08.15.13
Wishful thinking in the pot just before it boiled
While I’m very sympathetic to fellow citizens who think they can innovate jerry-bilt gadgets and miscellaneous consumer goods to fight the US surveillance state, Kickstarter campaigns won’t do it. The US government pays contractors 3,4, and five orders of magnitude more than you’ll ever raise in crowd-sourcing.
From the WaPost, a flavor of tech invention fad news built on the impression that Americans are now shocked, just shocked, over the Snowden affair and just how much of the technology of the war on terror is being directed at them:
“Developed as Adam Harvey’s master’s thesis at New York University, CV Dazzle, named after a type of ship camo used during World War II, is face paint designed to make features undetectable by computer vision algorithms … From there he moved into a line of ‘anti-drone’ garments made of a metallized fabric that traps body heat … Harvey rushed to begin an online Kickstarter fundraising campaign [for a metallized anti-track-your-smartphone case] ahead of schedule. The Kickstarter campaign went active Aug. 2 with a goal of $35,000 … Halfway through the campaign, they have raised more than $44,000.”
It’s too late.
Have to be the deliveryman of bad news: It’s not fixable in my lifetime. The technology of American global security has been turned on the civilian populace because that’s where the money is now.
You didn’t think forever chasing around the feebs in Al Qaeda was going to create enough of a lasting profit margin, did you?
Two months ago 3D-manufactured plastic guns were going to change everything, too. And then there was last week’s spying hardware gadget pest from Malice Afterthought.
America’s so awash in big thinkers and innovating talent, one just can’t understand why there would be 48 million on food stamps and a national growth rate of barely over 1 percent.
Just wait until the HyperLoop goes into action. It’ll be better than flying cars and your evening meal in a pill the size of one dose of Viagra.
In real news, the US is a corporate fascist state where you’re freedom is to shop. Increasingly, that means only the topmost and its allowed servant army.
So here I present th best Let ‘Em Eat Cake in the New America copy this week, easy on “Bespoke” jewelry at the NYT:
“But when she acquired a 10-carat Burmese sapphire earlier this year on a buying trip to Asia, she knew just the client who would want to commission her to transform the rare stone into something unique. It was a woman in her 40s living in TriBeCa who already owned many of Ms. St. Clair’s signature pendants, and had a generous husband who wanted to buy her a gift to mark their 20th wedding anniversary … After several weeks of discussion with the couple, which involved sending multiple sketches and three-dimensional molds, Ms. St. Clair created a ring for a fee, she said, of approximately $350,000.”
Three dimensional molds. Being able to drop $350,000 on a custom-designed bauble renders irrelevant displeasure over the surveillance state.