A month and a half of thinking about spies, blogs, and clones
Despite my furious posting on io9, I am continuing to write my weekly column Techsploitation. It’s nice to have a place where I can still be an angry leftist when it comes to science and tech, and these days there’s more than ever to be pissed about. Here’s what the radical, destroy-the-current-hegemony part of my brain has been doing for the past several weeks.
I thought a lot about consumer biotech. I worry that companies such as 23andme.com, which offers to sequence your genome for $1000 and tell you things about yourself based on your genes, will become the basis for new social networks based on genome-compatibility. Think of it as user-generated eugenics. Then I scoffed at people’s concerns over eating cloned meat, and talked about how cloning livestock for meat isn’t the real problem. Factory farming is.
I told you about how Comcast has a subtle but nefarious plan to stop file-sharing by occasionally stopping data packets that it believes are from file-sharing programs. And I screamed and yelled and stomped my feet about the government’s nonsubtle, utterly evil plan to grant telcos immunity for having handed over their customers’ personal data to the NSA without warrants.
Now that I am editing and writing a mainstream blog, I worry a lot about what will happen to this once-upstart medium as it merges with more traditional media. I wrote about my concerns that blogs will lose their edge and make the same mistakes that mainstream magazines and newspapers did when they started self-censoring and narrowing the range of what it’s permissible to talk about in a public forum.
And just last week, I wrote about the mysterious severing of 5 undersea fiber optic cables, which cut off network service to many countries in Asia and the Middle East.
February 18th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
The undersea cable sin the Mediterranean may have been severed by submarine, and if Dubai was one of the victims, then perhaps it is not a coincidence that:
1) The LA Times has recently run a favorable article on Dubai as high tech metropolis;
2) Readers responding to that LA Times article said Jewish people with Israeli stamps on their passports are not welcome in Dubai;
3) Other readers then wrote in to say Jewish travelers were welcome in Dubai (but there was no mention of Israeli stamps in their passports).
February 19th, 2008 at 8:35 am
in your Alternet column, you wrote “…places like the New York Times and the Washington Post have blogs that are often more newsy than the papers themselves…the upstarts are having to follow old-school rules.”
my reaction to that is there are blogs and there are blogs. yesterday i posted about sarah boxer book and narrowness of her view. mainstream media have been working outside their alleged “rules” for a very long time, now one of them proposes to assess what is “good” in blogs.
alternet, huff post, etcetera might throw light on the situation by defining how they see themselves: how does each monitor itself. is fire dog lake one of them or in another category?
thanks for asking the questions!
yours, naomi, an elderblogger
June 9th, 2008 at 9:45 am
I don’t think that blogs are going to lose their edge as long as everyone and their grandmothers are allowed to publish them. Maybe individual blogs will grow up and sell out when they reach a certain size or have a broad enough reader base that they’ll start to become worried about offending people, but there’ll always be more people showing up who are pissed off and ready to blog about it.
And I’m glad you’re blogging about it, by the way.