TONY ON DATA-TOTALITARIANISM & MORE

Including Thursday Thirteen, Monday Mural, Totally Optional Prompts, Heads or Tails and Search Engine Stories. Have you had a go yet?

Some recent headlines from the UK. Up to a million public-sector workers could be allowed access to sensitive information on databases concerning every child. The government plans to allow medical researchers access to personal details on databases. Who owns this information?

It is all to do with privacy.

Do I have a right to keep my personal details private? Freedom in my country was built upon the premise that as long as I pay my taxes, obey a fair common law and defend my country, no one has the right to anything concerning me, or hinder, in any way, what I want to do.
This no longer seems to be the case. Rather, the personal has been digitalized and we all exist in a collective information pool. Add to this the increasing surveillance measures being imposed through fear of crime and terrorism, and my right to privacy is now becoming void.

This is a huge contradiction.

And not only of freedom. We are said to live in the age of the individual and individual rights, yet the reality is the individual is being deconstructed and placed into a pool of citizenry to be spied on and controlled as a government sees fit.
Increasing technology made this state of affairs inevitable. A government will always try to grab rights over the individual in order to control him. In many ways our only defence against this urge towards totalitarianism is the privacy of our selves and family.
Information technology has decimated this natural societal defence mechanism. The need to know has supplanted the demand that we mind our own business. This growing impulse needs to be debated and questioned while we still have the right to say it is going on.
Next post, Thursday. Hope to see you then.

© Anthony North, November 2008

TT #32 – WINDOWS

Windows are eyes that stare at you,
or portals to others, if you look through;
mediums that connect you to more,
seclusion something they totally abhor;
Windows show how things can be,
allowing alternative ways to see,
the beauty of how others exist,
or horrors disclosed, they always persist;
But what if you’re neither here nor there,
just seeing a reflection when you stare,
caught in a world trapped in their glare,
a window to nothing from nowhere?
Shatter the glass! Escape! If you dare

(c) Anthony North, November 2008

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HANDYMAN – Fiction

‘Look what I can do with my hands,’ said Jimmy when he was a kid. And there he was, making gestures from the funny to the obscene. And later, when he found a new use for his hands, he’d supplement it by pulling girls’ pigtails. He never really grasped the deeper impulses of what he was doing.
I suppose that’s why, later, he used his hands to become a bully, hitting out, declaring I’m the big guy around here. He was challenged once when someone else used their hands, but Jimmy settled that score in a dark alley, using his hands to hold the baseball bat.
Using his hands was the making of Jimmy. Not in the way it should – he never used them to be a carpenter, or builder, or anything useful – but to perfect how to break into that house, how to mug someone fast, and occasionally using his feet to get away.
When he met the love of his life, he used his hand more gently – until she decided she had a life and opinions of her own. That’s when he started using his hands to batter her.
Of course, she eventually had enough, and she used her mouth to tell the police everything about him. He used his hands to escape when they tried to arrest him, laying three of them out before making it back to seek revenge.
That’s when he used his hands to throttle her – which was nearly the end of the story of Jimmy. Except that something strange happened to him and he used his hands one more time – to pull the trigger and blow his brains out.
Well, I say brains, but that was the problem with Jimmy. Always his hands. Never his head.

© Anthony North, November 2008

BUTTERFLY SKIES

I watch them flutter where I lie,
butterflies filling the deep blue sky,
coming so close, I could almost touch,
and I love them all, oh, so much;
A strange empathy I seem to share,
these creatures looking so colourful and fair,
harbingers of better days,
frolicking in a summer haze;
But why do they seem to fly by me,
is there something I just can’t see?
Why do I feel so strange and new?
Who took my legs? New thoughts imbue;
Oh!
I’m no longer a caterpillar; I’m a butterfly, too

(c) Anthony North, November 2008