darkmatter

I was about to comment on this US print advert for a new Intel computer chip, when after complaints of racism, Intel have apologized and pulled the offending ad.

This is Intel’s statement on their blog:

Before rehearsing those wonderfully myopic arguments about the internet as a space of unlimited freedoms beyond censorship, it’s worth bearing in mind the corporate nature of social networking sites like Facebook. Though you might not consider the ethics of corporate responsibility to be at the cutting edge of anti-racist politics today, surely it’s essential to take a clear position in these new media culture wars. There’s an email petition here.

If you surf the net you’ll eventually come across the buzz over the one laptop per child initiative. Simply put, it’s a scheme to make very low cost, open-source software based wireless laptops available to the children of the so-called ‘Third World’. Clearly, such a venture cannot alter core structural neo-liberal global inequalities, but should opening up technology to the economically improvished be welcomed?

Techno-utopianist Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the non-profit olpc, seemingly is aware of the limits of such a project. Even he admits it is not able to address basic issues of survival, such access to clean water.

There are many glib pronouncements that we have entered into a ‘Big Brother State’. Rather then think of surveillance as a panopticon of disciplinary enclosure, it has penetrated the mobilities of everyday life - what Deleuze has named as societies of control.

The war on terror is increasingly materializing itself as a virtual power of super-surveillance. This short video animation entitled ‘Stop the Big Brother State’ succinctly highlights recent key transformations of neo-liberal democracies.