#Egypt: What is this, 1984?

#TalkNerdyToMeLover's @MikeDelic

it's feb 3 now, morning, and the struggle in egypt continues.  hold on, i have to put on some music.  alright.  dark white winter scary beautiful changing world dawn music.  tannhauser overture feels right.  something is rising.

the last point of departure for a post from me concerning this involved the internet shut down and some other things.  the internet is back on now, though things are changed.  once people could use their smart phones again a lot of them start ed receiving texts inviting them to pro-mubarak demonstrations.  this is very 1984.  so now the tactic of the police state is not to just shut down the internet  since it is a threat but to assimilate it to their propaganda and surveillance systems.  so instead of keeping people from talking they will just join the conversation and record as much of it as possible.  they use u.s. made equipment to survey wireless digital signals. 

now, among book nerds and intellectuals, one of the interesting development has been malcom gladwell's pronouncements about how important social media is to this revolution.  he posted some article at the new yorker that ignited a lot of nerd rage on twitter and elsewhere.  i have read one of gladwell's books, the tipping point, and thought it was great, and have read different articles and reviews of his other books.  the term "tipping point" has become fairly common now and gladwell is a very intelligent man who is good at writing books.  but he's not fast enough to keep up with what he has decided to take part in.  this is ironic since he wrote a book called "blink" which is about consciousness and velocity and crap like that.  ten years ago he was ahead of his time and now he's fallen behind.  the concept of medium being more important than message a la mccluhan looms large here.  but it's essential.  it's like how you can look at the protestent revolution in christianity as having to do with christian principles or that kind of thing or you can focus on the fact that without the technology of the printing press as communications medium so that people could have bibles on a scale heretofore unknown the reformation simply couldnt have happened.  the difference between the two perspectives is profound because of the nature of technology.  things that mechanically reproduce content are completely disconnected from their content.  this is the essential thing to remember about information technology. 

etc.  there's other stuff going on that's more important than some of the silly nerd arguments.  which there have been a bunch of.  i've been following a lot of this stuff mainly on twitter.  that was the first thing i did when i got up.  okay, well, start some coffee and get the woodstove burning, then check the twitter.  seems the most recent developments involve a change in the dynamic where the "pro-mubarak protesters" who'd been attacking the original protesters (police state thugs and agitators in plainclothes) and journos.  anderson cooper from cnn got punched in the head a bunch of times.  last night before i got to bed people were saying there was some gunfire.

now from what i'm reading it appears that the military is helping the people against the state and protecting the people from the state thugs.  So we have three factions now -- the state, the people and the military.  the military is breaking away from the state and maintaining order.  the police disappeared days ago.  the military is in a sense looking after its own interests.  the thing is, even if the government is overturned the military will still be there.  there may be a full on coup any time now.  i'm sure that's what obama wants and has the cia working on it.  [update, i am now listening to a guy who is saying that the military is not doing enough and that the people want the military to give them more protection from the mubarak people because protesters are getting killed and hurt.  military guys did step in when machine gun fire broke out.  so it's complicated.  seems to me like the military is moving toward the people even (in terms of sympathy) even if not quickly enough.]

obama has publicly stated that it wants a transfer of power and that it wants mubarak to step down.  this is a big deal.  the guy was our buddy for a while.  but he was one of those seedy dictator types who we like because he will buy f16's and packetmining surveillance technology from u.s. based companies, and he'll let us use our country to torture people, and he's basically this dictator of a police states who hates human rights, but he was our guy until we threw him under the bus.  sam as with a guy like qaddafi or saddam.  the u.s. likes dictators.  we dont really care about democracy in other countries that's just the sales pitch for u.s. military hegemony and global capitalism.  but so anyway obama's basically like "you have outlived your usefulness i'm through with you."  on the one hand i'm glad because this could potentially be a good revolution with lasting positive results.  who knows though.  with revolution the odds are against you.  but some things if you cant try for them well then you simply have no soul.  this seems like one of those things to me.  i'm actually watching democracy now and they have footage of people asking obama to exert more influence.  i agree but i dont expect much of a president in times like this. 

oh and the craziest thing of all in all this is that it is another intense news event that more people on the internet seem to think involves the illuminati and crap like that.  or zionists.  it's really getting crazy.  more and more people are getting into conspiracy theories.  this is actually pretty disturbing.  we live in a time where people are suffering and riled up and therefore paranoia and scapegoating are both at high tide.  i am actually fairly paranoid and think that in the coming ages only the paranoid consciousness will survive.  i mean, people will survive physically, but most will be drones because they were not sufficiently suspicious enough of the world in general.  the paranoid crazies will be the only people who maintain freedom of thought and the rest will be drones serving a small oligarchy of fat, decadent jerks. 

or not.  these are the times that test us.  for now i am still thrilled and hopeful and scared.  a popular uprising against a brutal dictator is a beautiful thing but the truth is when things get to a high level of volatility all kinds of crazy things become more probable.

still listening to democracy now.  woman is talking about people being brutalized, the identities of the pro mubarak thugs.  sirens in the background.  it's interesting.  outside there's about a foot of snow on the ground.  everyone in the house is still in bed.  the peace and quiet are profound.  and yet over that snow and those trees information is flying everywhere.  there is joy and sorrow and repression and revolution and new news and old news and sex and poetry and lulz all flying around.  invisible words are zipping around everywhere all over the world.  sometimes you tap into it and you realize we're all neurons in one brain firing together in the service of a single decision.  okay more coffee.  later.

#EgyptShutdown: A global conversation

 #TalkNerdyToMeLover's @Mikedelic

so things are hot in egypt right now.  people are protesting in large number.  the government is surrounding them with tanks in tahrir square in cairo right now.  it's 4 a.m. where i am, in upstate new york.  far away from the unrest of the world in the quiet snowy wastes of the jefferson county winter.  but i can get instant updates because we have wireless. 

i am still impressed by how fast news spreads now and how certain world news items become popular.  we have a constant large scale -- huge scale -- international conversation going on now on the internet.  it's a huge paradigm shift in global culture and we're right in the middle of it.  things like wikileaks and the egypt internet shut down that i am trying to get around to talking about are very significant in terms of understanding where the world is at and where it is going.  these are not singular problems they are just early episodes of a type of problem that will become more and more frequent as technology advances, in particular telecommunications media.  one of the things that frustrates me when i read a lot of commentary on this kind of topic is how little people seem to understand about how much the world is changing.  freedom of information is going to be a really big deal for a long time. 

right now, this thing i'm writing is part of the big conversation going on.  hashtag it #foi #cablegate #egyptshutdown #etc i dunno.  over the internet via computers and smartphones, at all hours of the day, all over the world, a conversation.  this is leading to new developments in culture, politics, the economy, everything.  it's transforming the world.  egypt as a nation had previously shown a lot of interest in getting on board and have a growing tech industry that they'd hoped would grow even more, but things have changed.  because during their political turmoil, protesters were organizing via social networks, so egypt shut down the internet and cellphones.  i think for a large scale thing like this in a place like egypt you just contact service providers and tell them to stop providing service.

in the u.s. it would be more complicated but this incident should raise questions about our own policies and possibilities as regards this stuff.  in egypt it doesn't seem to have worked.  it was bad for public and international relations and will probably end up being bad for business as well.  big tech companies wont be as interested in bringing business there.  they already have a pretty poor human rights record.

i personally like seeing how much the internet scares The Man sometimes, and how internet activity can provoke from authority the kind of reaction that once can consider a win for civil disobedience in the age of information.  i worry sometimes that too much freedom of information will cause huge backlashes of oppression on a global scale and lead to a dystopian future in which only the rich and connected will get to have social networks and status updates.  judging by a lot of the comment threads this does not seem likely.  not because of the power of the people, lol, but because i don't think governments will need to repress people.  so many people just choose to conform.  and this is amplified by the very things on the internet that also make fast and effective grassroots political activism possible.  we are in the time in history now where we are choosing collectively how it will happen.  some people out there are trying to choose revolution, or evolution, or whatever, while some people are caught up in the massive flow of consciousness that new technologies have made possible.  that is a big part of the worldwide conversation we are having even if not always addressed directly.

the craziest thing about this all is how it is tied to stuff like facebook, twitter and youtube.  those were the main platforms that became socially threatening during this time of civil unrest.  they became culturally and historically significant in a way that i don't always associate with them.  so much of what you read on both places is just completely meaningless ephemera.  these are the homes of farmville and bieber fever for crying out loud. 

i guess it's like with other communications advances in some ways.  look at television.  95% dog shit but really good when you need to broadcast one thought to the entire groupmind in a hurry.  the internet is of course different in many ways from television but i think they share a similar chaff/wheat or noise/signal ratio.  but then, so does dna, from what i've read.   i dunno.  whatever.  finished randombling.  i'm chilly and need to go start a fire.  i like these quiet winter mornings.  later.

#nerdsunite