For 20 years, members of The WELL (the "Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link," an early, influential online community that I've been on since the late 1980s) ring in the new year with the STATE OF THE WORLD discussion, hosted by @jonl and @bruces, with a rotating cast of guest-hosts.
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SOTW runs on the INKWELL forum, which is readable by the general public - not just those with a well.com login. 2021's has been going since Jan 2 with this year's guest, @m_older, an sf writer, sociologist and aid worker.
"It interests me that the major change-drivers are illness and political upheaval. I've read a lot about earlier eras in which that was so, but the reflex of my contemporaries is that such matters should be subsumed by technological advance."
"Thinking about a list of terms that tell you the speaker is almost certainly bullshitting."
AI
5G
Smart city
IoT
Surveillance capitalism
Singularity
Big Data
Exponential
Orthogonal
VR AR XR MR
Digital Transformation
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the Spotify of ...the Netflix of ...
Content is King
Neoliberalism ruined ...
Synergy
Disrupting the industry
Mobility As a Service
4th Industrial Revolution
Sustainable, Equitable, Inclusive
Machine Learning
Customer first Customer centric Customer experience
Omnichannel
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agile lean
Paradigm
Future-proof
Seamlessly
Cloud as an Innovation Platform
Responsible AI
Edge Computing
Nanotechnology
Machine Learning
Quantum anything
Uberization
US law enforcement has literal centuries of shameful history of infiltrating and spying on politically disfavored activist groups, from trade unionists to suffragists to abolitionists to civil rights advocates to antiwar advocates.
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Long before #cointelpro, federal agencies were intercepting communications and embedding as provocateurs in radical political movements, often with the help of mercenary "contractors" like the @pinkerton_agent. The digital age only ramped up this public-private surveillance.
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The #NoDAPL protests were infiltrated and surveilled by beltway bandits who billed the US taxpayer handsomely for the service.
Inside: The WELL State of the World; Food and Climate Change Without the Hot Air; Mass court: "I agree" means something; Congress bans "little green men"; and more!
A terrifying aspect of last summer's uprising in Portland and elsewhere was the spectacle of anonymous federal police, bearing neither insignia nor identification, snatching people off the street and disappearing them.
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These were "little green men" - a term from the Russian annexation of Crimea, when Russian soldiers adopted the pretence of being local militias of Ukrainians who wanted to secede and dressed in generic uniforms while seizing Ukrainian territory.
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America's little green men come from the zoo of specialized federal police agencies created by dick-measuring bureaucrats and petty official who each created their own federal force to act as a kind of honor guard.
Arbitration was created to allow giant companies with equal bargaining power to settle disputes without incurring expensive court battles. So, when IBM and AT&T struck a deal, they'd agree that instead of going to court, they'd hire a neutral person to decide who was right.
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But in the 21st Century, a string of Supreme Court rulings have paved the way for "forced arbitration" - when a company tells its customers or workers that as a condition of doing business, they must give up all the legal protections that come with the right to sue.
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Once you've been bound over to arbitration, a company can maim, cheat or murder you and your only recourse is to ask a corporate judge, on the company's payroll, to decide whether you are entitled to compensation.
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