To utopians this will look a lot like the "singularity": an all-knowing, omnipresent data-processing system, which is really indistinguishable from ideas of God, to which humans will be constantly connected.
Even if the NSA's motives were defensible, Snowden perceived that with the new, omnipresent data-gathering system in place, the American government had pushed past the boundaries of acceptable conduct– that given the wrong leader, the country could begin a slide into despotism.
Picture the world we live in: content is ubiquitous, data omnipresent and social sharing universal.
They have more opportunities to connect with consumers, but they also must be more coordinated, omnipresent and data-driven.
Yet I suspect they are vital if we want to think of what it means to write today – to write, that is, in the shadow of omnipresent and omniscient data that makes a mockery of any notion that the writer might have something to inform us, and of a technologically underwritten capitalism that both writes and reads itself.
Vector quantization (VQ) is a fundamental and omnipresent mechanism of data compression with various conceptual underpinnings and diversified algorithmic realizations.
The art installation was also meant to demonstrate the omnipresent nature of big data.
Mallarmé, the first to introduce the category of the "virtual" into poetics, would have gasped (and not entirely joyfully) at the unfolded and expanded, omnipresent, omniscient "book" or data tomb within whose soft walls we live now – and gasped most loudly at the irony that this "book" renders the role of its writer redundant.
If these guys have their way, we may soon enter the age of the omnipresent assistant carefully offering data that aligns with our needs.
