Translate →
Said the detective to the Twitter user who promised to blow up an airport after his flight was delayed for bad weather. “It’s the world we live in,” says Dinarius when reading about Google China’s trouble with a targeted, sophisticated internal cyber attack responsible for thieving intellectual property.
What is this world we live in? Along the way of a marvelous whiz-bang weekend this author has had is tripping the circuit that points out just how different this new decade will be beginning with 2010. People miss people. Recovering from the technological bust in the early naughts has not given way to a fear of progress and development.
Everything is expanded and gotten faster and, again, people are missing people. I watched the indie movie, “Google Me,” on Hulu which streams to my HDTV powered by my HDPC blu-ray wireless computer. “Google Me,” is one Jim’s search for other Jim’s (not Jimmy or James) who share his last name after a late night Google search. He travels the world, has a sense of humor and completely exposes himself and his crew to the many lives of Jims – I recommend this movie for its charm, insight and well edited pacing that keeps the heavy ‘indie nature’ of this film safely at bay.
Before 2010, the web was fluttering with Social uses and applications and sites. Twitter.com among many. A Mr. Chambers posted, as a frustrated joke to his friends, that he’d like to blow up an airport if he cannot get on with his journey. A week later, he was arrested by police under the Terrorist Act by officers holding a print-out of his Twitter post.
In mid-December, Google executives had their attention plucked from democratizing the web to an internal attack in Google’s China office that targeted specific key members of R&D who had unique access to upcoming ventures (I’m taking artistic liberty with the full descriptions since Google is quite mum). China has publicly stated only that all companies, Google included, must abide by China law. That’s a response? As a happy American, my first thought was, “what else did Google expect from China?”
China’s recent history online is rife with theft, firewalls, spying, denying access, permitting access. America’s recent history with politicing hasn’t been a pretty one and dealing arms to Taiwan is a thorn in China’s toe. Bad guys hiding in the vapors around the world have their own recent history of attacking civilizations otherwise preoccupied with being civil. And the Internet, how does that fit in to the World we live in?
It’s a research sharing tool, an evil plot sharing tool, a tool for tracking research and development, a spying tool, a place where friends connect, a place where conspiracies eat their own tails before too long, a place where all kinds of informatiton is utterly democratized. The tail is not wagging the dog – it’s the chicken or the egg, or life following art or art following life: Can the Internet reshape the World or does the World we live in shape the Internet at the end of the day?
My growing disenchantment with the Internet as a world-changing force and its exaggerated self-values is tempered only by the idea that people will win in the end. Google’s mantra of democratizing information cannot change China’s leaders. Saying threatening things in public forms has NEVER been acceptable – and go figure, it’s still not okay online.
In the time I used maps and online resources to plot a two-day trip to New York, History Channel aired the story of the pilot who safely brought a disabled airliner into the Hudson for a nearly impossible emergency water landing. Low flying airplanes make United States nationals twitch visibly; it’s post traumatic stress on a National scale – no fault of ours, except sometimes. We never know who’s flying, or what belief someone is willing to kill for at Fort Hood, or what message a new CIA double-agent is willing to bring to the table….
People really miss people because people are starting to scare us. The Captain who saved 188 (I think) passengers and Jim’s journey of discovery and Sunday brunches with friends and Bloody Marys and worldwide money fears remind us that humans should win in the end.
The new decade won’t smite evil. The passed decade’s attempt to unite strangers virtually brought money but no fulfillment. Me thinks this decade will smite the Internet’s attempt to wag the dog and return it to one of the greatest sharing and research tools of all time as it should have been all the time. It’s the world we live in. We can better it on a human level; not count on a tool to change human nature.
