{"id":11577,"date":"2021-08-12T17:15:00","date_gmt":"2021-08-13T00:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=11577"},"modified":"2021-08-15T17:19:16","modified_gmt":"2021-08-16T00:19:16","slug":"agres-prophecy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2021\/08\/12\/agres-prophecy\/","title":{"rendered":"Agre&#8217;s Prophecy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.msn.com\/en-us\/news\/technology\/he-predicted-the-dark-side-of-the-internet-30-years-ago-why-did-no-one-listen\/ar-AANeMET\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">from Washington Post via MSN<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">He predicted the dark side of the Internet 30 years ago. Why did no one listen?<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<p>by Reed Albergotti<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Building an Internet Culture-Philip Agre\" width=\"1080\" height=\"608\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/dd8gcYfc_MU?feature=oembed\"  allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>In 1994 \u2014 before most Americans had an email address or Internet access or even a personal computer \u2014 Philip Agre foresaw that computers would one day facilitate the mass collection of data on everything in society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That process would change and simplify human behavior, wrote the then-UCLA humanities professor. And because that data would be collected not by a single, powerful \u201cbig brother\u201d government but by lots of entities for lots of different purposes, he predicted that people would willingly part with massive amounts of information about their most personal fears and desires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cGenuinely worrisome developments can seem \u2018not so bad\u2019 simply for lacking the overt horrors of Orwell\u2019s dystopia,\u201d wrote Agre, who has a doctorate in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in an academic paper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Nearly 30 years later, Agre\u2019s paper seems eerily prescient, a startling vision of a future that has come to pass in the form of a data industrial complex that knows no borders and few laws. Data collected by disparate ad networks and mobile apps for myriad purposes is being used to\u00a0<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/politics\/wp\/2018\/03\/19\/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-cambridge-analytica-facebook-debacle\/\" target=\"_blank\">sway elections<\/a>\u00a0or, in at least one case, to\u00a0<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/religion\/2021\/07\/21\/catholic-official-grindr-reaction\/\" target=\"_blank\">out a gay priest<\/a>. But Agre didn\u2019t stop there. He foresaw the authoritarian misuse of facial recognition technology, he predicted our inability to resist well-crafted disinformation and he foretold that artificial intelligence would be put to dark uses if not subjected to moral and philosophical inquiry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>[ <a href=\"https:\/\/www.msn.com\/en-us\/news\/technology\/he-predicted-the-dark-side-of-the-internet-30-years-ago-why-did-no-one-listen\/ar-AANeMET\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">click to continue reading at MSN<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>from Washington Post via MSN He predicted the dark side of the Internet 30 years ago. Why did no one listen? by Reed Albergotti In 1994 \u2014 before most Americans had an email address or Internet access or even a personal computer \u2014 Philip Agre foresaw that computers would one day facilitate the mass collection [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art","category-weirdness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11577\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}