Beware Big Brother

"And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name."

----------------
Don't be put-off by the length of this email.  Read on if you dare...
I saw a most interesting documentary on Akaku tonight.  I thought it was along the lines of all these bong-hit conspiracy theory flicks--but it turned out to be pretty convincing, with only a few instances of legerdemain (ehem).

The thrust of the film was 'beware big brother,' namely that international bankers and multinational corporations are eroding the power of national sovereignty and whats more, have a plan to implement world government.  Sounds far fetched until you hear so of the film's (waggon-authenticated) quotes and look into the purpose and mission of some of these private think tanks, especially  the Council on Foreign Relations (and its membership).  VErrrry interesssstink.

Read on:
from a wesite, authenticity unknown,

"Henry Kissinger in an address to the super secret Bilderberg Organization meeting at Evian, France, May 21, 1992 said the following as transcribed from a tape recording made by one of the Swiss delegates:

"Today American's would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow they will be grateful. This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well being granted to them by their world government." ___

"You have to understand. Future wars will be fought by capitalists and anti-capitalists as society polarises. When that happens, control of information will be as important as control of territory used to be in conventional conflicts. If you can stop your enemy from destroying your information, then you have a good chance of winning the war." "

Anyway, all this is prelude to my main point which is:
The film at one point discusses microchip/receivers which can be implanted into humans to track them (which they already have made and experimented with on willing subjects)--hence the quote from Revelations in the beginning of this email.

The film also discusses a very, very tiny--{one guy describes it as being as large as the dot on a "i" in the small print on a medicine label}--microchip which can and has been placed on consumer goods to track them either for shipping and logistics information, consumer data mining or more nefarious purposes.  Well, according to the film, Gillette, MIT and some other corp.--lets say Nabisco or something, got together about 10 years ago to try and develop the technology in order to be cost-efficient enough to place a chip on every consumer product.

This leads me to the good news and the bad news.
The bad news is that MIT et al. have somehow developed a time travel/space continuum device whereby they went back in time, or forward in time, and stole my idea from me before I even had it!  Damn Them!  The good news is, they only stole part of it.

I was thinking of this this past summer: how our cellphones have already become and are increasingly becoming even more so our magic wands, our remote controls for the world (readiphone) [editors note: when I left you a message the other day asking you if you knew anyone who had any iphones for sale I was kidding, but thanks for the info anyway] when I heard an NPR report on the future of radio wave devices.  I though how the logical next step would be to implant every product with a marker of some sort (like a barcode that send radio signals or something--this was before I heard about the MIT-Gilette thing tonight) so that your cell-phone would recognize it.  The aha moment here is that through this technology, consumers would no longer have to GO to the producer to purchase; goods would no longer be relegated to stores---or even websites per se.  This would turn the whole world into a store so that whatever you see, wherever you go, is potentially 'for sale.'  You see something you like in your everyday life (in your office, at your friend's house, in a restaurant etc.), you scan it with your phone and up comes all the information about that product and based on that information you can either save for later, or buy now.  Your credit card info. is already logged into you phone and so is your address so that you can buy directly from the producer and have it delivered to your house.

Built on top of this technology would be add on services so that this would be an entire personal system.  iShopper, myshopper etc. whereby all the items you scan over the course of your day are sent to your own iShopper website  where the information from the manufacturer is listed along with the manufacturer's price, delivery time etc. as well as all the nearby retail locations where the item is sold, which is closest, which is cheapest, which website (ebay etc.) has it for cheapest.  A whole system which simplifies and value enhances the process separating consumer wants from consumer satisfaction.

A simplified version of this plan is to eliminate the cell-phone scanning aspect (although this I think is the most dynamic part--turning the world into a store), and just developing the encyclopedic shopping website combining a) registered credit card and mailing information b) a search function, where you type in the name of any specific product (leading you directly to manufacturer's info), or any generic product (which leads to a list of products prioritized upon your past purchases and matrixing this info. with industry specific market research to determine which specific products you would be most interested in within this category) c) a retail location finder based on what is closest or chepest etc.  and d) a website crawler which searches all relevant websites for the cheapest offerings.

All of these features exist separately either on websites or on things like the iphone but there is not one central location I can think of which synthesizes all of these functions in one place.

So the idea would be that a person would go to wikipedia for information, facebook to network, google to search, and this to shop.  And when you want a set of Ping golf clubs and you type that in, up comes:

closest: xyz
cheapest: abc
fastest: lmnop?

And of course you could make a tidy sum in selling consumer data (when authorized of course) and this would allow for consumer specific incentives and discount programs.

Unfortunately, if the documentary I talked about earlier is correct, this idea is being read by someone already--if it wasn't scanned directly from my brain.