re: synopticon living
You make much of the "voluntary" nature of this arrangement, but you're using the word in a very narrow, technical sense. People enslaved by this company weren't literally marched into bondage at gunpoint, true. But the global nature of the workforce and their willingness to put up with degrading treatment at low pay makes it abundantly clear that they've been forced into it by desparate circumstances. They'd work elsewhere if they had a choice; and doesn't the lack of alternatives make a mockery of your assertion that it's "voluntary"?
It's the same kind of "choice" that people face when they're laid off from a decent job that can support them and their families in middle class style. They may have a "choice" of many fine employment opportunities in the fast-food and landscaping and home maintenance industries, but the foreclosure of better options is a very real narrowing of economic freedom.
"Whose 'Freedom' is it, anyway?" asked George Lakoff, and he clearly nailed it when he said that Conservatives have such a narrow and constipated view of freedom that it means essentially the opposite of freedom.
I didn't have to talk to a socialist in college very long before this hoary wheeze showed up. The object, of course, is to try to destroy the concept of "freedom" by redefining it into the metaphysical area. People are "forced" to work in order to live, so they obviously have no true "freedom." This fed neatly into the concept of "positive rights." the table.
I'm willing to entertain your ideas--or Lakoff's--on how to develop a society where everybody gets to do whatever they want without worrying about working to meet their needs. Where nobody has to settle for a job they don't like just to pay the bills. There were such societies in history, but they were a bit selective, since they were built on a large foundation of slave labor. The dream of "positive freedom" unfortunately requires the enslavement of those who actually produce the necessities people have a "right" to in order to achieve whatever goals they can imagine.
But I digress.
...You say you see governments setting up cameras and invading the privacy of their citizens in various ways, but you're oddly reluctant to go the full distance and mention just which governments are doing that.
Tell you what, why don't you do the legwork and tell us which countries have the most surveillance cameras and of those, which ones are often admired in America as examples of a "progressive" social government.
Keep in mind that, despite your feeble attempt to link it to Bush, the British program dates back to the 80s and 90s.
Remember the Clipper chip? We barely dodged that bullet, and you can be sure that today George Bush would ram it through by any means foul and illegal.
This may be the most bizarre anti-Bush spin you've come up with yet. Have you really forgotten who actually did try to ram through the Clipper Chip?
Remember talk about how a quantum computer can "slice through encryption like a hot knife through butter"? Want to speculate who owns the first operational quantum computers? Consider yourself gotten back to.
There are no operational quantum computers. Aren't there enough people on this board drifting around in the ether cloud of their own fevered imaginations?
Look, getting back down to Earth: I don't like this "Big Brother in the Home Office" any more than you do, but nobody's forcing it on me yet, and regardless of Lakoff's odd ideas of "freedom," I suspect that most of the people will take this work on are doing it because indoor work with somebody watching you is still leagues better than whatever they were doing for a living before. This is, of course, granting your premise that the people taking this kind of work will be poor and desperate--and somehow still happen to own computers.