The majority of the populace readily accepts the destruction of their privacy through personal tracking devices and a system that characterizes and profiles them through monitoring their movements, conversations, purchases, and associations while being largely unconscious that it is happening. If they are aware, they don't care, it's the price you pay for the toys. These systems and technologies have one use for the general populace and another purpose entirely for the elite who live as you say, in another reality altogether where the general population's fascination with celebrity, narcissism, and social status are things ripe for exploitation rather than participation.
The fascinating bit that Kubrick put a lot of his emphasis into for
2001 is how technology changes us. In his Odyssey the human race is on a transformative journey. I wonder a lot about that journey and how our basic tools always alter our own lifestyles and ways of being. Now we're in an era where the mantra is "program, or be programmed." But alongside that programming language are many other increasingly specialized languages such as those of the various sciences, medicine, quantum engineering, nano-talk -- what have you. All of these discourses and their effects, like the discourse of the computer programmer, are very much outside of the average person and leave us as the putty to be moulded and shifted, chaff in the wind.
The other thing i wonder about is whether or not technology, specifically something like computer technology, has its own inherent direction that excludes us from the calculation. The whole modern prometheus has a new message for our own culture. We keep stealing fire from the gods, employing it without too much consideration regarding consequences, and sit back to watch the fireworks and whatever other fallout might come. What exactly has Dr. Frankenstein invented with his binary monster and will it be the most radical of human shifts in terms of what becomes of things like human nature, memory, emotional relationships, ego, family structure etc.? Once our privacy departs, and we have to plan for those moments where our lives are not being recorded, what new shifts will come? I thought Wim Wenders'
Until the End of the World had a interesting moral message regarding the corruption of the mind and the death of the imagination that would come once we would be able to record our dreams and then watch them on continual playback whenever you like. That movie was like counterpoint to
Wings of Desire. Already i see a lot of people with corrupted minds tied to their selfies and obsessions about what is being posted about them, by them, for them. Many people constantly hear the phantom buzz from their cell phones going off in their pockets. It's a different kind of addiction, but as powerful as heroin.
From the CBC radio - this podcast
228: The future of privacy. Surveillance society. Mobile security. Genome identification. , might be of interest to you. It's a short piece. You have to scroll down the page to get to this one. Most of the episodes are fairly interesting and hit on this "future talk" that some of this discussion connects to.
