Skip to main content

Behind the blue curtain


When I started out in the working world I was editing and producing films, interactive laser discs and the CD-ROMS and early Internet web sites. After doing this work for about 15 years I was hired into a massive IT company to sell enterprise class technology (software & hardware) to media companies. Working for this global behemoth who's technology served as the foundation of all modern global business opened my eyes (mind) to a reality hidden in plane site.

  • The "Internet" floats on a sea of legacy technology installed in businesses around the world by a handful of companies during the 60's and 70's.
  • The size of the public internet is dwarfed by the size of the "internet" that resides behind the walls of Financial institutions, Energy companies, Health care providers and (especially) Government.
  • It is a miracle, and absolute miracle that any of this actually works and it doesn't work a lot more frequently than most casual web users realize.
I'm siting in a meeting with local police departments from a large metropolitan area discussing the issues involved in capturing and storing video created by body cameras on every street cop on a big city police force. How to assign metadata to hundreds (maybe thousands) of hours of video so that an investigator can actually find relevant information? How long do you keep the video and where will it be kept? How do you ensure that it will not be tampered with and that all releases of the video comply with regulations? (little discussed fact but editing tools are so sophisticated that any digital photo, audio or video can be altered with absolutely know way of knowing a change has been made to the original)

On and on the discussion goes describing the vast infrastructure these local PD's have already installed in remote data centers located near highways in suburbia - places you probably drive by every day on your way to work. Capturing hour after hour of video on the off chance that some transgression of the law will be captured as evidence or thwarted in advance when the perpetrator understands that he's "on camera." The good news is that police departments are a long, long way from being able to do any of this full time surveillance of their citizens and cops will never submit to wearing a body camera at every moment of their working lives - there's a lot of police work that mustn't be recorded. The bad news is that people already have a camera running and recording their every move - it just exists in their mind. This is the camera obscura that rules the modern mind and gives us such an upside down image of existence.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Real Story with Gretchen Carlson

She was "sexy", but "too much hard work." I'm a regular Fox & Friends viewer (mostly in protest of the other insipid morning programs like Today and Good Morning America) so over the years I've gotten to know Gretchen Carlson pretty well. Stuck between Steve and Brian she always seemed a prudish scold with an irritating, self-righteous demeanor that I simply put up with because I figured some people in the Fox audience actually liked her persona. It was obvious that Steve and Brian did not, but they were stuck with her like so many talking heads and had to make the best of it - which they did. Besides, she was no worse than any of the other women on morning show TV - I mean, you're only going to find a certain kind of person to do this kind of work and that kind of person is the Gretchen Carlson kind. Then, one day, she was gone and replaced by Elisabeth Hasselbeck and the F&F ratings began to climb, and climb and climb - in two months view...

The Pop-Tarts Bowl: Frauds v. Fakers

In the Techno-Fascist Imperium the "Holidays" festivities start on Columbus Day, when the Halloween candy pops up, and end New Years Day with college football Bowl games, black-eyed peas and collard greens. To be clear, the Imperium doesn't celebrate Columbus Day, au contraire, the Indigenous Peoples' Day psyop has been pushed hard by the IC for the past 50 years of failure but the candy... THE CANDY. This year's IPD got turned up to eleven when the colonizers of America's 51st state got kidnapped, raped and murdered by some indigenous maniacs on Sukkot 10/7 and, as a result, soured the festive '23 Holiday mood. Hey, we soldiered on, as it were, and kept on celebrating while the world burned: Halloween - Big for children and weirdos. Thanksgiving - Focus on God, country and family. Hannukkah - Jewish assimilation. Xmas - Santa Claus and gifts. Kwanzaa - Black Lives Matter. I'd call them Happy Holidays if it wasn't  a neo-Nazi dog whistle  to vocal...

Obligatory Report On The Techno-Fascist Imperium

John Henry Durham (great name) dropped his " REPORT ON MATTERS RELATED TO INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS ARISING OUT OF THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL   CAMPAIGNS " and, as the Keeper Of The Clown Bell, I feel compelled to write down my thoughts on this subject which has been the catalyst for so much bell ringing over the past eight (8!) years. I'm going to start with some hard truths, as I see them, and then move into speculative puzzling I've noodled over these long years of Cold Civil War. So don't stop reading even if the bumpy start makes you angry or despondent and be sure to click on the links which serve as footnotes or references for my report. I'm going to start on election night November 8, 2016 and reference a video recording of Government TV's coverage of the big event. The PBS NewsHour panel was populated by establishment left-wing talking heads and GOP squishes preparing to coronate Her as First Woman POTUS and for the first 4 hours of th...