io9
predictions
Posts Tagged “
social control
”
predictions
found footage
Sleep, Obey, Consume, and Watch "They Live"
If you want to spend your Friday evening contemplating the joys of alien-based paranoia, plus a little wrestling, then there's nothing better than a nice heaping of They Live. Released in the late 1980s, this ironic-paranoid classic was John Carpenter's giant fuck you to the Reagan Administration and social conformity of all types. Aliens have taken over, and are controlling all of the United States (and perhaps the whole world) by beaming a signal into everybody's mind that masks the true aliens, as well as the "obey" signs they've planted everywhere. In this awesome scene, "Rowdy" Roddy Piper puts on some sunglasses that allow him to see the truth. It's like the "taking the red pill" moment — suddenly the extent of his manipulation becomes clear. More »
social control
Emotion-Tracking Wearable Device Lets Your Boss Monitor Your Feelings
So you get a job in customer service, and your boss says your dealings with customers are going to be monitored for "quality." No, you won't be on CCTV — you'll be wearing a watch-sized device on your wrist that tracks your emotions by measuring heart rate, your location, body temperature, and skin moisture levels. This device will be sending your data via bluetooth to a central database. If you get too angry or too sleepy while dealing with a customer, your boss will be alerted with a message. Too much anger, and you might be fired. It sounds like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel, but it's actually a realistic application for a piece of technology called the BT2, released today by Exmocare. More »
dystopia
This is what a mass evacuation from a city looks like from space. Using satellites orbiting over Africa, human rights groups published UNOSAT satellite imagery to show, in very simple terms, the human cost of violence in the Chadian capital city of N'Djamena. Over 10,000 people are crammed on a bridge, trying to escape into the neighboring nation of Cameroon. The black dots are people, and the yellow dashes are vehicles, most likely trucks and buses. It's a chilling portrait of the human future, wracked with violence and recorded via space-based surveillance devices, taken on February 27. See the full map below.
More »
Satellite-Eye-View of People Evacuating in Chad
This is what a mass evacuation from a city looks like from space. Using satellites orbiting over Africa, human rights groups published UNOSAT satellite imagery to show, in very simple terms, the human cost of violence in the Chadian capital city of N'Djamena. Over 10,000 people are crammed on a bridge, trying to escape into the neighboring nation of Cameroon. The black dots are people, and the yellow dashes are vehicles, most likely trucks and buses. It's a chilling portrait of the human future, wracked with violence and recorded via space-based surveillance devices, taken on February 27. See the full map below.
More »
The Internet Will Not Bring Us Together
The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) has blocked the entire nation of Pakistan from looking at video-sharing site YouTube. Apparently the PTA is trying to prevent citizens from watching an anti-Islam viral video called Fitna made by right-wing Dutch politician Geert Wilders (pictured here, looking weirdly like an alien from This Island Earth). This is yet another sign that futurists who predicted that the internet would break down national barriers were dead wrong. Instead, nations have learned how to redraw their boundaries in cyberspace. [AP via Physorg]
The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) has blocked the entire nation of Pakistan from looking at video-sharing site YouTube. Apparently the PTA is trying to prevent citizens from watching an anti-Islam viral video called Fitna made by right-wing Dutch politician Geert Wilders (pictured here, looking weirdly like an alien from This Island Earth). This is yet another sign that futurists who predicted that the internet would break down national barriers were dead wrong. Instead, nations have learned how to redraw their boundaries in cyberspace. [AP via Physorg]
surveillance
You can gage how busy New York City is by looking at all the people swarming in the streets, or by smelling the giant piles of trash they've left at the curbs. But there are ways to take stock of the city's populace that are far more revealing. For a new MoMa exhibit this month, MIT's Senseable City Lab chose to expose how talkative New York is by tracking lines of electronic communication into and out of the city. Their project is aptly named the New York Talk Exchange (NYTE). It's also inadvertently a portrait of digital surveillance, showing exactly how easy it is for people to use phone records to monitor which countries New Yorkers are ringing up.
More »
The Art of Monitoring New York City's Telephone Conversations
You can gage how busy New York City is by looking at all the people swarming in the streets, or by smelling the giant piles of trash they've left at the curbs. But there are ways to take stock of the city's populace that are far more revealing. For a new MoMa exhibit this month, MIT's Senseable City Lab chose to expose how talkative New York is by tracking lines of electronic communication into and out of the city. Their project is aptly named the New York Talk Exchange (NYTE). It's also inadvertently a portrait of digital surveillance, showing exactly how easy it is for people to use phone records to monitor which countries New Yorkers are ringing up.
More »
found footage
A Joystick Remote Control For Your Kid's Brain
It's probably not a great idea to smoke while you do brain surgery and insert mind-control electrodes into little kids' heads. But that's how you can tell the Canuxploitation film Terminal City Ricochet takes place in a future dystopia. Besides implants that let the mayor to control your kids' brains using a video-game remote control, the authoritarian society also uses television, consumerist crap... and thuggish police led by the Dead Kennedys' Jello Biafra. Why is this movie not available on video?
social control
The Authorities Have Your Skeleton On File
Security checkpoints could do a full-body scan and check your skeleton against the bone structures of known terrorists in a few years. A new patent, issued on Friday, covers a system that would scan some, or all, of your skeleton and compare it with a database of skeletons. The database would also pull up data such as your name, address, social security number, and passport number. Worst of all, you might not even know your skeleton is being scanned from a distance. More »
social control
Beware Google's Surveillance Death-Ray
What happens when Google street view is no longer content with showing incredibly detailed pictures of the outside of your house? This hilarious science fiction video by the Vacationeers follows Google's omni-cam to its most invasive extreme... and of course they posted it on YouTube. More »
social control
Brain Scans Reveal That Inflation Gets You Hot
Inflated prices trigger the pleasure centers in your brain more than fair ones. Not only is the idea of buying something expensive more exciting than buying something on sale, but you'll actually get more genuine pleasure out of something expensive — even if it's not worth the cost. A group of social scientists at CalTech and Stanford discovered this not-entirely-unexpected fact when they stuck people into MRI brain scanners and gave them several glasses of wine, assigning each one a random price. More »
triviagasm
Great Zombies Of Science Fiction
When you think zombies, you think weird magic. But really, a lot of the greatest zombies in movies, TV and books have resulted from pure science. Okay, maybe not "hard" science, but at least some kind of scientific process involving lab coats. We list the greatest zombies of science, below the fold. More »
social control
Bio-Inspired Bots Spy and Kill
They're perfect for sneaking into a building and killing bad guys who want to destroy New York with poison balloons. "Bio-inspired" spybots that look and act like insects are the latest craze among Air Force scientists, reports Noah Shachtman of Danger Room. More »
social control
People are more likely to give money to a cause and to obey the rules when they are standing underneath a picture of watchful eyes. Melissa Bateson, a human behavior researcher, found that people put far more money in donation boxes underneath posters of watching eyes than they did in boxes under pictures of flowers. For over a year, Newcastle police have been using this information to help them fight crime. The weird part is that it works.
More »
Eyeballs Fight Crime
People are more likely to give money to a cause and to obey the rules when they are standing underneath a picture of watchful eyes. Melissa Bateson, a human behavior researcher, found that people put far more money in donation boxes underneath posters of watching eyes than they did in boxes under pictures of flowers. For over a year, Newcastle police have been using this information to help them fight crime. The weird part is that it works.
More »
social control
We Know When You're Pretending to Pay Attention
It's easy to tell when somebody isn't paying attention — their eyes wander, and they say "mm hm" a lot. But what about when they are doing a good job of pretending to pay attention by meeting your eyes? Now a University of Western Ontario psychology researcher says it's possible to monitor who is not paying attention at work or in school even when they are feigning interest. It all has to do with your neck. More »
social control
A Weapon That Makes You Hear Voices in Your Head
Apparently troops in Iraq have invented an off-label use for sonic pain guns that can project a focused beam of sound at someone's head. Because the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), pictured here, can deliver any sound at a distance, soldiers are using it to beam words directly into the ears of enemies. The idea is to make scared soldiers believe they are hearing the voice of a god — or that they're just going crazy. More about how to use this spooky-ass weapon after the jump. More »
social control
No mouse should look into that "I'm gonna chomp you" face and not run squeaking in the other direction. And yet a mouse has done it, thanks to a team of Japanese researchers who genetically engineered it to not fear cats.
More »
We Have Engineered You to Enjoy Being Eaten
No mouse should look into that "I'm gonna chomp you" face and not run squeaking in the other direction. And yet a mouse has done it, thanks to a team of Japanese researchers who genetically engineered it to not fear cats.
More »
social control
World of Warcraft's Strange Rules About Cybersex
A new version of massive multiplayer game World of Warcraft will allow people to change their characters' hair and dance moves, but not their genders. Just goes to show that you can move to a new cyber-world packed with an international population of millions, and still be SOL if you want to find a decent tranny bar. This isn't the first time that WOW has instituted weird, arbitrary rules about sex-related crap, either. More »
social control
People in Rome remember the 2004 anti-war protest as peaceful. But when university students in the United States looked at photographs of the protest later, they called it violent and disturbing. What happened? Was it a cultural gap? No — it was a doctored photograph, much like the ones the New York Times ran of an Israeli air raid on Beirut with a lot of extra smoke billowing over the city. The doctored Rome picture was used for a new study that asked whether small changes made in photographs could transfigure the way people interpret events depicted in them.
More »
Doctored Photographs Can Rewire How the Brain Remembers
People in Rome remember the 2004 anti-war protest as peaceful. But when university students in the United States looked at photographs of the protest later, they called it violent and disturbing. What happened? Was it a cultural gap? No — it was a doctored photograph, much like the ones the New York Times ran of an Israeli air raid on Beirut with a lot of extra smoke billowing over the city. The doctored Rome picture was used for a new study that asked whether small changes made in photographs could transfigure the way people interpret events depicted in them.
More »
