Typically when asked ‘who is responsible for setting citizenship rules’ there are two general answers that fall out. On the one hand we might hear ‘the government is responsible for setting down citizenship regulations,’ and on the other we might hear ‘the people are responsible for establishing membership guidelines.’ The latter explicitly locates power in the hands of the people, whereas the former recognises legitimised political bureaucracies and machinations are responsible for citizenship. In this post, I want to briefly look at some of the processes and theoretical discussions surrounding citizenship and immigration, and in particular how they relate to ‘Fortress Europe’ and a recent British controversy surrounding citizenship tests.

The Boundaries of Citizenship

Western nation-states have developed around liberal conceptions of citizenship. As a consequence, citizenship is associated with a particular legal status that requires members to fulfill a set of legally enforceable requirements. These requirements can include holding a certain amount of money, it may involve active participation as a citizen (i.e. remaining active in communities that one is being naturalised by volunteering, being active in local politics, etc), or being born in a geographic area.

As a citizen with certain rights and obligations you are separated from others who lack the particular distinctive character of your citizenship. While this is, at first, a fairly clear matter that seems uncontroversial, it becomes slightly more complicated should you approach constitutional rights, and the possibility of citizenship, from the framework of critical theory (in particular critical constitutional theory that finds its roots in Habermasian political theory). Omid A. Payrow Shabani has opened a line of dialogue surrounding this issue in his recently published article “Cosmopolitan Justice and Immigration: A Critical Theory Perspective” (Link; leave a comment if you don’t have access to the journal and are interested in the article).

In his article Payrow Shabani argues that immigration law and constitutional law have been kept separate and operate in tension with one another. Liberal democratic constitutions have been developed so to be inclusive – where citizenship is offered on legal, rather than ethnic, grounds it is theoretically possible for anyone to become a citizen. This was essential to overcoming the problem of legitimization, insofar as without an inclusive metric foreign aliens could not participate in lawmaking and thus could not perceive themselves as the authors and addressees of law.

When approaching immigration and citizenship from statist lines, when we evaluate whether the alien accords with legal definitions that have already been established rather than by evaluating their prospects of membership according to tenants of the constitution, we ‘moralise the border’. This involves affirming that “a democratic polity has a one-to-one relationship with a specific geographical territory” (Payrow Shabani, 93). This one-to-one relationship between membership and geography can be overcome by reevaluating constitutional preambles, where instead of asserting ‘We, the people’ as a reference to the present members of a geographic space a universalised (and legally open) signatory is asserted as the document’s author. This openess at the constitutional level would necessitate shifting immigration and citizenship issues to a constitutional level, to the highest level of the nation-state. This legally provides non-citizens with voices, letting them participate in the country they are seeking entry into, and establishes an essential dialogue between present full– and potential-members of the nation-state without denigrating the latter group.

Presently, the boundaries of citizenship are established around geographic territories, divorced from constitutional openness, and resistant to dialogue with foreigners. Let’s turn to the EU to elucidate on why the present method is unappetising and, ultimately, morally reprehensible.

Fortress Europe and British Citizenship Tests

The European Union is often referred to as ‘Fortress Europe’ because of the incredible borders that it is trying to establish to prevent influxes of immigrants. The Medlilla border fence, Ceuta border fence, Lampedusa permanent immigrant camp, not to mention mine fields along the Greek border with Turkey, inhospitable climates of the Sahara, and dangers accompanied with travelling through Chad, Libya, Niger, and Sudan are all aspects of Europe physical fortifications. They are buttressed with harsh illegal immigration laws and increasingly hardened immigration and naturalisation processes.

An element of that hardening can be seen in Britain, where the following proposals are being made:

• Raising visa fees for a special “transitional impact” fund
• More English language testing ahead of nationality
• Requirements to prove integration into communities
• Increasing how long it takes to become British

These modifications will lead to a clearer delimitation of rights, but strong obligations at each stage of the citizenship process to receive those ‘clearer’ rights Moreover, those with children or elderly relatives will be expected to pay higher application fees. (Source)

Closing the Lines of Constitutional Dialogue

What is missing from the British proposals is an openness to the needs of those who have been, or are presently being, exploited by British and EU forces. There is a moral obligation on the part of the West to assist those who are least well off – those worst off are, at the very least in part, in their present socio-economic situations because of the ravages the West has, and continues to, inflict on them. From bi-lateral trade negotiations between the EU towards African nations that effectively undercut a African nations from assuming collective bargaining positions to refusing to purchase foreign commodities unless foreign farmers significantly alter their modes of production, it is clear that the EU and Britain especially have a hand in the global pot. (And this doesn’t even touch on the legacy of colonisation, or a general Rawlsian (i.e. liberal) moral imperative for those best off to assist those who are worst off.)

However, because members of foreign nations cannot participate in dialogue with citizens of Britain on an equal footing when it comes to immigration they are forced to accept changes of UK immigration law without having been heard from. How can they be genuinely expected to integrate into communities when it is evident that the ethnic-political discourse is already working to prevent them from entering the dialogue? How is penalising those who are the worst off supposed to facilitate legal citizenship, where all are seen as equal participants in the legal process, where all have an equal right to voice their concerns? How are the UK’s constitutional conventions expected to prevent the issues of integration and legitimization if their core function of openness to difference is banished?

We live in a world that is becoming more interconnected and the attempts of to fortify and militarize Europe in order to compete in the global economy while simultaneously to accept the responsibilities that accompany the centralisation of global capital within EU borders, threaten to doom the EU. It may not mean an economic failure – it is plausible that EU actions will create a strong enough wall that it will be near impossible for most immigrants to enter the EU while enabling the EU to successfully accumulate global capital. It may ‘thrive’ culturally insofar as it can constantly experience the births of nouveau cultures. What it will find itself without, however, is the moral credibility to enforce the charter of human rights that that has (arguably) guided some of the most substantial and progressive advances in EU law. Substantively enacting that charter requires more than lip service concerning the rights of EU citizens and the injustices that occur past fortress walls – it requires a comprehensive re-evaluation of immigration law and the divorcement of citizenship from strict geographical boundaries.

I use Facebook. I blog. I am a registered member of various online services, as well as several offline ones. Google, Facebook, several IT forums, credit card companies, my bank, and my employer (to name a few) can develop a fairly good picture of what I do and where I go on a regular basis. They can predict what I can, and likely will, do. While these issues are important, and I continue to write about them, for this post I want to attend to public documents. Specifically, I want to think about the implications of making legal decisions and court transcripts publicly accessible to anyone with an Internet connection.

Welcome to Law, Online

As mentioned I use Google. I also use a series of other search engines, as I’m sure many others do. Some are specialised for journal articles, others for books to borrow, yet others for books to buy, and so on. Sometimes, when I’m bored, I also search for law cases to read up on (yes, I realize that makes it sound like I have too much time on my hands. It’s for research purposes, really!). Members of the Canadian public can request access to judgements that have been made in a Canadian court; while it may cost the first person to request the transcript a few dollars, subsequent visitors will face negligible costs where costs are imposed at all. Digitised judgements are increasingly placed online for major search engines index and which members of the public can access them at any time. This is done in accordance with precedent – citizens have always been able to read transcripts of court cases by visiting the court where the judgement is kept, finding the documents, and sitting down and reading them. The digitisation of such documents (the argument goes) is just a natural extension of past systems of public use.

Transcendental Formula of Public Right

In his essay ‘Perpetual Peace a Philosophical Sketch’, Immanuel Kant wrote that “[a]ll actions affecting the rights of other human beings are wrong if their maxim is not compatible with their being made public”( Political Essays, 126). As rational actors, citizens evaluate laws’ rightness or wrongness by independently evaluating whether they accord with reason – citizens must be able to accept laws on the basis of public reason alone – but to judge law they must know of it. On the basis of this formula, it follows that communication cannot be limited so as to prevent law from being made public. To accept law as a rational imposition, one that citizens can recognise themselves as the rational authors and addressees of, the law’s prescriptions must be compatible with being made public.

Of course, when Kant was writing this he (presumably) was addressing the issue of secret courts – citizens had to be able to read court proceedings and attend trials. I’m not entirely certain that his formula is in practically in line with the digitisation and dissemination of court documents. Now, in saying ‘practically in line’, I’m not making the broader claim that digitisation of court documents isn’t in line with at least a strict and comprehensive reading of his formula (comprehensive meaning encompassing all legal decisions), but that were his formula followed that individuals experience significant harms. I’m uncertain, however, whether those harms are sufficient to warrant a modification of the formula or (more likely) a need to attend to the formula in greater depth.

Have You Ever Done Anything Wrong? Let Me Check . . .

Govt-files.com is just one place where you can search to learn about prospective, well, anyones. Personal data searching sites give you the opportunity to learn about an intimate partner, a business associate, a long-lost relative, your professor, or the neighbour you dislike next door, and is reasonably cheap. After paying your admission fee, you can gain access to the following information:

Results include: full legal name, address searches, residential and cell phone numbers, old addresses, date of birth, reverse phone number searches, reverse record searches, background checks, court records, criminal files, public records, civil files, reverse email searches, arrest records, criminal indictments, felonies, federal and state records, personal records, private records, government files, sentencing files, warrants, identity theft records, correctional files, attorney records, small claims court records, prison records, federal records, driving history, DWU / DUI records, missing persons, mug shots, genealogy records, real estate records, court filings, county records, credit reports, business information, corporate filings and much more.

Govt-files.com, recognising that people might be a little uncomfortable about others having access to this much information about them write:

It is important that people are allowed to know one’s background for safety and security. You can legally investigate; job applicants, tenant applicants, co-workers, neighbors, police officers, friends, family, credential verification, criminal records, court records, credit reports, home and cell phone numbers, addresses, driving records, small and large business, even yourself. This is all totally legal. It is crucial with today’s security threats that each and every person has the right to know and has the ability to access any public information about anyone. You will be shocked by the volumes of information that are accessible online. (Source; boldface not in original text.)

While I doubt that Kant would have necessarily agreed with the statement that others must know about you for safety and security, or that it is crucial that everyone have a ‘right’ to know and have access to information about anyone, the process by which companies develop these digital portfolios is facilitated with the explosion of personal-data rich databases. Included in these databases can be legal cases that you have been involved in, and which have had their proceedings subsequently digitised. With regards to legal cases, this means that citizens can learn about the justice system from the comfort of their own home, enabling them to examine and critically appraise whether they recognise themselves as the plausible authors and addressees of law, right?

I’m not entirely sure that is the case. Notwithstanding the fact that most citizens (myself included) would likely be baffled by the references to precedent, particular case law, and legal jargon, since most citizens are in fact unaware of the majority of the legal code I don’t think that awareness of particular cases would necessarily enable them to see themselves in the making of law. At the very least, I don’t think that the number of people who would benefit from reading cases like this outweighs the potential harm that accompanies what I’m calling a voyeristic-legal-intentions. Legal-voyeurs can see if the woman next door really has officially left her husband by checking to see if they are divorced. Moreover, they can see if their first girlfriend is still with that ‘loser’ she married after dumping you!

The Point of Transparency vs. the Right of Relative Anonymity

Historically it was a pain in the ass to aggregate disparate court documents from a vast geographical area. While the case documents were public the need to actually move to where the files were located, decipher the clerk’s script, and transcribe/photocopy the documents reduced individuals’ ability to misuse documents in a manner that intentionally invades on others’ basic rights to privacy. This analogue-hindrance system is coming undone in the digital era, when public records are placed online in the spirit of public transparency and accountability. I want to refrain from making a strong claim that such transparency is a bad thing (or, for that matter, that is is necessarily a good thing), but do want to claim that modern conceptions of transparency and public accountability are infringing on what have historically been understood as basic rights to privacy. Whereas moving away from your hometown and settling in another province was once a valid method of escaping your past and starting over again, your neighbour and employer can now check to see what colour your past really is. This kind of voyeristic-invasion is typically justified using comments resembling Govt-files.com’s statements about having a right to know your neighbour, but a classical accounting of rights sees them as required to harmonise citizens’ freedom in political environments. In the latter (loosely defined) case rights are intended to minimally infringe on one’s natural freedom, whereas in the former’s case rights are intended to maximally allow others insight into how your substantive engagements of those freedoms.

Rights to privacy are not a zero-sum game; enhancing privacy does not necessarily come at a loss to security or vice-versa. What is needed is a comprehensive privacy theory that can recognise new shifts in technological structures, content distribution methods, and relationships between public transparency and private retention of content. While envisioning such a theory is becoming a cottage industry of sorts, the real challenge is developing any such theory so that it is logically coherent and remains applicable cross-nationally without unnecessarily imposing colonising principles or theories – privacy theories that are developed must arise naturally from existing legal principles that nation-states operate using.

To fully function as a student in today’s Western democracies means having access access to the Internet. In some cases this means students use Content Management Systems (CMSs) such as Drupal, Blackboard, or wikis (to name a few examples) to submit homework and participate in collaborate group assignments. CMSs are great because teachers can monitor the effectiveness of student’s group contributions and retain timestamps of when the student has turned in their work. Thus, when Sally doesn’t turn in her homework for a few weeks, and ‘clearly’ isn’t working with her group in the school-sanctioned CMS, the teacher can call home and talk with Sally’s parents about Sally’s poor performance.

At least, that’s the theory.

Three-Strike Copyright and Some Numbers

I’m not going to spend time talking about the digital divide (save to note that it’s real, and it penalises students in underprivileged environments by preventing them from acting as an equal in the digitized classroom), nor am I going to talk about the inherent privacy and security issues that arise as soon as teacher use digital management systems. No, I want to turn our attention across the Atlantic to Britain, where the British parliament will soon be considering legislation that would implement a three-strike copyright enforcement policy. France is in the process of implementing a similar law (with the expectation that it will be in place by summer 2008), which will turn ISPs into data police. Under these policies if a user (read: household) is caught infringing on copyright three times (they get two warnings) they can lose access to the ‘net following the third infringement.

While some may shout ‘it’s about time that we teach those damn thieves some responsibility! Do the crime = do the time!’ I think it’s a good idea to step back for a second. Two recent studies are of particular importance here – I’ll try to provide the ‘raw’ data, but won’t do something as controversial as to try and work out hard numbers with it (I’ve graduated with a philosophy, not a statistics, degrees). So:

We start with a slightly older article released by NDP Group Inc., which informs us that 50% of Mac Users in the US paid to purchase music, whereas only 16% of PC Users do. We then turn to another article, by the same group, we see that at least 26% of 9–14 year olds are using peer-to-peer services (49% are ‘legally’ purchasing music with their parents’ credit cards). It first strikes me that this almost makes it seem like younger children have wider access to Macs, were I to make the clearly erroneous move to compress tween and Mac users’ legal downloads. What strikes me second, and less trivially, is that this means that 26% of students (at least in the US) are ‘illegally’ downloading music.

So, if you’ll grant me the jump that probably at least 20% or more of tweens are downloading music in the UK too (just based on some quick surfing it seems like a fairly conservative number), then after three strikes the family loses their ‘net connection (because I presume that laws like those in the UK and Britain are as granular as to affect households, rather than individualised members of said households). Moreover, if we take some broad statistics we see that for couples they tend to have 1.8 children per family in the UK. (Note: I realize that more granular statistics can be found from National Statistics Online here, but it seems excessive to use NSOs stats for the purpose of a fairly brief blog post.)

What About Sally and 0.8 of Timmy (+ Parents, of course)

Well, when we look at the previous stats  it seems like a lot of public school children are involved in copyright infringement. Bad kids! What it also suggests is that the UK’s plan to move to electronic school records could face some problems if members of the family are caught file-sharing, not to mention all the issues with CMSs, Web 2.0 environments, and so forth; it’s remarkably hard to capitalise on digital technologies if your intended users can’t access them. 

Moreover, if cut-offs occur per household then all it takes is mom, dad, and Sally (we’ll assume that part of Timmy’s missing 20% is his ears, so he doesn’t really care about music) to download and get caught once each to be ‘struck out’. Then they can learn:

• No VPN from home.
• No ability to access personal or corporate email.
• No chance to do their banking online.
• No way to easily book plane reservations without incurring extra costs.
• No way to access ‘cloud computing’ resources.
• No way to legitimately participate in the digital world from their homes.

The effect of these laws would identify all members of the household as ‘guilty’, regardless of the respective members’ particular guilt – all will be guilty by association. Family members won’t be permitted to continue as full, participating members of society, even if it turns out that it was only Timmy who was downloading (maybe Sally bullied him, and he knows she loves music so wanted to make her life less pleasant and didn’t consider the larger consequences at the clearly mature age of 8). Fortunately, what laws like this do is recognise that being sensitive to situations and conditions are no more important than addressing law to those who are genuinely responsible for criminal act. I’m hopeful that this kind of lawmaking will lead to more rapid convictions, where when a bank is robbed we simply arrest everyone in the bank on the basis of their proximity to the crime. Preferably we’ll be able to round up those ‘criminals’ without the use of a magistrate of judiciary, just to cut some costs to the social purse, just as the state will be absent in judging the appropriateness of applying a three-strike rule. These laws will have at least two core kinds of benefits:

1. Reduce the number of people sharing music and other copywritten material;
2. Cut down on unsolved or un-prosecutable crimes by removing the overly burdensome process of establishing particularised guilt.

That means that we’ll really be making progress towards solving genuine social ills, right? Besides, it’s best to adopt these kinds of laws as nothing will get children to stop downloading music, right?

This is going to be the beginning of a semi-regular series where I’ll post some of the (what I find) interesting things that I’ve been playing with/working on. I expect that the its will tend to be somehow related to my work in IT, my work as a graduate student, and my persistent work in developing a redundant large storage system at home.

Bookmark Sync and Sort

I work on a lot of computers on a regular basis. I have a series of them at work, my laptop (which travels pretty well everywhere with me), and a few at home. You know, in addition to all the other computers I pass by on a regular basis. To date, the best bookmark synchroniser that I found was Foxmarks, but I wasn’t a terribly large fan of putting my data on another person’s server. In addition to that, when you send your data it isn’t encrypted (while https data will be encrypted using standard Firefox encryption, it still means that what you have bookmarked will be sent along whatever networks you happen to be operating on). Ultimately, those two matters meant that I wasn’t particularly comfortable with the Foxmarks solution.

While Foxmarks would work, I wasn’t happy with it, so I did some searching and ultimately discovered Bookmark Sync and Sort. From the description:

Bookmark Sync and Sort is a Mozilla Firefox extension that lets you connect to an FTP/WebDAV server and synchronize your bookmarks that are stored in an XML file. Setup is easy; just write in your FTP/WebDAV server address, username, password and…

So long as you have FTP set up properly, and you’re maintaining your own FTP server, you can synchronise your bookmarks across platforms and know that you’re as secure as you want to be. It also happens to work really well. Setup will take about 5 seconds (assuming you know your FTP settings).

Flash Books

Imagine you want to have a really cool Web 2.0 website. Imagine (further) that you really like Flash and want to integrate all of your writings into your webpage. In the past you’d have to go and learn Flash, and then import your content, et cetera. With issuu that isn’t the case.

It gives the the chance to integrate your publications into your website and simulate turning pages. In addition, I’m fairly certain that you can set the publication to be indexable by Google and other major search engines, increasing the chances of your work being found and referenced.

http://issuu.com/viewer?mode=embed&documentId=080207170644-88ff7c76d40a4a52b8143d52493f60ad&layout=grey

Redundant Storage

At the moment I’m investigating a series of different solutions to storage, remote access, and image hosting, and a few other issues I’m running into. Presently I’m looking at adopting either Windows Home Server or the QNAP TS-209. I’ve put together the following that outlines some of their respective strength/weaknesses and similarities.

Storage Bays

Windows Home Server: 4 vs. QNAP TS-209: 2

Maximum Storage Capacity

Windows Home Server: 4TB vs. QNAP TS-209: 2TB

Redundancy

Windows Home Server uses a multidisk redundancy system. It’s not RAID, but it’s something like it. When you insert a second drive you select the folders that you want to share, and only those folders are redundantly backed up (i.e. spread across multiple disks). This has the advantage of not locking you into one of the redundancy formats of RAID 0, 0+1, or 5, but it also means that you’re not looking at a hardware level redundancy system. This isn’t an issue for me, but it might be for those who are more comfortable with Enterprise-level data redundancy. On the plus side, drives are hot-swappable by default, and it’s easy to do with HP’s MediaSmart Servers, which can hold up to four hard drives.

The TS-209 solution supports RAID 0+1 and hotswapping. It also supports remote replication – you can backup your TS-209’s data using encryption to an off-site location, should your data be that mission critical (I’m kind of interested to know if that would mean I could back up to hidden and password protected space on the webserver I have access to. I have a feeling that it’s not possible.).

Photo Sharing

With Windows Home Server you can publish photos to the web, though through a Microsoft portal. The TS-209 has a preferred solution: it autogenerates an online-accessible web-based photo album that provides the same degree of discrete configuration as the MS solution. (I want to set things up so that I and my partner can post pictures online – it’s give her a way of showing her family in Brasil what’s going on in Guelph, and let me do the same when I leave Guelph for work or academics, but not necessarily using .)

Backup

Windows Home Server is based on Windows Server 2003 (not Windows Vista), and can be easily set up on any Windows computer. The backup solution also works well with OS X. I’m not certain as to how well it works with Linux, though that isn’t presently a concern in the environment that I’m working in.

While the TS-209 has strong instructions for integrating it into a Windows-based environment, I’ve read enough about the system that it should integrate with all environments.

Print Server

Both solutions can act as a print server, though the TS-209 is more dependent on a large community to develop and implement the drivers. While the same can be said for the MS solution, it already has a massive community that is producing add-ons, and most drivers that work on Server 2003 are operational in Windows Home Server.

Add-Ins

While in theory it’s possible for a series of add-ins to be developed and implemented for the linux system the TS-209 is running on, there is no guarantee that it will happen. That said, the Windows Home Server has a massive number of add-ins. In fact, there is a massive number of them already available for the Home Server and they’re really, really, really, really, really cool. Plus, Microsoft has pledged to add ‘power packs’ – extra features that build upon the already impressive basic functionality of the server.

Cost

Yeah, it had to be part of what’s coming. You can get an HP EX470 (Sempron, 512MB RAM, 1TB 7200RPM SATA HDD) with a free three bays for $599.00 The QNAP TS-209 is $347.99, a 1TB Seagate 7200RPM SATA HDD another $293.99 for a total of $641.98, with less expansion room, and a less subtle redundancy system. I think that if I could get WHS to integrate with Gallery I’d be totally sold.

Tags: Windows+Home+Server, Firefox, Flash, QNAP+TS-209

People are doing more and more online. They use Flickr to upload and share their pictures, they blog using Blogger and Livejournal, and chat using AOL systems. In addition to doing more online, the more they do, the more passwords they (tend) to have to know. They also have to create a discrete user profile for each new environment. With OpenID, those hassles could be over!

What is OpenID

OpenID is an open source community project that is intended to act as a centralised user-space. It is describes as:

a lightweight method of identifying individuals that uses the same technology framework that is used to identify web sites … It eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites, simplifying your online experience. You get to choose the OpenID Provider that best meets your needs and most importantly that you trust. At the same time, your OpenID can stay with you, no matter which Provider you move to. And best of all, the OpenID technology is not proprietary and is completely free.(Source)

In essence, users will be able to carry their profiles and data with them, regardless of the service or content providers that they turn to. the major upshot, for consumers, is that it should mitigate some difficulties and hassles related to online lock-in. At the same time, it means that the different communities and spaces a person participates in will have access to that centralised knowledge basin, from which increasingly complex and rigorous digital portfolios can be developed.

What does it mean for you?

As it stands now OpenID is being adopted by massive content and service providers – the list includes Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo. Between their provided services, this means that OpenID is likely going to include you. In fact, they’re a good chance that you already have, or will have soon, an OpenID.

On the one hand, this is great as a consumer because there are fewer of those hassles. You know, like having discrete logins and profiles, so that you don’t have to reveal to Livejournal the same information about yourself that you make available to, say, Facebook. This does away with those inconveniences! It also means that it’s much easier to identify your online activities (rather than following an IP address, it’s possible to just trace what is access using your OpenID), which can be helpful to law enforcement, revenue boards, and your (now) ex-partner’s lawyers.

It also means that the traditional modes of preserving anonymity, while simultaneously participating in collaborative online content creation, are greatly lessened. Of course users (should?) will be able to have a series of dummy accounts, but that defeats the very purpose of OpenID. This program isn’t being sold to consumers as the next super-spy system, but as a convenient technology. It effectively entices people into allowing corporations to develop deep and far-reaching (and increasingly accurate) portfolios that can then be used to regulate your daily actions without your being aware that your actions are being regulated. You might face different insurance rates, be subject to more intense policy scrutiny, face increasingly accurate ad delivery system that strike with smart-bomb-like precision. Your news could be better suited to meet you interests, limiting your exposure to the deviant info-experiences that have a habit of reshaping our attitudes towards core political and social movements and practices.

In essence, you could find yourself so wrapped up in a data cocoon, that escape would be nearly impossible, especially if strong opt-out and ‘delete-out’ policies aren’t developed by this community. As it stands, the education about this new system strikes me as quite poor, and the implications are particularly grim. While some may hail their new Google overlords, how many hail their new Google-Microsoft-AOL-Livejournal-Technocrati-IBM masters?

It’s been a while since I’ve been updating this blog regularly – since I last wrote, I’ve completed my Master’s thesis, travelled to Brasil, sent out applications to Doctoral programs, found (temporary) full-time employment, and rested my brain a bit. Now, I feel rejuvenated, and ready to get back into the swing of things.