What role is the net playing in this conflict: as social support network, as your own personal media network. I have no television, and news websites were clogged, but Morpheus was able to get videos to me quickly and efficiently. That coupled with instant messaging and text-based websites connected me to what was going on.
How did this get by the FBI & CIA?: Through email, Instant messaging? The US Military created a distributed network designed to be unstoppable, and now terrorists can also use it to ensure that their messages to one another always get through. Carnivore is okay, but it only works if they don't encrypt their email.
That being said, I wish you all peace and safety, and hope that some sort of global conscience emerges from this.
It’s now 11pm, and I’m at the Green Room café… Thought I’d have a glass of red wine tonight – not my usual coke or coffee. It was a long tense day, and there seems to be more people out tonight than on your average Tuesday night.
Perhaps everyone needs to relax tonight. Perhaps, and this is very likely, the people at this bohemian coffeehaus didn’t get the chance to vent and de-stress online the way I had.
You see, this morning after I heard about the World Trade Center disaster, I immediately jacked-in. I created my own news network and generated my own vision of New York by combining input from a number of instant-messaging friends in London England, Cameroon Africa, Melbourne Australia, New York New York, and across the rest of the US and Canada, in addition to the feeds from CNN.com (text-only for the day), WashingtonPost.com, and the overburdened NYTimes.com.
Later in the day, due to a lack of server-side bandwidth preventing me from streaming video footage (I don’t own a TV) I logged-on to Morpheus on the off-chance that there’d be some NY video there – and there was – and it came down the pipe quickly. Beautiful Morpheus. Horrific imagery.
That was the point at which it really hit me – the full power of the decentralized network. All it took was 1 search – “world trade” – and I had tonnnes of footage, pics, and audio straight from the horse’s mouth, and nearly live. This stuff was published fully uncensored by the people of NY for the world to see. This was cutting-edge. The gulf-war was the television war, and this is shaping up to be the internet-war, in more ways than one.In the same way that Napster failed (centralized server), traditional terrorism also failed; and in the same way that Morpheus and Gnutella are succeeding, so too is this new wave of de-centralized terrorism, with multiple-simultaneous attacks. You can stop one point of entry (like a missile), but what do you do when something inside your body rebels against you? It’s like the flesh-eating disease. You just have to wait out the pain and hope for the best.
This is a decentralized form of terrorism, for which there are no existing preventative measures. The only way that people will stop swapping music and divx files is for the RIAA and MPAA to stop charging exorbitant amounts for the content, and I believe that the only way to stop this new form of terrorism is to stop giving them cause to create that terror. In the best-case scenario this will be the dawn of ethical governance, as opposed to ego-governance.
The other revelation I had today came when I was at Slashdot.org where the users write the articles. Early in the day there was 1 article about the disaster (posted by CmdrTaco), and it had about 100 comments. Two hours later there were 2 or 3 articles, each with about 1000 comments – fully uncensored, real unmitigated opinions and observations.
The internet is a social machine, and a meta-support network.
By saying “meta” support network, what I mean to say is that it is the network which supports my social support network. Today there were far more of my Messenger and ICQ contacts online than usual. They were all tense, and they all went online to try to make sense of their feelings and the state of the world around them. Though we all live in different countries, we were for this one day, truly a global community.
We all had the same fears, the same sense of loss for those who were attacked in their homeland, and the same need to share and grieve together.
Only time will tell if this ultimately brings us closer together or pushes us further apart, but if “this country will never again be the same”, hopefully the ensuing geo-political and ethico-governmental changes will be for the better.
« return.