The current pseudo intellectualism surrounding all things-designated cyber is appalling in the entirety of lack of understanding all things-designated cyber. Intellectualism and discussion of the taxonomical and semantical constructs does not solve the operational needs and currently does not drive consensus or understanding. Society sits poised on the rim of a fertile valley that is filled with the bounty of interconnections that could make life better for many. Yet a deep chasm splits this fertile valley and that dark pit is where so many good ideas go to die. It is a fetid and egregious darkness on the soul of society. The glorious bounty of the valley has a pox in the center of it and that is the evil of men and their desire to control others.
The arguments over information security gilded by cyber terminology is threaded with the inherent desire to constrain, contain, restrict and maintain a status quo that can never be achieved. Time and place move forward into a future that we can endeavor to make better, but in no way can control except by force majeure. That future is architected by our intentions and built by our decisions. Each decision to inherently circumscribe the efforts of human kind to communicate is enabling the desperation to fester deeper and scar the fortunes of the future.
Consider the realm of social communication and participatory media in the interactions of the human population. The greatest literature was spread across the world on the adoption of the printing press. The ideology of freedom and democracy was spread through the newspaper and mass media revolution of the following centuries. Those same technologies allowed hate and fascism to spread heating the fires of conflict. New technologies allowing the same inherent behaviors of humans to be expressed do not have any differing pattern or preponderance of morality they are simply tools of the humans using them. There should be no expectation the shallow thinking and deep hate to be absent in the presence of the positive and inherently valuable contributions of those new technologies.
Society adopts and adapts the current tools of social technology for a universe of ideas in an exploding constellation. This fills and opens worlds of emotion and knowledge conceptualization never before considered. The terrain of human connection though exhibits polarization of politics and shows the debt that connectedness requires from society. Listening to the same ideas is a shallow bath where the intellectually lazy drown on teacups of ideas. The depth of discourse explodes at the speed of light and so many see thousands of channels and nothing of import on the variety of screens they use.
There is a requirement of intellectualism in advancing and understanding a new terrain of ideas and the inherent technologies to support this new terrain. On the lever of society we move polarized and diffused conceptualization of various troubles and issues across the span of the population. The increasing transmission speed of the idea and the breadth of a specific population accessing it inherently exemplify the velocity of ideologies. Monks copying prose at a steady rate and transmitting those ideas were subsumed by the much vaster speed of voice and memory. The inherent lossless of verbal communication with the addition of innuendo and bias was balanced by the studious transcription of the written word.
The realm of cyberspace allows for polymorphic media with near instantaneous transmission to those who are willing to interact. The cacophony of idioms drowns salient criticism in the salacious meandering of meaningless rancor. The world of total connection, ubiquitous bandwidth, and pervasive messages may actually be the place good ideas go to die terrorized by the meaningless drivel of society run amok.
The information and security of technology bent on social control is another realm where the relative drivel infects the malcontent social controls and mechanisms of inherent restriction are bent on the forge of logical inconsistency. A thread of the controlling yoke is seen in the current fallacy perturbing the relative tranquility of the technology. Neither the empirical evidence nor a logical deductive process supports blaming the inherent openness of the Internet for the perceived insubstantial security. The flexibility and resiliency of an open system is nearly incontrovertible when the scope and size of that system is large enough to be self-correcting.
Explorations of various vulnerability databases expose the attack vector to the human agent as being primarily at the application layer. The technology of the Internet is not suspect except as a transmission mechanism. The transmission pseudonymously is inherently a work factor issue of governmental regulation and enforement. The balance being the egregious error of anonymity applied as an advantage point for further eroding and simplifying the enforcement mechanism. The challenge being that the erosion will not solve the problem of security. The deanonymization and certification of agency on the Internet and by corollary the future of cyber space has many negative factors, and does not answer the posited problem. As recent world wide political events have demonstrated the pseudo anonymity of the Internet does affect the real world political landscape, and despots and dictators are more than willing to use the seams to violate the sanctity of human rights.
These points as simple and easy to discern are covered in the veneer of continuing debate over the relative merits of definitions and conceptual analysis. The veneer is the layers allowing profit and political control rather than scientific or empirically based inquiry. Technofascism further obscures a path to enlightenment. Technofascism is the use of technical language and technology controls to subjugate a subordinate population and the use of public policy to increase power of technologists. Despots have used the relative ignorance of populations throughout history to subjugate and victimize them. With ubiquity and pervasiveness it becomes more apparent if the agency of subjugation has substantial control over the technologies. As in the earlier example, those who controlled the printing press therefore controlled the content that was printed. Those who control the Internet shall control the message. The technology is only neutral as a tool, the tool though can be wielded in many different ways.
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nice! (gonna have to read it again before I dare claim ‘tour de force!’