The Noble Lie

New Scientist ran an article about the sinister potential of crowdsourcing and social networking, shedding light on how government and law enforcement can and already are tapping into the awesome potential of this mass of bored, naive Facebookers. Notice the Pentagon-funded crowdsourcing experiment mentioned in this article -- evidence that the military-industrial complex is definitely paying attention. The CIA and In-Q-Tel (a CIA company) have been dedicating resources to social networking and so-called "open source intelligence."

One of the hypothetical "games" the New Scientist article posits is to show the user a snapshot from a protest followed by a number of mug shots, asking the user to identify the mug shot belonging to the person in the protest for a nominal fee. Confirmation and certainty is established by repeating this little transaction many times over with many users. It would be presented like a game or "Hot or Not" style app, optimized for simplicity, speed, and repeatability. Payment could be a few cents of real money, or any of a host of virtual currencies and game points. Facebook users are already hopelessly addicted to games and sharing apps which are little more than thinly-veiled scams. Like shot-machine addicts, these people can mindlessly click through widgets for hours.

The article also mentions already-running systems on the Texas border that allow any user to tune into public spy cams and report suspicious activity they see. If they're smart, they will turn it into a game and keep score.

Henry David Thoreau lamented, "We do not ride upon the train, the train rides upon us." In this age, we are all ridden upon by information. Americans consume 34 gigabytes a day worth of data, mostly from mass media sources stuffed with advertising messages and grades of propaganda. Each one of us is stuffed so full of marketing messages, memes, pre-packaged opinions, slogans and jingles it's a miracle we ever hear ourselves think.

Merlin Mann at the productivity site 43 Folders wrote a brief essay titled "Enough," which makes the analogy between gorging on food and gorging on information.

"Enough" is what I said when The Noble Lie went dark for a while and I fell behind on all of my blogs and other forms of social networking.