gregory donovan's eportfolio (a syndication of cyberenviro.org)
Archive for quotes
by gtdonovan on January 31, 2011 at 12:01 pm · Filed under cybercity, Gore, imagineering, industrialism, informationalism, infrastructure, quotes, superhighway
From Vice President Al Gore’s remarks to The Superhighway Summit at UCLA on January 11, 1994:
The pressure of competition on the information superhighway will be great — and it will drive continuing advancements in technology, quality and cost. Incidentally, when I first coined the phrase “information superhighway” 15 years ago, I was not prepared for some of the unusual images it would ultimately bring into our language. For example, one businessman made this point I’m making here about competition and the pressure of competition when he told me last week that his company was accelerating its investment in new technology to avoid ending up as “road kill on the information superhighway.” And just this week I received a letter from a group of companies wanting to be allowed to compete, who complained that they were scared of being “parked at the curb” on the information superhighway. (emphasis added)
by gtdonovan on December 8, 2010 at 4:06 pm · Filed under AEI, Assange, cyberdominance, cyberwar, informationalism, insurance, quotes, security, wikileaks
Welcome to the informational: where jailbreaking your iPhone is a threat to national security, the global dominance of Goldman Sacks depends on government-based policing of proprietary trading code, and WikiLeaks is a thermonuclear device.
From the transcript of Andrew Marr’s interview with Mark Stephens (WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s lawyer):
ANDREW MARR: Now another thing that we read today is that he has a file, a further file of even more damaging and explosive information which he is keeping as a kind of insurance policy.
[ . . . ]
MARK STEPHENS: Well I think the problem is that they have been the subject of the cyber attacks, they’ve been the subject of censorship around the world and they need to protect themselves, and this is I think what they believe to be a thermonuclear device effectively in the electronic age. (emphasis added)
The nouns may change but the verbs stay the same.
-UPDATE 12.09.2010 @ 11:25AM-
In a Washington Post OpEd, the neocons at the American Enterprise Institute ratchet up the WikiLeaks/WikiWeapon rhetoric (h/t IGP Blog):
Like the war on terror, we have been attacked in this new cyber war in ways we did not anticipate . . .
. . . He recently announced through his lawyer that if he is arrested, he will unleash a “thermonuclear device” of completely unexpurgated government files. Think about that: Assange has threatened America with the cyber equivalent of thermonuclear war . . .
. . . If WikiLeaks is treating this as a war in cyberspace, America should do the same. The first step is to rally a coalition of the willing to defeat WikiLeaks by shutting down its servers and cutting off its finances . . .
. . . Governments that provide WikiLeaks with virtual safe havens should be told in no uncertain terms: “You are either with us, or you are with WikiLeaks.” (emphasis added)
From the same people that championed the Iraq War before there was a 9/11: You are either with us, or you are against us with WikiLeaks.
by gtdonovan on September 29, 2010 at 1:56 pm · Filed under capitalism, economy, governance, Mill, possession, property, quotes
From Principles of Political Economy, p155-156:
We proceed, then, to the consideration of the different modes of distributing the produce of land and labor, which have been adopted in practice, or may be conceived in theory. Among these, our attention is first claimed by that primary and fundamental institution, on which, unless in some exceptional and very limited cases, the economical arrangements of society have always rested, though in its secondary features it has varied, and is liable to vary. I mean, of course, the institution of individual property.
Private property, as an institution, did not owe its origin to any of those considerations of utility which plead for the maintenance of it when established. Enough is known of rude ages, both from history and from analogous states of society in our own time, to show that tribunals (which always precede laws) were originally established, not to determine rights, but to repress violence and terminate quarrels. With this object chiefly in view, they naturally enough gave legal effect to first occupancy, by treating as the aggressor the person who first commenced violence, by turning, or attempting to turn, another out of possession.
by gtdonovan on September 28, 2010 at 1:53 pm · Filed under citizen, ecogovernmentality, governance, identity, language, Psychology, quotes, Rose, state
From Inventing Ourselves, p70-79:
Government depends upon knowledge. Not simply the knowledge of statecraft, which had been the subject if innumerable books of advice to princes in classical antiquity and in the Middle Ages. But a positive knowledge of the domain to be governed, a way of rendering it into thought, so that it can be analyzed, evaluated, it’s ills diagnosed and remedies prescribed. Such ‘representation’ has two significant aspects: the articulation of languages to describe the object of government and the invention of devices to inscribe it . . .
. . . Modern citizens are thus not incessantly dominated, repressed, or colonized by power . . . but subjectified, educated, and solicited into a loose and flexible alliance between personal interpretations and ambitions and institutionally or socially valued ways of living. The languages and techniques of psychology provide vital relays between contemporary government and the ethical technologies by which modern individuals come to govern their own lives.
by gtdonovan on September 28, 2010 at 1:53 pm · Filed under citizen, ecogovernmentality, governance, identity, language, Psychology, quotes, Rose, state
From Inventing Ourselves, p70-79:
Government depends upon knowledge. Not simply the knowledge of statecraft, which had been the subject if innumerable books of advice to princes in classical antiquity and in the Middle Ages. But a positive knowledge of the domain to be governed, a way of rendering it into thought, so that it can be analyzed, evaluated, it’s ills diagnosed and remedies prescribed. Such ‘representation’ has two significant aspects: the articulation of languages to describe the object of government and the invention of devices to inscribe it . . .
. . . Modern citizens are thus not incessantly dominated, repressed, or colonized by power . . . but subjectified, educated, and solicited into a loose and flexible alliance between personal interpretations and ambitions and institutionally or socially valued ways of living. The languages and techniques of psychology provide vital relays between contemporary government and the ethical technologies by which modern individuals come to govern their own lives.
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