People, Networks, Databases and Fascism

A strange series of ideas to be a topic.

The database is a method of  recording, storing, sorting and retrieving information.

Back in the old physical-analogue world we had libraries and drawers filled with card indexes. For anyone that used that system, it was a slow process to find what you were looking for, and took a significant level of skill and labour to use and maintain.

But then came the innovation, a machine to automate some, and then eventually almost all of the process of the database. The first database was used for census purposes, innocent enough on the surface. Then Germany had a census in 1933. The company that made the first electromechanical database eventually was bought by the founder of IBM, their client was Nazi Germany. The Nazis needed a way to keep track of all possible opposition to their regime and exactly who was already dead or in prison. Not much point in sending thugs to a house of a man who was already executed and buried anonymously in a mass grave.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

So the Nazis needed to uniquely number people who could be trouble.

ID tattoo on the arm of a suspected dissenter who survived Auschwitz, Nazi Germany. Fascism is not subtle if you know what clues to look for.

So not only were the dissenters numbered, so where the prisons, the supposed type of dissent, in short everything was number for the database. To a machine everything is just a number, in a cold , clinical, unfeeling, morally vacuous way.

After this happened, the second world war started, and 5 years later ended. The surviving fascists deemed useful were absorbed by the fascist victors (operation paperclip) and the surviving dissenters ran as far as they could. Many survivors of prison camps were really serious about getting as far away as possible, and Melbourne, Australia (about as far as you can get from Germany) became home to one of the highest number of survivors of this period of fascism. Not surprisingly many of the ethnic and religious groups with historical roots to Germany of the 1930’s are quite evasive about census questions, or even refuse to reply to such requests for information.

So in short fascists love databases, it helps them feel in control, and it does give them some level of control when they attempt to crush dissent. The less databases your name and details are on, the safer you are from fascists.

The Database Join

This brings us to a subtle database concept: ‘the join’.

The join allows different databases to be used together and a more detailed picture can emerge. Imagine we start with a list of first names and next to each name is their favorite fruit. Next we have a separate database with fruits and the color of the fruit next to it. So then by joining these databases together on the common column of ‘fruit’, we would than have ‘name’, ‘fruit’ and ‘color’. Nothing sinister so far but as you can see the join allows the database to become more expansive, and offer even more related data.

In some countries joining government databases together is illegal, as it is too much of an invasion of privacy. What business is it of the government to know which fruit you like (or any other matter) ?

Data relationships

Before joining a database to another database, the technician must consider an important technical consideration: data relationships.

The database join visualized.

For the above example I will explain

One to One :John like apples only

One to Many :John likes apples and bananas and oranges

Many to One: John and Jane like  apples

Many to many: John and Jane like apples and bananas

Only the ‘One to Many’ and ‘One to One’ relationships can be easily modeled  in a database, and most fascists prefer systems that match that kind of data relationship.

The many to one relationship is really just a one to many relationship looked at from another direction, and is not too difficult to model in a database.

The many to many relationship is almost impossible to model in a conventional database and fascists really hate anything that looks like this as they cant control it.

Natural networks getting stronger or weaker.

A fascist is like a puppet master, many strings connect for the limbs of the puppet to his/her one hand. A ‘One to Many’ relationship and control is almost absolute.  The puppets under the puppet master could have their own puppets but in terms of the fascist puppet master the relationship is still one to many via the join of the initial puppet. But if additional strings were added between the existing strings, control of the puppets and its limbs would be lost and the puppet would be out of control. The fascist may be a puppet controlled by another puppet master.

The resulting arrangement of a healthy ‘Many to Many’ network would be like a web made by a drunken spider. It is a good  network. If you are reading this it means you are connected to a network, even if it is printed out and far from electricity and any for of connectivity that’s where it has come from. The internet is now everywhere, in  remote parts of Africa, emails and webpages are printed out and carried far into jungles for people to read. The internet was designed to be a destruction proof network, a central system simply couldn’t survive as there was one point of vulnerability which would collapse the entire system, the center.
This illustrates fascism’s weakness, once the center is gone fascism fails. in a network this is no center, no central point of catastrophic failure.

The ‘Many to Many’ relationship is the safest because it is outside of the control of the fascist puppet masters. There is no center, there is no single string to pull, no armchair control strategy, it’s simply too complex to control.

Fascists always wants centralization because it leads to central control which is fascist control.

Central banks, central planning, central control, ever wonder who is at the center?

Be independent, form you own connections with people, make up you own mind and resist all forms of centralization.

An example of a dangerous network to join.

http://map.occupy.net/

Fascists or their puppets trying to create a database of dissenters, whats next?

No serious activist or dissenter would join a mysterious database.

Pinocchio. He was a puppet until he stopped telling lies, then he became a real little boy. Subtle message in a children’s story.

<more to come>

$5 Fingernail sized computer

micro SD card, finger nail size, with SD card adapter.

Impossible?

Put a live USB for Linux Ubuntu LTS 12.04 on a bootable 4Gb micro SD card and you’ll realize it’s not impossible.

http://www.ubuntu.com/

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/help/try-ubuntu-before-you-install

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-as-1-2-3/#button

<need make bootable and loader links>

In fact I’m using it right now. And I bought the card (4Gb with SD card adapter for $5) just weeks ago.

O.K, it’s not a whole computer, is a whole operating system and saved files , but as soon as you find PC with with a flash card adapter or a USB port, you’ll quickly be able to have your familiar environment and files on screen.

You can get all the software for free, you may need to hunt down someone a little computer savvy to help you set it up.

Once set up, it is a small as you are going to get your files, and it contains a system to view and alter them, connect to the Internet, the whole thing.

To use this you will  possibly need to alter the host PC BIOS to accept boot from USB and probably press a key on restart to enable this to happen*.

micro SD card with USB adapter

*guide coming soon

You could of course use a USB stick but its not quite as compact. The extremely small size of the micro SD give its the ability to be hidden if necessary. Something that small can be hidden in so many places the mind boggles, even more so for a person trying to find it.

If you find yourself in a an emergency or sudden collapse scenario, you can take all of your important data with you as a very small item and very fast. Any one searching your computer would not be aware for quite some time that you took this essential component with you. leaving behind a computer with a copy of windows or apple OS with nothing particularly interesting/identifying/incriminating on it. It can really change the game.

You may be traveling for a long time in a sudden collapse scenario and the ability to periodically access a computer and have everything you want on it ( exactly the way you left it last) would be very useful.

Imagine you have been on the road for  a week and find an abandoned house.In the house there is a desktop computer with the side of the case missing,clearly the hard drives are missing. The house still has some power from whats left of a solar PV and inverter setup. They left in a hurry, and as it is, the PC wont work .Those plants you saw 2 kilometers back, are they edible? Load up your tiny fingernail computer and compare them to the edible plants data you have. Are there any WI-fi signals here?  What dose my map tell me? All these things become possible with this tiny investment you made when you saw a post on the Internet about a $5 fingernail sized computer.

Cost $5 or less, might save your life.

Ubuntu Logo. Ubuntu is a popular variant of Linux, a free and open source computer operating system.