We are surrounded by order. Over the last 300 years we’ve developed amazing new ways to harness energy. Order and Disorder with Jim Al-Khalili II: The Story of Information, BBC 2012
Another type of invisible order ... Something we call Information. ibid.
By combining different sounding pictures, the ancient Mesopotamians could express any idea imaginable. ibid.
A new information carrying medium – electricity. ibid.
Just like Jacquard’s punch cards, the genius of Morse and Vail’s code lay in its simplicity. ibid.
The telegraph system would spread around the entire globe. ibid.
The [Maxwell’s] demon seemed to suggest that you could put things back together without using any energy at all – just by using information you could create order. ibid.
Alan Turing was the first person to conceive of the modern computer. ibid.
The power of information was revealing itself. ibid.
A Mathematical Theory of Communication: Claude Shannon. ibid.
Information is actually an inseparable part of the physical world. ibid.
Information can never be divorced from the physical world. ibid.
The paradox of our time is that humanity is becoming simultaneously more unified and more fragmented. That is the principal thrust of contemporary change. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era ch1
In our time the routinization of conflict has also meant a shift from sustained warfare to sporadic outbreaks of violence. ibid.
The impact of science and technology on man and his society, especially in the more advanced countries of the world, is becoming the major source of contemporary change. ibid.
But while our immediate reality is being fragmented, global reality increasingly absorbs the individual, involves him, and even occasionally overwhelms him. ibid.
The United States: A major disruptive influence on the world scene … No other society so massively disseminates its own way of life and values. ibid.
Marxism, born of the social upheaval produced by the combined effects of the industrial and nationalist revolutions provided a unique intellectual tool for understanding and harnessing the fundamental forces of our time. ibid. ch3
America’s relationship with the world must reflect American domestic values and preoccupations. ibid. ch5
The capacity to assert social and political control over the individual will vastly increase. It will soon be possible to assert almost continuous control over every citizen and to maintain up-to-date files, containing even the most personal details about health and personal behaviour of every citizen in addition to the more customary data.
These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities. Power will gravitate into the hands of those who control information. Our existing institutions will be supplanted by pre-crisis management institutions, the task of which will be to identify in advance likely social crises and to develop programs to cope with them.
This will encourage tendencies through the next several decades toward a technetronic era, a dictatorship, leaving even less room for political procedures as we know them. Finally, looking ahead to the end of the century, the possibility of biochemical mind control and genetic tinkering with man, including beings which will function like men and reason with them as well, could give rise to some difficult questions. ibid.
Society dominated by an elite whose claim to political power would rest on allegedly superior scientific know-how. Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behaviour and keeping society under close surveillance and control. ibid.
Nation state as a fundamental unit of man’s organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state. ibid.
The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values ... Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up to date complete files contained even the most personal information about the citizen. ibid.
Many of us are concerned about who has access to all this personal information. And how corporations and governments might use and abuse it. Brave New World with Stephen Hawking II: Technology, Kathy Sykes
By collecting and analysing data from mobile phone users Sandy and his team are about to predict certain elements of an individual’s behaviour with up to 95% accuracy. ibid.
Reality-mining is technology getting personal. ibid.
Sir Humphrey: How are things at the Campaign for the Freedom of Information by the way?
Sir Arnold: Sorry, I can’t talk about that. Yes, Minister: Party Games, Christmas Special 1984
The equivalent of twelve filing cabinets of new information for every American citizen every year. Nova: The Spy Factory, PBS 2009
Experts – from criminologists to real-estate agents – use their informational advantage to serve their own agenda. However, they can be beat at their own game. And in the face of the Internet, their informational advantage is shrinking every day – as evidence by, among other things, the falling price of coffins and life-insurance premiums. Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner, Freakonomics
Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent – all depending on who wields it and how. Information is so powerful that the assumption of information, even if the information does not actually exist, can have a sobering effect. ibid.
Information is the currency of the Internet. As a medium, the Internet is brilliantly efficient at shifting information from the hands of those who have it into the hands of those who do not … It has vastly shrunk the gap between the experts and the public. ibid.
If you were to assume that many experts use their information to your detriment, you’d be right. Experts depend on the fact that you don’t have the information they have … Armed with information, experts can exert a gigantic, if unspoken leverage: fear. ibid.
The gulf between the information we publicly proclaim and the information we know to be true is often vast. (Or, put a more familiar way, we say one thing and do another.) This can be seen in personal relationships, in commercial transactions, and of course in politics. ibid.
You’ve got to know how to get information ... I’ve been casing all my life – it’s the only trade I know. Ambush in Leopard Street 1962 starring James Kenney & Jean Harvey & Michael Brennan & Norman Rodway & Bruce Seton & Pauline Delaney & Marie Conmee & Charles Mitchell & Lawrence Crain et al, director J Henry Piperno, Nimmo in back seat
The world entered a new era: the era of the military-industrial complex … but as the Cold War ended … another paradigm shift … welcome to the age of the information-industrial complex. The Corbett Report: The Information-Industrial Complex, James Corbett online 2017
The connections between the IT worlds and the government’s military and intelligence apparatus runs deep. ibid.
Tonight: Google and Facebook: just how much do they know? The tools they use to identify you even without your personal details. The terms and conditions we’re signing up for. And how other companies can harvest your information without you even knowing it. Tonight: Google, Facebook and You: What they Know, ITV 2018
Facebook’s success relies on the fact that we do give the social media platform a lot of our personal information. ibid.
Your personal information is gathered and stored everywhere, all the time. Every single thing you do with your cellphone and your computer is registered and analysed by companies like Google, Facebook, Apple and Twitter to name but a few. All this personal data forms the heart of something called Big Data … This makes all your information very valuable. The Real Value of Your Personal Data, VPRO 2013
All this data reveals things about you. ibid.
Six months ago the American whistleblower Edward Snowden first revealed how the NSA has access to personal data stored with internet companies like Google and Facebook. In fact as it turned out, these companies actively cooperate in sharing your data with the authorities. ibid.
‘The frontier of accuracy is yet to be determined.’ ibid. expert
Businesses can also use your personal data to predict your future behaviour as an individual even better than you can. ibid.
Having all this data also provides power to who controls it. ibid.
‘It’s a new kind of power that’s very sneaky and gradual. ibid.
Will our data be used for less positive purposes too? ibid.
We naturally gravitate to information that confirms what our group already believes. Why We Hate s1e2: Tribalism, cognitive scientist, Discovery 2019