SXSW: Al Gore Talks Surveillance Culture, Spider Goats

Nerval's Lobster writes "Former vice president Al Gore sat down with Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg at this year's SXSW conference to talk about the future — specifically, what Gore sees as the dangers and opportunities awaiting the planet for the next few years. Gore drilled down into what he referred to as the "stalker economy." The rise of apps such as SnapChat, which allows smartphone users to control how long friends can view messages, is emblematic of people reaching the "gag point" with pervasive recording and surveillance by government and business. "Our democracy has been hacked," Gore also told his audience, referring to the U.S. Constitution as "our operating system." While there's never been a "golden age" of American Democracy, he added, the perils emerging today are new. "If a Congressman or Senator has to spend five hours a day begging special interests or rich people for money," he said, they'll be more concerned about how what they're saying will appeal to those interests—rather than their constituents. In yet another tangent, Gore railed against genetic engineering, including Spider Goats, which are goats with spliced spider DNA that allows them to secrete spider silk along with their milk. The goats breed, extending that trait to future generations. Gore sees such things as a case of science run amok, alternately creepy and scary."

Wasn't treason, just business as usual

[dbIII]

Ford flew to Jakarta to accept a large donation on the day Indonesia invaded East Timor, and then the US used it's regional influence and UN veto to ensure that Indonesia was left alone. Policy has been set by foreign powers donating to US political parties for quite a while and what looks like it should be treason is sometimes just the way both parties operate, and why outsiders like myself see the US political system as a corrupt shadow of what it was supposed to be.

Re:democracy hacked?

[roman_mir]

. Their bribing politicians with contributions is one one part of that. Reducing the power of government will not reduce the power of corporations at all, it'll actually increase it. And thus would be counter productive.

- what do you mean when you say power? Because when I say power, I mean legal power to force an individual to do things that the individual does not want to do. Power is backed by force of violence. The State is predicated on violence, in fact by definition State is a system of violence.

Consent of the governed gives the government its authority and I don't believe that the governed are interested to give the authority all of the powers that authorities have today, the governed are complaining, they are unhappy. However they are lulled to sleep by the promise of a free lunch but of-course to deliver that promise the State must engage in unprecedented amount of explicit violence against a number of people (they are a minority) but actually currency war is violence as well and so everybody who holds USD denominated assets (including dollars and bonds) are being violently attacked by the State, which is stealing their savings and investment capital, reducing their real earning and purchasing power.

Compared to that what can a private institution do that has no legal means to engage in such acts? Sure, a private institution can fight another private institution for a larger market share, but there is at the minimum the criminal code that is (at least in theory) supposed to stop a private institution from committing actual violent acts.

The gov't is supposed to protect private property, contract law and probably enforce the criminal code. If those necessary functions are implemented, then any amount of power that a private corporation holds is irrelevant. They will have the power not to be bound by stifling rules and regulations that are designed to create monopolies and extract money from them by the political system, but they can't actually hurt people if the private property rights, contracts and criminal code is enforced.