’s need for alarm clocks (the water horologium and the verge and foliot clock).'

'Consumers who mouse over the icon will get a view of all the data that was used to target the ad, as well as the option to opt-out of future targeting by those companies.' -- The Principle: Show me *me*. The Test: Does your brand substantiate and celebrate an authentic, mutual affinity, i.e., do you 'get' me?

'If Facebook continues its growth on mobile platforms, then Facebook Credits will have the opportunity to become the default mobile payment currency accepted worldwide. Half a billion people would not have to sign up for an account to use them, because they already have the account. The data, learning, market research, and point-of-sale advertising implications are potentially limitless. The opportunity for Facebook Credits is to reward people for engaging with brands and retailers. If using Facebook Credits more often, or sharing information about their purchases results in discounts or even the earning of more Facebook Credits, you can count on consumers to reveal more to their friends and Facebook, as long as the value exchange is clearly identified. This kind of access to purchase habits and behaviors may finally be able to help justify using Facebook as a true CRM tool for brands, allowing for the tracking of sales back to influence and relationships...'

'Not too long ago, if someone were spying on you, you’d feel creeped out. But now the concept of personal privacy is nearly dead. That’s right: Millions of Americans are obsessively spying on themselves for fun. By far these youth-marketers’ most awe-inspiring triumph is to paint privacy as a refuge of the unhip. An army of new-media strivers eagerly deploys corporate-friendly concepts like “social capital” and “migrating social patterns.” In reality, frequent corporate spokesman and new-media guru Clay Shirky cooked up these phrasings inside a think tank—they are lent a tinge of genuine popular phenomena, and parroted by the establishment media. “Privacy… is a small price to pay for peace, especially since we’re headed toward radical transparency anyway.” What Horgan and kindred spirits, like Shirky and Google’s Chris DiBona, don’t tell you is that intelligence is only good if you have the power to use it.'

'The internet is already doing a good job of serving as a clearing exchange and means of valuation for the currencies of reputation, social graph, intention, and attention. Blippy broadcasts purchasing activity and serves as a leading indicator for public company quarterly sales; a real-time economy feed. Hunch goes a step further with the grand vision of mapping and predicting the affinity of all people for all objects. ...what is any individual’s preference for Nike, TikTok, Slaughterhouse-Five, Ulan Bator, existentialism, or any other noun, brand, product, item, object or idea. Social feed “likes” are already being mined for preference, affinity, and revenue.'

'MasterCard is getting into the predictive online marketing business. Next Jump converts one in every 11 browsers into buyers, a rate that far exceeds the industry norm. Joseph Turow, a communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said that hiding the identity of customers from merchants was not enough. The type of profiling done by sites like MasterCard Marketplace, he said, often leads to “social discrimination,” in which people are lumped into categories they may find objectionable. He said companies rarely explained to people how they were categorized. “People might be happy with a Dell 30 percent off, but why did my neighbor get one deal and me another?” he said. “We are accepting this notion that companies have a right to do this.”' -- Just another opaque price-fixing scheme?

'If you can use Twitter to predict the future of movie tickets, then why not elections, or sales of other products? As the authors write: "This method can be extended to a large panoply of topics, ranging from the future rating of products to agenda setting and election outcomes. At a deeper level, this work shows how social media expresses a collective wisdom which, when properly tapped, can yield an extremely powerful and accurate indicator of future outcomes.'"

'Meet Google. The noun that became a verb. The world's favourite search engine, and the company whose motto is "Don't be evil."'

'The tools of surveillance today are based on integrated circuits: unlike the grim secret policemen of the 20th century's totalitarian regimes they're getting cheaper, so that an intelligence agency with a fixed budget can hope to expand the breadth of its surveillance rapidly. Here's a shopping-list of ten technologies for the police state of the next decade, and estimates of when they'll be available. #Smart cameras #Peer to peer surveillance networks #Gait analysis #Terahertz radar #Celldar #Ubiquitous RFID 'dust' #Trusted computing and Digital Rights Management #Cognitive radio #Lab-on-a-chip chemical analysers #Data mining -- Don't think you can escape by going and living in a log cabin in the middle of nowhere. It is in the nature of every police state that the most heinous offense of all is attempting to escape from it. And after all, if you're innocent, why are you trying to hide?'

'#Social production crowd: consists of a large group of individuals who lend their distinct talents to the creation of some product like Wikipedia or Linux. #Averaging crowd: acts essentially as a survey group, providing an average judgment about some complex matter that, in some cases, is more accurate than the judgment of any one individual. #Data mine crowd: a large group that, through its actions but usually without the explicit knowledge of its members, produces a set of behavioral data that can be collected and analyzed in order to gain insight into behavioral or market patterns. #Networking crowd: a group that trades information through a shared communication system such as the phone network or Facebook or Twitter. #Transactional crowd: a group used to instigate and coordinate what are mainly or solely point-to-point transactions, such as the type of crowd gathered by Match.com. -- Some crowds become more useful as they get bigger; others work best when kept to a small scale.'

'Emphasis will be placed on discussing the "digital footprints" that we all leave in our daily lives, and how it is now possible for an investigator (or government Agent) to determine a person's likes and dislikes, religion, political beliefs, sexual orientation, habits, hobbies, friends, family, finances, health and even the person's actual physical whereabouts at any given moment, solely by the use of online data and related activity.'

'Some will find this questionable on the grounds of who sets up the incentive structures... Others will see it as a big invasion of privacy... Yet another group will worry about the fact that the incentive structures here are likely to be based on psychological hacks and reinforcement tricks. -- ...we need to be thinking about what our accommodation is with these technologies and approaches. Almost all of this arises simply out of better knowledge of ourselves and our psychology paired with improvements in communications technology. And that is not a new problem—it’s an old one. Spotting [(manipulation)] has become a cottage industry, from Photoshop fails to political fact-checking. And we shouldn’t by any stretch think that games or game tactics are the only place where this stuff will be used or even most impinge upon our lives. ...the concerns that arise from gameifying the world apply in larger measure to non-games.'

'Aleks gives the lowdown on how, for better and for worse, commerce has colonised the web - and reveals how web users are paying for what appear to be 'free' sites and services in hidden ways. Aleks explores how web advertising is evolving further to become more targeted and relevant to individual consumers. Recommendation engines, pioneered by retailers such as Amazon, are also breaking down the barriers between commerce and consumer by marketing future purchases to us based on our previous choices. On the surface, the web appears to have brought about a revolution in convenience. But, as companies start to build up databases on our online habits and preferences, Aleks questions what this may mean for our notions of privacy and personal space in the 21st century.'

'... just because these Facebook users made their profiles publicly available does not mean they are fair game for scraping for research purposes. ...the purpose of this public availability is to help people—humans, not bots—find [people]. ...my profile is only “public” if a human being takes specific and conscious action to find me. -- Warden’s actions, however, violate this implicit understanding for making profiles publicly searchable. Rather than trying to find me, Warden is systematically sought everyone, letting a script to the work of seeking and harvesting my data. There is no genuine desire to find me, to friend me, and so on. He’s just collecting data. The point is whether the 215 million Facebook users who now have some of their information in Warden’s database contemplated such harvesting and aggregating when they built their profile and configured their privacy settings.' -- Asperger's social web?

'...picture our perspective leaving our own experiences, zooming out and up until we can see how all the different groups are interacting on a worldwide social network. That bird's-eye view could be both beautiful and horrible if the resolution was clear enough. ...the next stage of innovation online may be services like recommendations, self and group awareness...' -- Warden: "Nobody thinks about how much valuable information they're generating just by friending people and fanning pages. It's like we're constantly voting in a hundred different ways every day. And I'm a starry-eyed believer that we'll be able to change the world for the better using that neglected information. It's like an x-ray for the whole country - we can see all sorts of hidden details of who we're friends with, where we live, what we like."' -- Here be dragons.

'Thanks to a cooperation with Citi and other third-party data suppliers, Bundle is able to compile detailed statistics about how Americans are spending their money. To get started, you just enter your location, age, income and whether you are married, single or have kids. Bundle will then create an infographic that represents the spending habits of similar households in your neighborhood. From there, you can drill down deeper into the statistics. At its most granular level, Bundle displays where people are spending their money. My neighbors, for example, buy their electronics at Best Buy, Apple and Fry's.' -- Lambs to the slaughter.

'In hopes of identifying good credit customers, some financial institutions are tapping into the information you and your friends reveal online. The idea is that the friends you keep and data you disclose may help them make more accurate business decisions. -- ...profiles provide banks with insight into your behavior patterns - what you like and dislike, want and don't want, do well and do poorly. Creditors can see if people in your network have accounts with them, and are free to look at how they are handling those accounts. The presumption is that if those in your network are responsible cardholders, there is a better chance you will be too. So, if a bank is on the fence about whether to extend you credit, you may become eligible if those in your network are good credit customers. -- Having a robust online social network can also expedite loan acceptance. If you're connected to a lot of people who are great credit risks, it can speed you through the process.' -- Brave New World

'...although the Demosphere belongs to General Communications Inc., it is the schmos of the world who make it - every time a schmo surfs to a different channel, the Demosphere notes that he is bored with program A and more interested, at the moment, in program B. When a schmo's paycheck is delivered over the I-way, the number on the bottom line is plotted in his Profile, and if that schmo got it by telecommuting we know about that too - the length of his coffee breaks and the size of his bladder are an open book to us. When a schmo buys something on the I-way it goes into his Profile, and if it happens to be something that he recently saw advertised there, we call that interesting, and when he uses the I-way to phone his friends and family, we Profile Auditors can navigate his social web out to a gazillion fractal iterations, the friends of his friends of his friends of his friends, what they buy and what they watch and if there's a correlation.'

'#The myth of personal empowerment takes root amidst a massive loss of personal control. -- Social technologies are cloaked in a rhetoric of liberation (customers are in control, the internet fosters democracy, social technologies propagate truth etc.) that tend to obscure the fact that never before have we handed so much personal information over in exchange for so little in return. This loss of control over personal information is on a collision course with the law of unintended consequences... Amidst this barrage of good news for how much power we wield in the transaction of commerce one has to wonder if we are giving away something quite precious in the bargain.' -- Give all your information over to Facebook and they'll rent your identity back to you.

'The idea, one that is generally accepted in social psychology, is that word choice can reveal a person’s mood. This is true in ordinary writing, these experts say, and even more so in writing like Facebook updates or the tweets of Twitter users, which ostensibly are attempts to describe what you are doing right now and how you feel. The Facebook happiness index could be the first step in reorienting the nation’s sense of self-worth. “We have tracked the economic health of the nation for a long time. The reason we track those things is that the government is full of economists, not psychologists. I could imagine it would allow us to look at a group of people, get a sense of what their concerns are, how insecure they feel. It could be an advertiser’s dream. Yes, it is creepy from a government perspective, but it is even creepier from an advertising perspective.”' -- Creepy and extremely dumb. Measure actual behaviours not claims on behaviours. "I'm happy." "I'm sad." You're confused.

'The European Commission is calling for a "common culture" of law enforcement to be developed across the EU and for a third of police officers – more than 50,000 in the UK alone – to be given training in European affairs within the next five years. A separate EU-funded research project, called Adabts – the Automatic Detection of Abnormal Behaviour and Threats in crowded Spaces – has received nearly £3 million. Its is based in Sweden but partners include the UK Home Office and BAE Systems. It is seeking to develop models of "suspicious behaviour" so these can be automatically detected using CCTV and other surveillance methods. The system would analyse the pitch of people's voices, the way their bodies move and track individuals within crowds.' -- FACECRIME. YOU SMILE. WE KNOW. YOU UNSMILE. WE KNOW. MAKE REPORT. SEND JOYCAMP. THIS WARN YOU.

'Parents who install a leading brand of software to monitor their kids' online activities may be unwittingly allowing the company to read their children's chat messages — and sell the marketing data gathered. Software sold under the Sentry and FamilySafe brands can read private chats conducted through Yahoo, MSN, AOL and other services, and send back data on what kids are saying about such things as movies, music or video games. The information is then offered to businesses seeking ways to tailor their marketing messages to kids. -- Competing data-mining companies such as J.D. Power Web Intelligence, a unit of quality ratings firm J.D. Power and Associates, also trolls the Internet for consumer chats. But Vice President Chase Parker said the company does not read any data that's password-protected, such as the instant message sessions that EchoMetrix collects for advertisers.'

'...how can a data stream be turned into real-time action, reaching the people who need it, when they need it, and in a form they can easily digest? At the most abstract level, history and computation are the same thing: the evolution of systems over time. Twitter has several remarkable properties that allow us to finally leverage this correspondence in tangible ways. The simplicity of its data, the openness of its system, and its extreme time resolution make it possible for us to detect atoms of history, those moments when something is triggered and society is reconfigured ever so slightly. Simply tracking the volume of various phrases gives us a sense of what is happening on the street, literally and figuratively. But that signal is but a shadow of a far more complex and intricate reality, an interwoven web of individuals and actions. -- Disruptive events lead to information elites.'

'... a Swedish company, The Astonishing Tribe, has gone a step further, with a facial recognition system called Augmented ID. It tells you who people are, based on identifying their picture via a technology called Polar Rose, which analyses faces and then searches for photos on Flickr that match it - and pulls out the name from the tags.' -- What motivates this? Is the motivation even human?

'While attitudes toward privacy can appear paradoxical, the seeming contradiction is really about something else: control. When people bare their bodies on Facebook or their souls in the digital confessional of Google’s search engine, they feel as if they are in charge. Not so, when the private embarrassments come to light unexpectedly. The subtle relationship between privacy and control has complicated things for marketers, too. Advertisers talk about having to move away from analog-era “push” tactics and embracing digital-age “pull” strategies, in which consumers are enticed into seeking information about a product or brand, rather than having ads foisted on them. Yet behavioral targeting is, in some ways, “push” marketing carried to its extreme, with the advertiser controlling not just the content of its message but also the audience for it. Even if privacy concerns are overcome, can targeting work once consumers realize they are being “pushed”?'

'Most journalists have run out of knowing what's going on in the world. And they have embraced this idea of media democracy as a way to disguise that fact. I'm deeply suspicious of it. The whole reason why journalism was invented in the first place is that we have the time, the money, and the power of the organisation to go places, push through doors, find things out, bring it back, and tell you it and allow you to make up your mind about it. ...those who are the promoters of the internet, the boosters, the people who put forward the utopian dream of the internet, and those who basically run silicon valley, are arch individualists, they portray the internet as a playground where every individual can invent their own identity, and it's a new form of democracy without hierarchies of power.' -- On the paradox of the booster dependence on datamining: -- 'it's a completely contradictory view of what human beings are, how they behave, to what these boosters actually portray the internet as.'

'What's happened is you had an idea – which in a way was quite an heroic idea – that each individual could be themselves, could express themselves and become better people. In fact, what happened in that process is that you shifted the idea of risk away from institutions and onto the person themselves, and in that process is what people began to do – far from expressing themselves – began to monitor themselves to see whether they are the correct definition of the individual, whether it's in psychology, how they feel and how they behave; and they begin to search for – and are given – ways of monitoring that as individuals, and that paradoxically leads them to trying to become what they think is the right individual, which actually leads to homogeneity... that idea of total expressiveness... it may be breaking up now as we enter an economic crisis and politicians discover they have power, institutions have power, and that's the way to change the world. The idea of the self may change.'

'As part of an attempt to fight crime, Philadelphia is now the subject of an experiment never tried in another city: A computer is forecasting who among the city's 49,000 parolees is likeliest to rob, assault, or kill someone. -- Each time someone new comes through intake, a clerk enters his or her name and the computer takes just seconds to fish through a database for relevant information and deliver a verdict of high, medium, or low risk. "It's a complete paradigm shift for the department," said chief probation and parole officer Robert Malvestuto. "Science has made this available to us. We'd be foolish not to use it." -- History of Precrime

'Traders are using software developed by US-based technology StreamBase to monitor "tweets" for price sensitive information. The software allows traders to take into account "event-based" information published on Twitter in their automated equity, bond and foreign exchange trading. The company claims it could give traders an edge when deciding whether to trade on breaking news, like terrorist attacks and natural disasters, rather than waiting for the information to be filtered through providers like Reuters Thomson or Bloomberg. Nasir Zubairi, a former product manager for algorithmic trading and foreign exchange e-commerce at Royal Bank of Scotland, said the City would be looking at websites like Twitter.com as a useful market information "broadcast tool". "Markets tend to buy on rumour and sell on facts," he said.'

'EMAIL logs can provide advance warning of an organisation reaching crisis point. That's the tantalising suggestion to emerge from the pattern of messages exchanged by Enron employees. Menezes says he expected communication networks to change during moments of crisis. Yet the researchers found that the biggest changes actually happened around a month before. For example, the number of active email cliques, defined as groups in which every member has had direct email contact with every other member, jumped from 100 to almost 800 around a month before the December 2001 collapse. Messages were also increasingly exchanged within these groups and not shared with other employees. Menezes thinks he and Collingsworth may have identified a characteristic change that occurs as stress builds within a company: employees start talking directly to people they feel comfortable with, and stop sharing information more widely.'

"Richard Bilton meets those who have made our private lives their business - ex-soldiers watching suspected workplace thieves, corporate spooks trawling companies' rubbish for lucrative secrets, suppliers in the booming trade in tracking devices, secret cameras and hidden microphones. He also delves into the criminal underworld of hackers and blaggers who steal and sell our information."

"Richard Bilton explores the hidden world of surveillance. He goes inside the CCTV nerve centre, sees how all our journeys can be monitored and meets undercover agents, those who are watched and those who have fallen foul of modern surveillance."

'Marlow's team recently carried out a study to determine how close we are to our friends online. They looked at how often people clicked on their friends' news or photos, how often they communicated, and if the communications traveled in both directions. Studying this data, they determined that an average Facebook user with 500 friends actively follows the news on only 40 of them, communicates with 20, and keeps in close touch with about 10. Those with smaller networks follow even fewer. What can this teach advertisers? People don't pay much attention to most of their online friends. By focusing campaigns on people who interact with each other, they'll likely get better results.' -- All this 'research', just to sell some tat. Futile and pointless. Though kinda interesting as applied to the workplace via: the megacoup. Intimates/Inmates via: the stockholm syndrome.

'Selling ads doesn't generate only profits; it also generates torrents of data about users' tastes and habits, data that Google then sifts and processes in order to predict future consumer behavior, find ways to improve its products, and sell more ads. This is the heart and soul of Googlenomics. It's a system of constant self-analysis: a data-fueled feedback loop that defines not only Google's future but the future of anyone who does business online. -- Wu calls Google "the barometer of the world." Indeed, studying the clicks is like looking through a window with a panoramic view of everything. You can see the change of seasons—clicks gravitating toward skiing and heavy clothes in winter, bikinis and sunscreen in summer—and you can track who's up and down in pop culture. Most of us remember news events from television or newspapers; Googlers recall them as spikes in their graphs. ...every bit of data, no matter how seemingly trivial, has potential value.'

'Are cardholders suddenly logging in at 1 in the morning? It might signal sleeplessness due to anxiety. Are they using their cards for groceries? It might mean they are trying to conserve their cash. Have they started using their cards for therapy sessions? Do they call the card company in the middle of the day, when they should be at work? What do they say when a customer-service representative asks how they’re feeling? Are their sighs long or short? Do they respond better to a comforting or bullying tone? If they check their balance three times a day, are they worried or uptight?' -- IN UR CARDZ PEEPIN' UR MOTIVATIONZ

Keep Calm And Give Us All Your Data

"There is indeed a culture of almost constant surveillance and most of it is carried out by family members and friends who record as many moments of one another’s lives as they can. The most effective forms of public manipulation and mobilisation are not to be found in the public sector, or politics at all, but in advertising campaigns and branding. The State is more than capable of losing personal data, but only the private sector will sell our most intimate financial details on to unscrupulous fraudsters for a profit. Totalitarianism is found far more forcefully in private sector team bonding sessions in which you either commit yourself publicly to obvious bullshit or risk losing your job. Orwell was right that society would become atomised and sedated, he was right that abstract forms of communication would feed a permanent sense of displacement and powerlessness... Where he was wrong was in his assumption that capitalism had been beaten."

'In private networks, a company will be able to receive automatic notification when one of its employees has begun conversing with another particular employee more than they had before. Perhaps they'll consider putting them in the same work group. If one sales person doesn't converse with the technical team as often as other sales people do, a company might wonder whether that salesperson is less comfortable explaining technical matters to customers. It will be trivial to determine which technical staff are friendliest and most appropriate to introduce a sales person to, because those kinds of connections will be fully graphable. In public business networks, community managers will be able to identify the customers most engaged in conversation with diverse groups of other customers with the snap of the fingers. Those are the kinds of community members that companies hire. -- Is this creepy?' -- *notes hesitance for later 'treatment'*

"What I see, is that twitter could become a trellis for the web - a opt-in backbone that holds an open invitation for the entire internet and grows without bounds, but (unlike the web at large) wonderfully imposes those liberating constraints of time-location and brevity. It is this constraining format - the timestamp, tag, and shortform, that enables unprecedented collaboration... This opens up a whole new way of creating databases... Increasingly people are going to use Twitter in new unintended ways simply for the data-structure of it- because this structure enables them to create these kind of powerful new social databases that we can only begin to imagine." -- Rhizome

'Cardinal Richelieu famously said: "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." When all your words and actions can be saved for later examination, different rules have to apply. Society works precisely because conversation is ephemeral; because people forget, and because people don't have to justify every word they utter.'

'Gender turned out to be a negative influence on interactions: even after their low numbers were taken into account, female players avoided interacting with each other. Time zones had some influence; players in the same time zone were 1.25 times more likely to partner than players even one time zone apart. But distance had a much larger effect; players within 10 kilometers of each other were five times more likely to interact. Contractor concluded that, for the typical player, the game simply offered a way of continuing their real-world social interactions in a virtual setting. Older women turned out to be some of the most committed players but significantly under-reported the amount of time they spent in the game by three hours per week. -- "There are a lot of things we can show them about their bottom line, but these industries are deadline focused," Williams said. "They're not far enough beyond the garage-shop mentality."'

'**Facebook is, he told me, studying “sentiment” behavior. It hasn’t yet used that research in its public service yet, but is looking to figure out if people are having a good day or bad day. He said that already his teams are able to sense when nasty news, like stock prices are headed down, is underway. He also told me that the sentiment engine notices a lot of “going out” kinds of messages on Friday afternoon and then notices a lot of “hungover” messages on Saturday morning. He’s not sure where that research will lead. We talked about how sentiment analysis might lead to a new kind of news display in Facebook. Knowing whether a story is positive or negative would let Facebook pick a good selection of both kinds of news, or maybe even let you choose whether you want to see only “happy” news.'

"Please use the following instructions to setup Hotspot Shield on your iPhone. In just four easy steps, your connection will be secured."

"AnchorFree has launched the world's only free ad-supported virtual private network client called Hotspot Shield. Utilized by millions of people in over 190 countries, the Hotspot Shield sets new privacy standards online for users world-wide. Hotspot Shield is powered by AnchorFree's global media network bringing new unique innovations to advertisers around the world. Advertisers interested in reaching traveling business people that get online on wired and Wi-Fi connections utilize AnchorFree as the solution." -- So smart.

"AntiPhorm is a new type of privacy software. The first of it's kind. It is an auto-surfing simulator that generates a background noise of natural surfing activity that intelligently confuses any web tracker allowing you to surf with peace of mind using your favorite browser. It's Free, and easy to use."

"Data has this really weird quality. In economic terms data has an increasing marginal utility. Anyone who took Econ 101 knows that most physical objects have a decreasing marginal utility. Data has the opposite characteristic. Each incremental point of data adds value to the ones you all ready have. Google’s services all benefit from additional data albeit in different ways. Google could potentially provide a better value proposition to the end user with an inferior algorithm powered by more data, sourced from a broader range of services." Comment: Greg: "total utility increases... marginal utility decreases."

"All this sort-of Web 2.0 stuff is nice, but you have to type stuff in. Things are never up to date, and unless you consciously know about something, you can't put it in. Reality mining is all about paying attention to patterns in life and using that information to help you do things like set privacy policies, share things with people, notify people when you're near them, and just to help you live your life." -- !!! Everyware must default to plausible deniability.

"Who controls our data controls our lives."

"... true teme machines are arriving" -- "... it will look like humans are just a minor thing on this planet with masses (of) silicon-based machinery using us to drag stuff out of the ground to build more machines."

"If I'm accused of being a terrorist in the fictional WoW, what happens when I try to get through passport control in the real USA?"

"Mark Zuckerberg stole tens of thousands of digital files on his fellow Harvard students, directly from the University’s “secure” servers... Anyone who can found a multi-billion dollar business with stolen property is worth paying attention to."

Comment (gregory): "some of us are soooo leading edge that we are beyond early adapters.... we are early discarders."

"If you select that you don't want to share some Beacon actions or if you turn off Beacon, then Facebook won't store those actions even when partners send them to Facebook." Hmmm... someone will. You won't let that data go that easily. Fishy.

'Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, also apologized: "Instead of acting quickly, we took too long to decide on the right solution. I'm not proud of the way we've handled this situation and I know we can do better."' Oh well, that's okay then. (Evil)

"Ouch. You can dismiss whiny "pundits" all you want, but when major advertisers you touted as being charter members of the program decide you jerked them around, you had better start apologizing in a hurry." That would mean *now*, Zuckerboy.

"But no, it is actually worse than that. The affiliate sites are pretty much dumping their entire customer database into Facebook's lap, FOR FREE and without their customers permission. What. The. Fuck."

"Facebook guys: stop thinking about how to "monetize your users". Start thinking about how to turn yesterday's inert consumers into living, breathing, prosumers - who can begin to reshape the DNA of the firms you're connecting them with."

Spooky sh*t that makes me want to disappear into a lead-lined cave. DO NOT READ THIS!

'The take away from Foucault’s discussion of the Panopticon... is that it’s enough for us to believe that we’re under surveillance at all times and in all places, to internalize this belief, to get us to change our behavior. To be “docilized.”'

"we might find ourselves responding more favourably to those brands and advertisers that can master the compelling generalisation and the universal truth. We might remember that great communicators can connect with millions by knowing only one thing about

"There’s no global opt-out - no ability to tell Facebook, “Please stop posting my purchase behavior from any third-party sites to my feed.” You’ve got to opt out from each new partner you encounter..."

"Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results."

"... from a technical point of view, the key to facilitating the attention marketplace is in decoupling of attention capturing, attention storage and attention recording services."

"VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management, is the reciprocal of CRM or Customer Relationship Management. It provides customers with tools for engaging with vendors in ways that work for both parties."

"First you get your users to entrust their personal data to you, then you not only sell that data to advertisers but you get the users to be the vector for the ads. And what do the users get in return? An animated Sprite Sips character to interact with."

"1:17 Naval: My rules for successful Facebook apps are they have to be simple, social, viral, universal, and gathering user data. -- 1:30 Naval: Google didn’t get built by Madison Avenue. By the time mainstream advertisers get there, the party’s over"

"Facebook disallows developers from retaining member profile or relationship data in their databases. Facebook wants to always own the fundamental human grid on which the myriad of social applications are developed..."

Facebook funded by CIA (sort of)

'the replacement of expertise and intuition by objective, data-based decision making, made possible by a virtually inexhaustible supply of inexpensive information... "intuitivists" are on the defensive against the Super Crunchers.'

Video: Jonathan Harris wants to make sense of the infinite world on the Web.. he builds dazzling graphic interfaces that help us visualize the data floating around.. he presents "We Feel Fine" a project that scours blogs to collect the planet's emotions"

Advertising supernova in the sky