Being connected to the Internet means being vulnerable to coordinated actions that can knock down walls of secrecy and shatter mechanisms of control.
Interpretation
The Internet can expose vulnerabilities by breaking down barriers to information and control.
This quote by Jamais Cascio emphasizes the dual nature of the Internet as both a tool for connectivity and a source of vulnerability. While it can facilitate communication and access to information, it also leaves individuals and organizations exposed to coordinated actions that can disrupt their secrecy and control, illustrating the challenges that arise in an open digital landscape.
In practice
In a cybersecurity conference discussing the implications of online data breaches.
Sustainability is a seemingly laudable goal - it tells us we need to live within our means, whether economic, ecological, or political - but it's insufficient for uncertain times. How can we live within our means when those very means can change, swiftly and unexpectedly, beneath us?
Trying to do what your competitors are doing but basically a little bit better is probably not going to be the winning strategy. The problem is finding what your competitors wouldn't even consider doing.
The idea of sustainability can imply there is one perfect, unchanging future, if only we could work out how to get there. Resilience might be more useful, in that it assumes a dynamic environment and that perfection is impossible. You need to design systems to accommodate failure rather than eliminate it. By trying to be perfect, many visions of sustainability are quite brittle
In technology, we spend so much time experimenting, fine-tuning, getting the absolute cheapest way to do something - so why aren't we doing that with social policy?
With our Paleolithic instincts, we're simply unable to resist technology's gifts. But this doesn't just compromise our privacy. It also compromises our ability to take collective action.
One way to think about the magnitude of the changes to come is to think about how you went about your business before powerful Web search engines. You probably wouldn't have imagined that a world of answers would be available to you in under a second. The next set of advances will have an different effect, but similar in magnitude.
We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.
Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
When you make machines that are capable of obeying instructions slavishly, and among those instructions are 'duplicate me' instructions, then of course the system is wide open to exploitation by parasites.
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