Issues
Why I’m Hopeful About 2021
What we need is not a return to the corrupt, tottering kleptocracy of 2019, but a re-democratization of capital, agency and money. I’m hopeful about 2021, and no, it’s not because of the vaccines or the end of lockdowns or anything related to Covid. The status quo is cheering the fantasy that we’ll soon return to the debt-soaked glory days of 2019 when everything was peachy.
A glaring hole in the digital charter
This week the Canadian government introduced legislation titled the “Digital Charter Implementation Act” which proposes to upgrade the country’s privacy laws while also creating a new regulator, to govern both data and AI.
The One Chart That Predicts our Future
That our “leadership” reckons “bread and circuses” is what the stripmined bottom 90% want is beyond pathetic. There’s one chart that predicts our future, and no, it’s not related to Covid–it’s related to capital, specifically the concentration of capital and power in the hands of the few at the expense of the many.
Future Tools: ZoneMinder
Given our recent discussions about surveillance, especially in the context of a pandemic, it makes sense to take a moment to examine open source surveillance systems. After all, surveillance is seductive. As it increases in accessibility and ease of use, more people will be tempted to use or play with such systems.
Assessing the spread of covid surveillance
If we are to accept that all data, is health data, then we also ought to entertain the possibility that data transforms us, at the very least in the form of feedback.
The more data we have about or body, and our health, the greater the likelihood our behaviour will change, hopefully as a means of improving our health, but that’s not always the case.
Vaccines–Too Little, Too Late?
Trust in institutions, authorities and Big Pharma are scraping the bottom of the barrel, and rushing these vaccines into mass use with extremely high expectations of efficacy is setting up the potential for a devastating loss of trust in the vaccines should they fail to live up to the claims of 100% safety and 95% effectiveness.
Contributors
Mark E. Jeftovic
Mark is the co-founder of easyDNS and the editor-in-chief of #AxisOfEasy. He is the author of Managing Mission Critical Domains & DNS (Packt UK, 2018) and Unassailable: Protect Yourself from Deplatform Attacks & Cancel Culture.
Jesse Hirsh
Futurist, researcher and public speaker, Jesse Hirsh has been active in technology and commenting on it across the media for 25 years. His premium newsletter service operates from Metaviews.ca.
Charles Hugh Smith
Charles Hugh Smith is the author of numerous books and writes from OfTwoMinds.com.
Latest Headlines
Latest comments
Latest tweets
