Category: News

DUBAI — The Christian fundamentalist extremist terror organization “God’s Foundation,” led by Jamie Jo Horne, crashed seven hijacked spaceplanes into the Burj Dubai, the world’s second largest skyscraper. Officials say “Hundreds of thousands” were evacuated only to be crushed by falling debris.

Erech Al-Ansur, mayor of Dubai, told reporters at an emergency press conference, “Twelve other buildings seem to have disappeared underneath the mountainous pile of twisted metal and concrete which is approximately the size of twenty Pyramids of Giza and covers three square miles. Rescue efforts will continue for the foreseeable future. Today is perhaps the worst disaster in human history in terms of brute terror and also in terms of numbers killed. Over a million may have died today.”

The high-speed intercontinental passenger spaceplanes hijacked by God’s Foundation were filled with liquid oxygen which may have flash frozen structural beams before combining with other fuels and igniting. According to expert Dr. Angstrom H. Troubador, “These fuels burn at temperatures which approach a supernova-like cosmic event.”

Videos of poor and downtrodden Americans in the streets waving tattered American flags in celebration were played on news stations across the Arab world, prompting the Islamic Federated Union’s Ayatollah Khamman the Great to announce, “We will smoke Jamie Jo Horne out of her Appalachian cave systems and rain hell on her organization. Christian Fundamentalist Terror is a threat to the stability of the world, and peaceful nations of the world stand behind us in the ongoing war on Christian terror.”

INTERNET — The world’s second most famous whistleblower, Chelsea Manning, and the hacker snitch who ratted her out, Adrian Lamo, reconciled in a passionate conjugal visit at the disciplinary barracks in Fort Leavenworth, Texas on Tuesday evening.

Manning disclosed her work with Wikileaks to Lamo in famous and tragic chat logs which are believed to have led to Manning’s subsequent torture and indefinite detention.

Manning wrote, in a letter addressed to the public, “I know Lamo deceived me. I trusted him like a priest at a confessional, but he turned me in. I still love him and forgive him. I get marriage proposals every day, and to be honest I just can’t trust any of my so-called fans. They don’t know me like Adrian — they think I’m some kind of a saint — and they just say whatever they think will make me happy . . . It may be his fault that I got caught when I did, but I was going to get caught sooner or later . . . Adrian doesn’t worship me, and right now that is the most valuable and rare thing in the world. If no one can understand this, I don’t care.”

INTERNET — Every day, you go to work and consider it a privilege. In fact, you pay your bosses for what you have always considered a service. It’s fun to go to work.

You work for a few different bosses, depending on your tastes, but they are all sprawling monopolies that have usually cornered more than just one market.

Meanwhile, the invisible widgets you don’t know you are churning out are the hot product in the world’s fastest growing industry, easily worth trillions to your bosses each year.

Only a handful of your fellow workers are getting paid for their work, and if they are, the bosses don’t even tell them their wages. In fact, pay rates are a “trade secret” that change according to their whims, rules that are never disclosed. Speaking about pay in public is grounds for immediate termination.

The widgets you’re creating are made up of the ever-increasing wake of data and metadata left behind when you chat with friends on your favorite social media site, play a video game, watch videos, or order a book of medieval epic poetry.

It seems as if you are on the receiving end of great boons: Discount video games, books, and endless streams of movies that cost nothing or next to nothing. Isn’t it just too good to be true?

What has happened, likely without your noticing it, is that the harvest of your digital wake — your invisible widgets and labor — now easily pays for the negligible overhead needed for internet businesses to operate. Also, there’s the obscene profits.

You are paying to go to work for internet monopolies when you deserve to be paid.

As automation replaces jobs and increasingly leaves even educated young people with no hope for employment, it seems the one great light left for those starving and jobless because of things such as super-efficient combine harvesters is the production of data and metadata.

Like industrialization at the turn of the century, this informationalization of the economy has lead to monstrous exploitation which must be exposed and corrected. Unlike industrialization with its overworked children and terrifying factory floors, there is instead a sweet and pleasant dream overlaying the invisible exploitation and violence.

Edward Snowden has uncovered some ramifications of this informationalization with his revelations on the NSA. The major response from Snowden supporters has been to pull out of big data’s gaze with the use of cryptography. This view places the focus overwhelmingly on the rights of the individual, which must at all costs be preserved. Any of the potential sociological or valid security benefits possible with big data collection by government are in this view too often altogether discarded or ignored.

Rather than dismantle mass data collection, as Luddite textile artisans smashed mechanical looms, the informationalized economy must be democratized. Bosses need to pay their workers a fair wage and keep children off of factory floors. Collective bargaining and organization — a careful move away from the overburdened and even fetishistic emphasis on individual rights — can and will pave the way for new utopian dreams.