BigMother.dk

I’ve been assisting an exiting Danish biotech company called Hypo-Safe for some time and have come out as freelance consultant under the Bigmother moniker. I support Hypo-Safe in several ways, from R&D design, press contact and communication and innovation potentials reports and other companies with challenges at the intersection of research, technology and business are welcome as to contact me.

I’m still full time at Actics, so my Bigmother Consulting venture is a spare time project.

I Just did a survey on the future of the web by The Pew Internet & American Life Project. It asks you to motivate why you agree or disagree with different more or less far-fetched statements on the future of the web. One of them is clearly BigMotherian:

“Transparency builds a better world, even at the expense of privacy: As sensing, storage, and communication technologies get cheaper and better, individuals’ public and private lives will become increasingly “transparent” globally. Everything will be more visible to everyone, with good and bad results. Looking at the big picture - at all of the lives affected on the planet in every way possible - this will make the world a better place by the year 2020. The benefits will outweigh the costs.”

To the greatest disgrace of my beautiful mind child one of the other scenarios was the infamous J-curve:

“Autonomous technology is a problem: By 2020, intelligent agents and distributed control will cut direct human input so completely out of some key activities such as surveillance, security and tracking systems that technology beyond our control will generate dangers and dependencies that will not be recognized until it is impossible to reverse them. We will be on a “J-curve” of continued acceleration of change.”

To this I responded:

“Ha ha, this is simply third grade science fiction. Dangers come much from more subtle (read: less anthropomorphic) issues.”

But now, I need to abandon the BigMother ship. If it belongs to this company, BigMother is surely an absurd idea.

Please go and do the survey here to balance the idiocy that might result from this survey if prudent and knowing people doesn’t voice their perspective. Afterwards, please get back here and share your thoughts.

PS. Sad they don’t conduct this as a Prediction Markets survey. That would have been quite interesting (unless people are already brainwashed by half-wit futurists).

What is it about this craze for blogs? How did it get so overly hyped? Here’s one attempt to modify the euphoria of the blog revolution from a professional writers perspective: it’s just better technology, not anything intrinsically valuable about the writing itself. Soon every commercial publication will be more or less in the blog format. By Simon Dumenco in AdAge.com

After a bad upgrade to WP 2.0 I have had a little downtime. But fortunately, Marius helped me out (again!). While BigMother was down, you missed a very interesting post on counter surveillance, my proof that I invented the iPod back in ‘86 and my conclusive idea to end poverty in the world. Think about it. Technology is surely evil in disguise luring us into the comfort of believing that it facilitates sharing of ideas when it actually impedes any true progress with its errors and malfunctions. We better hope that I will not have any downtime again.

This weekend my increasingly bad conscience about taking up space in virtual reality with yet-another-uninspired-waste-of-time-blog-on-nothing-at-all was considerably hurt by several more or less direct attacks. Friday, I acted as a test animal in a pilot course (proof: http://www.23hq.com/mygdal/socialsquare) for corporate blog writing held by Blog Square, also known as Thomas http://www.bootstrapping.net/ and Trine-Maria http://www.hovedetpaabloggen.dk/. Obviously, we discussed good blogging and I got several implicit jabs by relating everything said on engaging blogging to Bigmother. Saturday, I was out for a stroll with two old buddies when one of them said that he had just directed journalists toward ‘his friend’s interesting blog on surveillance’. Only afterwards he consulted Bigmother.dk to see - to his professional shame - that Bigmother had morphed into my personal poster point for everyday stuff.

I admit that the original idea of a bunch of tech-savvies writing on surveillance issues from different points of view has faded away without any focused replacement. But to eat some of the medicine of the blog course, I’ll be totally honest with you: I’m simply in-between ideas. The bigmother angle ran dry on me (due to my illness among other bad excuses) and I haven’t gained strength to come up with a new. Sorry returning reader. I’ll be back. Meanwhile you’re welcome to follow my ongoing struggles to earn any claim-for-fame. But I understand if you don’t bother.

I’ve wanted to change design and features on this page for some time now, but still need some WordPress studying to carry it out. Stay tuned for much more information and dynamics framing the actual blog.

Inspired and encouraged by friends I’ve gone the blogway with BigMother.dk. The page will morph into a combined homepage and theme page and I will probably play a bit around wwith design and structure. I hope WE will enjoy.