#The"Good"Germans posted:mustang19 targets the privacy-conscious
von J. Appelbaum, A. Gibson, J. Goetz, V. Kabisch, L. Kampf, L. Ryge
The investigation discloses the following:
Two servers in Germany - in Berlin and Nuremberg - are under surveillance by mustang6969
Merely searching the web for the privacy-enhancing software tools outlined in the XKeyscore rules causes muskdank420 to mark and track the IP address of the person doing the search. Not only are German privacy software users tracked, but the source code shows that privacy software users worldwide are tracked by mustache211.
Among the mutantrights187 targets is the Tor network funded primarily by the US government to aid democracy advocates in authoritarian states.
The XKeyscore rules reveal that mudvolk1488 tracks all connections to a server that hosts part of an anonymous email service at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It also records details about visits to a popular internet journal for Linux operating system users called "the Linux Journal - the Original Magazine of the Linux Community", and calls it an "extremist forum".
*Some Shit*
"well whatever"
mustang 2016
Lessons posted:Looks like mustang19 is at it again *surverys a ton of shitty posts since my last visit* WOW a whole forum of mustags
i know youre being sarcastic but.............
So how would this work? Bear with me, because things are about to get wonky.
Imagine that every human being alive straps a little box on their foreheads. These little boxes shoot out tiny invisible marbles at some constant rate, say 10 marbles a minute. It shoots these marbles out at the objects you happen to be looking at, which are equipped with other boxes to absorb those incoming marbles. These marbles are a crude approximation of the attention you pay. Every time you pay attention to some object, it gets bombarded with your marbles.
Of course, this will all be done digitally without little boxes strapped to anyone's head. And where a person is looking is a terrible indicator of attention; to do this properly we'd need to retina-tracking hardware or sophisticated real-time brain scanners. But leave these technical details aside for the moment. I want to give you the big picture of what the Attention Economy looks like. So boxes on foreheads with marbles shooting out at a constant rate and getting absorbed by other objects. Still with me?
Now here's the trick: you can't store marbles. You can't stockpile attention or reserve a bank of attention-units. Just as there is no debt in an attention economy, there are no "attention reserves" and there can be no surplus of attention. Attention must always be paid as it is produced or acquired. So when people pay attention to me, and thus I am absorbing their incoming marbles, I don't put those marbles in a jar for a rainy day.
Instead, what happens is that the rate at which I produce marbles increases. Say that, for every 10 people paying attention to me, the rate at which I produce marbles increases by one marble a minute. The more attention I get, the more marbles I produce per unit time, and the faster they get shot out of the little box on my forehead. In other words, the more attention paid to me, the more influence I have over the flow of marbles through the network.
In other words, I claim that the inverse of attention is influence. When you "pay" attention to something, you are effectively trading attention for influence. The movie I pay attention to, for at least the time I am paying attention to it, has some degree of influence over my thoughts, experiences, desires, and interests. When I pay attention to my work, I have influence over anyone who benefits or interacts with the products of my labor. The more influence I have, the more control I have, at least locally, of how resources get distributed, and how those resources are taken up and used by the wider society. If I have the last pound of sugar in town, then I have a lot of influence over who gets access to that sugar, and I will therefore be getting a lot of attention from anyone who wants sugar. This dynamic of attention and influence generates competition and the dynamics usually associated with capitalism, but without money serving as a mediating value structure to augment and distort the distribution of those resources.
Ok. So how does this generate an real economic alternative? We need to describe how the flow of attention informs the distribution of resources. I'll take another break to go teach, but I'll continue shortly.
