As from time to time in the past, today I offer “the last commencement address” of the season from what I like to call “the campus of my mind.” To be specific, I address “the Internet class of 2014” on their “world of shadows,” the online world they inhabit that often dazzles me, but most of the time leaves me feeling as if I were a creature from another planet and another time. What I explore, however, is the part of that world -- involving surveillance and our vulnerability both to the prying power of the national security state and of corporations -- that I feel strangely at home with and why that’s so. “Part of the answer,” I write, “may be that the means of tracking, listening in on, and getting to know everything about you, the technological process of creating your dossier (in the case of government) and your profile (in the case of the corporate world), couldn’t be newer, but the urge to do so couldn’t be older. In my own life, decades before the Internet or email arrived on the scene, I encountered it up close and personal.” This, then, is an address to the young, an exploration of my own encounters with the power to surveill, and my thoughts about how to deal with it all. Tom tomdispatch/blog/175849/
Posted on: Thu, 29 May 2014 14:21:43 +0000
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