skanking biker, thanks.

Landgolier, a big part of my argument in the book is that you know that data is garbage, and I know that data is garbage, but that won't stop people from trying to make (crude) inferences from that and taking action on the inferences they make.

You've got people like good ol' Ray Kurzweil out there telling people "the singularity is near," any number of organizations willing to build and sell systems based on the assumption of seamless and perfect data capture and useful machine inference, and suckers by the boatload lined up to buy them because they promise to make life "safer" and "more convenient." (Not infrequently, the suckers in question are municipalities, etc., with Homeland Security money burning the proverbial hole in their pockets.)

What's ten times as scary to me as genuine panoptical surveillance is panopticism the way we're actually going to get it, which is unusable, overpriced, taxpayer-underwritten systems that are manifestly ate up like a soup sandwich but treated as if they were infallible.