I sat through several presentations that were all about novel ways of gathering urban information and then turning that data over to the relevant authorities and never once questioning or caring where it went, let alone what it was used for. (Oh, and one guy who presented his civic service idea as “a nice kind of bank,” in the same tone of voice you might use for the phrase “a nice kind of Hitler.”) Essentially, they were all about gathering up every codon of information thrown off by the second-to-second existence of citizenry—and that’s becoming a denser stream every day, almost a digital wormcast—and just handing it over to the local state apparatus. Dazzled by the ability to collect and offer it, not even thinking about what it would be used for. I told them an old piece of apocrypha, that an inventor gifted the King of Scotland with a brand new execution device, and was quite surprised to find himself becoming the first person the king used it on.
Warren Ellis (via The Paris Review)
