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Tag Archives: traceable
China Wants Change
According to this Forbes article, China’s sovereign wealth fund wants to buy a large enough chunk of Facebook, so that it can control its image abroad, as well as censor much of what the site already allows, because the People’s Republic of China is weary of social media and the freedom it propagates. Although the article is careful to mention that the fund would only be able to buy non voting stock, and that even a billion dollars worth of stock would be only about a hundredth percent of the total amount once the stock goes public, the idea of the article is clear: China wants to take away our social media freedom , and control us.
A Sassy Control Agent or a Smart Shopper?
As was apparent in the little bit of Foucault that we read in class, control and capitalism go hand in hand. The author of the article states that China figures that if it can buy its way into our social media, then it can control us. We owe China so much money that it practically owns us already, and now it wants to own our favorite pastime?
I don’t think that the Chinese sovereign wealth fund is all that interested in telling us Crazy Americans what to do. Maybe it just wants to be a bank and fulfill its wealth-making function, a la capitalism. I don’t think it’s possible for China to own us anymore than it already does. Anytime we feel threatened, we like to demonize the perceived threat, make it worse than it really is. Especially if we’re in control.
Surveillance ! (Zhanna Onishchuk)
“The Outsiders” has made the point that certain people set the rules, and others are forced to abide by them. Although we tend to rebel in our minds against the police and the government, we often just accept rules because they seem credible. There’s this new “Smart Meter” technology, an electricity meter to be installed by major electric companies in homes, that is advertised to reduce green house emissions and reduce electric bills. I heard about it from “Lionel’s” Commentary on the WB 11 news. Here’s the video :
Can you believe it ? Now the government is not only surveillance criminals through unethical methods, as per our classmate (@Antonio,) but it is surveillance regular people. If you do any research about the smart meter, which homeowners probably wont, it is difficult to find out out about the surveillance characteristics that the meter has, all that is advertised is its beneficial bill-reducing capabilities.
How are we supposed to follow rules when they are not justified at all ? We are blinded by everything that the government wants us to hear – and we have done nothing wrong. The government applied bad stigmas to regular people just as much as they do to criminals. Otherwise, such deception and surveillance would not exist. This is proven over and over again with intrusive privacy legislation that applies to everyone. So are we all really criminals that need to be controlled ? If we look at aourselves as criminals, we can justify breaking laws. Which comes back to the government’s need to surveillance us. This loop will never end !
Zhanna Onishchuk
