why the interweb in 201 has become pandora's box

almost literally- the legend was that when Pandora's box was opened, many things escaped but the lid was shut just in time to stop Hope getting out.

So as the Internet gives away all our privacy and lets people share TOo Much Information in ways that erode the weak social walled gardens that let different viewpoints coexist in some sort of vague harmony, governments start to put the lid on the one Hope, that the Internet might also let us know What is Really Going On and Have a Say in it instead of having our lives run and our intercourse mediated by creeps in suits.....as the East demands RIM give them access to all blackberry mail, and CHina blocks this that and everything, what Hope is left?

Answer's on a blog comment (we know where you live)

Towards a New Theory of Social Mind

It's clear that collective minds can be better than single minds, but its clear to me this only really worse when they start to behave like committes or like mobs - so
this is when social structures break down (alienation) - so is this once you get above Dunbar's magic number 150? Does technology help people do group-mind thinking with larger groups ? I think it does (the IETF spent 10 years working well (til 1990:-)
before it went pear-shaped and became less than any of its parts (not just less than the sum of its parts)

if we don't solve this problem, then the human race is doomed to fail (to fail to solve climate change, population, or any other world scale problem)

we are human stumble-bums who' lurch from one random mix to another, and occasionally, some cascading idea leads to herding behind some new thing (enlightenment - good; fascism - bad)

Alien's will land and find our remains and say "could do better"....

why havn't we seen aliens?

because they look at our group mind and say "how dumb is that"....