> And this power is more intangible because it has no ‘real’ origin…
Massumi: In a way the real power starts after you’ve passed, in the feed, because you’ve left a trace. Something has registered. Those registrations can be gathered to piece together a profile of your movement, or they can be compared to other people’s inputs. They can be processed en masse and systematised, synthesised. Very convenient for surveillance or crime investigation, but even more valuable for marketing. In such a fluid economy, based so much on intangibles, the most valuable thing is information on people’s patterns and tastes. The checkpoint system allows information to be gathered at every step you take. You’re providing a continuous feed, which comes back to you in advertising pushing new products, new bundlings of potential. Think of how cookies work on the internet. Every time you click a link, you’re registering your tastes and patterns, which are then processed and thrown back at you in the form of flip-up ads that try to get you to go to particular links and hopefully buy something. It’s a feedback loop, and the object is to modulate your online movement. It’s no exaggeration to say that every time you click a link you’re doing somebody else’s market research for them. You’re contributing to their profit-making abilities. Your everyday movements and leisure activities have become a form of value-producing labour. You are generating surplus-value just by going about your daily life – your very ability to move is being capitalised on. Deleuze and Guattari call this kind of capitalising on movement ‘surplus-value of flow’, and what characterises the ‘society of control’ is that the economy and the way power functions come together around the generation of this surplus-value of flow. Life movements, capital and power become one continuous operation – check, register, feed-in, processing, feedback, purchase, profit, around and around.
if what they say is true about technology, then this is peanuts. they have ability to peak into almost any PC. you know theres a helicoptor that flys around almost everyday and when it passes over my place, the TV and other electronics get a little whacked out for a second. maybe its nothing...
i need to cancel all of my yahoo groups and all that junk.
thanks for the info
z
Love,
V
Yahoo is now using something called "Web Beacons" to track Yahoo Group users around the net and see what you're doing and where you are going, similar to cookies. Yahoo is recording every website and every group you visit.
Take a look at their updated privacy statement: http://privacy.yahoo.com/privacy
<http://privacy.yahoo.com/privacy>About half-way down the page, in the section on cookies, you will see
a link that says web beacons. Click on the phrase web beacons. That will
bring you to a paragraph entitled "Outside the Yahoo Network."In this section you'll see a little "click here to opt out" link that will
let you "opt-out" of their new method of snooping.Once you have clicked that link, you are exempted. Notice the
"Success" message on the top of the next page. Be careful because on
that page there is a "Cancel Opt-out" button that, if clicked, will
*undo** the opt-out. Feel free to forward this to other groups.
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