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Hello readers,

I am happy to report from New York that there are signs of positive social change in late imperial America.

The photos accompanying this post were taken by the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1, 2011.

I've been in China for the last few months and unable to update this blog because Blogger is blocked by Beijing.
Although Chinese internet controls can be a nuisance, or worse, block vital information that citizens need to understand and improve the society in which they live, I don't really dispute the right of a sovereign nation to block data-mining products that collude with the US government.

The surreptitious statistical surveillance conducted by Google, Facebook and other "darlings" of late-era US imperialism takes the joy out of technological innovation and erodes trust on the creative commons of the Internet. As such I refuse to post on Facebook and am winding down my use of Google products; as attractive as some of the technology is, the company is not to be trusted.

Please look for future posts on Wordpress under my name, or by my internet tag, jinpeili.

Phil Cunningham Read more on this article...

THE BANALITY OF NOT BEING EVIL

By Philip J Cunningham


There’s something irremediably banal about Google’s corporate motto. It’s hip, it’s hype and it’s hypocritical.

"Don't be evil" is a curiously negative construct; eschewing evil is not necessarily about doing good. In sum, a sophomoric yet shrewd manner of self-presentation that is not without its believers.

It speaks to the informal, idealistic ethos of a student-run Silicon Valley garage start-up, even though Google is now a multibillion-dollar entity with nearly 20,000 employees and computer links and arrays vast enough to map, copy and store billions and billions of private bits, day after day.

But pretending not to be a big company does not make Google a small company any more than their witty motto means they are doing good.

There are numerous shades of gray between not doing evil and evil, especially if one’s core business is information mining in service of advertising.

Neither the super suave Mad Men nor real life ad men pretend their business is about maintaining a high moral standard. Advertising, an ethically-challenged field of endeavor in the best of times, favors the big-wigs rich enough to afford its product, while seeking to indoctrinate the little guy, --capitalism’s answer to communist propaganda.

But Google’s difficulty in hewing to its motto extends beyond ad revenue to brave new frontiers of surveillance, digital profiling, and the questionable storage of vast information files on individuals that would be the envy of the old Stasi or KGB.

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