Phorm ......

A symptom, a disease, a sign of the time, or just the way thing are or are going to be?

There is plenty of lively debate on other forums but ZDNet and it's readers remain relatively quiet and, dare I say it, relatively quiescent.

Our country fought a war, The Second World War, for values, standards and a way of life which we, or should I say our peers, are very busy throwing away. Similarly, we abhorred communism (East Germany, Albania and even Russia) for similar reasons, but it is now 20 years since the Berlin Wall and the rest of the Iron Curtain came down. Are we now living in a time when this has all been forgotten?

Now we live in a world where truth, honesty and integrity appear to have no value in our institutions of government and commerce, and hence by extension in our society. We cannot believe what we are told, and we cannot have faith in the culture of greed, as has been clearly demonstated over the last while.

The phorm type technologies are invidious and invasive. They do not have the approval of the majority of those that understand them, not only in the current form of a money making advertising vehicle which uses our privacy without any control over it on our part, but also represent the thin edge of the wedge (creep) whereby these technologies could be used more widely to control and record our every activity. It seems that this last point is why our government is so interested in getting the technology past the first hurdle and accepted, or at the very least acquiesced to reluctantly.

Taken together with all the current enthusiasm of our government for identity cards's and databases (and all that entails) for all aspects of our life, this creates a considerable cause for concern or anxiety. Unlike a prison sentence which considers rehabitation and is spent, these records will be for life, even if incorrect or unsubstantiated information is held in them, and have the capability to blight a person's whole life. And all this is before we consider any abuse or misuse of the systems, already amply demonstated.

So all of this comes back round to our lack of trust in our government and institutions and a genuine concern that they do not understand the inevitable consequences of their actions. Ironically, this also betrays a luck of trust by our government in the people themselves, something which I think is a consequence of the changes to the structure of our society brought about by, you guessed it, government.

I believe our politicians should, amongst other things, have an obligatory reading list of a selection of science fiction novels to gain an understanding of where the wrong use of technology could lead, and to see how much of the unacceptable side 1950's science fiction is already science fact.