Before all the revelations revealed by Edward Snowden artist Curtis Wallen was already uneasy about the amount of tracking going on in the digital world. To escape it he invented the alter ego Aaron Brown and was reborn on the internet.
A new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything. In the year 1500, fifty years after the printing press was invented, we did not have old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe. After television, the United States was not America plus television; television gave a new coloration to every political campaign, to every home, to every school, to every church, to every industry. And that is why the competition among media is so fierce. Surrounding every technology are institutions whose organization – not to mention their reason for being – reflects the world-view promoted by the technology. Therefore when an old technology is assaulted by a new technology, institutions are threatened.
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New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop.
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Something has happened in America that is strange and dangerous, and there is only a dull and even stupid awareness of what it is – in part because it has no name. I call it Technopoly.
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