Todd Suomela's Library tagged control →  View Popular, Search in Google

"When­ever I bumped into a silo like Face­book, I may have grum­bled but I didn’t leave. In fact, I pushed more con­tent into it, not ask­ing that it push con­tent back out. I did that because that’s where the read­ers were, where I could get more users, etc…

When my smart phone provider decided to put a cap on how much band­width I could use on my unlim­ited plan, I didn’t leave because I had to be on a net­work where I could con­tinue using my iPhone/iPad/Kindle/Whateverdevice. I grum­bled on Twit­ter and may have done a tum­blr post but I didn’t walk away.

When the politi­cians started talk­ing about things like Net Neu­tral­ity or other weird acronyms like PIPA/SOPA/ACTA/etc I may have pushed back for that law but I didn’t make it clear that any­thing that attacks the Inter­net attacks the peo­ple and thus under­mines democracy.

I think you may real­ize that I’m not alone in these behav­iors and the truth is: I may have killed the inter­net… but so did you."

internet open culture control social-media technology-effects privacy protocol facebook commercial business

digital-humanities culture technology-effects control printing print digital text design

I have often remarked in the past how libertarianism - at least, its modern American manifestation - is not really about increasing liberty or freedom as an average person would define those terms. An ideal libertarian society would leave the vast majority of people feeling profoundly constrained in many ways. This is because the freedom of the individual can be curtailed not only by the government, but by a large variety of intermediate powers like work bosses, neighborhood associations, self-organized ethnic movements, organized religions, tough violent men, or social conventions. In a society such as ours, where the government maintains a nominal monopoly on the use of physical violence, there is plenty of room for people to be oppressed by such intermediate powers, whom I call "local bullies."

libertarianism libertarian ideology power control oppression freedom

Comments on Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott.

legibility modernism social control bureaucracy state government rationality

economics complexity infrastructure control free-markets

"This experiment tests effects of passive, neutral reporting of contradictory factual claims on audiences. Exposure to such reporting is found to affect a new self-efficacy construct developed in this study called epistemic political efficacy (EPE), which taps confidence in one's own ability to determine truth in politics. Measurement of EPE is found to be reliable and valid, and effects of neutral reporting on it are found to be conditional on prior interest in the issues under dispute. Implications of this effect and of EPE are discussed. Self-efficacy theory (Bandura, 1982) suggests these short-term effects may accumulate over time. EPE may affect outcomes related to political understanding, opinion formation, and information seeking."

communication experiments self-efficacy political-science power perception control confidence

"What's most important is the tipping point, spawned not by Assange but by a new body politic — a new party of individuals bonded by commonality of interest not defined by national or geographic boundaries. The Party of We.

In response to the attacks on Wikileaks, this virtual We Party, comprised of citizens of the world, unleashed an unprecedented — and united — attack on parts of the infrastructure that transact payments and sustain eCommerce and for a brief moment shut critical parts of it down.

This was unprecedented not because it hasn't been tried before (even with some success), but because its success, however brief the moment may have been, was only reversed by those who started it and who had a change of heart. Furthermore, it was novel in its motivation not to hack a system or engage in fraud or greed, but rather in support of a cause — a belief in the idea and purity of unencumbered speech."

politics internet wikileaks government revolution centralization censorship control networks power

"For all that the revolution in Egypt tells us about the power of networked media to promote bottom-up change, it even more starkly reveals the limits of our internet tools and the ease with which those holding power can take them away.

Yes, services such as Twitter and Facebook give activists the means to organize as never before. But the more dependent on them we become, the more subservient we are to the corporations and governments that control them."

politics networks control revolution power centralization censorship government

In recent research experiments, Derek Rucker and Adam Galinsky, found that people who felt powerless were willing to pay more money for luxury or status items than people who’d been conditioned to feel more powerful and in control.

economics psychology control power work labor entrepreneur

power control violence love peace anarchism politics psychology

by(Unabomber) manifesto critique technology technology-effects technoscience technocracy society control

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement

environment radical population control

Part of what’s going on here is an attempt to give meaning to an essentially unpredictable environment over which the prognosticators have very little personal control. Rather than simply sit back and admit that nobody knows what is going on, their general inclination is to try to find patterns.

A new set of experimental studies by recent Kellogg graduate Jennifer Whitson and my colleague Adam Galinsky shows that this kind of pattern attribution is a normal human reaction to a feeling of lacking control. In a paper published in the October 3 issue of Science, Jennifer and Adam show that “lacking control increases illusory pattern perception,” which is defined as “the identification of a coherent and meaningful interrelationship among a set of random or unrelated stimuli.” Now, of course, the current market declines are not entirely random, but it’s safe to say that nobody can truly predict where the market is going at any given moment. There is a tremendous feeling of lack of control in the marketplace, which is probably causing people to make lots of incorrect attributions.

psychology perception pattern prediction unpredictable control fear bias environment