HyperTextHero: Welcome to the World of Tomorrow

I’d like to point you to a master piece from Frank Rieger in 2006 (!), predicting many of the things that are ongoing now and how to fight it. I recommend reading it completely as he does leave room for hope in the end :)

http://frank.geekheim.de/?page_id=128

Frank is the current speaker of the Chaos Communication Club, btw. They have a lot of influence in Germany and culturally contributed a lot to making working for secret services uncool. Something which i believe is not really the case in the US and probably also not in the UK?

I love the ending of Frank Rieger’s article:

The eavesdropping people must be laughed about as their job is silly, boring, and ethically the worst thing to earn money with, sort of blackmail and robbing grandmas on the street. We need to develop a “lets have fun confusing their systems”-culture that plays with the inherent imperfections, loopholes, systematic problems, and interpretation errors that are inevitable with large scale surveillance. Artists are the right company for this kind of approach. We need a subculture of “In your face, peeping tom”. Exposing surveillance in the most humiliating and degrading manner, giving people something to laugh about must be the goal. Also, this prevents us from becoming frustrated and tired. If there is no fun in beating the system, we will get tired of it and they will win. So let’s be flexible, creative and funny, not angry, ideologic and stiff-necked.